A field dossier on the Budayeen — the walled quarter where vice is tolerated, moddies rewrite who you are for an hour, and a fixer named Marid Audran does the asking. Built for the people who still play it, not the abandonware bins that just host it.
Somewhere between Casablanca on the Atlantic and the old capitals of Persia sits a city that never made it onto a map — and inside it, the Budayeen: nine crooked streets between the East and West Gates where the law looks the other way. You wake up here most mornings with a headache, a moddy socket at the crown of your skull, and just enough kiam in your pocket to owe somebody.
You play Marid Audran, an Algerian refugee turned reluctant private investigator, wired to accept moddies — personality modules that let you become someone else entirely, real or invented — and daddies, smaller add-on chips that hand you a stranger's knowledge for as long as they stay plugged in. Marid also carries a rarer set of implants: hypothalamic daddies that let him dial down fatigue, fear, hunger, thirst, and pain on command, and turn his own senses up when he needs the edge.
Above everyone sits Friedlander Bey — Papa — more than 175 years old, worth maybe a fifth of the buildings in the quarter, and the closest thing the Budayeen has to a government. Marid used to be nobody's protégé. That's changing, whether he wants it to or not.
Circuit's Edge was Infocom's only outing into George Alec Effinger's Nebula- and Hugo-winning Budayeen universe — the world of When Gravity Fails and A Fire in the Sun. The story is new, built for the game, but the cast, the streets, and the rules of the quarter are lifted straight from the novels, and Effinger wrote both the game's opening dossier sequence and the guide to the Budayeen printed in the back of the manual himself.
The Budayeen's regulars, drawn from Effinger's own guide in the back of the Player's Manual. Everyone here owes someone, sells someone, or is Someone.
Half Berber, half French, early thirties, five-nine, clean-shaven, with short reddish-brown hair. Marid grew up on the street and is only now, as Papa's reluctant protégé, starting to eat regularly. He keeps his moddy plug hidden under a keffiya, dresses Western — jeans, boots, a work shirt — and rarely wears the gallebeya other men in the quarter favor. Not religious. Definitely has an addictive personality.
"Papa." Five foot two, pushing 200 pounds, over 175 years old, dressed in plain white cotton and gray trousers, no jewelry at all. He owns clubs, cookshops, and half the deeds in the quarter, but doesn't bother discouraging competition — vice is maybe five percent of his income. What he actually sells, in a world where borders redraw themselves every decade, is order. He dispenses favors and punishments, the manual says, "like someone's ancient idea of God."
Tall, lean, around forty, tattooed in the geometric scarring of her ancestors, canines filed to points she rarely shows off. She owns her bar outright, chips into her fantasies only at home, and drinks tende — a liquor she suspects is made from fermented yams and worse. One of Marid's few real friends, and per the game's own hint file, a great source of information on anyone who's skipped town.
Rich, tall, immaculately groomed, and a compulsive liar who considers earning money beneath him. His favorite moddy is a steel-belted tough guy with a charm chip snapped in, so he can make anyone like him on command. Strictly homosexual; his teenage boyfriend Abdul-Hassan brings home the rent. Drinks Wild Turkey or Johnny Walker, and likes to sneer.
A sexchange, fully modified inside and out, with big hands and feet and hair that's still entirely her own. Famous across the Budayeen for arriving late to absolutely everything — not laziness, she'll insist, she just loves to sleep.
Permanently fried on RPM, a hallucinogen strong enough that he sees fire demons the rest of the Budayeen can't. Long wild sandy hair, a graying beard, blue-green tattoos gone blurry with age, skin burned red from driving in the sun. His driving matches his headspace exactly. Still how you leave the quarter — tell him where you're going through the Talk menu and hold on.
A Jordanian ex-dealer with a rap sheet of his own, recently promoted and trying, awkwardly, to be less crooked than he used to be — mostly out of fear of getting fired, not any new sense of honor. Thinning hair, a new beard the manual compares to "the skin of a kiwi fruit." Marid hates cops on principle, and Hajjar is exactly the flavor he hates most.
