Bureaucracy (Walkthrough)
Bureaucracy: Part I
Welcome to the wonderful world of Bureaucracy (or B'y for short), where anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Just like in real life. In fact, some of the incidents in the game are based on real-life experiences. Read the manual for more about that.
B'y is unusual for an Infocom game; it is exceptionally linear, and once you leave a particular area, there is no way to go back. That means you have to be sure to do everything and get everything before moving on to the next part of the adventure. Otherwise, you'll have some problems. Maybe insoluble ones.
The puzzles themselves are either pretty easy or very hard. This unevenness is mostly the result of having so many different people work on the game. When you get near the end, you'll be able to read about B'y's history, which will help to explain the game's episodic nature.
Also, keep that little Popular Paranoia flyer handy. A little later on, you'll have to answer some crazy questions, and that flyer has all the answers. Don't lose it!
And there's the nerd. He pops up at random times, offering you anything from a real Star Trek phaser to a digital tooth meter, all at a price just slightly more than you can afford. Don't worry about it. You don't need anything he has, and you can ignore him. He's just there to make your life even more difficult than it is.
On the very first boot-up, you must fill out a form. There's no getting around that (I told you this was drawn from real life!). Do remember the information you put on that form; some of it will be important later on. I also recommend saving the game right afterwards, so you won't have to go through it again.
Whew! Now that's over with, and you're standing in the empty living room of your new home. Of course, the moving men (called "removals men" in the game; there are a lot of Britishisms in this one) will get around to delivering your stuff sooner or later (probably later). Right now, tho, it doesn't matter, since you'll soon be on your way to Paris, compliments of your new employer, the Happitec Corporation.
Well, you'll be off just as soon as the mail arrives with some money (you haven't got a cent on you at the moment). While you wait, hop on over west to the back room, where you'll find an interesting assortment of items. The answering machine is only there to raise your blood pressure, so you can ignore any messages on it; they'll just make you unhappy.
You can leave the computer for now; instead, take the letter and hacksaw, then open the case and get the adventure game cartridge (the game doesn't work too well). Around about the now, the doorbell should be ringing. Go to the front door and answer it.
Hmm..a delivery of llama food. Not quite what you were expecting, but who knows? The stuff might come in handy. Fortunately, the delivery man accepts credit cards, so get out your wallet and hand him your Beezer card (the Excess card is expired, and you can't use it).
Now it may occur to you that this bag of llama treats was delivered to the wrong place. If that's so, then (horrible thought!) possibly your own mail has been sent to the wrong place, too. With some trepidation, you open the front door and go out to the mailbox. Uh oh. Inside you see a leaflet, with an orange postal sticker on it, and an address that certainly isn't yours.
Now you're really stuck. There's nothing else you can do except go messing around other people's homes, snooping through their mail to find your own. Most of this mail is not important. What IS important, VERY important, is that you make note of the letters on those postal stickers, in the order you find them.
It doesn't matter which places you go to, the mail can be found in almost any sequence. Just make sure you write down the sticker letters as you come to them. You will need this information to reach the end game later on.
This particular leaflet, however, does have some importance: the stamp on it is a very rare one (and, by the way, there is indeed a real, live creature called the Ai-Ai). So hang on to the leaflet for now, and start hiking north, past the bookstore and fast food (of sorts) joint, until you come to the travel agency and tenement building (don't worry about the bank now, we'll deal with that later).
Go west into the travel agency, and give your letter to the agent. She will give you your plane ticket (the right one, even). Leave the office and go into the tenement. Knock on the door, then go south into the stamp collector's grimy room.
He's a little manic, and if you don't act quickly, the last bits of mail will be shredded by his scissors. We can't let that happen, so show him the stamp. Wow! That caught his interest, all right. He grabs the leaflet from you and goes capering out the door. That gives you the chance to go through his mail. Alas, there's nothing much there, certainly nothing for you, but at least you found an issue of Popular Paranoia. Write down the the letter on the sticker, and take off.
Head for the bookstore and go inside. Examine the best-sellers and remainders if you like; they're just outrageous plugs for some of Adams' books. However, as you look around (and the clerk eyes you dubiously), you notice a small selection of Boysenberry software on the wall.
