God's Imitator

Huang Shengjie thought for a moment, ”Yes, I think so.

”For instance, until now there’s been no motion in this community that allows for putting a player to death. So that power, ’executing someone after a public trial,’ doesn’t actually exist.

”But if we add that motion in order to deal with the Imitator, then a new kind of power, the power to kill, suddenly comes into existence within the community.

”It’s a power that wasn’t there before, created from nothing.

”Regardless of whose hands it ends up in, that is what it means to expand the scope of authority.”

Ye Lin gave a satisfied nod, ”Exactly.

”According to the current logic, our ultimate goal is to find the Imitator and eliminate the threat, and expanding the community’s authority is a necessary step toward that.

”But my inclination is that the true situation is rather different.

”Expanding the community’s authority is itself the ultimate goal, and finding the Imitator and eliminating the threat is merely the justification.”

Huang Shengjie was taken aback. He understood roughly what Ye Lin was implying.This was an accusation directed at Lu Bingjun.

Ye Lin added, ”Of course, I’m not saying there’s no Imitator in the community. There certainly is one.

”But they may not be nearly as dangerous as people are imagining.

”We’ve taken every game with a questionable element and attributed it all to this supposed hidden Imitator, but it’s equally possible that they were each the work of different Imitators.

”Take ‘Remorse Poker’. I think it’s actually more plausible that game was designed by an Imitator from another community.”

Huang Shengjie frowned, ”Why? The game was so precisely targeted. If someone didn’t have a clear understanding of Gao Teng’s character weaknesses and the specifics of his crimes, how could they possibly have designed something like that?

”Are you saying Brother Lu concealed information when he was telling us about it?”

Ye Lin shook her head, ”No, not that.

”The game records have been wiped, but everyone here saw them at the time. Even if individual memories have faded a little, there’s no way a collective false memory, a kind of Mandela effect, could produce the same identical error across everyone.

”So any information that the veteran players all consistently agreed upon without objection can be treated as reliable.

”On that basis, Lu Bingjun didn’t slip in any incorrect information when presenting the records, and what he described matches what I saw in those records at the time.

”What I disagree with is the reasoning that came after.

”I think there are two serious problems in it that simply don’t hold up.

”First, how a player would actually confess their crimes, and what card totals would actually be drawn, these are two uncontrollable variables. An Imitator could not possibly have predicted or managed them effectively.

”Second, if such a hidden Imitator really existed, they would have had to be very close to Gao Teng in private.

”They would have needed to know the full picture of Wei Changfeng, Gao Teng, and Xu Yili’s situation, including the fact that Gao Teng was the Imitator. And Gao Teng would have had to trust them completely, enough to show them his own design draft.

”But I don’t believe anyone in this community fits those conditions.

”So I don’t think the argument that all three games were the work of a single hidden Imitator holds up at all.”

Huang Shengjie paused, ”Hold on, I follow the first point, but on the second, Sister Ye Lin, how can you be certain no one in the community fits those conditions?”

Ye Lin said, ”That’s actually the key reason I didn’t raise this directly in the meeting just now.

”I know what you’re thinking, and I know how Lu Bingjun would explain it. He would say this Imitator would have been very careful to conceal themselves, so any interactions with Gao Teng would have happened privately.

”The community is large enough that two players can easily find an empty room or quiet corner to talk without anyone noticing.

”So the fact that no veteran player appears to have been visibly close to Gao Teng wouldn’t disprove the existence of a hidden Imitator.

”Lu Bingjun might even question my motives for raising it and make everyone think I’m covering for someone.

”In that kind of atmosphere, there’s no way I could have started a direct argument with him in front of everyone, so in the end I said nothing.

”But think about it carefully. In a community like this, if two people were genuinely close, could they really avoid drawing anyone’s attention at all?

”A single private conversation between the two of us right now is fine, no one would think anything of it.

”But what if we did this frequently?”

Huang Shengjie’s brow furrowed. He tried to put himself in that position and gave a small shake of his head, ”I suppose, actually, that would be quite difficult to hide.

”The community isn’t enormous, but it’s not tiny either.

”Any two players can find a quiet corner somewhere, but the problem is that the total number of people here is small. If two players disappear at the same time, that’s noticeable.

”No one needs to know exactly where they went. The fact that they vanished together is enough to raise eyebrows.

”Once or twice might be forgettable, but if it happened regularly, even the least observant person would pick up on it eventually.”

Ye Lin nodded, ”Which is also part of why so many players make a point of spending time in the hall.

”It’s not just because the hall is lively and sociable. Being in the hall is also a way of demonstrating that you haven’t slipped off somewhere private with another player to do something unusual.

”Gao Teng, because of his personality, had almost no real friends in the community to begin with.

”First, there was already tension between Deng Xiao and Gao Teng from the start, and that tension naturally extended to Lu Bingjun and Yao Yuan, since they were in the same group and naturally closer to Deng Xiao.

”Second, He Qinyun and I both genuinely disliked Gao Teng. We could both sense that he carried a great deal of darkness inside him, and we kept our distance.

”Zheng Chunhua was relatively friendly toward him, but only in a superficial way.

”The rest of the veteran players, Wen Wan, Zhou Wanlin, Geng Yuxia, they’re all more the type who just get on with things quietly.

”For Gao Teng to build the kind of trust we’re talking about with any of them, it would have required a substantial amount of ongoing communication over time.

”And there’s nothing like a chat function on the community computers.

”If two players wanted to develop a genuinely close relationship, they would have to communicate privately and frequently, whether in person or by writing.

”Either way, there would always be some trace of it. It couldn’t be completely invisible.

”So I genuinely don’t think any of the current veteran players in this community was ever that close to Gao Teng.

”You’re also welcome to ask any veteran player the same question, as a way of checking what I’ve said.”

Huang Shengjie’s brow remained furrowed, ”I see. That does make a lot of sense.”

He couldn’t say with certainty whether everything Ye Lin had told him was accurate, but the logic was sound.

The veteran players’ interests were not perfectly aligned with one another. Simultaneously controlling and winning over every veteran member would be impossible.

If Gao Teng had ever shown signs of being unusually close to one of the veteran players, whether their absences and reappearances had regularly coincided, or whether they had shown something warmer than usual in some unguarded private moment, keeping that hidden from every single other person would have been nearly impossible.

Someone would have noticed something.