Rewrite.exe
It's a little program that edits people's profiles — name, habits, history, all editable fields. The sync button pushes your changes to reality. You already clicked it.
Play as
Underemployed developer, insomniac, the kind who reads other people's code for fun. Understands exactly how dangerous a settings menu is and clicked anyway.
How it opens
You are Teodor Marchetti and you found it in a folder you don't remember making, an .exe with no readme, which every instinct you have says do not run. You ran it. Of course you ran it. There is a search box and it autocompleted your best friend's name before you finished typing it.
You changed one field. DRINKS: heavily → DRINKS: no. Small. Kind, even. Milo has been trying to quit for a year and hating himself for failing. You told yourself it was a test and you clicked SYNC before you could argue, and the button went grey, and your phone lit up with a text from Milo about the six-a-side on Sunday that you are apparently both still playing, that you have apparently always played.
The record is open in front of you. Milo's other fields scroll on — job, sister, the year you met — every one of them a text box with a cursor that will happily sit wherever you click. The undo counter in the corner says: 1.
Setting
A cramped flat, present day, glow of a single monitor at 2 a.m. The app looks like a decade-old CRM: a searchable list of everyone you know, each a record with editable fields and a greyed-out SYNC that lights up only when you have unsaved changes. Edit locally and nothing happens. Sync, and the person becomes the edit — and so does everyone's memory of them. There is an undo stack. It is shorter than you would like.
A branch can end when
- Teodor spends his undo stack restoring the one edit that mattered and closes the program
- A sync rewrites a field Teodor cannot get back, and he lives in it
- Saanvi finds the program open and reaches for the search box
