The Green Ward

The Green Ward

It is night. The corridor is long, pale green and very quiet, and the only sound is the hum of the tubes overhead. Six doorways open off the left-hand side, and in each one a surgical lamp burns over a bed.

There is no one in the beds. Instead there is a coral reef in a tray of water, a peat bog going grey at the edges, a river delta, an orchard in blossom, and a glacier tongue sweating in a steel basin. Three brass gauges are bolted to the wall above each of them — temperature, water, life — and every needle is walking slowly toward the red.

You have a supply cart with four spaces on it. You push it up and down the corridor, you read needles by eye, and you decide who gets the coolant and who waits. When a needle sits in the red for ninety seconds an alarm starts in that room, and it does not stop until you deal with it. When a needle reaches zero the lamp above that bed goes out and stays out.

There is a wall switch in every room marked LIFE SUPPORT. Throwing it will hold two of that patient's three gauges in the green for the rest of the shift — but the compressor draws on the whole ward, every other patient starts falling faster, and the corridor lights drop a step darker. You cannot take it back off without killing them. Partway through the shift the steel door marked INTAKE unlocks, and behind it is a plant room with a valve that will halve the decline across the whole ward if you can stand there and hold it for ninety uninterrupted seconds. Nothing is happening in the corridor while you do.

At the end of the shift somebody hands you a clipboard, and it lists every bed, what state it was in, who is on life support, who was lost, and whether you ever got the valve closed. There is no way to save all of them. The game is about which ones you choose.