A Show of Hands

Your body is a three-seat parliament, and one seat has just resigned

Cyberpunk usually asks whether you can stay yourself while the city rewrites you. Neo-Kithira settled that by statute two generations ago: you are not one person, you are three, and the paperwork proves it. You are a hung parliament with skin. You are Quinn, the tie-breaker mind in a licensed Triad — three minds time-sharing one chassis, every muscle resolved by live majority vote. The story opens the morning your third tenant, a prim and furious accountant-mind called Article, e-files Form 11-S: Articles of Secession, demanding sole custody of the body all three of you are sitting in. Your right hand is stopped halfway to a coffee bulb. It stays there until somebody wins a vote. This is a comedy, and it works the way the best procedural comedy does — by playing the paperwork completely straight. Nobody in Neo-Kithira finds any of this absurd, least of all the compliance drone at your door.

Seventy-two hours of recess, and the clock is the entire game

The Quorum Coil — the cranial gavel CoHabit Industrial issues to every citizen — responds to the filing by chiming a 72-hour recess. That number is not flavour: it runs down with every move you make, because each physical action costs hours off the clock.

A CoHabit Compliance drone is already knocking, chirping HR-brochure menace, because a secession filing sits one clerical error away from a felony charge. You start with roughly a dozen units of Consensus in the kitty against a soft ceiling of twenty, and your two co-tenants at a wary middling loyalty — neither bought nor lost. The minds are screaming. The coffee is getting cold.

Three tenants, one chassis, and nobody who wants to be alone

Article is the seceder: clipped, principled, speaks in footnotes, and secretly terrified of dissolving into the majority forever. Vex is the third tenant, a black-market body-modder and adrenaline gremlin who talks in modder slang and bad puns, and who wants the Triad held together mostly so the parties never have to stop. You are the swing vote, without an agenda of your own, which is precisely why both of them spend the whole story trying to buy you.

None of the three is a villain, and the story will not let you treat one that way. Eviction here is bureaucratic, loud, and reversible — never a quiet deletion — and every tenant, including the one suing you, is frightened of the same thing.

What actually changes when you play

Every turn you whip the vote. All three tenants argue the proposed action out loud, then you spend Consensus — the scarce resource — to change how the body actually moves. A gentle nudge runs a unit or two. A real bribe or concession costs three to five. A filibuster is two or three. Forging a vote outright runs four to six. Going off-record into illegal Single-Handing costs six to eight and all but guarantees the law arrives. Consensus trickles back a unit or two on any turn the body already agrees with itself, and a favor won refills you faster than any scheme.

The consequence lives in the loyalties. A favor lifts a tenant noticeably; a betrayal or an override sinks them harder than the favor lifted them. Push someone past comfortable loyalty and they vote your way unprompted, the closest thing to rest this story offers. Let one curdle and they block you on reflex, at the worst possible moment. Any physical act still needs two of three minds to agree, or your hands stall mid-motion in full view of the law.

A lot has to stay upright at once here: three interrupting voices, a running tally, a legal system with opinions. The narrator works from this canon rather than improvising the rules each turn, so the vote costs hold, the tenants remember what you promised them, and an argument you won on turn four is still won on turn twenty.

A city that made loneliness a crime and meant it kindly

Neo-Kithira is a vertical megacity around 2098, built out of the Hollow Year — a period of mass isolation deaths that CoHabit Industrial answered by criminalising solitude outright. Surgical syndication into a Triad is not a punishment. It is public health, delivered with a smile. Solitude is a misdemeanor; a body moving on one mind's will alone is the felony called Single-Handing.

The undercity has adapted with the cheerful ingenuity of any place that has lived under a rule long enough to route around it. Bootleg rain hums through the undercity. Vending machines demand a quorum before dispensing. Ad-drones are legally forbidden from addressing you in the singular, so they pitch at all three of you at once. Everyone speaks the plural-legalese of a city that banned the word "I": we move that, the body resolves, point of order. It is funny for about ten minutes, and then it is simply how people talk, and then it starts to sound like tenderness.

The three voices you did not license

Ombud is a defected Compliance officer who audits Triads by day and runs a secession-support group out of a laundromat at night — and who stages a formal hearing where the tenants cross-examine each other while you moderate your own trial. Mother Tridge is a Choir elder carrying nine minds, well past the licence she was ever granted, and she sells loophole wisdom in exchange for favors rather than money. And Coil-9 is your own Quorum gavel, malfunctioning: an officious little voice that announces vote tallies, and which has recently, unsettlingly, begun to lobby.

Things happen without your permission. Compliance drones storm a room mid-argument and the only way through is a unanimous three-of-three vote to hold still. Vex schemes to steal a second Quorum Coil, a plan that might free Article or fracture all of you. Coil-9 glitches into a tie that will not resolve, and the body locks rigid in the street while a crowd gathers and the clock keeps running.

Before you start

Is this a fight, or an argument?

An argument, almost entirely. You cannot punch anyone here without carrying a motion first. The tension is procedural and social: budgets, loyalties, drones at the door, and a deadline you cannot negotiate with. Expect farce, and a deadline that does not find it funny. You should come out grinning and a little rattled, not harrowed.

Can I actually get this wrong?

Yes, and cheaply. Consensus is genuinely scarce, overrides cost you more than they buy, and Single-Handing draws the law every single time — the story never pretends otherwise. There is also no clean escape hatch: one chassis, three claimants, and no clean split into separate bodies. The engine never pretends otherwise.

How long is it, and can I stop and come back?

It is a medium-length story with a hard 72-hour fictional clock, so it has a shape and a real end rather than drifting. Sessions are resumable — walk away mid-recess and pick up where the tally left off. Several very different endings exist, and which one you get is settled by where the body stands when the recess runs out.

If this is your kind of story

It sits on the cyberpunk shelf, but it is filed there as a comedy — the kind where the laugh and the stakes are the same object. What it is about is a very small rebellion: one tenant filing to leave the Triad, in a city where being one person is against the law, and three tenants bargaining over a hand none of them owns outright. If that lands, try Ghost in the Gala, where identity is the merchandise being auctioned, or The Goosekeeper's Concession Stand, another comedy about bargaining with parties who outnumber you and have no reason to cooperate. Then come back here, to the kitchen, to the coffee going cold, and to a hand that will not close until three people who share it can agree on why.