TRANSMISSION NOTES

How SIGNAL//LOST was made — a maintenance log for the curious. The story is fiction. Everything below is true.

THE CONCEPT

SIGNAL//LOST is an interactive fiction told through the last nine log entries of Arctic relay station K-47, played back from a recovered magnetic tape. The screen itself is the narrator: a phosphor-green CRT with a status bar whose day counter, temperature, tape position, and signal meter degrade in step with the story. The reel ends at a live prompt the archivists tell you not to use. The ending is something you have to choose to send.

THE TECHNIQUES

No frameworks, no build step, no images. One HTML file, one stylesheet, and about 800 lines of vanilla JavaScript.

• Typewriter engine — a single typeLine() function with four cadence profiles (diagnostic, prose, slow, header): base delay per character, random jitter, longer pauses on punctuation, and rare 200–700 ms hesitations so the operator feels human. Any keypress sets a skipFlag that flushes the rest of the line instantly.
• Narrative state machine — the story is data: eleven "beats," each an array of typed lines, gaps, glitches, ghost flashes, and status-bar updates. Space, click, scroll, or swipe advances; the same input skips.
• The phosphor stack — layered CSS only: repeating-linear-gradient scanlines, a radial vignette, a drifting raster "roll bar," a steps() flicker overlay, glass sheen gradients for curvature, and text-shadow bloom. Chromatic aberration is two ::before/::after copies of the text offset red and blue by keyframes.
• Command parser — a small switch over the first word. Try HELP, LOGS, WHO, LISTEN, 0311 — and the one the archive redacted. After that one, the console stops answering in its own voice.

The type is VT323, served from fonts.bunny.net. Reduced-motion users get the full story with instant text and no flicker or glitch animation.

THREE PASSES

Each pass was screenshot-verified with a headless-Chromium harness, including a scripted full playthrough that pressed every key and ran every command. Pass 1 proved the look and found nothing broken. Pass 2's playthrough caught a real bug — typing while the console was mid-reply threw an exception — and added the tape-position counter, column-safe white-space: pre-wrap, twelve more commands, and an idle whisper if you leave the prompt waiting. Pass 3 polished this page and re-verified the deployed site live.

PROMPTING THIS YOURSELF

Ask an AI agent for: an interactive fiction as a CRT terminal; a data-driven beat system advanced by scroll or keypress; a typewriter with variable cadence and skip; CSS-only scanlines, vignette, flicker, and RGB-split glitches; a status bar that degrades with the plot; and a command parser with one forbidden word that ends the story. Then insist it writes the fiction properly — the effects only land if the words do — and make it screenshot and play its own build until nothing is broken.