New Times

The day to day life is very different now than before the civil war. The new government has introduced a lot of new laws to combat the crime and that followed years of conflict and with each new law the ruling party got stronger and the personal freedom of any individual living here was reduced. Although the government ruled with an iron fist and anybody challenging their power mysteriously disappered, nobody had anticipated the introduction of the Social ranking laws. Although a lot of people had been against these laws in the beginning, the zero tolerance towards critizism had crushed any uprise.

The Social ranking laws:

The social ranking laws were introduced to combat crime and it means that when a person turns 18, the person is given a number from 1-100 and that was this persons social ranking (SR). Everybody is injected with a chip that is connected to a smart watch. That way you can always see the SR of everybody in your proximity. You can swipe through the people that is within a radious of 50 meter and then you can see an updated picture of the person and the persons SR. It is each persons responsibility to update the picture at least ones a year and if you do not comply, you will loose 10 points on your social ranking. The simple rule of the Social ranking scheme is that people with a lower ranking always have to obey people with a higher Social ranking.

In theory all people get a SR of 100 when they turned 18, but unknown to most people, teachers and other government employed people have been reporting on everybody for years, so that each person has a file and it was this file that is used to adjust the social ranking points for everybody.

Everytime you comit a crime, disobeys a person of higher ranking or in other ways did things that is not in the interest of the government, points will be subtracted from your SR. If you are one of the few lucky people with a SR of 100 you will each month be rewarded with 50 points that you can use to reward the less fortunate.

Life with Social ranking:

When the government introduced the Social ranking laws it did have the intended effect, crime dropped dramatically and people started acting like model citizens. But the Social ranking laws also turned everything upside down, because the people who got the highest SR when they turned 18 was often the geeks and the quiet students, whereas the beautiful and popular kids often had some bad reports from the teachers and therefore got a lower score when they turned 18.

In the beginning you did not see the big effect of the Social ranking laws, except for the drop in crime. But as the people with a high ranking realized the power they now had, things started changing rapidly.

Now that the Social ranking laws has been in effect for 6 months it is clear that it is utopia for people with a score of 80 and above and if you have a score of 100 you are a god. But for the rest of the population it is a living nightmare, where you never feel safe and where a normal day can turn into the most humiliating day of your life within seconds, simply because you attracted the interest of a person with a higher ranking.