• Story
  • Post-Apocalyptic
  • Wasteland Survival
  • Bureaucratic Black Comedy

First Day Outside

Sixty-one years underground, and the shelter isn't dying of radiation—it's dying of unfiled paperwork.

Inside Shelter Nine, air scrubber cores are failing while a requisition form sits pending review for fifty years. Sick of waiting eleven days for committee authorization, you crank open Clause 9's vault door yourself. Outside, twenty meters down a weed-choked valley road, an auditor in a folding chair waits with carbon receipts and a pencil. You carry no guns or superpowers—just a tool roll, a tin of spares, and schematics nobody in the wasteland can read. Up here, repairing a dead water pump is your bed and your currency, but every valve you fix broadcasts to every settlement on the mast line exactly who just stepped out of the mountain.

Play

Player discussion

How to play

  1. You open in the outer lock on the morning you say step nine — committee authorisation — out loud and then crank the aperture anyway; the door holds at ten centimetres for a four-minute sample, and by the time it finishes there is a woman on a folding chair twenty metres out with a logbook and a pencil, and the secretary is still reading you the clause in your ear. Your first move is whatever you type.
  2. After that you write freely every turn: a line you say, a repair you start, an order you refuse, or a whole paragraph of your own narration — and three suggestions sit under each turn for when you would rather not start from nothing.
  3. When a scene has gone as far as it can, hit Advance the story and it jumps forward; chapters close and file themselves as you go, and the next one opens on a valley that kept trading while you were deciding, and on a shelter whose board number went down without you.

What makes it different

Your leverage is competence, not force. Nobody out here can read a schematic and you were raised on them, so a pump that has been dead ten years is an afternoon's work — and that afternoon is your water, your bed and your standing. Repairs happen on the page, part by part, tool by tool, and they are allowed to fail in specific and inconvenient ways.

Every fix advertises where you came from. A pump running again is proof that somebody shelter-trained is out here, and word goes up the mast line faster than you walk, so the same act is both your income and your exposure. Meanwhile the thing killing your home is not out here at all: it is a requisition that has been pending review for fifty years, and a committee that sits on the sixth.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to pay to play First Day Outside?
You get 100 free credits when you sign up, and credits never expire. The game spends credits only when it generates new AI content, based on actual usage — there's no fixed per-round fee and no subscription required to start.
What kind of game is this?
An open-ended novel you write with an AI. You play someone born in a sealed shelter who has just forced the door, you type in your own words, and the AI writes the valley back at you in real time — no multiple-choice options, no dice, no stats.
What can I type?
Anything: a line of dialogue, a repair you start, a form you refuse to sign, or a whole paragraph of prose. Each message has two destinations — Continue story puts it into the book as written, while Direct the AI passes a private note to the storyteller about where you want this to go. There are also three suggested openings under every turn if you would rather pick than write.
Does the story ever end? How long can I play?
There is no ending and no final confrontation. Shelter Nine is never saved and never lost — the air is failing of paperwork, and paperwork does not resolve. Chapters fill up, close and file themselves, and the next one opens on a valley that kept moving, so it runs as long as you keep writing, and you can leave it for weeks and pick it up where you left off.
Do I need other players?
No. It is single-player; the AI plays everyone else, inside the shelter and out on the road.
Is anything I write kept?
Yes. The story saves as it goes and archives chapter by chapter, so you can open the directory and reread any of it. Inside the fiction it matters too: what you actually wrote down and copied is the only kind of record either side of that door has ever managed to keep.
Is there a Chinese version?
Yes — Simplified Chinese and English, each written for its own readers rather than translated line for line.