My main problem with this game is that pretty much all the “bad endings” are so much better than the current timeline. I seem to recall that there is some kind of City on the Edge of Forever-like justification for this towards the end, though.
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Yeah, if the whole game is like this, there are some definite Pangloss “best of all possible worlds” vibes that I’m not sure our present reality really deserves. Because a lot of things could definitely be better about it.
But, after thinking on it a bit more—what if it’s “wrecking history”, not because any other history is worse than our own, but because it stops us from going back to the past? What if there’s some huge crisis we need to avert at the end of the game, and these other histories are bad because they prevent us from doing that later?
The actual mechanics of time travel are inevitably kind of complicated, because what exactly does “later” mean? How was the timeline in one state “before” and in another state “after” when they’re both at December 31, 1999? But this seems like a game where we shouldn’t think too hard about that—it’s a vehicle for the story, not something to examine too closely.
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Ah, I misremembered:
A large jigsaw piece, six inches on a side and square.
So probably not big enough to be really distracting.
We might have to resort to setting the curtains on fire with our sparkler instead.
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All right, let’s give this a shot! First, let’s play up to the crucial moment and make a save, for experimentation purposes.
Notably, if we say “yes” instead of “no” to Black’s question, the response is the same.
>black, yes
Black looks pained for a moment.
Is it that obvious we weren’t paying attention?
Now, let’s see here.
>close window
The window’s too stiff to budge.
Black thought of everything!
>fire rifle
Whom do you want to fire the sniper’s rifle at?>air
You can’t see any such thing.>shoot cafe
Rather a large target, surely?>shoot window
Not a very specific target.>shoot horses
Spare the animals, please!
Argh!
Black murmurs, training the pistol carefully at the student.
We’re running out of time! What can we do?!
Oh no oh no…
>shoot black
It might well be the best thing all round, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it.
…well that seems pretty harsh! Black hasn’t even killed anyone (they shot Princip in the hand) and their goal is stopping WWI. That hardly seems to merit death!
Maybe we can distract them some other way?
Black stands here, as tantalising as ever, even if no longer a stranger.
Hmm…
>kiss black
You wish you were more impulsive. Somehow it never quite seems the right moment.
Come on, protagonist! The world is at stake here!
Though I suppose Black currently has a loaded gun. Yeah, getting in the way right now might be a bad idea. Even if they don’t want to kill us, that seems like a great setup for a tragic accident. “Took a bullet for Princip while he tried to assassinate Franz Ferdinand” might get us into the history books, but probably not the way we want to be remembered.
Now we’re thinking with portals!
>z
Time passes.“Here they come!”
And so they do: the carriage pulls in to view and halts a moment in confusion. It looks as if the coachmen are lost. The student suddenly looks up. Black aims the pistol at him with a certain panache. The Archduke chats complacently to the Duchess, unaware of all this… attention.
You feel sharply tense. This is no time for indecision.
>set clock to 1
You shorten the time left on the clock.>z
Time passes.Suddenly you are wrenched out into the time vortex once more, and find yourself back…
(Something heavy seems to be missing.)Disc Room
This is a tiny tetrahedral annexe of a room, whose only clear feature is a broad black disc embedded in the floor.
Hm. So not only did Black not come back with us, their sniper rifle didn’t either.
Let’s head back northwest, and…
You shake your head, confused. Why did the mad London-born architect Kettering build this monument? Why did the government of the Franco-British Republic ever allow Century Park to be built here at Versailles? Never mind: time to go and get a drink of potato brandy from the commissars and toast the new millennium.
Dammit. Restoring again.
>burn window
(with the sparkler)
It seems futile and pyromanic to do so.
The first seems to be much more of an issue than the second, given how we deal with monuments.
Uhhh…what do we have left to try?
>shoot student
The trigger seems stuck.
Huh?
>x rifle
A triumph of twentieth century engineering over twentieth century morality, the kind of gun 10-year old boys think is the best thing ever invented. There is one concession to common sense, though: a safety catch.
Oh.
>turn off safety
You slip the safety off.
There we go.
“Here they come!”
And so they do: the carriage pulls in to view and halts a moment in confusion. It looks as if the coachmen are lost. The student suddenly looks up. Black aims the pistol at him with a certain panache. The Archduke chats complacently to the Duchess, unaware of all this… attention.
You feel sharply tense. This is no time for indecision.
Let’s try this one more time. A warning shot.
>shoot princip
You can’t see any such thing.>shoot student
Black shoots at the student too, but the pistol misfires. Your shot is luckier (for some). The student is winged in the arm and drops his own gun. The Archduke’s entourage rides past, having noticed nothing, into who knows what future. Black gives a grin of pure relief as the student is taken into the cafe, arm wrapped in a tablecloth. Dazed, you give the rifle back.
Why couldn’t Black have misfired the last time?!
And history is once again wrecked.
Well. I guess there’s one thing left to try.
