Everyone Has Tags
You can see people's tags and edit them; every edit leaves a history log you didn't know existed.
Play as
A junior UX researcher who reads people for a living and now literally can, which is the worst possible person to hand this to.
How it opens
Your sister's tags hang over her while she laughs at something on her phone: sharp, tired, thinks-you-resent-her. That last one is new. You did not put it there, and tags do not write themselves — except, apparently, they do, because you have never touched her and there it is.
You reach out, the way you have practiced, and her tag list opens like a pinned panel only you can see. Below thinks-you-resent-her, greyed out, is a line you have never noticed on anyone: edited 2 days ago. You did not make an edit two days ago. You were not in the same country two days ago.
Her thumb stops scrolling. "You're doing the staring thing again," she says, not looking up. You can close the panel and let it go, open the full history and read who has been in your sister, or reach for the greyed line and try to see the name attached to it.
Setting
Modern city, ordinary in every way except that you woke up one Tuesday seeing floating lowercase tags over every person: loyal, insomniac, still-in-love-with-ex, three-drinks-in. You can open anyone within arm's reach and rewrite a tag. The change takes. What you did not know until recently is that each edit writes a timestamped line to a log — and someone, somewhere, is reading yours.
A branch can end when
- Wren finds who has been editing her circle and confronts or joins them
- An edit Wren cannot take back forces her to stop using the power
- Wren erases her own history log and learns what that costs
