Hook
The Maple Court group chat has one unspoken rule: never leave the chat, because the last person who did got their bins mysteriously never collected again — so when new tenant Dara mutes it at 2am to sleep, she wakes to eleven missed 'welfare check' knocks on her door.
Escalation
- To make peace, Dara posts a photo of her rescheduled bins — and the chat critiques the angle, the timestamp, and the 'off' brand of her recycling bags, then quietly opens a poll titled 'Is Dara a good fit for Maple Court?'
- The poll passes. Overnight, small services vanish for her alone: the shared cleaner skips her landing, the WhatsApp 'parcel holders' return her packages to sender, the residents' Amazon locker code stops working — none of it traceable to any single person, all of it deniable as 'just how things are.'
- Desperate, Dara does what everyone does to get back in: she reports someone else. She screenshots the elderly man at No.9 leaving his gate open, and the chat lights up with gratitude, warmth, casserole offers — she is In again, and it feels unbearably good.
- The old man at No.9 gets his own eleven knocks. Dara watches from her window, muted, as the pattern she survived is administered to him with the exact tenderness that once welcomed her back.
✦ Twist
Dara finally finds the group's origin: it was started years ago as a single message — 'Anyone else feel like nobody looks out for each other anymore?' The chat isn't a conspiracy; it's that one lonely wish, iterated by frightened people into an appetite, and it now needs a fresh outsider every few weeks the way a body needs food.
💡 The engine is a community's care mechanism running as a threat system — belonging and exile use the exact same button, so every act of self-preservation feeds the machine that will eventually eat you.