Maybe he'd be interested in that adventure cart. Show it to him, and he'll tell you he has some *special* cartridges, if you'd like to see them. Naturally, you say yes. He pulls out a cart labelled "Recipe". Of course you figure that's just a fake name for something else (how could a recipe cart be special?).
No matter, offer your adventure cart to him and the exchange is soon made. With the recipe cart now in your hot little hand, leave the store and head on south until you come to the llama farm.
This was proabably where the llama treats were supposed to go. And yes, behind the fence, there is one little llama, bleating hatefully. Poor thing, I bet it's hungry.
Open the bag of treats, then open the mailbox. Funny sort of mailbox, with no back to it. Why, any mail that was put in there would fall right into the feeding trough...which, in fact, is exactly what's happened. Fortunately, tho, this is no problem for you. Shove the bag of treats into the mailbox. It goes right through, and before long, the llama is happily champing away on the food, giving you the chance to pick up the mail.
Still nothing for you, but again, note down the letter on the sticker. Where to now? Well, the farmhouse is locked, for the moment, so continue on southward to the camouflaged house at the end of the street. This is not one of your more inviting places. For one thing, a welcome mat is conspicuously absent.
If you wait long enough, someone from inside the house will speak to you over the intercom. This is important. You must wait until you hear the phrase about the radio. Then go directly back to the farmhouse. While you were gone, burglars broke in and stole everything. Enter the farmhouse, and wait. The weirdo (who looks like Woody Allen dressed in Early Rambo style) will show up pretty soon.
When he arrives, speak the phrase you heard from the intercom. After a short wait (none of these waits is more than one), he will give the counter-phrase about the BBS. Now return to the camouflaged house. When the intercom talks to you again, tell it the phrase about the BBS. The doors will open, and you'll be able to enter the house (knowing these phrases ahead of time will NOT work; you must get them from playing the game).
However, the weirdo is there, too, and the owner of this fortress is a little confused. He's sure that one of you is a fake, and it's probably you. As a test, he asks you several questions. Fortunately, all the answers are in the flyer that came with the game. Unfortunately, the man is still confused, and dumps both you and the weirdo into a jail (spelled gaol in the game, but pronounced the same way) in the basement.
Try your hacksaw on the bars. It won't do much, but the weirdo gets an idea from that and hands you his Swiss pocket knife, with attachments for everything under the sun. Examine it, and you'll see a button and a lever. Push the button and pull the lever. The knife ejects a power saw and a bizarre generator (no Swiss Army knife should be without them).
Get the saw and plug it into the generator (which bears an uncanny resemblance to an exercise bicycle). Now give the saw to the weirdo, and get on the generator. Huff...puff...with a little muscle, the power saw starts up and the weirdo saws through the bars. Now you can leave the cell.
Just don't be in a hurry to go up the stairs. Let the weirdo go first, and wait awhile (otherwise, your reception above might be somewhat unpleasant). When you finally ascend, both the paranoid house owner and the weirdo are nowhere to be seen (whew). But the mail is there!
Ho hum, STILL nothing for you. Write down the sticker letter, and leave the house, which closes behind you. By now, you're probably feeling a trifle hungry, so go north to the fast food place. Once inside, open the back door to waste a move. A waitress will come to take your order.
This part is designed to aggravate you. Make your choices as simple as possible (for instance, do not order water on the side), because you won't get anything on this visit anyway. The waitress will leave and come back, saying the computer lost the order, then she'll slip out the back door. Follow her, and you arrive in time to see her sneaking around the corner with a man from the Deep Thought Corporation (your former employer).
They move too fast to follow, so instead go south to the backyard of the mansion from which you hear that wonderful muzak. Open the door to the house, but don't go inside. Return to the fast food restaurant, and open the door again. Now a waiter comes, and he's for real. Give him your order, and eventually your meal arrives. Do eat it.
