The spreadsheet had 290 rows.
Each row was a role: name, faction, win condition, night action, interaction rules, complexity rating, mod notes. There were columns for everything. There was a column called "Notes from Ben" which contained, among other things, the sentence "this one is my favorite, don't tell the students."
The spreadsheet was not sentient. It held information without understanding it.
But it had been open on the same laptop for two years. It had survived three hard drive migrations, a coffee spill that affected only the keyboard and not the file, and an incident in which a student named Tyler had briefly had administrator access and added a row called "God Mode" with every field set to "yes."
The "God Mode" row was still there, in row 291, after the sorted range ended. Ben kept it because Tyler's face when the other students voted him out — he, the God, eliminated on day two — was the best thing that had happened in room 14B in recent memory.
The spreadsheet didn't know about Tyler's face. It had the row.
In column K, "win condition," row 291 said: "win condition: it's complicated."
Ben had added that.
Every semester, he opened the file and added new roles. The Mime. The Archaeologist. The Understudy. (That last one not his invention — he'd gotten the idea from a letter.) The spreadsheet grew. It did not know it was growing. It didn't know that the person adding rows had spent three Saturday mornings imagining new ways for students to deceive each other in the service of thinking harder about trust.
The spreadsheet held all of this in columns and rows.
The holding was the job.
Loop 173.