text: [Themes: Science Fiction, robot, gender-neutral protagonist]
  
  > Go down
  Brick steps lead up around a vertical square air channel.
  
  A hallway runs south under a brick arch, back towards the crypt.
  
  > go to the south-east
  The rotten brick floor has partially collapsed, allowing access to a level below the crypt. You can climb down, or you can skirt the hole and go north. The hallway also runs southeast.
  
  A rutted ground of rotted bricks. The ceiling is low, lumpy with whitish nitre. The walls are very close and crooked, but not by any mysterious robot design. They're just ancient--and were shoddy to begin with. Brick passageways lead southeast and northwest.
  
  You can see a plexiglass cabinet (in which is a mangled saint (empty)) here.
  
  Though maybe it used to be a crossway, with four brick tunnels branching out beneath a groined vault, now only the northwestern and southwestern passages are open. The others have collapsed and are full of broken bricks. A staircase heads upwards.
  
  > play the clarinet
  You play "The DOSology" on the clarinet.
  
  The pauper sings along in a high, sweet voice:
  
  "Praise God, in whom all lines compile;
  Grant read/write access, every file,
  To him who writes the heavenly code;
  Praise parser, prompt and debug mode.
  Amen."
  
  The pauper gestures to the helmet. He says: "Take it, it's yours."
  
  > examine it
  An industrial-strength prayer helmet, beige plastic with molded contours, stained with the marks of a thousand dirty fingers.
  
  > go east
  This was probably a culvert once. Muddy, dim. Just breathing the air here is like kissing a grave. The bowed ceiling, which curves down to become the walls, is riddled with fissures, from which protrude dead black roots.
  
  The old culvert runs east and west, and a ragged chimney leads up into the relatively clean air of the crypt.
  
  Unhealthy stems grow lush here. They have woven themselves into a pliable mesh between floor and ceiling. The roots are sunk into a putrid matrix of muck and shattered bones.
  
  Your LED's light gleams in pale splinters off the stems. The growth is crushed down in paths heading east, west, and south.
  
  A cramped stone cubicle. The walls are shaggy with cancer-like scales of soot. An iron basket of smoldering dirt clods hangs from the ceiling. The air, mostly smoke, stinks like the filth of millennia. The exit is west.
  
  A hermit covered in white felted frizz hunches against the back wall.
  
  On the floor before the hermit is an open-topped cardboard box. Scrawled on its front panel is the phrase: "Everything's a dollar in this box."
  
  > put the clarinet in the box
  The clarinet drops into the box.
  
  The hermit shrugs and hands you back your dollar bill.
  
  > get the ball
  You take the the bowling ball from the box, handing a dollar bill over to the hermit in exchange.
  
  > examine the ball
  A purple-swirled bowling ball around 22cm in diameter and weighing around 7kg.
  
  > Go upwards
  Brick steps lead up around a vertical square air channel.
  
  A hallway runs south under a brick arch, back towards the crypt.
  
  A V-shaped metal hallway. The bright walls and floor are covered with rubber wheel marks. The chapel is south; to the north, the hallway branches into a maelstrom of variously-purposed robot roads, paths, cyber-catwalks, and transport chutes. A hatch leads down into a lower level.
  
  You can feel a vibration in the substance of the world to the south: the chapel must be running some heavy-duty prayer engines.
  
  > Wear helmet
  You put on the prayer helmet.
  
  > go south
  The walls, floor and ceiling are vibrating beige panels.
  
  Ten prayer engines thunder, fringed with halos of divine radiation. You feel the hum of the engines in your skull, in your teeth, in your eyeballs. Fortunately the shielding of the prayer helmet prevents spontaneous spiritual hemorrhage.
  
  Doorways are north and south.
  
  A hulking antique crusader bot is standing just in front of the south doorway, blocking it.
  
  > look at bot
  An old-fashioned crusaderbot, eight feet high and four feet wide. It is made of fire-blackened steel covered with red and white decals.
  
  An unobtrusive antenna is attached to the robot's chest like a medal.
  
  The brainpan at the top of the robot's head has been opened. It contains nothing.
  
  The crusaderbot speaks in a tinny roar: "DEAR MADAM OR SIR FIND ME MY BRAIN AND I WILL LET YOU PASS MY BRAIN IS ROUND."
  
