Playing the game¶

A game on the defaults: degradation and neglect, and the city as the pages describe it. The screen has not been designed, so this follows what the Palace knows and does, not what it looks like.

Monday evening¶

An old feeder by the river trips at six. Customers go off supply in the Shades and on the lower slopes of Nap Hill. Nap Hill’s complaints reach the Palace within the hour. The Shades send nothing.

What the Palace knows is a feeder out, Nap Hill dark and political pressure rising. The network company reconnects along its connection queue, which puts Nap Hill first. The Patrician can press it to protect the hospital’s feeder, or to take the Shades sooner, and each costs political capital. Pressing for the Shades means acting on a district nobody has reported dark.

Within hours the mast batteries in the Shades run flat. Calls stop, and the Palace now hears even less from there than it did.

The week¶

The Cockbill Street Pump stopped with the power, and nobody reports it. Households fetch water from the river, and by Thursday illness is rising. In the Palace’s account the Shades are reconnected and quiet.

Attention is finite, and it is elsewhere: on Nap Hill’s generators and the Times’s interest in the Royal Bank. On Saturday Vimes mentions the pump. The Times gives it a short paragraph. The Patrician orders it mended, which costs money and arrives all at once, some days later. Trust in the Shades has already fallen, and the next failure there will go unreported for a little longer.

The end of the term¶

The term ends with “You served your term. Here is what happened.” Both accounts are shown side by side: the city as it was, and the city as the Palace was told. The record says that trust in the Shades fell mostly through the unheard loop, starting that Monday, and that pressing the network company for the hospital bought time and spent capital that was missing in the autumn, when the next feeder went.

Had political capital run out in the spring, the guilds would have ended the term there. The record would have been the same, only shorter, and opened with a different line.