Deeplight

There are people living under a hill, and you will never meet them. They used to live at the bottom, in halls so big you could not see across them. Then the Glass began to uncover — a flat thing far above everything, higher than any of them has ever been — and light escapes upward through glass. So the great halls went dark first, because a room that size cannot hold light. They moved up one level, for a season, until it got better. It never got better. Eleven camps, four hundred years, and nobody ever decided to leave. Now they live on thin ground at the top with everything they were underneath them in the dark, and every morning somebody ties a rope at the mouth of the shaft and walks down to look for it. WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO Nothing. That is not a joke and it is not a hook. The Glass is your screen. While it is dark their lamps hold and they get further down. The moment it lights, the light starts leaving, and it leaves faster if you are watching something busy, faster again after midnight. When the lamp is empty they put a hand on the rope and walk back up, and that takes them four hours they will not get back. You are not a character in this. You have no name down there and nobody knows you exist. You are the weather. WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR Eleven abandoned camps, each older and better built than the one above it, and every one of them left tidy — furniture stacked under sheets with chalk marks still on the cloth, doors pulled shut with the latches down, floors swept. Nobody down there was running. They were coming back next season. On the twenty-first floor are the Record Rooms, where nine hundred years of ledgers still stand on their shelves in order, with a ladder leaning against one of the runs, put back where it belongs by whoever came down it last. And below all of it is the first place they ever left, with a list nailed by the door saying what was stored inside and that somebody would be back before the season turns. THE PART THAT MAKES IT URGENT The Glass uncovers a little more every year. So a lamp does not carry as far as it used to, and the reachable depth comes up by a floor every few years, permanently. Nothing down there is destroyed. It simply passes out of reach, and it does not come back. They know. Ord has four hundred years of measurements and he can tell you exactly how long the Record Rooms have left. WHAT IT WILL NOT DO It will not shame you. There are no streaks to break, nothing is taken back off you for a bad day, and no character in it has ever heard of a phone. Some evenings are worth spending and the game never suggests otherwise. It has no internet permission. No account, no sign-in, no server — Android will not even let it open a connection. It cannot see which apps you use or what is on your screen. It knows the screen is lit and roughly how hard it is working, and that is all it will ever know. No ads. No subscription. No timers to skip. The best thing you can do with this app is put it down.