The Debt of Air
Miss three payments and they don't evict you. They make the station smaller.
- ~95 min
- 14906 words
- 38 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 5 endings
- Near future, 2094, cislunar orbital habitat
2 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
Cover art · generated placeholder backgrounds and character art in-game · licensed music, credited in the build · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Coriolis Station, 2094. Eleven hundred people under a worker-owned charter, breathing an atmosphere that is legally a loan. Every kilogram of nitrogen and oxygen in the hull is financed; the co-op services the debt in refined volatiles, and when it misses, the consortium seals corridors. Vasha Reyes runs life support and knows the station's mass balance the way a farmer knows rain. Fourteen months ago a scrubber stack failed on her shift and her wife walked into it. Tem has lungs that will not last three years, a place on a treatment queue the station cannot afford, and the distinction of being the person who filed the incident report that blamed the hardware instead of Vasha's sequencing. Now the consortium's compliance auditor has arrived with the authority to seal volume and one discretionary allocation to spend — a new scrubber stack or a debt restructure, not both — and a habit of asking questions that cannot be answered in kilograms. Then Module Nine vents, two people die, the interlock history is under Vasha's credentials, and the insurance clause it triggers would wipe four years of debt and hand the consortium the charter. A grief story with an airlock in it: hard engineering, a marriage with an accident inside it, a third person who is neither a temptation nor a villain, and a sabotage whose perpetrator has a reason that holds up under audit. Desire is adult and frank and cuts away at the door. Five endings; in none of them does everybody breathe.
Content notice
- terminal illness and medical decline
- asphyxiation and industrial death, graphic
- suicide
- medical rationing
- sexual content implied, cuts away
- grief and anticipatory grief
- workplace injury caused by the protagonist
If this is close to home: findahelpline.com lists free crisis lines by country.
Cast
- V Vasha Reyes protagonist; life-support lead no portrait yet
- T Tem Adeyemi-Reyes Vasha's wife; rigger, fourteen months post-injury no portrait yet
- O Ori Kessendra consortium compliance auditor no portrait yet
- M Mireille Ocampo co-op chair; elected, exhausted no portrait yet
- D Dag Wynter atmosphere technician; Vasha's second, and the one who found Module Nine no portrait yet
- D Dr Susannah Okonkwo-Feld station physician; keeps the treatment queue no portrait yet