I-0

From Author's Website

Written by Adam Cadre. Winner of two Xyzzy Awards, including Best Game of 1997.

You're Tracy Valencia, first-year student at the reasonably prestigious University of Dorado. Sure, it's not Berkeley -- hell, it isn't even Stanford -- but it's light-years better than Dorado State, where your older brother Trevor goes. Dorado State's just a party school. Trevor makes a point of rubbing this in every time he calls.

He'll be able to rub it in in person soon enough: it's Thanksgiving Day, and you're driving home. Daddy was perfectly willing to buy you a plane ticket, but like you told him on the phone, there are much better things to spend the money on. Birthday presents, for instance -- you turn eighteen tomorrow. Besides, it's only a four-hour drive.

Two and a half hours into said drive, the car starts making a noise no piece of machinery should ever make. It's the sort of sound a rhesus monkey might make being forced down a garbage disposal. Now, Dorado is nothing but scorching desert from the time you cross the coastal mountains until you reach the river; true, it's the scorching desert in which you grew up, but sentimentality aside, it's not exactly the best place in the world to find yourself stranded. But you've got to do something about this noise, if only because it's drowning out the stereo. So you pull over. You're just about to switch off the ignition when the car goes dead of its own accord. You try to start it up again, but absolutely nothing happens.

Guess what, Tracy? You're stuck on the loneliest stretch of Interstate Zero miles away from the last sign of civilization. It's twenty minutes to noon and the temperature's well over a hundred and twenty. You already miss the air conditioning. It's beginning to look like Ed and Sandy Valencia's only daughter might not make it for Thanksgiving dinner...