Ancient, toothless, shrill-voiced, permanently chipped into something, and possibly running on one of the first experimental implants ever wired into a human skull — her brain hasn't worked quite right since. Dry black skin, straggly white hair, yellowed eyes. Nobody enjoys her company. Everybody eventually needs what she knows about out-of-print moddies.
Egyptian, and one of the rare women in the Budayeen who hasn't had her skull wired at all — everything about her is unmodified and real. A practicing Muslim by her own standard: no alcohol, just Sharab, the champagne-colored soft drink Chiri keeps behind the bar for her, worn under a peach-colored shawl that hides very little.
Tall, thin, spindly-legged, with greasy hair piled in a pompadour and elbows that stick out like apples on a stick. Not very bright, constantly robbed and swindled, and nicknamed "the chronically unlucky" by everyone but Marid, who's one of the only people in the quarter who actually feels sorry for him.
Marid's Arab friend, a sexchange who used to be a slim-hipped dancing girl on the Street and is now short, broad, and — the guide's words — "mean, like an evil djinn." These days he runs the quarter's organized prostitution for Papa out of the old Tourist Paradise.
Habib and Labib, Friedlander Bey's enormous, near-silent enforcers. The manual's own advice for telling them apart: insult one, and see which one blinks. It rarely matters — either way, stop insulting them.
Pick a daddy from the rack below — one moddy socket, three daddy sockets, same rules as the game — and its knowledge loads into the reader. Pulled from Effinger's full glossary in the back of the manual.
Every establishment and every street in the Budayeen uses the same nine-part screen. Fights swap two of the parts out — see below.
A reconstruction, not a screenshot — the real thing runs in 16-color CGA/EGA down in the terminal below.
Nine streets deep between the East and West Gates, every shop, club, and flophouse cross-referenced to an eight-digit commcode — copied over from the 1625 A.H. edition of the directory in the Player's Guide. Directories go out of date fast down here; ask around if a number's dead.
The essentials, expanded from the Command Summary and the Player's Guide. Numlock off, always.
Two games are legal in the Budayeen. Everything else you'll want kiam for is a shop, a bribe, or a mistake.
Bet with 1, 5, or 10-kiam chips, up to five per round, placed directly on the board or a side box. Play a round and watch the flashing box track the ball around the wheel; the winning number lights up top-right. Cancel your most recent chip at any time before the wheel spins.
Closer to Twenty-One in spirit — you're chasing a hand as close to 9 as possible, in 25-kiam bets, either to win or to tie. Face cards and tens count as zero; anything over 9 drops ten. Draw another card or stand pat. An 8 or a 9 dealt outright is a natural winner, and a tie only pays if that's what you bet.
Certain characters pay for help, your benefactor can be called on in a pinch, and the street scum who try to mug you can — per the hint file — be mugged right back. If all else fails, there's always the Gambling Den. Save your position first; the house doesn't extend credit.
A best-effort in-browser DOSBox, running the original EDGE.EXE. This is one executable and one small data file rescued from an old install — not a full set of disk images — so treat this as an attempt worth trying, not a promise it plays clean through.
The whole game bundle — EDGE.EXE and ACTIONS.DAT, zipped into a .jsdos package with an autoexec — is embedded directly in this page as data, so nothing extra needs to load except the js-dos runtime itself from its own CDN. No separate files, no broken links.
The 1990 install process: boot clean DOS with no TSRs running, run install off Disk 1 to create a CIRCUIT directory on the hard drive, then feed it Disk 2 and Disk 3 when it asks. First launch decompresses its files for several seconds — the manual's actual advice is just "be patient."
Mouse support was included, except on Tandy machines, where the manual flatly states: you cannot use a mouse.
Straight from the back of the Player's Guide, reworded, collapsed by default. Open only what you're actually stuck on.