However, you don't happen to have any money to pay for it. Sneak out through the back door into the alley way. From there, go west to the street, then south to the mansion front door. Ring the bell, then go straight back to the alley and from there to the back yard. Do not waste any moves in this portion of the game. Your time is limited, and you have only enough moves to get everything done safely without any wasted motion.
From the backyard, go west into the house. Pass by the macaw, who is guarding the mail, and continue south into the living room. The old matron is still locking up the door, but she has that elephant gun handy, so don't make any mistakes here. Grab the portrait (which will be either Reagan or Gorbachev; it varies), and hurry back north.
Show the picture to the one-winged macaw, who will be roused into a political frenzy at the sight of it. After the bird collapses, exhausted, drop the picture and get the mail. At last! You've found your mail.
Oh dear. It seems that the money order you've been waiting for is in sad shape...far too sad to be cashed. However, there is another piece of mail for you, from the Excess people. It seems you didn't pay your last bill (probably some mail foul up), and in revenge they have sent you a check for -$75.
Bureaucracy: Part II
It's not every day you (or anyone else for that matter) get a check for a negative sum of money. It may, perhaps, give you some pause for thought. How does one, after all, turn minus money into positive cash flow? Actually, when dealing with a bank of the caliber of Fillmore Fiduciary, it's a lot easier than you might think.
So trot on up to the bank (which has its own strange hours of operation). If it's closed, just wait until it's open again. Now, the teller windows are random, and you can't be sure which one is which when you visit; they change around. Start with window #1, and just keep going until you reach the "WITHDRAWALS" window. Get TWO withdrawal slips.
Now follow this carefully. First, fill out all the slips, in the amount of $75 (positive $75). Go to the DEPOSITS window, and hand over one of the withdrawal slips and the negative check. I will not attempt to recreate the teller's logic...you'll have to read it for yourself in the game. But it's enough to get you a balance of $85 (the check plus the $10 balance you already had in the account).
Ok, you're almost there! Move along to the WITHDRAWALS window, and hand in your other withdrawal slip. TA-DA!! You now have $75 hard cash! See, it wasn't really difficult, after all.
Rush off home, get your address book, passport, and your trusty Boysenberry computer. Look through the address book and call the cab company. Wait outside for the cab, which will arrive soon, and before you know it, you'll be on your way to the airport (by the way, the cabdriver is a fountain of irrelevant information, and won't tell you anything of importance).
So there you are at the airport entrance. From time to time, you will hear some announcements over the speakers about the "white courtesy phone". Like the nerd, these are designed to annoy you, and can be safely ignored.
Go north twice and you arrive at the Omnia Gallia desk. Hmmm. No one is here. Reading the sign posted on the wall, you note that Omnia is now out of business, and all their flights are now being handled by Air Zalagasa. Ho hum.
Go south twice, then either east or west, watching the signs carefully, until you notice one on which Air Zalagasa does NOT appear. Then go north twice, and stand on line at the Air Zalagasa desk. It's going to be a long wait, because the guy ahead of you has some complicated routing he wants to do. In the meantime, over the ever-present and annoying muzak, you hear your plane is scheduled to depart like real soon now.
Control yourself. Much as you may like to do so, you really can't push in ahead of the twit in front of you. Finally, as your flight is taxiing to the runway, you reach the desk. Show your ticket to the clerk, and accept the direct flight to Paris (hardly a choice here, as you don't have the money for the other one). She exchanges your ticket, giving you one on Air Zalagasa flight 42, the very same one that's about to take off.
But all is not yet lost! As you go back south, you suddenly notice a pillar that may not have been there before (by the way, somewhere along the line, you will lose your address book...don't worry about it). Climb the pillar all the way to the top.
Ignore the speaker for now, and open the grate. At this desperate moment, anything is worth trying. Go through the opening and follow the duct to the end, which is another grate. Open that and exit the duct. Well, look at that! You're in the control tower!
Your arrival has also had a remarkable effect on the air traffic controllers. To their dazed minds, you appear as some sort of deity. However, that effect will not last forever. Taking advantage of their momentary lapse of intelligent discrimination, you order one of them to stop flight 42. Then, you get the heck out before they realize they've been conned.
