The Dead Ring

The dame left before you could offer a drink. The gesture was as empty as the bottles under your desk. All that lingered was a thick haze of perfume, smoke, and a note with a scrawled number.

Mostly smoke. She would of given the River Rouge stiff competition. 

She was dead the next day. 

Not the smoking mind. Bullet holes tend to be faster than a tracheostomy. Face plastered between the obituaries of gangsters and the infirm. 

You stare at the lone number etched across the ivory skin of her impromptu epitaph. Not even a name or address to go along with it.

Who would even pick up now? A grieving relative? A ghost? Or her hoarse voice, croaked between long drags, inexplicably no worse for wear. Those ten digits haunt you more than the maelstrom of a headache forming from last night's escapades.

Then words pass through you like a bad hangover: "LEFT/RIGHT to choose number. Hold UP to dial". Before you can even start to decipher any meaning, the world unravels like a director's script. Neatly summed up in five centuries of incoherent symbols:

n=0d=0q=0p=""o=""for i=0,9do
o=o..((i==3or i==6)and"-"or"")..rnd(9)\1end
f=circfill::_::flip()r=btn()\4%2u=(q+1)/12if(p==o)?"²0ring⁷ag",rnd(112),rnd(122)
if(p==o)goto _
if(#p>11)p=""
if(d==0)v=btnp()q-=v\2%2-v%2
if(d>u and e)p=p..q e=z if(#p==3or#p==7)p=p.."-"
if(r<1and d>0)d-=.05?"⁷b0"
if(r>0and d<u)e=1d+=.1?"⁷a2"
q=q%10d=mid(0,d,q+1)cls()f(63,72,50)?p,40,2
?o
for l=0,1do
for i=0,9do
a=i/12+(l>0and 0or n-d)j=cos(a)*40+63k=sin(a)*40+72if(l<1)f(j,k,9,i==q and 1)
if(l>0)?i,j-1,k-2,7
end
end
goto _