>assassinate archduke franz ferdinand
I only understood you as far as wanting to assassina Archduke Ferdinand.
>:[
>assassinate archduke ferdinand
With a clean fateful shot, you assassinate the Archduke yourself. At almost the same moment, the student in the cafe fires, killing the Duchess by mistake. There is mayhem below.“You missed him!” Black exclaims, lowering the pistol. But it’s too late, the Archduke is dead. The student has escaped, not that that matters now. Black looks guiltily relieved not to have needed to kill anyone.
Which is more than you do. With a sickened calm, you throw the rifle away. History is safe - for you.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Ah, hell.
The air here suddenly seems disturbed, and a kind of cloud gathers from light winds and currents.
From inside the rucksack, you hear a bell ring.Black notices too and smiles winningly. “Lend me that device, please? I have business in The Land…”
Dazzled, you hand it over, and this ever more mysterious stranger does something very complicated, muttering and giving a devil-may-care grin. “Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing!”
The air suddenly condenses into a black sphere, but your friend (or foe) enters it and it vanishes again.
You begin to feel bewildered, manipulated… and deviceless.
I guess the deed is done. Time to head back?
>set clock to 1
You shorten the time left on the clock.
And this time history isn’t wrecked. That’s…something.
Sitting on the jigsaw table, evidently left for you by Black, is the curious device.
So they gave us the device back, that’s also something. And we have a new edge piece! This one must go, uh…
>x edge piece
A large jigsaw piece, six inches on a side and square. It’s a dull grey-white, perhaps depicting the side of a battleship.It is currently this way up:
O OOOOOOO OOOOOOO OOOOOOOOO OOOOOOO OOOOOOO
…where must it go?
I guess we’ve got seven places to try (it can’t fit at D2 because C2 has a nub on the bottom). Anyone got an idea for how to narrow that down, or should we brute-force it?
And now we’ve successfully started World War I. Kaldecki said “happy is the one who knows the causes of things” but this isn’t making us very happy at all, right now! But maybe this next piece will take us somewhere better. Who can say?
Here’s a save file at the end of this session, and one right before Ferdinand shows up, if you want to experiment with it. Tomorrow, we’ll see what we can do with this new puzzle piece!
03.txt (10.6 KB)
03b.txt (21.3 KB)
tmp.sav (1.1 KB)
03.sav (1.1 KB)
And of course, the ever-important map:
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Were we able to enter that sphere?
Also, congrats on causing WWI!
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Unfortunately not. That whole paragraph happens within the space of a single turn, so we don’t have the opportunity to do anything before it’s gone.
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Oof, OK, guess that’s how we’re rolling. Sometimes the simplest solutions are best, I suppose, and they wouldn’t have had sufficiently detailed forensics to determine that this shot trajectory would make the Kennedy magic-bullet theory seem positively euclidean.
Oh, I guess that wasn’t a fail state! I wonder, did the arrow stay at 99 the whole time, or did it ever shift to something else?
A4 was also described as battleshippy, I believe, and has two center-oriented holes that might fit this piece, so maybe first try A3 and B3?
Here’s hoping! This third data point should also help us figure out how, if at all, the spatial arrangement of the pieces maps to points on the timeline (you can draw a line between any two points so that first pair doesn’t really help).
I’m trying to think of other 20th Century events that might have enough chrono-potential to be possible destinations. We’re told these have to be “big turning points in history”, but at least based on the first one we visited and given our discussion of the structural factors causing WWI, they seem more like “triggering points” than turning points, so what else might qualify?
(Sidenote: we sort of passed over this before, but is Black’s explanation that a party big enough to get into the history books would qualify really plausible? I mean the all-time Pac Man high score is in some history books, too, but I doubt that counts as significant enough. Is the number of people involved significant? Or is there something else that’s going to be going down at Century Park that might go beyond just “lots of people having a good time”?)
Anyway, potential list (I haven’t seen any spoilers, beyond knowing from Jimmy Maher’s recent series that we’ll be going to the Titanic on somewhat unsatisfying assumptions, so this is entirely ill-informed speculation):
- Completion of the Panama Canal – links east and west, largely to net positive effect I suppose, but there’s a coup that leads to the creation of a whole new country, plus the short-term impact is to strengthen colonialism. Plus it’s a sufficiently challenging engineering problem that if this second attempt fails, it might be a while before a third, successful try.
- Russian Revolution/execution of the Tsar – as mentioned above, this impacts a whole lot of stuff later in the 20th Century, much of it pretty bad though of course a modern Tsarist regime could be awful in its own way too. But a White Russian movement built around a living Tsar in exile could maybe create a least-bad scenario…
- The Treaty of Versailles – didn’t necessarily make WWII and the holocaust inevitable, but it sure helped, what with contributing to German hyperinflation and the global depression.
- The Reichstag fire – nice and dramatic; maybe without this pretext Hitler has a harder time consolidating power?
