Eight games, run by Tim Evans. Two a day — one afternoon, one evening. Four-hour slots, pre-generated characters, no system knowledge needed, safety tools at every table.
You bought a treasure map off a man in a tavern. Yes. You know. So did four other groups this week, and by Tuesday there were three parties on the same road being extremely rude to each other. Here’s the thing, though: the map is real. The vault is where it says it is, there is a great deal of gold in it, and the old man who printed four hundred of them wasn’t running a swindle. He was recruiting.
Los Angeles, 2037. A memory designer is dead in his studio and Rep-Detect has the case with a whisper attached: rogue replicant. The whisper comes from a corporation, and it is a lie of the useful kind. You have until dawn, the case you were handed is wrong in every particular, and nobody in this story gets to be right — you only get to decide who pays.
New York, six weeks after the fall. The army’s last plane leaves an old Brooklyn airfield at dawn and boarding needs a stamped chit with your face on it. Between the five of you, you have three. The queue at the far end is longer than anyone wants to think about.
Six months ago you left a witch finder at a crossroads with a list in his hand — three villages where the evidence didn’t add up and the verdict came anyway. Dee took the list. Now Garratt has called in the favour, and the village has its own view. A sequel that stands alone.
A parcel reaches the Society: the field diary of an English naturalist who drowned in a northern lake last October — posted three weeks after he died. The first sixty pages are ordinary. The last twenty are in the same hand and written from somewhere outside his own life. The final page is dated nine days from now, and it describes your arrival.
Under the Chancellery garden, below every level that appears on a captured plan, they built a room. Its walls are the wrong shape. It was made to broadcast once, on the last night, to every loudspeaker still standing in Europe. They believed they were calling something. They were the call. Three eras, three investigations, an audience that keeps getting bigger — and each part stands completely alone.
You catalogue German science before the other lot get to it, and it has been six weeks of frozen filing cabinets. Then a requisition turns up for forty tons of concrete, delivered to a building that was already finished. There is a room under the bunker that is on nobody’s plan.
You have worked here eleven years and long ago stopped being curious about the tapes. On Monday the gates shut for an “administrative period”. On Tuesday a technician takes off his headphones and walks into the lake. On Friday, at six in the morning, someone is going to close a switch.
A lacquer disc came out of a box of Cold War acetates at auction and sold for four hundred euros to a producer who liked the label. He sampled fifteen seconds. You have almost certainly already heard it. At midnight it closes a festival, live, to two hundred thousand people.