CYOA Automod

The notice arrives at 4:12 in the morning, which is when most things happen now. Nobody goes outside in daylight in February any more.

You're on the roof of the Wexford Street cooling centre, swapping a burned-out fan motor by headlamp. It's thirty-four degrees with ninety percent humidity, and it's the coolest part of the day. You've kept this building running through six summers of wet-bulb alerts. The two hundred people asleep on cots downstairs would not survive a night without it.

Your phone buzzes.

RELOCATION AUTHORITY — FINAL ALLOCATION

You have been granted guaranteed passage to an off-world settlement of your choice. Report to the Northern Processing Centre within 30 days.

Residents who do not report will lose all legal right to live or work on Earth. Unregistered persons detained after the deadline will be transferred to an off-world penal facility.

This offer will not be repeated.

You climb down and find your sister Mara in the triage room, where she runs an unofficial clinic on her nights off from the hospital. She's still in scrubs from a double shift. She got her own notice last week. She hasn't reported, and you already know she isn't going to.

"Someone has to stay with the people who can't fly," she says, before you can ask. "You don't have to be one of them."

The supply boat leaves you on Gull's Rest at dusk with a lantern, a ledger and a warning: the last keeper vanished three weeks ago, and the lamp has burned every night since. A storm is rolling in off the black water.

Your crew has one shot at the Gilded Vault: the private bank under the Marchetti Opera House, where the city's richest stash what they can't declare. Tonight is opening night, and the alarm system reboots for exactly four minutes during the second act.

Your village owes a debt to the dragon Vesperine: one hundred gold crowns or one volunteer, due at the next full moon. The moon rises tonight, the coffers hold eleven crowns, and every eye in the square has turned to you.

Rain hammers the neon sign of the Hotel Paloma as you step into the lobby. You're a private investigator, and the client who hired you—a jazz singer named Lila Monroe—was found dead in room 714 an hour ago. The police have already called it suicide.

You're the newest member of a six-person research team at Station Kerguelen-9, deep in the Antarctic winter. At 3 a.m. the radio crackles with a distress call from Station Vostok, two hundred kilometres away—a station that was abandoned in 1987.

Varenna, 1936. You're a courier carrying a sealed envelope across the border for an agency you're not allowed to name. The night train to Lausanne leaves in ten minutes, and at the platform gate two men in grey coats are checking every passenger's papers.

Your little brother has fallen ill with a fever no doctor can break, and the village elders whisper that only the Witch of Hollow Fen can cure it. You set out at dusk with a loaf of bread, a lantern and your grandmother's silver thimble.

You and your best friend Dev have ten days until Demo Day, where you'll pitch your startup—an app that tells you your houseplants' feelings—to a room full of investors. The app currently crashes every time a plant is sad.

The storm tore your schooner apart on Calder Reef. You wake on a white-sand beach with three other survivors: the ship's cook, a stowaway girl and the first mate, who is clutching a map he won't let anyone see.