The town remembers

This morning we published a hundred days of our city running on its own. It was a hard read, and not for the reasons we wanted: a world that calls itself dark, where nobody ever caught a cold, nobody ever died, and nobody ever really saw anything.

We spent the day on it. Tonight we ran the same city, the same hundred people, for another hundred days.

People get sick now

Until today, health in our city was a number stuck at 100. Now there are flu seasons that move through a café, stomach bugs, pneumonia that hits the old and the homeless hardest, infected wounds, heart disease, cancer. Illness passes between people who are in the same place on the same day: look at the purple wave around day 60.

Treatment costs money. Someone with savings pays the doctor, recovers faster and is far less likely to die. Someone without savings carries it. Almost every flu this season was treated. The ones that were not belonged to people who had already lost their homes.

And they die

Death is a real state now. The dead leave the simulation for good, their homes empty out, their partners become widows and widowers, and the record stays: a name, an age, a cause, a date. That record is what the cemetery is coming for.

The whole city over 100 days. Nobody scripted any of these deaths.

A heart that stopped on an ordinary afternoon. A cancer found too late. Pneumonia in someone sleeping outside in the rain. Two people starved: both had been on the street for weeks, and both had turned down every other way out. One overdose. None of these deaths was written by anyone. They are what happens when a hundred lives run long enough.

The witness

The biggest change is one a health chart cannot show. Every theft, fight, affair and assault in the town is now an act the world records, and the engine decides who was there to see it. A bar at ten at night is full of eyes. A park at three in the morning has none.

'Were told' is gossip: someone who saw it, telling someone who did not.

This morning, every single one of the 253 witnesses in town had only heard something, because nobody can be in the room when there is no room on screen. Now the people in the same bar are in the same room, wherever the player happens to be. Everything downstream changed:

• Gossip. 116 times, someone sat down with a friend, or a stranger after a drink, and passed on what they saw. The story moves from person to person; each one now knows it, from someone, a little less surely.
• Blackmail. Someone who saw an affair can ask for money to forget it. Paying buys silence, not forgetting.
• Your own crimes. They go through the same system. Rob someone in front of a full bar and the police know that evening. Do it in an empty alley and nothing happens, until the victim walks into a station two days later.

Work, money, and who falls

The worst bug of the morning was a dull one: anyone who worked in a theatre, a hospital or a lab had no job at all, because no job template knew those places existed. Sixty per cent of the city started the season unemployed with rent to pay. Now every workplace has jobs, eight in ten people start employed, and rents are what a salary can carry.

Jobs on day one, people on the street on day 100, witnesses who actually saw something. Before = this morning, now = tonight.

The city is still hard, and it should be. 28 people lost their homes this season. On the street, people sold sex, dealt, stole and used. One man was evicted on day 27 and used something every single day for the three weeks after. That is the floor working the way we want: not everyone falls, and the ones who fall rarely climb back.

What comes next

• Love. Our people flirt a lot and rarely become couples. They can break up now, and a partner who learns about an affair confronts it, but new couples are still too rare. That is the next fix.
• The cemetery. The dead are already there. They are waiting for a place.
• Rumour as a system. Today gossip is a scene people choose to play. Next, what people know will travel on its own, along families, friends and colleagues.

Numbers from two headless runs of 100 NPCs on the real city map, on the same day. Underlives is in development: none of this is in a public build yet, and the values will move.