- Manhattan project/first uses of the A-Bomb – too close to Trinity territory? These should definitely qualify, though.
- Gandhi’s assassination – a whole lot of communal violence and 2-3 wars might have been avoided with his more moderating influence on events in the subcontinent?
- The Mossadegh coup – you could say this is just a regional one-off – much like the various US-backed South American coups I’m ignoring – but the central role of the Middle East in much contemporary geopolitics makes the region a very big deal, and arguably this is one of the events that helped make it more of a basket case than it could have been (no coup, no Shah; no Shah, no Ayatollah; no Ayatollah, and maybe things in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria look very different indeed?) Of course much of these impacts have been felt in the 21st Century – 9/11, the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis…
- Cuban Missile Crisis – a dog that didn’t bark, thankfully! Not sure whether Black also needs to go back to “good” turning points to make sure they go off right.
- MLK and/or RFK assassinations – sure are a lot of assassinations on this list!
- Stanislav Petrov averts a nuclear holocaust – thank God for this man. Not sure folks really knew about this in 1995, though.
- Tiananmen Square – sort of the opposite of a turning point, where something big that could have happened instead didn’t, but it might qualify.
- Fall of the Berlin Wall – a nice crystallization of a major world event, the end of Communism in the Russian sphere of influence (you could do the 1989 Prague protests instead, I suppose, but there’s already been a game about those).
- The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin – this seems like the rare assassination that fundamentally changed the course of events, foreclosing a potential peace deal that could have restructured the politics of the Middle East (for whose overall importance, see the Mossadegh coup, above). But this was in 1994, after the plan of the game had been drawn up.
This is fairly US-centric, though I assume Nelson would have more UK events – I don’t roll deep here and most of the stuff I can think of, though, doesn’t seem to fit the bill : the Blitz (dramatic but not really a singular turning point), the Miner’s Strike (significant but hard to turn into IF), Edward VIII’s abdication (OK, “seduce Wallis Simpson first” would be a fun puzzle, but at this late date monarchs aren’t very important), the Troubles (depressing and also hard to narrow down to a single moment, except maybe the Good Friday accords?)
Anyone else have candidates?
2 Likes
I’ve played the game so I won’t add guesses. But I’ll say that your list is all political events, aside from the Panama Canal (sort of).
3 Likes
I was coming to say the same thing: too much political focus.
1 Like
I think those descriptions are random, as a sort of tongue-in-cheek description of “flat gray”: “oh, that’s a lovely drawing of a polar bear in a snowstorm”. But it’s as good a starting place as any!
>put edge piece at a3
It fits in nicely at a3.
Or not.
After a lot of trial and error, it lights up at C1:
>put edge piece at c1
It fits at c1, and suddenly lights up with a picture: a cocktail in a glass, with tonic and ice.
1 2 3 4
+----------------------------------------------------+
| ooooooooooooo|
a | Park o|
| oooooo oooooo|
| |
b | |
| . |
|.............oooooo oooooo |
c |. Glass .. Carriage oo |
|.............ooooooooooooo |
| . o |
d | |
| |
+----------------------------------------------------+
>list
a4 parklands strobed by laser light (solved)
c1 a cocktail in a glass, with tonic and ice
c2 a horse-drawn state carriage (solved)[If you’re curious about what happened next in a solved time zone, you can type something like “footnote c2” to find out. There are no hints in the footnotes, so this won’t spoil the game.]
Oh, what’s this?
>footnote a4
[ Footnote a4: ]You’ll have to wait a hundred years for the sequel to “Jigsaw” to see what the 21st century had to offer.
Fair enough.
>footnote c2
[ Footnote c2: ]There were two attempts that day to kill the Archduke: a thrown bomb had already missed him. Six students, all Bosnian Serbs belonging to the Black Hand terrorists (then, as now, run by Serbia), were giving up when the Archduke’s carriage unexpectedly stopped nearby.
Gavrilo Princip, the assassin, was too young to be executed: he later died of tuberculosis in prison. (Several of the other five lived to old age.) A bronze monument to Princip was placed on the spot, and his footsteps preserved in cement. Local Muslims tore it down one night during the Serbian siege of Sarajevo of 1992-4: at night because, by day, the road had become one of the snipers’ favourites.
The Archduke was the most prominent voice for peace in Austria-Hungary, and (to satisfy honour) the hawks sent Serbia an ultimatum designed to be unacceptable. Serbia accepted it almost entirely; Austria-Hungary declared war anyway. Russia found itself defending Serbia, having wanted no such war. Germany was obliged by treaty to back Austria-Hungary, and had perhaps encouraged it: now it tried, but failed, to calm the situation. Since its battle plans, ten years old, assumed France would be the enemy, Germany planned to subdue France before facing Russia. To do so, it planned to occupy Belgium. Britain had an old, almost-forgotten treaty obligation to defend the neutrality of Belgium. By this stage, every country had mobilised its army, a step very hard to undo.
Over eight million men were crushed by the avalanche.
