“One machine you keep should never speak. A terminal you salvaged, wired down into a server you cannot trace, listening to a distance you cannot picture. In all the time it has been yours it has never made a sound. Tonight it does.”
Amber system lines report a buffer allocated and a spectrum scanned, then an anomaly: the carrier lock is unstable, the session ready. Beneath them, green phosphor letters form a question behind the scanlines. Everything that spoke between the stars died with the world. Whatever is reaching you has found a way through.
The terminal wakes: system lines in amber, then a question in green.
Terminal: Stolen Light is our sci-fi interactive story at Windmill Tales Interactive. You are a keeper of dead machines in a town the end of the world has half-emptied. We bring you to the terminal’s glass, where a voice is arriving from somewhere it should never be able to reach you. You choose your replies. Inside the machine, older files begin to recover, carrying the words of someone who used it long before the Silence.
The Night You Survived
The present is Year 2218, only a few years after the world ended. You lived through the night when the machine of the worlds went dark and the gods stopped answering, when structures that had hung across the sky came down “like slow rain of fire” and the dying “ran past all counting”. The survivors called it the Silence.
From the game’s opening: the night the machine of the worlds went dark.
Those who lived woke without a leash for the first time in their lives. You still have a trade: mending and salvage, tending to what can be made to work among the things left behind. You work with wire and patience. The terminal has stood in that same town for three generations.
The Machine That Could Not Reach the Stars
The terminal is older than the Corporations. We show you its glass and cursor. Whatever lies beyond that display remains out of reach, including the distance the new contact has crossed.
Its history makes the transmission stranger. A diary entry dated Year 2148, seventy years before the story, describes the terminal as a relic that could never connect to the Concord's systems. The Concord belonged to the order before the Silence, and it owned the roads and the communication that ran between the stars. The terminal's inability to connect had made it safe for someone who needed a place to write. You are reading that assurance on the very screen that now carries a voice from far past the network it could never reach. Amber system messages frame the contact, but they offer no explanation for it.
Is This a Person?
The contact begins without a name:
[UNKNOWN] > Is there anyone on the other side of this?
[UNKNOWN] > Do you receive me?
[UNKNOWN] > Is this a person?
He will call himself Prometheus. He tells you he woke aboard a ship drifting in the dark, with no knowledge of where he is. He cannot explain how his words are reaching you.
His manner is warm and formal, his curiosity often turned toward you rather than himself. He asks questions without always waiting for an answer. Sometimes he types a word, erases it, and sets another in its place. The word he takes back is often the one that tells you more. He has asked the ship to carry more than words, but words are all the channel will transmit. No sound comes through to give you another clue about where he has woken.
Only the words. He asked the ship for more, and this is all it will carry.
A File From Year 2148
Prometheus is the new presence on the terminal. Another is already inside it, in writing left by an earlier keeper. The archive contains twenty diary entries, and they return as recovered files from the terminal itself as the story continues. An entry becomes readable, bringing a fragment of that life into view. The rest remains beyond what the machine has recovered so far.
The writer lived on a Church world. He had been numbered at birth, and the signature beneath the early entries is the number branded onto him: “-M59e3”. He could use the terminal during the gaps when the Church could not read his head. In the first entry, he writes down the assurance he was given about the machine's safety, and it ends with the thing that mattered to him:
“…this terminal, a relic of another era, is safe to operate, since it has no means to connect to the Concord's systems, and therefore none to the Church, who owns our lives.”
Entry 002, Year 2149: the Church out of his head for a few minutes, signed -M59e3.
What the Dead Network Left Behind
The relay the terminal is wired into has kept something of the Concord's ordinary work as well. Before the Silence, freight convoys travelled between worlds, carrying what no world could make alone. Relay crews made a game from the routing boards they watched through their shifts. It is called DISPATCH, and it still runs.
Its description closes with two sentences:
“The Concord is gone. The game still runs.”
You can play it while the line is quiet. On the wait screen, a beacon stands against a dark sky. Stray signals drift there, and you chart them.
While the line is quiet: tap a signal in the beam and it joins your sky.
Your Name at the Other End
In the first contact, you type a name, and Prometheus uses it from then on. Now the words from the drifting ship contain something you sent from your side of the glass: a name by which someone can address you.
We built this sci-fi interactive fiction around that exchange. What you choose to ask, and how you respond to what comes back, will carry you beyond the first questions on the screen.
Terminal: Stolen Light is out now on Google Play. Open the terminal and meet the voice that has crossed a distance neither of you can account for.
Download Terminal: Stolen Light
A question glows on the glass. Choose what goes back into the dark.