Fourteen Wakings
A free online text adventure in five acts. 2151. A hundred and thirteen years, and fourteen chances to be awake for any of it.
The Anselm left Earth orbit in November 2149 with two hundred and six people aboard and a target four point three light years away. The crossing takes a hundred and thirteen years. Nobody who boarded will arrive — that was in the prospectus, in the second paragraph, in ordinary type, and two hundred and six people signed it anyway.
You are Ines Varga, thirty-eight, and you are not crew. You are the wright: the one person aboard kept in cold sleep against the things the crew cannot fix. Your body will survive fourteen thaws. The bay prints the number on the inside of the lid, in stencil, four inches high, because in 2148 somebody decided it should not be possible for software to be wrong about this.
You cannot supervise anything
That is the whole game. You are woken, you deal with what is in front of you, and then you choose how long to go under for — and the world moves without you. Crew age and die. Their children become the crew. Their children's children run the farm and paint the corridors and have opinions about you.
And a thing you said once, in passing, to one tired woman in an engine room in 2151, because you were annoyed about a valve, spends twenty-eight years becoming a rule painted on the commons wall with your name on it. You did not write it. You cannot revoke it. Half the ship will go to war over what line two means and both halves will quote you.
The number on the lid
A short cycle is not free. Set eight years across a twenty-eight-year gap and the bay opens four times instead of once, and three of those are a woman standing in a corridor at three in the morning being told by an apologetic watch officer that nothing in particular has happened.
Spend the body carelessly and the last thing that happens is that the bay tries to open in 2264 and the medical governor stops it on its own authority, exactly as you were told it would in 2148, and arrival happens to other people. That ending is reachable from the first act onward, and it is not a failure state. It is arithmetic.
Nine years each way
You can put a question to Earth. Alpha Centauri is four point three light years out and getting further, so an answer takes the better part of a decade — which means you have to ask a long time before you need to know, and you will be asleep when it arrives, and somebody will keep it for you because there is a rule about that too.
Earth sent every ninety days from 2149. On the fourteenth of March 2191 it did not send, and then it did not send again. There is one message in the archive from the week before, flagged personal — wright, that four generations of this crew have each decided in turn was not theirs to open.
How it ends
Four ways. At arrival there are two hundred and forty-four people who have a founding story that has held them together for a hundred and thirteen years, and there are four things you know that they do not, and you have four working days and one voice. Or you slept through it.
Two and a half to three hours. 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.