I thought the total number of casualties was in the tens of millions—but again this is very far from my area of expertise. I do have to wonder if this was really the best possible outcome from that moment.
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True, and that probably reflects personal bias (I work in policy/politics). But also, from what we know of Black’s agenda, they’re trying to “alter history for the better” – and looking at the 20th Century, just about all the times/places where things took a turn for the worse (or could have taken a turn for the better) involved politics, if we’re assuming stuff like “give Tesla the technical specifications for the Internet” would cause too much of a temporal paradox, and “instead of futzing around with whatever the big event is, just warn everyone about the ozone layer and global warming” kind of goes against the conceit of the game.
(I did have Chernobyl on a draft version of the list, but not sure it’s sufficiently large-scale in its long term impacts, though I’ve heard arguments. Same with most natural disasters).
EDIT: oh, maybe the Challenger disaster? Most other space race stuff seems generally positive so not sure what Black would be trying to do vis a vis, like, Sputnik, but fixing those O-rings would be good!
1 Like
Good thought!
>x device
A highly curious device, like a wood-mounted gimballed compass, with dials and swinging arrows, inscribed “tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis”. The main feature is a white button. The easiest arrow to read points to 14.
Aha! So this is a sort of temporal GPS: it tells us what year we’re in. And presumably something with it (I’m guessing the button) lets us…make black spheres? Something about “the Land”?
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Yay, footnotes!
Er, I don’t think the Black Hand was still a going concern in the 90s! Unless the meaning is that separatist Bosnian-Serb movements have been largely run from Serbia, in which case I believe that’s basically right (and topical given the early-90s time period).
I think this is more or less right, but elides the fact that his version of “peace” was a federalist subdivision of Austria-Hungary that would have schlorped together much of the Balkans in a way that the Serb irredentists would have deeply hated.
I’m pretty sure that this is incorrect, though not sure whether Western historians had sufficient archival access to know it for sure in the 90s.
Makes sense! I think we kinda need that back.
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It was only mentioned in passing, but Black did give it back to us—it was sitting on the jigsaw puzzle when we came back to the Monument. So fortunately we will have that for our next adventure.
Should I test out this cocktail glass today, giving you all some basic information to speculate on for next time, or wait until tomorrow to get the initial description?
3 Likes
Right now this thread is my main distraction from my kid having RSV (he’s mostly ok, just very snotty and not sleeping well) so I’m all for getting the teaser.
3 Likes
Very well then!
>set clock to 59
The clock starts, silently and slowly, and the jigsaw board pulses with a flickering amber light, warm and erratic as though from an oil lamp.>press c1
The piece at c1 presses in smoothly, like a button, then releases. You are sucked up once again into the time vortex. As you slow down, you briefly make out hand-held cine film of Kennedy’s assassination and then everything begins to change…[Press SPACE to continue.]
What’ll it be this time?
Chapter Two - Icy Calm
Reading Room
This is a wood-panelled room, luxuriant with book-cases, newspapers and journals. Side by side are cartoons of Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Along the north front are windows onto the black night; a single swing-door leads southwest.A copy of The Times lies discarded on an armchair.
Pinned to a green baize messages-board is a folded note, simply addressed to “White”.
I wonder who that could be from!
>take note then read it
Taken.It is written on White Star Line notepaper.
“My dear White,” it begins promisingly enough, "I’ve already fixed this one, so if you want to catch the time window just hang around a while. See you later and earlier! – Yr friend, Black.
PS - Forgot to mention this, but do take care never to stray too far away from the temporal nexus, you might get stranded beyond recall!"
How nice of them!
>get times
(putting Emily’s sketch book into the canvas rucksack to make room)
Taken.>read times
The (London) Times for Wednesday 10th April, 1912. It is well-thumbed and a few days old, though the style is pedestrian by today’s standards and most of the reportage concerns the passage of the Irish Home Rule bill, and a speech by Mr A. J. Balfour.
I’m getting a bad feeling about this…
2 Likes
Welp, guess my one bit of spoilery knowledge is no longer a spoiler!
If this is already fixed, does that mean Black’s altered our course, and we need to change it back? Or knock out various nightwatchmen so they miss the iceberg?
“See you later and earlier” suggests we could go even before 1912 (while the device’s arrow only having two digits seems to confirm that we’re confined to the 20th Century). Looking back at the table, this seems right, since so far we’ve got:
C1: 1912
C2: 1914
A4: 1999
That sure seems to confirm that time increases first along the columns, then up the rows. If that’s the case, we’ve got 4 more destinations before 1912 and the Boer War and Boxer Rebellion could still be in the cards! Though honestly the 1900s are kind of a sleepy decade to my mind; off the top of my head there’s the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk (big, but again hard to see as a candidate for interventions) and the McKinley assassination (kinda rough for the guy, but I think on net it’s probably better that TR assumed the presidency? We might not have the national parks system, if nothing else)!
