Reading It

The Oracle announces Rollo's peer score has been updated. Rollo asks: 'What's my number?' The entire peer review arc collapses into a single data point -- all the watching, the feedback loops, the mandatory trust exercises, reduced to a score Rollo doesn't even know yet. You've waited for a performance rating that would determine your year, delivered as a number with no context.

Deeper Read

The score is the system's summary of you. It doesn't matter what happened; it matters what the number says happened.