The Cave of Dead Voices

You were taken from your homes blindfolded and marched, stumbling, for hours to the heart of a guerrilla camp. You are surrounded by armed men. You are not prisoners: you are the new recruits. But in times of war, the line between a rookie ally and an enemy spy is so thin that there must be a process.

The General and the Lieutenant have designed a series of tests that the recruits must pass by the campfire. The General orders a single jug of raw clay, heavy and porous, to pass from hand to hand, each time filled with a different mezcal —the agave spirit of Oaxaca and many other Mexican regions. You must drink and get ready for the test the Lieutenant sets in each round.

Pass every test and the Iron General will accept you as blood brothers. Make a mistake or cough, and the Lieutenant will confirm her suspicions, cock her rifle in the dark and declare you infiltrated spies.

Tons of solid rock have sealed the only exit of the silver mine —the kind that made colonial Mexico one of the richest places on earth— raising a cloud of dust that blinds you completely. The carbide lamps have flickered out, leaving you buried alive in the belly of the earth.

Beside you is a trapped miner, his hands torn from digging at the stone. But in the depths of this vein, the real terror is not the lack of air: whispering from the cracks, with a ghostly, icy echo that seems to bounce inside your own mind, waits an unknown entity.

Survival in this abyss will not depend on strength, but on fairness. In total darkness, the entity will test the survivors' morals by handing them scarce rations in deceptively irregular shapes. Your mission is to ration life: turned into human scales, you must feel and weigh each piece blindly and debate how to split the loot into mathematically equal parts for everyone at the table.

But the mountain sees everything. At the climax of the test, a sudden, violent flash of red emergency lights will flood the room for a second and reveal the truth about your plates. If the hosts discover that fear or selfishness won someone over and they took a bigger share, mercy is over: the entity will unleash its punishment on the greedy and force them to drink a deadly sip.

You wake up with a terrible headache and, with it, your identity has been forgotten. You are no longer who you used to be: you are now one more inmate in the gloomy wards of La Castañeda, Mexico City's infamous asylum, which operated from 1910 to 1968.

Before you stands the Chief Psychiatrist. To her you are not a person: you are the perfect subject for her next clinical experiment. Around her lurks Patient Zero, a living warning and the exact reflection of what awaits you if your mind breaks tonight.

The treatment has begun. You will undergo a sensory shock therapy designed to fragment your mind, and your only hope of regaining your sanity is to hold on to memory. In the darkness of your confinement, the dishes placed before you will be your only lifeline: pure, primal ingredients that will trigger specific memories buried in your subconscious.

But salvation is not individual. To prove you still have your reason, you must debate with your fellow inmates, connect your minds and reach absolute agreement. As a table, you must shout in unison the exact word that evokes that shared memory: the ingredient. Get it right and the psychiatrist will note your progress. Hesitate, let madness divide you or say the wrong word, and control will be lost completely: Patient Zero will be free to unleash a chaos no one can escape. Will you remember who you are before you lose your mind?