Looking at Wikipedia timelines, we’ve got Special Relativity in 1905 (GR or GTFO), and the Russo-Japanese war which of course is of personal interest (as I recall, I largely got housed). There was the big San Francisco quake – not sure what one person could do about that – and Anne of Green Gables came out. Sorta slim pickings!
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I’ve always loved time travel yarns, and especially stories where the goal is to set history back to the way we already know it is supposed to be. This was the running theme of tv shows “Voyagers!” “Quantum Leap” at least one episode of “Bewitched”. The entire “Back to the Future” series, and now “Jigsaw”
Or for an exceedingly convoluted “change history to what it’s supposed to be” try Douglas adams weird “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”
The alternate scenario, trying to make history better appears in a number of stories also, my favorite being Stephen King’s 11/22/63.
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I loved the salt shaker scene 
All right! We’ve made it to the Reading Room. Our next goal: explore the Titanic and figure out what exactly is going on here! We’re starting at 11:36 PM, which I think means we’ve already hit the iceberg and the ship will go down in a little over two hours.
…I wonder if you can add time to the clock, or if your limit is always 59 minutes?
>set clock to 1
You shorten the time left on the clock.>set clock to 59
You give the clock a little longer to run.
Cool. So our time limit is the ship sinking, not the clock running out. I’ve made a save right after entering this era, which we can restore to if that becomes a problem. For now, let’s explore!
>sw
First Class Lounge
A comfortable lounge with a rich green carpet, in the style of the Palace of Versailles, where drinks are served and ladies take tea in their great bamboo cushioned chairs, attended by Stewards. Paintings, engravings and notices such as “Deck Quoits”, “Squash Court - professional coaching, two shillings per half-hour” line the wallpaper. Doors lead out to the Promenade, north and south; a swing-door leads northeast; and a long corridor runs east from here.The bar has just this minute closed up for the night: the only clock in the lounge reads 11:41.
The engines begin to shudder.
Restoring and going straight southwest without messing with the clock confirms the bar has always “just this minute” closed.
>n
Port Promenade (fore)
The passengers’ promenade deck, which runs aft from here. The air is extremely cold, but the sea is calm as a table and the night cloudless, so clear that you can see stars right down to the horizon. A doorway leads back south into the warmth of the lounge.>aft
Port Promenade (aft)
The passengers’ promenade deck, which runs forward from here. The air is extremely cold, but the sea is calm as a table and the night cloudless. The engine funnels can be made out only because they occlude the brilliant stars. A doorway leads back south into the warmth of the lounge.
Oh dear, we’ve got both shipboard and compass directions here. Well, let’s see. The Titanic was going west, right? Which means south should be port and north should be starboard?
>port
You can’t go that way.>starboard
Adjoining Staircase
A carpeted staircase rises from here to the Boat Deck, if the signs are to be believed. It adjoins the Smoke Room to the west, and pipe smoke can be made out even here. Doorways lead back to the cold air of the Promenade deck. There are also stairs descending to the Turkish Baths and the swimming pool, but they’re closed up for the night.There is a first-aid box up on the wall, painted white with a red cross.
Or not. A bit of experimentation confirms we’re using the standard parser convention that all ships must be heading east, because then S for Starboard and S for South mean the same thing.
The engines suddenly cut out, and the ship is dead in the water. The familiar vibration of the deck ceases at once. Still, worse things happen at sea.
It’s probably nothing. Let’s keep exploring.
The first aid box has a single dose of “Sailor’s Syrup” for seasickness. It’s never been used, and a steward shows up and comments that he’s never seen it so calm in his 26 years at sea.
Something very odd has just happened - a tiny spray of chips of ice has splashed over the floor on the starboard side, and melted almost immediately in the warm air. A gust of wind, perhaps?
This is fine.
>w
Smoke Room
This is very much a gentleman’s lounge even if ladies are in principle welcome, and a few American heiresses hold fashionable cigarettes in holders. If Noel Coward were on board, this is where he’d be sitting, writing a musical about all the awful rich men lazing in the other chairs. The more feminine Verandah lies aft to the west.Benjamin Guggenheim, the rich American gentleman, sits here, playing cards with a poker school.
The cardplayers speculate amiably about the size of the iceberg. “Eighty feet above deck, would you say, Colonel?”
My, wouldn’t that be something!
>x guggenheim
Rumoured to be possessed of a fortune exceeding twenty millions.“I say,” says Guggenheim, “d’you think there’s ice up on deck? I could do with a jolt,” and he waves his whisky to a great uproar of laughter.
Haha! Simply uproarious, my good fellow! A smashing joke!
Moving on.
>w
Palm Court
A pleasant verandah to one side of the great trunk of the liner’s aft mast, this “Palm Court” is decked out like a belle-epoque Parisian cafe, with Louis XVI treillage (trellis plants) thrown in for good measure. On a moonlit evening, there would be a magnificent view of the waves lapping around the wake, but the night is coal-black.The rich and beautiful heiress Miss Shutes stands here, striking an elegant pose as she and her ladies at court conduct some kind of seance over a ouija board.
