The Red File — the record that doesn't clear
Take the envelope and an entry is created. Bury the case and an entry is created. Run an operation to erase the trail — and that operation is an entry.
This file is the spine of the game's data.
What's in a line
Each entry carries a number of values, but two of them are what actually splits play.
Evidence strength. How hard the proof is. Cash handed over in person, a bank transfer, and a recording of the conversation are three completely different weights.
Exposure risk. The chance this blows up this week. Recalculated every turn.
Keeping those separate is the point. An entry with low risk and thick evidence is the most frightening object in the game. It sits quiet for years, and on the day it lands there is no defence available.
What pushes the risk up
Risk creeps upward on its own. Things stack on top of it.
- The state of your accomplices. If someone who was in it with you falls out with you, comes under investigation, or is ruined, every entry they appear in rises with them. Cutting people loose has its own price.
- Press attention. The worse your standing with investigative outlets, the faster it climbs.
- Prosecutorial focus. Being at odds with the government raises it. The same corruption is more dangerous in opposition.
You can push risk back down with a cover-up. But the cover-up becomes a new entry, and the new entry carries evidence of its own. The better you are at burying things, the thicker the file gets.
The rumour stage
An entry doesn't jump from quiet to front page. There's a rumour stage in between. Gossip circulates, and you get a popup. There's a strange story going around.
That's your chance to respond — and responding is itself a signal. Put a lawyer on something nobody is sure about yet and reporters will notice you did.
Expiry isn't the end
Every entry has a statute of limitations. When it expires, the legal risk is gone. You cannot be charged for it any more.
The political risk stays. And the evaluation engine at the end reads the file regardless of whether anything ever blew up. Corruption you got away with completely still shows up in your obituary.
That cruelty is deliberate. This game does not say "it didn't happen if you didn't get caught." Getting away with it and having done it are two separate facts, and what gets scored at the end is the second one.
The good goes in the same file
The same structure records the other direction. Laws you passed, promises you kept, people you saved. These don't detonate — they come back. Where someone you helped twenty years ago is standing when you're cornered two decades later is decided here.
The file isn't a punishment mechanism. It's a memory. It's how the game remembers you.