Glasnost GLASNOST

A woman alone in a closed town after everything stopped.

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The log house at the forest cordon by day: snow on the roof, a paling round the yard, a workbench under a lamp, and Olya beside it
Not on any map

Postbox 12 (п/я 12)

After everything stopped

You are Olya Teratova, from the forest cordon a day's walk out of Postbox 12, a closed town of the Commonwealth. Your husband was a miner and the men's representative at the mine. He kept a list of the men who died of an illness nobody would name, and three months before the end he was taken.

Then something went wrong at the institute. The tunnel out was blocked, the town went silent, and the dead got up. It is December. You have an axe, a cold log house and his last letter, and nobody is coming.

There is no rescue in it. The most there is, is the truth got out.

What is in your hand

Everything gates on what you are holding. Bare hands take branches, loose stone and what grows. An axe fells standing timber, a shovel digs, a prybar strips a building a storey at a time, a hammer builds. Tools wear out, and are made at the thing that makes them: the bench, the forge, the still.

  • Heat

    Out in the open a night is death. Under a roof with no fire it is a long bad night. Every fire eats coal or timber from the store.

  • Power

    A generator burns diesel you had to find, and every watt is a signature. The machines come to signatures.

  • The map

    There is none. You draw it by walking. Found sheets and climbed chimneys put districts on it.

  • The body

    Meat goes off unless it is kept or smoked. Sleep is owed by the day and paid by sleeping, and asleep in the cold the cold takes more.

  • Places

    Put a building down, raise it, then upgrade it a part at a time: chinked logs, a storm porch, a great stove you can sleep on, a cellar, a barred door.

  • The fence

    Drag a fence out round the compound and raise it tier by tier, from junk wired to stakes to a lit palisade. From the twelfth day they come at night.

From the game

The cordon at night, lit only by a fire in the yard; the rest of the taiga is black
The cordon after dark. The light is the only thing between you and what comes to it.
The new estate in town: nine-storey panel blocks, a brick shop and a burnt-out lot under snow
The new estate in town, a day's walk from the cordon. A prybar strips a building a storey at a time.
Teratov's last letter on a desk, typed in capitals
His last letter. The papers are how the story is told, and what you carry out at the end.
An old woman in a red headscarf speaks: Marfa's girl. You have her chin. Shut the door. The steam is all I have.
The people still alive. What you can say to them is a row of tiles.
The workbench screen: axes, hammers, a prybar and other tools as square tiles on a plywood board
The bench. Every thing is a square with a picture on it, and you move it with the mouse.
The mine a day beyond the town: a headframe over the shaft, rail sidings, spoil heaps in the snow
The mine, a day further out. Officially a feldspar and mica works.
Three ways

The way out

The town is ringed by mountains, with one road tunnel through them, and the far end of it is a rockfall and a pile-up. The radio room is dead. Bring it the manual, a generator and a cable run, and go on air for ninety seconds: the loudest thing the town has heard, and everything answers it.

Then one way out per run: the tunnel, with a bulldozer for the cars and a charge for the rock; the air, with a strip, an airframe and an engine; or the drones, the lab's own machines, sent out. Each ending is read in the light of what you carry out.