Welcome to the April A to Z Blogging Challenge! Every year, bloggers from around the world commit to posting every day in April (except Sundays), working through the alphabet one letter at a time. This year, I’m visiting twenty-six fictional alternate Earths — worlds that diverged from our own at some crucial moment and became something wonderfully, unsettlingly different. Think of it like the TV show Sliders, which followed a group of travelers “sliding” between parallel dimensions, never quite knowing what version of Earth they’d land on next. Each day, we visit a new one. Today: F.

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The emergency rooms on Fame Economy Earth have a waiting area and a priority lane. This is not unusual — our world has something similar, organized around the concept of medical urgency. If you come in with a stubbed toe, you wait. If you come in with a sucking chest wound, they see you immediately. The principle is straightforward and pretty hard to argue with.

On Fame Economy Earth, the priority lane is for people with a FameScore above 500,000.

The stubbed toe of a minor celebrity gets seen in twelve minutes. The sucking chest wound of a mid-level accounts manager gets a clipboard and a number. There is a sign above the priority lane — tasteful sans-serif font, very on-brand — that reads Because Your Audience Is Waiting. Nobody on Fame Economy Earth finds this unusual. The sign has been there for fifteen years. It was designed by a firm that won an award for it.

This is what it looks like when a joke becomes infrastructure.

The Part Where Everything Was Fine and Then Suddenly Wasn’t

The financial crisis of 2008 hit Fame Economy Earth the same way it hit ours — collapsing banks, government bailouts, economists on television looking like they had recently been told something they very much wished they hadn’t been told. The recovery was rocky and expensive and politically miserable in all the familiar ways.

What was different, on Fame Economy Earth, was who showed up with a solution.

The company was called Lumen, incorporated in 2004 by three people who had met at a conference about “the monetization of human attention” and immediately recognized that they were the only ones in the room who were thinking about this correctly. Their product, launched in 2007, was called the FameScore: a single number between zero and one million that quantified a person’s measurable social influence across every platform, every medium, every trackable interaction. At launch, it was a novelty. Tech journalists wrote articles about it with titles like “Is This the Future of Social Media?” The answer, it turned out, was no. It was the future of everything.

The governments of seven nations, scrambling in 2009 to rebuild economic confidence on the rubble of the financial crisis, noticed something remarkable about the advertising markets: they had wobbled and then stabilized, because whatever else happened, people could not stop looking at things. Human attention, it turned out, was a more reliable commodity than mortgage-backed securities, which in fairness is an incredibly low bar, but in 2009 you took your stable commodities where you could find them.

The Lumen Accords of 2009 integrated the FameScore into the national credit infrastructure of the seven participating nations as a “supplementary collateral mechanism for economic recovery.” It had a two-year sunset clause. The sunset clause was quietly extended in 2011, again in 2013, and at some point between 2015 and 2018 stopped being discussed at all, because by then the FameScore wasn’t a supplementary mechanism anymore. It was the mechanism. And once something is the mechanism, you do not sunset it. You build the rest of the house around it and act like it was always a load-bearing wall.

Lumen’s founders are, at the time of our visit, among the wealthiest people in human history. Their FameScores are also very high, though at this point that is a bit like noting that the person who invented money has a lot of money. Of course they do. They set the exchange rate.

How the Number Works (And Why You Should Be Worried That It Makes Sense)

The FameScore is, to its credit, elegantly simple. Everyone has one. You receive your first score at birth, derived from a weighted average of your parents’ scores, which Lumen describes as “reflecting the natural social capital advantages of family connectivity” and which everyone on Fame Economy Earth accepts as obvious and correct in the way that people accept the rules of the game they were born into.

From there, the score updates in real time, twenty-four hours a day, based on a proprietary algorithm that Lumen has never been required to disclose. What it broadly measures is engagement: followers, shares, comments, the duration of attention paid to your content, and — here is the part that makes sense once you hear it, which is the most alarming thing about it — the FameScores of the people engaging with you. Attention from a high-scoring source is worth more than attention from a low-scoring one, because of course it is, because that is how influence actually works, and the fact that baking this into an economic system creates self-reinforcing dynastic inequality is something that Lumen’s legal team has successfully argued, in six jurisdictions, is not their problem.

Your FameScore determines your access tier. Access tiers determine almost everything.

Housing is zoned by score bracket, which means the nice neighborhoods are full of people with high scores, and the people with high scores make the nice neighborhoods more visible, which raises the scores of the people who live there, which is — and the economists of Fame Economy Earth use this term without irony — a “virtuous cycle.” Healthcare operates on a tiered system. Education has open-enrollment tracks and score-gated tracks, and yes, the score-gated track is better, and yes, your starting score is partially inherited, and no, Lumen does not consider this a design flaw.

Employment works the way you would expect it to work in a system like this, which is to say that your FameScore is your resume, your credit rating, and your letter of recommendation simultaneously, and many employers look at the number before they look at your name, and some of them look at nothing else. There is a word for this on Fame Economy Earth. The word is “efficient.”

