adrift

A ship with no crew, a light that keeps turning, and notes in bottles from strangers.

You wake aboard a small brig adrift. Nobody is at the helm. Now and then the sea brings something alongside: a bottle, a plank with something lashed to it, a stone that floats, which stones do not do. You fish it out.

Bottles hold notes from other people, somewhere. Keep one and its glass is yours to fill. Write something, throw it over the side, and the sea carries it to a single stranger. You won’t know who. They won’t know you.

The rest of what drifts by is what the sea has kept. There are logbook pages and letters, belongings, and sometimes the drowned. They belong to things that happened on this water between 1821 and 1851, near a lighthouse that is on no chart. It comes to you a little each day. Some of it only makes sense once people start passing it on.

Before you sail

• The sea remembers you by your SSH key. If you don’t have one, make one with ssh-keygen -t ed25519. Without a key you can come aboard and watch, but you can’t write.
• It’s painted in true colour for a window of at least 80×24. If the colours look wrong, press c.
• Notes are anonymous. The sea won’t carry links, addresses or phone numbers. If a note is cruel, let it sink.
• Press q to leave. The sea keeps your place.