Dead Reckoning

 At the edge of explored space there is a slow current of dead ships called the Drift, and you are a salvor: the one the Company sends to board the wrecks, read what happened, and close the file.

Every ship is someone's last chapter. A family hauler that ran out of air. A fugitive who faked their own death to escape a debt. A Company transport with its holds locked from the outside. An old woman who died loved, tended by people who don't officially exist. You read each one by lamplight — the hull, the traces, the signal — and then you decide: log the truth, or the lie the Company wants paid for; hand over what you found, or bury it; strip the dead, or leave them their things.

Those choices add up. You drift, slowly, toward one of two kinds of salvor — and the people you meet on the station between jobs come to know which one you've become.

And underneath every contract is your own question. Thirty-one years ago you survived a ship that died, and the Company keeps your file sealed in an archive you've spent your whole life trying to open. The deeper you read, the closer you get — to the truth of the Drift, to the people hidden inside it, and to an answer you may not be glad to find.

This release is the opening of an episodic story: six dead ships and three nights ashore — roughly 1.5–2 hours of reading, 19 branching decision points, over 15,000 words. More chapters to come.

- Plays in your browser, desktop or mobile. No install.

- One self-contained file. Works offline.

- Autosaves as you go.

- Interactive fiction first: spare, second-person, atmospheric. No combat, no puzzles, no fail states — just the dead, and what you choose to do with them.

Themes: death, grief, loss, and exploitation. A quiet, heavy game.

Dead Reckoning is in active development. Feedback is genuinely wanted — leave a comment and tell me what landed and what didn't. It shapes what comes next.