Gatecrash

You are not reading this story. You are being processed by it.

You are Eli Moreau, a polymath grad student on the worst morning in the history of Chicago - the morning the sky tears open and the Bureau arrives: a cold extra-dimensional administration that processes whole worlds into filing systems. It recruits you on sight, because a mind that reads everything is exactly the kind of mind it most wants to harvest.

In this interactive gamebook, YOU make every choice. The Gauntlet is a machine for killing clever people, and you are the cleverest it has ever met, so it will try very hard. Bold options are bait. Powerful cards are hooks. The cleverest-looking move is almost always the one built to flatter you into your own filing. Choose wrong and you die - graphically, specifically, always your own fault - and the page sends you back to learn faster than the machine does.

But here is the secret the whole trilogy turns on: the Bureau can process your brilliance, your fear, and your despair. It cannot process a man who refuses to abandon the weak. Every person you save stays with you - not as an ally, but as weight you must keep choosing to carry. The party is not your support. The party is your weapon: the one thing the wheel has never learned to metabolize.

Collect all eight hidden sigils. Carry everyone. Don't take the powerful card.

Book One of The Gauntlet trilogy.