VIRAL — one whisper, a whole town reacts

VIRAL is a butterfly-effect game you play with one sentence. Mistport is getting ready for tonight's Lantern Festival. You are not a character — you are a thought that spreads. Pick a resident and whisper anything: a rumour, a joke, a lie, a command. Each of the eight residents is played by Gemma-4-31B-IT running on AMD Token Factory. They understand your words through what they know, want and fear: the café owner whose daughter performs tonight, the police chief who must see things for himself, the reporter who needs a scoop, the organizer hiding an uninspected stage. They doubt it, retell it in their own words, phone a friend, go and check, cover something up — or shrug. A deterministic engine owns the truth and the rules. The model proposes beliefs and actions; the engine validates every answer, decides what anyone can actually see or do, and logs every cause. The town has its own clock: stage check at 17:00, doves at 18:00, stalls at 18:30, police at 19:00, rehearsal at 19:30, generator at 19:40. At 20:00 you watch the festival your sentence produced — lanterns, doves, crowds, a booed mayor, a stage taped off — and then read the front page of The Mistport Gazette, with the chain of who told whom, what was really true, and one hidden motive you uncovered. Different sentences, and different listeners, lead to different evenings: a made-up story about the mayor's new car sends the reporter to the town hall's accounts, where she finds a real budget hole; a worry about the stage, told to the café owner, gets the stage sealed off; a joke that the mayor is afraid of pigeons ends with him denying it in a public statement. And the town has its own slapstick lying around — a banana peel by the notice board, a dove cage held shut with tape, a generator on empty — that only the residents' own movements can set off: lure the mayor to the plaza and he goes down. Some sentences go nowhere — the town does not have to care.