Nine Acres of Glass
A free online text adventure in five acts. Hyde Park, 1852, and a building coming down around you to a printed timetable.
You are Owen Straith, forty-one, clerk of the Executive Committee. There were eleven of you in October and there is now one.
The Great Exhibition closed on the eleventh of October 1851. The building is being taken down by Fox & Henderson to a printed order and carted to Sydenham, and there is a board on trestles by the south door that says which bays come down on which day, a fortnight ahead, and it has never once been wrong.
Your work is the Returns: three thousand and eleven exhibits restored to the people who lent them. Two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine are done. Twelve are standing in nine acres of glass that will be a field by the middle of August.
What goes is gone
Not blocked. Not flooded. Not for the moment. Crated, carted, and standing in a field at Sydenham with four thousand others, along with anything that was still in the bay when it came down.
This is not a collapse and it is not a tide. It is knowable in advance, it is posted on a board, and it is therefore plannable — which is exactly what makes losing something your own fault. You have six days a week. Walking somewhere and signing something take time; reading, looking and talking do not. You will not get all twelve, and deciding which ones to lose is the game.
And one entry you wrote yourself
Entry 1140. One case, contents not stated, exhibitor not stated, Class 30. You wrote that on the fourth of October last year at about eleven at night with three thousand entries to close in eleven days, and you meant to come back to it.
Finding out whose it is takes four documents. The corrected Class 30 catalogue proofs, which exist nowhere else in England and are in a room that comes down on Saturday night. The Class 6 jury minute books, in a gallery that goes on Thursday of the following week. The carriers' waybills, which move to a shed in a mud yard. And the memory of a watchman who has slept in this building every night since it closed and is being turned out on the fourteenth of August.
Your sources are being consumed on the same schedule as everything else. That is the whole design.
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.