Form Nineteen
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1961. You are officially dead, and the form that fixes it needs a form only living people can have.
On the seventeenth of March 1961 a printed notification arrived at your own address informing you that you had died on the fourteenth. You read it standing up in the hall. The error is on the third line: a transposed file number, 4471 for 4417. The other man is genuinely dead, was seventy-eight, lived on the same street, and is not the point.
You are Tomas Wierny, fifty-two, a lathe operator. As of the fourteenth of March you have no ration book, no wages on paper, no pension accruing and no vote, and your daughter's papers for the conservatory require a parent of recorded status.
Everybody has told you it will take an afternoon.
The circle
Form 19, the Certificate of Living Person, requires Form 40 and Form 12. Form 12 requires Form 40. Form 40, the Identity Booklet, is issued only to persons appearing on the Register of Living Persons. And the Register is amended on production of Form 19.
That is not a queue. It is a circle, and it closes itself the moment your third refusal lands, and every person who refused you was right to.
Nobody in this building is your enemy
That is the whole design and it is the hardest thing about it. Ostrowski at counter one can see the transposition on the page in front of him and has said so, and there is no form for I can see it. Feliks at counter two is twenty-four and the best clerk in the building and has explained twice, patiently, why he cannot hand you the ration book with your name on it that is four feet behind him. The Director had the plate taken off his door in 1958 because a man who cannot help you should not have a plate suggesting he can.
Every refusal you receive is correct, and every refusal names exactly what is missing — which is not obstruction. It is the map being drawn for you, one refusal at a time, and the game keeps the graph so you can look at it.
What else there is
Four kinds of paper account for everything that happens at counter three. There are forty in the rack. The other thirty-six are not obsolete — they are simply not asked for, and a form that is not asked for is not withdrawn. It is just quiet.
Mrs Pilar has been at that counter for thirty-one years and was trained in 1930, and nobody has ever asked her what else there is.
How it ends
Four ways, and the hardest part of the best one is not the paperwork. It is that you have to ask somebody to put their booklet number on a form, in a file, for ever, to swear to the identity of a man the state says is dead — and everybody you could ask is standing on the same steps at six in the morning for reasons of their own.
Two and a half to three hours. Nothing in this game can kill anybody. No sign-up, no download, and it saves where it stands.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.