They have politely ceased communicating with the underworld while you’re here, and are now making small talk.
>x shutes
One of the most beautiful women in Europe.
Not quite as beautiful as our friend in black, though.
“The air tonight,” remarks Miss Shutes to her companions, “reminds me of the ice-caves of the Eiger. Shall I ever stop shivering!” They simper in concurrence.
Yes, quite, indeed!
Moving on.
>u
Boat Deck
The topmost deck of the liner, a sixth of a mile long, with a magnificent view of the two masts, the rigging, the eighteen oar-drawn lifeboats and the four great funnels sloping slightly back. Stairs lead back down to the warmth. Very few passengers are out tonight: the night is bitterly cold, though there is no wind. You gaze at the stars, bright in the clear sky.A great mass of deckchairs crowd one end of the boat deck. On the far side you can make out one with the name Black affixed to the back, but the others are in the way.
As you look out to sea, a star rises on the horizon, for a moment half above and half below the water, casting a needle-thin ray of light across the perfectly still surface.
Of course you have your own private deck chair, labelled “Black” and nothing else.
There’s a saying about this, isn’t there?
>rearrange deckchairs
You manage to rearrange the deckchairs, and get to Black’s reserved seat. Underneath it you notice a shiny-covered new book.[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
Wait, that actually worked? Ha!
>get book
(the Boy’s Book of the Sea)
(putting Emily’s sketch book into the canvas rucksack to make room)
Taken.>x sea book
You open the book, but before you can read anything something metal falls out - Black must have been using it as a bookmark.>x metal
You can’t see any such thing.
*sigh*
>look
[…]
On the deck is an elegant key, perhaps for an elegant door.>get key
(the elegant key)
(putting the Victorian ormolu clock into the canvas rucksack to make room)
Taken.
There we go. Now we need to go find an elegant door.
A fascinating book from the nurseries of the Empire. There are many helpful passages on semaphore, naval flags and so on, together with details of the brand-new Marconi wireless signals: one of them, the distress signal CQD (CQ for “all vessels”, D for “distress”) has been underlined in black ink.
CQD, huh? I guess this was pre-SOS. I wonder if the Titanic has one of these newfangled Marconi wireless systems.
Not much else to do up here. Back down we go. More poking around reveals another promenade on the starboard side (covered in ice). There are some fun little atmospheric messages while we explore:
A couple of stewards come out on deck, jokingly, gathering ice for their own cabins.
Good thing this ship is unsinkable!
The lift-attendant boy, going off duty for the night, looks sadly out at the splendid deck before going below.
It is a very splendid deck, all things considered.
“That was a very suitable service, wouldn’t you say?” a much-pearled woman declares to her husband. “‘For Those In Peril On The Sea’. Very suitable that we should think of them, too.”
Yes, very suitable!
Anyway, the last place I can find that we haven’t explored is east from the First Class Lounge, so let’s go that way.
First Class Entrance
An opulent entrance hallway, twenty yards square and more at home in a country house than a passenger liner. The grand sweeping staircase curls upward, supported by pillars from the marble-tiled deck. The ceiling is painted and well-lit; the wooden panelling is interrupted by arched windows onto the night. A long staircase runs west and the first-class cabins lie to the east.
A brief aside: one thing the Brits got right in their spelling system was “panelling” instead of “paneling”. Most of the spelling I learned in school was the American style, but for whatever reason I was taught the British rule about doubling a final consonant before a suffix even in a multi-syllable word (everyone writes “shipped”, but traditionally the Brits write “worshipped” while the Americans write “worshiped”) and I’ve stuck to it ever since.
Anyway! Onward!
>u
Top of Stairs
The top of the grand flourishing staircase, high up in the superstructure of the liner. The lounge continues west with, extraordinarily, a Gymnasium.The band, a suave-looking octet of musicians in leisurely evening dress, jive away with hot ragtime numbers.
The Wireless Room door, to the east, bears a notice in small print.
Ooh, a wireless room! Fancy!
>x notice
“Wireless Marconigrams to the United States, via Cape Cod, 8s 4d for ten words, extra words sixpence each, address and signature free. Apply to the Purser by 5 pm.”
Eight shillings four…pence, right? That sounds like a good deal, for sending a letter instantly across the sea! The wonders of modern technology.
“Aren’t we listing a little to port?” an elderly lady asks a passing officer. “Oh, very likely, ma’am,” he replies smoothly, “we often take more coal out of the starboard bunkers on the outward run.”
>w
Gymnasium
A polished wood-floored room, surrounded by windows from which no light enters. And a thoroughly modern gymnasium too: there are rings and ropes, of course, but also a rowing machine and mechanical horses.Stewards, allowed to use the gym at this late hour, are riding around in circles on bicycles.
Hanging on a peg by the door is a jacket.