Back at the top of the pillar again, you stop for a breather, and a closer examination of the speaker. Let's face it, you probably hate the adulterated music it spews forth. With a feeling of satisfaction, you pull the wires out. Of course, that only kills this one speaker. How about the rest?
Ever hear of "short circuit"? Take one wire and touch it to the other one. Voila! Every speaker in the airport goes dead! From below, you hear the hearty applause of the crowd (they didn't like it any better than you did). After you slide down, the crowd carries you off to the boarding gate (bet you were wondering how to get there, eh?), and before long, you are safely aboard flight 42, on your way to Paris.
Air Zalagasa is economizing these days, and there are no windows to look out of during your flight. Pass some time by reading the informative magazine and listening to your headphones (right there in the little pocket on the seat back in front of you).
In a short time, a flight attendant will come around to take your dinner order. It doesn't matter what you want; the attendant's motto is: promise them anything, but give 'em Zalagasan stew.
And sure enough, before you can say "barf", there it is, reposing on the pull-down table: a bowl of one of the most noxious concoctions you have ever had the misfortune to look at, however briefly. We won't even mention odor.
Trust me: this, you don't want to eat...or even get too near to. Getting rid of it, however, is no simple task. The airline attendants are not permitted to remove full plates (or bowls) of food. Further, the pilot isn't allowed to land while people are eating. You see the problem.
Still, something must be done. If you play with the little buttons on your seat, you'll notice an odd fact: none of them activates anything at your seat. Further, they don't even operate the items they should. For instance, the "light" button causes some other seat to recline.
In a short time, a smart (and desperate) person like you has no difficulty in figuring out which light buttons control which seats. A little experimentation shows you that seat 8C is the one that will be of enormous use in removing the bowl of stew.
Unfortunately, 8C is occupied by a young mother, and her baby is next to her in 8B. What to do? In a moment of brilliance, you remember the magazine, with the picture of the princess in it. So, take the magazine and go show it to the baby. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!! Boy, you really set the little darling (?) off, didn't you?
But that's all to the good, because now momma has to walk the baby up and down the aisle to quieten it down. While she's doing that, you slip into seat 8C and push the "light" button. From somewhere ahead, you hear a horrible squashing sound. Au revoir, Zalagasan stew!
Back at your seat, you find something that wasn't there before. A laminated card, that is the missing part to the safety procedures (which, of course, you read earlier, right?). Note carefully the name used for parachute.
Along comes a flight attendant to tell you that you have a phone call. Yes, Air Zalagasa may not have windows in their planes, but they do have telephones. And of all the people to call you, would you expect it to be the fast food waitress? I wouldn't, but that's who it is (how did she know where you were, anyway?). Don't worry about telling her the truth about the tip; before long, the line will go dead, then you'll be listening in on another conversation.
This one is much more interesting. The pilot is talking to a control tower somewhere. It seems that flight 42 is going to crash. In about 5 minutes. Ooops.
Don't panic! Hang out there by the phone, which is conveniently located right next to the emergency hatch. An attendant will be with you shortly. Ask about a parachute, but don't call it that; use the words that were printed on the laminated card.
Before you can say "Geronimo", you're all fixed up with a parachute. Open the hatch according to the instructions, and just wait. You'll be pulled out of the plane by the air flow. Ummm...looks like part of the chute is caught in the door, and you just can't get it loose.
You're freezing and suffocating at the same time, which is not the most pleasant of circumstances. But if you wait long enough, you'll be able to look into a window (which mysteriously appears from nowhere) and see the attendant who gave you the chute.
Knock on the window. The attendant, seeing your plight, frees the caught strap, allowing you to free fall towards the earth. As you plummet, she kindly tells you that she was mistaken: there was a computer malfunction, and the plane isn't going to crash, after all. However, you will, if you don't pull the cord and open your parachute!
Bureaucracy: Part III
So you float gently down into the Zalagasan forest, to find yourself hanging upside down from a tree. No problem. Just remove the parachute. FWOP!
Hmmm...looks like you fell right into the dinner pot of the Zalagasan natives. Cannibals, you know. And they're all dancing around the pot, chanting, of all things, ZBUG! ZBUG!