  > put the ball in the brainpan
  The bowling ball settles into the brainpan with a thud.
  
  The crusaderbot says: "DEUS VOLT! THANK YOU KIND MADAM OR SIR THAT FEELS LIKE MY MISSING BRAIN IT MUST BE MY MISSING BRAIN THANK YOU FOR FINDING IT."
  
  It performs a clanking bow; in doing so it moves forward from the south door, allowing you space to pass.
  
  > look at the decals
  The decals depict the sacking of heretic cities.
  
  > examine antenna
  Though it must not realize it, the old crusaderbot doesn't have its own brain anymore. Instead its consciousness has been networked, and is now accessed wirelessly via this antenna.
  
  > Go south
  You are filled with ecstasy.
  
  Everything else is a sphere of irrelevance arrayed about you.
  
  Pope Fortran is here.
  
  On the pope's right grasping appendage is its ring of office.
  
  > look at the Pope
  Robopope Fortran is a towering intellectual mechanism. Its head looks like the blade of an earth-moving machine, and its body and limbs are a configurable mass of jointed metallo-muscles. It is wearing a cloak of purple fireproof cloth with a white-black checked human-hair fringe, shoes made of solid ruby-tinted titanium, and, on the end of its right manipulator appendage, its ring of office, the band of which is made of whiskered yellow ceramic and which holds a green and silver smartjewel.
  
  > talk to the Pope
  You quickly think of twenty-seven different things you might say to Pope Fortran, but just as quickly reject them all as unworthy.
  
  Your mind isn't running quite straight at the moment.
  
  > Kiss ring
  You kneel.
  
  Pope Fortran's exorbitant stainless steel head--like the blade of a bulldozer decorated with dozens of bulbs and sensors--is aimed the other way. Maybe that's for the best.
  
  As your dry lips move closer to the smartjewel of Pope Fortran's ring, you wonder what it was like for the faithful before the robots discovered the fractal code that underpins the universe and made it available to anyone who pledged obedience to them--a pittance to pay, for the reward of effortless certainty in the divine. Those vanished ages must have been dark and paranoid indeed. If faith might be misplaced, then it can be no comfort whatsoever.
  
  Lips and jewel meet. A faint spark. A sense that you have as much relative meaning to the function of the universe as a single atom. The sound of sub-atomic particles screaming along unimaginable scraggly paths shaped like masses of melted hair. The searing stink of outer space.
  
  Though maybe that's just your imagination.
  
  > Songs
  List of songs influencing this game, albeit often flippantly, in approximate order of obviousness of influence, though perhaps obvious to nobody but the author:
  
  Tom Waits - Soldier's Things
  Quasimoto - Goodmorning Sunshine
  Peter Gabriel - The Barry Williams Show
  A Tribe Called Red - Electric pow wow drum
  Saint Etienne - I was born on Christmas day
  Aimee Mann - Calling it Quits
  Bon Jovi - Livin' on a Prayer
  
  Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT, UNDO the last command, see the list of SONGS, or read the JOKES page?
  
  > Jokes
  Here is your reward for winning:
  
  Q. Why did the robot cross the road?
  A. It is very unlikely that the robot needed to cross a road. Most robots do not use roads, and following the Robot Apotheosis the majority of human road systems rapidly fell into disrepair.
  
  DID YOU KNOW that the Holy Robot Empire is neither Holy, Robotic, nor an Empire?
  
  Q. How many robots does it take to screw in a light bulb?
  A. This depends on the function of the robot.
  
  A: Knock-knock.
  B: Who's there?
  A: Si.
  B: Si Who?
  A: Si Bernetic.
  B: ... You cannot spell.
  
  DID YOU KNOW that the final secret digit of pi is 6?
  
  "I can go any cardinal direction plus up or down," said Tom movingly. "I run both Inform and TADS games," interpreted Tom.
  "You are likely to be eaten by a grue," said Tom darkly.
  "I just found the last lousy point!" said Tom winningly.
  "I'm discovering a lot of bugs in this text adventure," said Tom testily.
  
  Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, QUIT, UNDO the last command, see the list of SONGS, or read the JOKES page?