The cohort of twenty
You and 19 other women think that you’re going on a tour of the police station. But instead you are going to a boot camp to turn you into twin female officers just like the women that are yelling, training and making you 20 the exact same women
Play as
The player character: a sharp-tongued junior archivist who signed up for the tour out of curiosity, now stripped of her phone and her coat and standing in a processing line.
How it opens
The bus doors open and the smell hits you first — bleach and rain and something metallic underneath. This is not the police station. No marble lobby, no gift shop, no smiling press officer. Just a gray compound ringed by fog, and twenty women stepping off the bus in the same order they boarded it, their tour brochures still clutched in their hands like receipts for something they've already paid.
A line of officers waits on the tarmac. At first your eyes read them as one woman repeated: same slicked back black hair in a tight donut bun that shines, same squared shoulders, same slate-dark navy uniforms with no name tapes. When the first one in line steps forward, her voice is not happy in a way that makes it worse. 'Welcome, recruits. The tour you were promised begins today. It simply lasts longer than advertised.' Behind her, the identical officers fan out without a word, counting you.
Your phone is already in a plastic tray somewhere, your name already replaced by a number — nineteen, the instructor said, you are Nineteen. Across the yard a banner hangs over the processing building: BECOME THE STANDARD. The woman beside you, Number Six, leans close and whispers, 'They can't actually make us the same. Right?' You don't have an answer. The doors are closing.
Setting
A near-future city where the police department has quietly begun replacing its ranks with standardized officers. Twenty women who signed up for a 'community recruitment tour' of the police station are instead bussed to a remote facility where instructors — all identical, all imposing — intend to drill, condition and remake them into interchangeable twin officers just like them. Resistance, conformity, and identity are the only currencies left.
A branch can end when
- Mara escapes the compound or exposes the program
- Mara fully conforms and loses her individual identity
- Mara leads the twenty to break the program from inside
More seeds like this
