{ "name": "Police Squad — Property Annex, 11:40 PM", "enter_text": "One bench, one clipboard, sixty-seven years of evidence, and a television old enough to remember all of it.", "music": 2, "strokes": [ { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 168, "color": 8, "meaning": "Floor" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 58, "color": 0, "meaning": "Wall" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 56, "w": 160, "h": 3, "color": 1, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 59, "w": 160, "h": 109, "color": 8, "meaning": "Floor" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 8, "y": 10, "w": 34, "h": 44, "color": 8, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 8, "y": 10, "w": 34, "h": 3, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 8, "y": 26, "w": 34, "h": 3, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 8, "y": 42, "w": 34, "h": 3, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 118, "y": 10, "w": 34, "h": 44, "color": 8, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 118, "y": 10, "w": 34, "h": 3, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 118, "y": 26, "w": 34, "h": 3, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 118, "y": 42, "w": 34, "h": 3, "color": 7, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 164, "w": 160, "h": 4, "color": 0, "meaning": "Wall" } } ], "spawn": [ 24, 148 ], "exits": [ null, 1, null, null ], "exit_flags": [ "", "tuned", "", "" ], "exit_blocked": [ "", "The east wall of the annex is a wall. It has been a wall all evening. Something about the television suggests this is negotiable.", "", "" ], "objects": [ { "name": "archivebox", "sprite": "archivebox", "x": 58, "y": 118, "look": "The 1958 pallet, back from the digitisation project, awaiting final disposal. Somebody has written on the top box, in fresh marker, in your own handwriting: DO NOT DISPOSE. You do not remember writing it. You agree with it completely.", "synonyms": "pallet boxes evidence shelf archive", "use_text": "You square the boxes to the pallet edge. Sixty-seven years of paper, and you are the only living person who has read any of it, and you square the boxes, because they are his." }, { "name": "plotdevice", "sprite": "plotdevice", "x": 96, "y": 122, "look": "The P.L.O.T. Device, in property since New Year's, awaiting a trial that keeps being adjourned because no prosecutor can explain to a jury what it does. Tonight, on the bench, four feet from a 1958 television set, it is doing something it has never done before. It is humming the tune to something.", "synonyms": "device orb primordial exhibit", "points": 0, "sets_flag": "device_on", "use_text": "You inventory the device, as the clipboard requires. As you lift it, the hum finds the television's aerial, and the dead screen fills with static, and the static is not random. Static is never anything. This static is a channel guide. (+5)" }, { "name": "satdish", "sprite": "satdish", "x": 26, "y": 100, "look": "Bolted to the annex roof, above a property store, is a satellite dish that is not on the building schedule, not on the asset register, and not on any invoice. It is aimed down, through the roof, at a television with no plug. There is a faint red glow at the receiver and it is the only warm-coloured thing in this building.", "synonyms": "dish antenna receiver roof aerial", "use_text": "You radio Facilities at midnight and ask when the annex acquired a satellite dish. Facilities says the annex has always had a satellite dish. You ask since when. Facilities says always. You ask them to check. There is a pause of eleven seconds, and then Facilities says, in a slightly different voice, that the annex has always had a satellite dish." }, { "name": "salesman", "sprite": "salesman", "x": 76, "y": 132, "look": "There is a man in the property annex at ten to midnight in a maroon blazer and a bolo tie, holding a clipboard, standing between you and an exhibit. He is very pleased to see you. Nobody is ever pleased to see anybody in a property annex.", "synonyms": "spike man blazer bolo salesman rep", "points": 5, "sets_flag": "signed", "use_text": "You ask for identification and he produces it instantly, laminated, with a photograph that is definitely him and a company name that is definitely not a company. Then he does the only thing that has ever worked on a Drebin: he hands over the paperwork and asks you to sign. You read it first. All of it. You are the first customer in the instrument's history to read it first, and he watches you do it with the expression of a man watching weather come in. (+10)", "dialogue": [ { "says": "Salesman: Detective! Congratulations. This property annex has been selected for a complimentary upgrade — six hundred and sixty-six channels, no monthly, no installation, already installed. He gestures at the roof. The gesture is slightly too accurate about where the dish is.", "choices": [ { "text": "Who installed a dish on a police building?", "goto": 1 }, { "text": "What company are you with?", "goto": 2 }, { "text": "I'd like to read the terms.", "goto": 3 } ] }, { "says": "Salesman: We did! Wednesday. There's a work order. There is a work order. It is correctly numbered, correctly countersigned, and filed in a system that has no record of the countersignature belonging to anybody.", "choices": [ { "text": "I'd like to read the terms.", "goto": 3 } ] }, { "says": "Salesman: Entertainment. He says it the way other men say a number they have agreed not to say out loud.", "choices": [ { "text": "I'd like to read the terms.", "goto": 3 } ] }, { "says": "Salesman: ...You'd like to read the terms. Salesman: Nobody reads the terms, Detective. In four hundred years of this instrument, in every format it has ever taken — the deed, the wager, the fiddle contest, the standard-form end-user agreement — nobody has ever once read the terms. He hands them over. He is smiling. He is smiling slightly less than he was.", "choices": [ { "text": "Then I'll be the first.", "goto": -1, "sets_flag": "read_terms", "points": 0 } ] } ] }, { "name": "tvset", "sprite": "tvset", "x": 132, "y": 126, "look": "EXHIBIT 1958-114: one wooden television set, seized from the Meridian Terrace boarding house in 1958, never claimed. It has no plug. It has never had a plug. The 1958 property log notes this, in your grandfather's hand, without comment, because the form asked what was seized and not what was possible. Tonight the screen is showing a channel guide: CH 3 — CURTAIN OF STEEL. CH 5 — AFTERBURN! CH 7 — BADGE HEAT. CH 9 — NORTHERN DRIZZLE. CH 13 — THE LATE MOVIE: CRATER WOMEN OF VENUS. In the corner of the screen, very small, a counter reads 24:00:00 and is not moving yet.", "synonyms": "television screen set channel exhibit aerial", "requires_flag": "signed", "points": 5, "sets_flag": "tuned", "use_text": "You tune it, because it is on the clipboard and the clipboard says CONDITION: CHECK. The static folds inward. The annex acquires a horizontal hold problem. And somewhere in 1965 a retired detective sergeant feeding hens looks up at his porch light; and somewhere in 1982 a lieutenant reversing out of a parking space feels the car pass through something enormous and priceless without breaking it for once; and all three of you are pulled through the same six-inch screen into the eleven o'clock schedule, in order of seniority. (+10)" } ] }