How about that...in addition to being cannibals, they are also members of the Zalagasan Boysenberry Users Group. What luck! And given the sort of things they eat (such as Zalagasan stew), you may have the very thing that will save you from a horrible fate.
Quickly you stick the recipe cart into your Boysenberry (which has survived the fall none the worse for wear). Up on the screen flashes the recipe for the very same stew you so neatly avoided earlier. The Zalagasans are delighted! They grab your cart, give you an unlabelled one in return, as well as your lost address book (!), and rush off.
They might come back at any time, so I wouldn't stay in that pot if I were you. You needn't worry about what direction to go, because as soon as you're out of the pot, you fall through a hole (which mysteriously vanishes), to find yourself in a Grubby Antechamber. The end game is near, but you aren't quite there yet.
As long as you have some spare time now, why not check out that address book; you'll find something different about it. Namely, that your original address has somehow changed into that of Random Q. Hacker's. Who could that be? How about the nerd? Yup, that's who he is, all right. Note especially that RANDOM Q HACKER and RAINBOW TURTLE are in all upper case letters. Keep that in mind for later. Right now, it's time to make an inspection of the only object in the room, a locker.
A pretty odd sort of locker, with three handles, and some binary code written below it. You don't really think that's binary code, do you? Of course not. It's the pattern for moving the handles and unlocking the door.
The first line represents the position of the three handles as they are now. All you have to do is move the handles into the positions indicated by the succeeding rows, one row at a time, but two handles at a time; they only move in pairs.
So, turn the left and middle handles, then turn the left and right handles, and finally turn the left and middle handles again. Click! Open the locker and go inside, where you find a card, then exit the locker.
You've been wondering about that unlabelled cart, haven't you? This is the time to boot it up. You'll notice it has five files: NOOZ, PRINTB, PRINTC, PRINTD, and PRINTE. The NOOZ file is actually the checkered career of the game Bureaucracy; by all means, read it for a chuckle or two.
After that, it's time for the hard stuff. Get out that list you made of the postal sticker letters. This is where you need them. Print the files from the cart in the same order as the letters on the stickers. When you're done, you have one mess on your screen.
However, it's not as messy as all that...if you read the screen VERTICALLY! Yep, you have to read down the columns to get the instructions for moving through the switchgear rooms (I found that a piece of paper held against the screen was helpful in reading the columns). Because this part of the game is random, you have to read the instructions and go through the rooms on your own.
Eventually, you arrive at the airlock. Insert the card from the locker. The door is tough, but keep trying, and you'll get it open, just before your blood pressure goes through the roof. Go north, and you're in the Persecution Complex.
As you walk west along the hall, take time to look at the various monitors; it will explain a lot about what's been happening to you. By the time you reach the end of the hall, you're probably ready to commit mayhem on someone or something.
Fortunately, you can do just that, thanks to the handy jack right there. Plug it into your Boysenberry, and you're about to hack into Random's computer system (about time the nerd had a taste of his own medicine!).
First you need to login. The ID, of course, is RANDOM-Q-HACKER (note the hyphens!). The password is RAINBOW-TURTLE (you have, of course, realized why those were in all caps now, right?).
Now you're in the system. Check out the commands, and get a listing of all the files and programs. As you do this, from time to time you will get messages from the computer about what Random is doing (he's online, too). Pay attention to these messages.
However, before you arrange for the total destruction of Random's little system, it's a good idea to provide yourself with a way home. Run PLANE.EXE to make sure of that.
Now, watch the screen for those messages, in particular for whatever file Random is going to use next. Copy DVH2.HAK to that file. Then sit back and wait. It won't be long before the system dies. HEHEHE! After the auto shutdown, go west into the airshaft, then up to the landing strip. Before long, a plane arrives to take you home.
Not entirely home, as you're back in the tenement building (and no, you still can't get up those stairs). No matter, just go to your house, where several pleasant (for a change) surprises await you. And who knows...one of these days, you might even get to Paris!
Bureaucracy is copyrighted 1987 by Infocom, Inc.
