Agnes

How to unlock Agnes in Cheevos. Open your browser while completely offline and listen to the quiet. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You opened the browser. There was nothing on the other end.

Cache keeps a recording in the Stash labeled AGNES. It's from 1997, a dial-up modem in a house in Ohio. Every evening at six, Agnes connected to the internet. The handshake, the static, the screech, then the quiet hum of a connection that had gone through. She did this every day, reliably, for years.

Then one day she didn't. Cache does not know exactly why. A phone line changed. A modem failed. Somebody upgraded and forgot to say goodbye. He only has the last recording, the one where the dial tone answers and nothing else does.

You opening a browser with no connection is the closest thing Cache has heard to that silence since. The tab tries. It reaches. Nothing answers back. Cache finds this quietly moving in a way he has trouble explaining to partners who have never heard Agnes's last recording.

This one goes in the quiet section, right next to her.

The catalog entry

THE LAST DIAL TONE Acquired: Opened the browser while completely offline. Condition: Silent. Still trying. Rarity: Uncommon. Most people notice their connection is gone before opening a tab. Cache's Notes: Cache has a dial-up recording labeled AGNES. It is from 1997. Agnes was a modem in a house in Ohio. She connected to the internet every day at 6 PM. Then one day she didn't. Being offline with the browser open is what Agnes sounded like. The connection trying. The silence after. This item goes next to Agnes. In the quiet section.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one only takes a moment, but it requires an actual, honest disconnection.

  1. Turn off your WiFi or unplug your ethernet cable, or use your browser's Developer Tools to simulate an offline connection.
  2. Open your browser, or a new tab, while the connection is down.
  3. Cheevos detects the offline state.

When there's no network available, most browsers still let you open tabs and browse, they just can't fetch anything new. Chrome famously fills this gap with a small dinosaur game that appears on its "no internet" error page, playable by pressing spacebar, a feature the Chrome team added specifically so the wait wouldn't feel wasted. Pages you've visited before may still partially load from the browser's local cache or from data a Service Worker deliberately saved for offline use, which is why some sites keep working, in a limited way, even with no connection at all.

Where it fits in the Stash

Agnes sits in the quiet section of the Stash, the one Cache visits rarely and never rushes through. To hear more about the recordings that live there, read the story.