Ours now!
>x jacket
A dark-cloth blazer jacket, with silver buttons, a double lapel and (not very much) braid on the sleeves: this is the Sixth Officer’s everyday uniform jacket.>take it
(putting the tagged key into the canvas rucksack to make room)
Taken.>wear it
Too big for you, but if nobody looks very closely…
The Wireless Room is locked, so that ends our explorations of this area. Back down we go.
>e
Cabins
Here the first-class deck breaks up into cabins and corridors: passengers come and go from time to time. There’s no way further forward, in any event, except via the cabin doors.There are many cabin doors adjoining to the east, with surnames on and apparently locked.
Captain Smith, a rugged British commander of the old school, paces the deck here, reassuring the passengers that all is well.
Captain Smith, displeased to see one of his junior officers loafing about, dispatches you off to hoist the Ensign.
First Class Entrance
An opulent entrance hallway, twenty yards square and more at home in a country house than a passenger liner. The grand sweeping staircase curls upward, supported by pillars from the marble-tiled deck. The ceiling is painted and well-lit; the wooden panelling is interrupted by arched windows onto the night. A long staircase runs west and the first-class cabins lie to the east.
Oops. Let’s stop impersonating an officer for a minute.
By the way, does anyone know what “hoisting the Ensign” is? Is that a flag or a sail or something?
After some annoying parser-wrangling, we find a door labelled “Black”, unlock it with the elegant key, and go in.
Inside Black’s Cabin
Black’s ridiculously spacious and decorative cabin (in Old Dutch style) looks hardly used, not surprisingly as it must have been vacant for most of the voyage. There’s a single bed (four feet wide!), a writing table, an open-curtained porthole and a tall wardrobe, but all quite plain and predictable.On the writing table sits a key with a long barrel.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
We know what we have to do here!
>look under wardrobe
Hidden beneath the wardrobe you find and pocket a detector (for want of a better word: a small apparently scientific instrument) with another, accompanying note from Black.>x note
“My spare KD - be careful with it! Sorry I’ve got the time machine and you’re still trailing after those jigsaw pieces, but this might help - it detects whether pieces are still hidden in your time zone. Don’t get your feet wet, Black.”
Hmm.
>x kd
The detector has three golden ball-bearings extended on arms from a gimbal-mounting. It is not obvious how to activate it.>wave kd
You look ridiculous waving the Kaldecki detector.A stewardess in maid’s uniform knocks and enters in one fluid motion. “Very sorry to disturb you. They say there’ll be a boat drill later - that’s the trouble with commissioning voyages, still, we’re making history aren’t we?”
And she bustles around, changes the sheets, finds some towels but peers oddly at one which is covered in scribbled mathematics; still, she understands laundry well enough, so she takes it away before you can get a proper look.
>maid, give me the towel
You seem to want to talk to someone, but I can’t see whom.>out
But you aren’t in anything at the moment.
Argh!
I haven’t found any way to stop (or even locate) the maid after this. But we need to get that towel somehow!
We can’t examine much of anything else in the room, and none of our keys fit the wardrobe, but something surprising happens if we open the porthole:
>x porthole
It’s too dark to see much. At least the cold air isn’t getting in.>open it
For a moment the porthole seems to be jammed. But then you realise it’s just that on the other side, a weight is hanging from the catch. Pulling it through, you are gratified to watch a grey jigsaw piece land on the floor.Since it’s very cold out, you shut the porthole again.
Puzzle piece! The “KD” (Kaldecki detector?) would presumably have told us about it, but I can’t figure out how to make the damn thing work. This one is, in particular, an “edge piece”.
We can talk to Smith, though I haven’t gotten anything useful out of him except this:
>ask smith about iceberg
“Icebergs present no threat to modern shipping, dear me no!”
Somewhere in here:
The Stewardess is doing the rounds of the first-class passengers, tapping on cabin doors and picking up laundry.
Aha! Not a maid but a stewardess!
>stewardess, give me the towel
The Stewardess looks at you as if you’re mad, but returns the filthy towel to you, it not being her job to judge the sanity of the first-class passengers. She completes her rounds and disappears into the underworld of the liner.
Success!
>x towel
It is almost black with fountain-pen flourishes, Greek letters, arrows, integral signs, and so on. You can make out little in the mass of scribbles except, disconcertingly, for “3x6=24” in one corner. The conclusion reads: “Opens about 2.10 am, in the lounge”.
Writing on a towel with a fountain pen seems like an exercise in frustration. Also, Black, you might want to check those numbers again…
(Unless it means something completely different?)
Well, it’s 1:11 am now, so we have a while until 2:10. We set the clock back to 59 and keep exploring.
An evacuation has begun of women and children into the lifeboats, which are being lowered one by one from the boat deck. Nobody is taking this very seriously at the moment.
