The Password Game
Your roommate asks you to pick up a part they’re 3D-printing for a project, and on your way out of the prototyping center, your phone begins to vibrate against your hip. Normally you’d ignore it, but nothing about this week has been normal. The call is from a blocked number. Hand shaking, you answer the phone.
“Hello?”
“You’re doing very well,” says an inhuman voice, deep and terrifying. You almost drop the phone in shock before you realize it’s the sound of one of those voice changers that they always use for anonymous witnesses in the true crime documentaries you sometimes watch when you can’t sleep.
“Who are you?” you hiss. “Why are you doing this to me?”
An eerie, mechanical laugh. “You should know by now that I’m not going to just give you the answer. This is something you have to solve for yourself.”
“Please. I just want to understand. How are you able to do all of this?”
“Listen to me,” the voice says. “This place is a machine. It treats all of us like parts. Replaceable. But sometimes those parts break. And that’s where one can find – opportunities. The game is changing, now. Figure out what part you are in this machine – or whether you want to be a part of it at all.”
And then, before you can say another word, the line goes dead.
You don’t know how long you stand there, before your feet begin to move almost of their own volition. Beneath you, you feel the rumble of a train going by. So many systems. So many moving parts.
You keep walking. Until, as if your body knows something your brain can’t understand yet, you’re standing in front of the machine shop.
“Can I help you?” asks the bored girl in a hoodie behind the counter.
“I – don’t know,” you say. “Do you have a – red envelope for me?”
“No,” she says, and your heart sinks. But then she pulls a slim cardboard box from a shelf. “But I do have this.”
You thank her, rush just around the corner to the first place you can find to sit down. With trembling fingers, you open the box. Inside is a thick grey laptop, at least twenty years old. You open it, and the screen lights up.
To unlock the computer, you'll have to guess a valid password...