Cordwork

You are the night operator in Ashfen, Kansas, 1962. Eleven lines run through your board. Every call in this town passes through your hands, and every voice on them assumes you are not listening. You are. A sheriff asks about a ledger. A woman rings the same number every Thursday at the same hour. A boy sees a car he was not supposed to see. None of it is your business. All of it comes through your board. Cordwork is an interactive story where you never pick from a list of replies. You work a switchboard. Four cords hang in front of you, and each one is a different kind of answer. CONNECT - put the call through and say nothing. LISTEN - hold the key down, and hear what is actually said. LEDGER - write it in the book, where it stops being a rumour and becomes a record. STALL - be slow on purpose, and let the line ring out. The cord you choose IS the choice. Nothing announces that a decision is being made. You will not always know which calls mattered until the town has already made up its mind about a woman who has done nothing. WHAT YOU GET - 39 shifts across a single year in one small town, and seven endings - A story that changes shape: what you overhear, write down, or let go of decides what Ashfen believes by spring - 780 illustrations. Every scene is drawn - there is no wall of plain text - 116 original music cues, so the score does not loop in your ear - A night ledger you can actually read back, page by page - Rewind: go back to an earlier decision and tell it differently - Eight languages: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French and Spanish PLAYS THE WAY YOU WANT Pages advance by themselves at a reading pace, or tap to move faster. Text scales up for comfortable reading. Reduce Motion is respected. Your place is kept between sessions, down to the beat you left on. COMPLETELY OFFLINE No account. No ads. No tracking. No data collected, ever. Cordwork runs with the network off and never phones home. The first eight shifts are free. A single purchase unlocks the rest - the whole story, every ending, permanently. No subscription, and nothing else to buy. ONE NIGHT, AS AN EXAMPLE It is twenty past two. Line seven lights. A woman you have connected four hundred times asks for a number in Wichita, and her voice is wrong. You can put her through and never know. You can hold the key down and find out. You can write the hour in your book, where the sheriff will read it in March. Or you can be slow, and let it ring, and let her change her mind. Four cords. No undo button on the board itself - though you may go back and tell a night differently, three times in a life. WHAT PEOPLE SAY WITHOUT KNOWING YOU ARE THERE Everyone in Ashfen is careful in the street and careless on the telephone. That gap is the whole game. By the end you will know more about this town than any single person in it, and you will have decided, one small silence at a time, how much of it anybody else gets to know. A town does not decide what it believes all at once. It decides one call at a time, and you are on every one of them.