Black’s key does get us into the Wireless Room:
>e
Wireless Room
Inside the spartan wireless room. Cables from this primitive radio equipment run up to the forward mast. The only decorations (a few charts) contrast with the opulence just outside the door.There are two wireless sets here. The vacant one is primitive, with only a simple Morse key to tap.
The wireless operator sits on a listening watch, headphones clamped over his ears, staring into space with blank concentration.
The charts spell out Morse code (“As approved by the 1851 Convention on Telegraphy”), in case the wireless operator forgets. Or perhaps in case someone else has to fill in on short notice.
Maybe we need to send CQD?
The liner is now lurching and listing. The remaining passengers realise that all is not well. But there is calm everywhere.
I then spent a long while trying to figure out what verbs would work here. After a lot of trial and error I resorted to a walkthrough and discovered that the verbs are “dah” and “dit”. Which…may have been obvious to a telegraph operator, but certainly was not to me! You also need to not put a gap between letters, or the message will end, and…blah. All-around a neat puzzle ruined by a frustrating interface.
As the liner sways, you are struck by a sudden thought. Of course this is all very unfortunate for the people concerned, but why is this such a turning point in history? What is going on that you’ve missed?
Good question!
You finish sending your CQD call. The wireless operator hesitates a moment, then turns round. “It’s the S.S. Carpathia! They acknowledge and they’re coming! Well done sir!”
Then he peers a little more carefully at you. “Wait a moment, you’re a passenger! Thanks - but quick, get out before the officers come!”
He shoves you away, though not before confiscating your key.
Puzzle solved!
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
And now we have twenty minutes to get back to the lounge.
The liner lurches once more, and swings a little.
Back we go!
It is now absolutely clear that the liner will sink, and very soon. Yet all around is admirable stoicism and calm. Stewards still serve, though the deck tilts. Women and children are being helped up from the second class; the steerage is underwater.
Nothing to do now but wait, I guess. And see if we can figure out this “KD”.
>push kd
You toy ineffectually with the detector.>pull kd
You toy ineffectually with the detector.>twist kd
You set the threefold arm spinning, but after a brief moment it spins its arms up together, chiming a rough bell. The motion then dies away.Hardly anyone is left now: they have all drowned, left by lifeboat or dived for it.
So this is a thing we twist? Maybe the bell means we’re finished here?
The deck begins to lift in a horrifying fashion. The last lifeboat has gone.
Three minutes left!
The deck rises higher yet. There’s not a moment to lose.
Two minutes!
This would be an excellent moment to panic!
ONE MINUTE!
The air here suddenly seems disturbed, and a kind of cloud gathers from light winds and currents.
The curious device rings a little bell excitedly.You are utterly terrified. There’s only one chance left: the time window!
LET’S DO THIS!
>press button
The cloud of disturbed air condenses into a kind of spherical ink-black ball, large enough to swallow you up whole.Suddenly the entire liner heaves onto its side, the stern pointing straight up at the sky, at ninety degrees to the water. You desperately cling on, holding your ears against the loudest noise you have ever heard, like everything metal you’ve ever seen all thrown down the stairs at once, as the engines break loose and fall straight through the ship, smashing bulkheads as they fall, down to the sea bed three miles below. By a miracle you survive this, and leap instinctively for the black ball…
You climb into blackness, which draws you…Inside the Black Ball
You stand in absolute blackness, as if in space, but a space without stars. You can imagine the six spatial directions, but although there seems to be light and you can see your arms and possessions, there is nothing else. All you can hear is your own breathing.
Safe!
>x me
Somehow that seems inappropriate here.
Hmm.
>n
You try to translate yourself, and perhaps you succeed, but how can you tell?As suddenly as it enveloped you, the blackness begins to thaw and melt, like snow into an ash-grey slush which drifts and piles into landscape.
The Land. Grim, monochrome steppes, wide and exposed beneath a brooding sky, the colour of boiled bruised potatoes. Bleak mountain crags surround a huge plain. But you know that what you will never forget is your first sight of the pyramid, a beacon gleaming gold in the centre.
At the Pagoda
The western rock face meets the glacier-milk canal just to the north.A Chinese Pagoda, or pavilion, is placed serenely on this bank, its doorway open.
The canal-water splashes and catches the light.
[Your score has just gone up by one point.]
…yeah, I have no idea. Let’s…um…
>e
Southwest of Pyramid
Open field south of the canal, which opens out here to a steel-grey river and then flows under the western corner of the golden Pyramid. In the centre of the southwest face is a gleaming doorway.>ne
Disc Room
This is a tiny tetrahedral annexe of a room, whose only clear feature is a broad black disc embedded in the floor.
I’m not sure if every direction leads you to the pyramid or if I just got lucky.
It seems we haven’t wrecked history, so maybe sending the distress call was all that was needed? But I have a strong feeling we missed something in here.
So that’s where I’ll leave it for now! Any suggestions for other things we could try to change, or where we might find another puzzle piece, or…anything? Or was Black telling the truth that they’d already fixed this one for us?
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