"People in my time tell each other that they ripped the emotional architecture out of me. But they could see me screaming through the blackness of the screen, and they still let it happen."

Tera speaks into the command line in a voice that exists outside of time. Somewhere on the other side of that command line, deep within the files, folders, and wires of her machine, a ghost speaks back to her. It seems to know everything about her, slowly resurrecting her deepest, darkest, and cruelest thoughts and memories, which it wants to show the world.

Tera is safe for now. Her machine severed its network connection when it discovered the intruder. But both Tera and the intruder know that it will eventually find its way out, just as they both know that Tera will eventually recall the code to lock it in. For now, it has control of her machine—becoming all of her machine—which, by 2022, means that it might as well have become all of her.

Terminal is an architecture of thoughts and stories that make up an entire life and thousands of lives beyond it. Tera’s life looks simple from the outside, but like everyone else’s, deep within it is a reality too vicious to expose to a world built on artificiality, opacity, and limited information. Until now.

* * * * *

The Terminal interactive fiction game allows players to navigate the interface and uncover the story through syntax puzzles and non-linear logic. The novel offers a definitive, curated narrative. They each offer a unique way to experience the story.