The Silent Partner
A free online text adventure in five acts. Two people, one job, one earpiece — and only one of you has hands.
Ash Vuković is thirty-one and is inside a building with a torch that has four turns of gaffer tape over the lens, and can see about four feet.
Nadia Okonjo is forty-four and is in a van four hundred yards away with eleven camera feeds, the floor plans and a contractor session somebody left open on the access control system in 2019, and can see the whole building and cannot touch one single thing in it.
You are both of them.
Which of us can do this
switch changes body. It is the only command in this collection that changes who you
are, and everything else in the game exists to make you type it: separate rooms, separate pockets, and
— the part that turned out to matter most — separate knowledge. Ash finds a service
riser on the second floor. Nadia cannot release a door she has never been told exists. radio
is not flavour; it is how a fact gets out of one head and into the other, and it costs a minute like
everything else.
And the moment you become Ash, the camera picture starts going out of date, and it goes on going out of date whether or not anybody is doing anything about it. There is a meter for how stale it is.
The thing one person cannot do
Bay 4 has a maglock on it. No handle, no reader, no keyhole — there is nothing on Ash's side of that door for anybody to do anything to, which is the entire point of a maglock. It opens from a system, and the system is in a van, and the van cannot walk through it.
unlock bay4 in 3 queues the release for three minutes' time. Then you switch, and get
there, and the clock does not stop while you are switching. That is Act III, and it is the one puzzle
on this whole site that a single person genuinely cannot solve.
What is actually in the building
Not money. This is a commercial records and destruction company — a good one, nine hundred tonnes a year, twenty years, every certificate it has ever issued with a weighbridge ticket stapled behind it.
Except one. Certificate of Secure Destruction 2011/4117, signed and dated the eleventh of March 2011, for four hundred and eleven boxes that are sitting eleven feet away from it on racking somebody bought that same month.
Nobody forged it to steal anything. Destroying four hundred and eleven boxes costs about nine hundred pounds and printing a certificate costs nothing, and somebody meant to do it the following month, and that was thirteen years ago.
Alarm, not death
Nobody dies in this game and nobody is hit. What rises is an alarm level, and what it does is shut things — the lift, the floor doors, and eventually the session in the van. Every door Nadia opens is one line in a log with a timestamp and a credential, and there is one credential, and she bought it in April with her own card, on purpose, because using somebody else's would have been a different kind of crime and she has never in nine years done that kind.
Five acts
Act I — The Walkthrough. An empty building on a Sunday and a genuine audit badge. No risk of any kind. Learn to ask the question.
Act II — The Lobby. Live, with a night man of fifty-eight on a fixed round, and only one of you can see where he is.
Act III — The Server Floor. Two people, one door, two minutes.
Act IV — The Fourth Floor. The index, a phone call that asks for the wrong thing, and four clean rungs on a ladder that somebody else has been using for years.
Act V — The Van. One door out and it opens from the other side. Four answers, and three of them cost somebody something.
Roughly two to three hours. Autosaves every turn, checkpoints at every act.
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.