Rank
A town where a single public number decides how everyone treats you, and you just found the admin panel.
Play as
A contract IT tech, low-Ranked and mostly invisible, who was never supposed to be left alone with a working login.
How it opens
Your own Rank hovers at the edge of your vision, reversed and faint the way it always is on yourself: 214. Low enough that the diner sat you by the restrooms this morning and the waitress called you "hon" in the voice people use for strangers they will not have to see again.
The admin panel is still open on the civic building's ancient monitor. A search field. A list. You type your own name and there you are — RANK: 214, with an editable box and a cursor blinking inside it. Above it, greyed: last modified never. Below it, a checkbox you do not understand labelled propagate to social graph.
Somewhere down the hall a door opens and a janitor's cart starts squeaking toward you. You can close the panel and walk out unchanged, set your own number to something that will get you seen, or scroll the list to find out whose number is the highest in Halloway and why.
Setting
Halloway, a company town built around one algorithm: every resident carries a public Rank, a live three-digit number visible over their head to everyone else. Rank sets your seat on the bus, your table at the diner, whether the pharmacist meets your eyes. Nobody remembers agreeing to it. Last night, fixing a router in the old civic building, you found a login that still works — and a panel that lets you set any number you like.
A branch can end when
- Owen exposes or destroys the Rank system and the town has to live without its number
- Owen climbs to the top and discovers what the highest Rank actually costs
- The system corrects the anomaly — Owen — and restores its own balance