Daily Life in the Attention Economy (A Field Guide for the Bewildered Traveler)

Step through the portal to Fame Economy Earth and the first thing you will notice is that everyone is slightly performing. Not in a way that reads as dishonest, exactly — the performance has been integrated into daily life at such a fundamental level that the distinction between authentic self-expression and content strategy no longer exists in any meaningful sense, which is either a beautiful dissolution of the public/private divide or a complete psychological horror, depending on your perspective and possibly your FameScore.

Public spaces are optimized for documentation. Parks have been redesigned with dedicated photography zones, each offering a different curated backdrop — flowering walls, geometric murals, a tasteful arrangement of vintage objects that suggests personality without committing to any specific one. Restaurants design dishes to be photographed before they are eaten, and the highest-rated restaurants on the local equivalent of Yelp are rated not on taste or service but on how much the average visit improves a diner’s engagement metrics. There is a steakhouse in the Washington, D.C. that has been serving the same mediocre steak for eleven years and maintains a six-week reservation list because the lighting is genuinely exceptional.

Coffee shops have “score check” screens next to the menus, which display your FameScore so you can watch it update in real time while you enjoy your beverage. This was introduced as a marketing feature. It has become, for many people, a minor addiction. There are support groups.

The medical profession has adapted with the flexible entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes Fame Economy Earth at its most optimistic. Doctors with high FameScores charge more — their expertise is, by definition, more valuable, because more people are watching. Surgeons livestream elective procedures. The top cardiac surgeon in the nation has 3.2 million followers and a sponsored content deal with a medical supply company, and before you ask: yes, the sponsored content appears during procedures. The surgeon finds this enhances focus. There have been no formal studies on whether the audience finds it reassuring. There have been several studies on whether it improves the surgeon’s score. It does.

Children on Fame Economy Earth receive their first posting tutorial at age five, which is when the school curriculum formally introduces “Personal Brand Foundations.” By age eight, most children have a managed social presence. By age twelve, those with high-scoring parents have junior talent managers. The school subject formerly known as “physical education” has been rebranded as “content fitness,” which is a term that means what you think it means and is taught by coaches who are compensated partly in score-improvement metrics.

None of this is mandatory. Technically. You can opt out of personal branding at any time. You can decline to post. You can choose to exist as what the system calls a “passive participant,” which comes with a score ceiling of approximately 50,000, which is enough to rent in the outer neighborhoods, access the public-tier hospital, and send your children to the open-enrollment schools where the underfunding is described in official communications as “character-building.” Freedom has never been more available. It just has a fairly legible price tag.

The Philosophy of It All (Which Everyone Agrees Makes Perfect Sense, Which Should Worry You)

The most impressive feature of Fame Economy Earth is not the FameScore. It is the fact that nearly everyone on Fame Economy Earth, across every tier and bracket and access level, believes the system is a meritocracy.

This belief is not entirely wrong. The system does reward effort. High-scorers have, in many cases, worked genuinely hard. The content grind is real — the relentless consistency required, the skills developed, the emotional labor of permanent public self-presentation. The Luminous (as the top tier is called, without apparent irony) will tell you about the years of work behind their numbers, and they are not lying. They did work. They deserve credit.

What they do not talk about is the inheritance. The baseline score received at birth. The compound interest of being seen by people who are already seen. The algorithm that is not biased toward hard work so much as it is biased toward existing visibility, which rewards the already-visible, which increases their visibility, which — and you will notice a pattern forming here. Lumen calls this “organic growth.” Economists on Fame Economy Earth call it “natural market behavior.” Sociologists, in the one journal that still publishes papers critical of the FameScore system, call it “a dynastic aristocracy with better graphic design.”

That journal has 4,200 followers. Its editor has a FameScore of 31,000 and lives in the outer neighborhoods. She is aware of the irony. She has written about the irony. The article got eleven shares.

What the Sliders Know

You can leave Fame Economy Earth any time. The portal will take you. Nobody tries to stop you, partly because leaving is your right and partly because, if your FameScore doesn’t register on their instruments — and it won’t, because you’re from somewhere else — you are, for all practical purposes, invisible. On Fame Economy Earth, invisible people move through public space like ghosts. Nobody is rude to them. Nobody is anything to them. They simply exist in the negative space where an audience should be.

What you carry when you leave is not quite horror and not quite recognition and not quite the smug satisfaction of having visited a cautionary tale, because cautionary tales are supposed to be warnings about something that hasn’t happened yet. Fame Economy Earth is a warning about something that is actively, measurably, right-now happening, just without the legal infrastructure making it official. Our world gave attention the shape of culture. Fame Economy Earth gave it the shape of law. The difference is real and meaningful and somewhat smaller than you would like.

The billboard above the portal, as you step through, is running a Lumen public awareness campaign. A beautiful, well-lit face looks directly into the camera. The tagline reads: Everyone starts somewhere. Where you finish is up to you.

Below the billboard, the algorithm is running. It is always running. It has never stopped running since 2009, not once, through every appeal and every protest and every think-piece and every support group for people who cannot stop checking the score screen at the coffee shop. It is running right now, making its small continuous adjustments, deciding who is worth seeing.

It is very good at its job.

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Join me tomorrow for G — and another world waiting just beyond the edge of what we know.