19 days ago I hid a novel inside an HVAC company.
Over the last three weeks I posted a voicemail you couldn’t hear, a job ad that only hires people who read, and a customer care bot that happily puts a price on your daughter.
Some of you asked what it was all for.
It’s an alternate reality game (ARG). It’s a piece of fan fiction I created. Everything in it belongs to T1M3 R3WRITTEN, a hard science fiction trilogy by Avery Novikov currently in production. I was given free range to adopt parts of it as an ARG. It’s a project very close to my heart: Buffalo, 2030, an HVAC technician named Ayden Cross, his eight-year-old daughter Zoe and a city whose cooling infrastructure carries something it shouldn’t.
Since October 1st:
– 29 people talked their way into the technician portal
– 7 let a holding company that doesn’t exist assign them an asset ID
– 3 broke the bot that prices everything
– 2 times someone climbed down and re-tuned Joseph’s machine
– 1 made it all the way to the end
– some even noticed all of this extending into SARC-FM
– 2 codes were sent back for whoever comes next
That last number is my favorite. The game ends by handing you a code to pass on. In the novel, that’s exactly how the antagonists work: they plant a mission in you, and you carry it out as if it were your own idea. Kinda like an LLM puppeteering some people you even may know. The ARG’s finale says it out loud:
„You were never the customer. You were the carrier.“
As always there are things I learned while vibe-coding the ARG for T1M3 R3WRITTEN:
– Hide things in plain sight. Hidden things get missed
– Honesty is a feature, even inside fiction. Ask the bot if it’s real and it tells you
– People don’t want to be told a story. They want to find one and enjoy the dopamine of the process plus the reveal.
Oh, and just in case you asked yourselves if this was it. No.It isn’t over. Today the last of Sarah’s 19 messages arrived. Put them together and Novikov will hand you the first line of his first of three books. The door stays open.
Link’s in the first comment. And if you’re already inside: thank you for carrying it. I will keep you posted about an author who seems to write about a scenario that I am actively working to stop from happening when- and wherever I can.
#ScienceFiction #Storytelling #VibeCoding
