God's Imitator

Huang Shengjie stared at him, ”What?”

Qin Cheng explained, ”Looking purely at these two motions, our positions are actually different.

”Even so, I’m happy to help you work through it, because I want you to make your decision only after fully understanding every part of it.

”Even if my analysis ends up pushing you further from my own view, that’s fine. We can disagree and still get along.

”Now, Shengjie, I want you to think carefully. Is ’no killing within the community’ really an absolute, inviolable line?

”On this question, I agree with Lu Bingjun’s position.

”I believe this hidden Imitator genuinely exists, and that they are acting with real, extreme malice.

”If we don’t expose them, they will keep operating indefinitely. When survival is on the line, every principle and every line in the sand can be set aside.”

Huang Shengjie hesitated, ”But, does the evidence we have actually prove they exist?

”Couldn’t it just be that a few malicious Imitators happened to produce games around the same time, and we’ve worked ourselves into a state of paranoia over it?”And why would they need to wipe us all out anyway? What would that actually gain them? They can’t have a personal grudge against every single one of us.”

Qin Cheng looked a little exasperated, ”What kind of question is that? The benefit is obvious.

”Visa time.

”In the worst case, once he’s killed off the community’s core players, the whole community falls apart, and everyone left becomes nothing more than a blood bag for him.

”Whenever he’s short on visa time, he just kills one or two people to top up. Easy and convenient.

”He could go after players from other communities too, but that doesn’t conflict with this at all.

”And besides, killing people you already have access to is always easier than killing strangers.

”As for what happens if this hidden Imitator doesn’t actually exist?

”I’ll admit, he might exist, or he might not. Either guess carries a real risk of being wrong.

”But the truth is, we don’t actually need to work out which possibility is more likely.

”We only need to work out which outcome would be worse.”

Huang Shengjie paused. Qin Cheng’s framing had, to some degree, named exactly what had been bothering him.

After his private conversation with Ye Lin, Huang Shengjie had gone back and forth on this question repeatedly.

Lu Bingjun and Ye Lin had each proposed an extreme scenario, and misjudging either one would carry serious consequences.

The real difficulty was that the current evidence couldn’t conclusively point to either being correct, which meant no matter which way he leaned, something would feel wrong.

After much deliberation, Huang Shengjie had decided his own interests mattered more, and that was why he’d voted against.

But Qin Cheng’s reasoning had opened up a new way of looking at it.

Qin Cheng continued, ”If these games were each the work of several different Imitators, and there’s actually no hidden Imitator in the community at all, what’s the worst outcome?

”At most, we pass the Trial Rules and possibly end up wrongly killing one or two players.

”But think it through carefully. Would that really happen on any large scale? No, that’s not realistic.

”Not at this stage, certainly.

”Even a single wrongful execution isn’t especially likely.

”Because a death sentence only happens if every other player votes unanimously in agreement. That’s an extremely high bar.

”Anything short of that, and the motion simply can’t pass.

”Even if Lu Bingjun genuinely wanted to use this rule to eliminate people who oppose him, it would necessarily take a very long process.

”And by that point, whether Community 2 still even exists would be an open question.

”So I think this path is one I can accept, even with the cost of giving up some rights.

”But what if this hidden Imitator genuinely exists, and we fail to pass the motion?

”There are roughly three scenarios.

”First, we fail to expose them at all. There’s nothing more to say there. We simply wait to die.

”Second, we manage to expose them within a game, and use the game’s own mechanics to kill them.

”But everyone here knows how unlikely that scenario actually is.

”Shengjie, you’ve had a successful experience with this before, but you also know exactly how slim the odds really were.”

Huang Shengjie nodded.

His success in killing the Imitator during the ‘Pain Game’ had come down partly to Xu Yiheng’s own carelessness, and partly to the large amount of information Lin Sizhi had effectively force-fed him.

There had been a great deal of luck involved.

Qin Cheng continued, ”Third, and this is the most likely scenario: we fail to kill him in a game, but we manage to confirm his identity within the community.

”What do we do then?

”Do nothing and wait for the next game to find an opportunity?

”That’s simply not viable.

”In the end, we’d be forced to rush a motion through to kill him on the spot.

”But passing a motion in an emergency like that brings far more problems.

”Because we’d all be forced to vote under the extreme pressure of having just caught a dangerous Imitator in our community. There would be no time to think things through properly, and the resulting motion would likely have rule gaps, or end up even more extreme.

”Let me give you a simple example. Say after a vote, 10 players in our community believe he’s the Imitator, and 3 believe he isn’t.

”Under the current motion, we’d expel him from the community. If he turns out to have been wrongly accused, he’d still have a chance to live.

”But if we only started drafting and passing a motion at that point, what would likely pass wouldn’t be anything like the current motion. It would more likely be something along the lines of, ’10 guilty votes means immediate execution.’

”Because all 10 of those players would vote in favour, and that’s already more than half.

”In other words, passing a motion at the last minute under pressure would push it toward something far more extreme.

”So from where I stand, I believe this motion should be passed now, even with all its imperfections. It must be passed.”

Huang Shengjie scratched his head in frustration, ”This is exhausting. Why does the politics inside the community feel even more draining than the games themselves?”

He had thought his position was firm, but now that Qin Cheng had offered a different way of weighing it, he felt his stance had nearly flipped entirely.

Qin Cheng said, ”The community and the Gallery aren’t the same thing.

”Games tend to have clear rules, an optimal solution, and a definite outcome.

”But how a community develops rarely has an optimal solution, and sometimes doesn’t even have a clear right or wrong. You can only take it one step at a time.

”Fortunately, we still have time. Take your time thinking it over.

”Whatever you decide, just make sure it’s the choice you genuinely believe is right.”

The two of them went their separate ways.