unwelcome guest. He would ignore D_Light. Surely the human would see the futility of his questions and leave.
D_Light raised his loaded crossbow.
Hal glanced up and then back to his monitors again. Hal knew D_Light’s profile. The player was human, but not stupid. “Not in your best interest,” he said dismissively. “You would not gain the information you seek by killing me.”
D_Light lowered his weapon slightly, now aiming it at the analyst’s legs. He paused there for a moment and then slung the crossbow back over his shoulder. “I’ll smash your machines!” D_Light erupted like a crazed man. “All this shit you need-I’ll smash them, bash them against the floor!”
This sounded to Hal like a more plausible threat. His eyes darted away from the screens, over to D_Light, and then back to the screens again. “To end the game, either win or lose,” the analyst answered.
Hal considered pinging for the guards. However, they, along with all the other so-called “intelligent life,” had been evacuated from the inner sanctum. Such evacuations were routine in the inner sanctum. Aside from real emergencies due to rogue microbes and the like, the doctor would run occasional drills. But this unscheduled quarantine had lasted too long, and the temporary lair given to Hal was inadequate for his work. Therefore, the analyst had seized an opportunity to escape back into the inner sanctum, back where real grinding could get done. Up until now, escaping back home had seemed like an optimal move despite the time it cost him to hack out of the network quarantine to get Cloud access. Now Hal was not so sure.
No, the guards would come too late to be of use if they came at all. Worse yet, Father would have him evacuated again. It would be a terrible productivity hit for the analyst.
“I don’t want to win or lose,” D_Light clarified. “I do not want to destroy the product. I just want the quest to end.” D_Light took a step closer to the analyst’s desk.
Hal regarded the human more carefully now. He ran an analysis of the expression on D_Light’s face. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, his face was pale, and his chin trembled. His appearance was indicative of one suffering from sleep deprivation, but beyond that he also appeared to be under significant stress. Panic? Anger? Hal often found it difficult to tell these emotions from appearance and body language alone. A sniffer could measure D_Light’s pheromone signature and get a better reading, but Hal had never needed a sniffer in his lair before.
“I am afraid I do not know how to end your game,” replied Hal. “Remember, you entered the MetaGame under your own free will and agreed to abide by the rules. I have scanned over the rules of your current quest, and it is quite clear that you must either win or lose to end the game. Alternatively, if basic survival is your goal, you could attempt to escape the inner sanctum and by doing so escape the cullers present here. However, all exits are sealed, and I do not have the key-not that it matters because the key changes every fifteen minutes. Yet another alternative would be to obtain some culler repellant. I do not have any. Unlike many here, I was designed for the inner sanctum and the smell of my flesh is of no interest to the cullers; therefore, I have no need of external repellant that is imbibed.”
Unfortunately, this explanation did not satisfy D_Light, who grabbed a nearby monitor, ripped it off its housing, and flung it down on the stone floor with a crash.
Hal recoiled as though wounded himself and cried out. He wrung his hands uselessly at D_Light. “ No! Stop that!” Just the loss of that monitor alone would cut back Hal’s productivity by perhaps 0.5 % until replaced. Everything in Hal’s lair had been optimized over the years. Every piece of equipment was the right tool for the job and was positioned in just the right place. As bad as the loss of the monitor was, Hal shuddered to think what would happen if this maniac let loose on the Artificial Intelligence machines.
D_Light seemed oblivious to the cries of the analyst as he pulled down yet another monitor that splintered and shrieked as it was obliterated on the floor.
“ Damn you! ” Hal screamed at him. It was alien for Hal to curse. For once, he did not know what to do. Perhaps if he had some time to analyze the situation, but this monster was literally ripping the lair apart!
“This will cost you everything! Stop! ”
The crazed human was oblivious, as though in some mad trance.
“You did this!” Hal shouted. “You made the MetaGame! You can’t ask me to fix what you made! I can’t! I can’t!”
D_Light paused and looked up at the tall, gaunt analyst. D_Light’s face was flushed with exertion. He was breathing heavily. He looked slightly puzzled, but reached up to grab another monitor.
“Stop! Stop! I’ll send you an archive! The answer is there! Damn you, stop!”
For the first time in his life, Hal did something impulsively. Unauthorized, he sent one of the most top-secret archives in his possession. He sent the night harvest archive. Hal would later regret it. He would later decide that it would have been more prudent to lose the entire lair than to succumb to this terrorist act, but standing idly while watching his tools get smashed was unbearable. Although Hal was designed to find violence loathsome, had he any weapon he might have murdered the human.
D_Light stopped his rampage. “My Soul,” he whispered with shock and exhaustion as he received the archive. He slumped against the wall and slowly lowered himself to the floor to avoid fainting.
CHAPTER 33
Democracy is not dead, merely unconscious.
Despite the fact that Hal sent Smorgeous the encryption key along with the archive, it took over a minute for the content to be decrypted. D_Light had never received anything with such high security.
Night Harvesting Executive Summary
Artificial intelligence alone is insufficient to power a framework as unfathomably complex as the Game. Combined, there are over twenty-eight billion humans and intelligent products in existence today. These beings make up an astoundingly intricate network of relationships and interconnected knowledge. Only by leveraging these nodes is it possible to optimize the Game and enable an overarching consciousness (the OverSoul) to emerge from this collective intelligence. The means by which this intelligence is tapped is through the most obvious method available, which is to say, by tapping into the mind interface chips implanted in the majority of intelligent organic beings.
The type of work performed by night harvesting falls under one of two categories: one, gathering data known by subjects (data mining); and two, answering questions (data processing).
It was determined after numerous studies that probing a subject’s mind interface chip was best done while the subject slept. While awake, the subjects tended to be stressed by what was often considered a “mind hack.” Even when subjects were compliant, they tended to try to manipulate the probe for their own benefit. For example, when a subject was posed the question of whether fuel for transport should be taxed, their answer depended largely on how often they used transport themselves. Despite being given evidence suggesting a different decision, subjects would generally make choices based on self-interest and/or beliefs in which they had previous investment.
In addition to greater objectivity while asleep and unconscious of the probe, subjects’ minds were also much more pliable. For example, when the Game wanted a logical answer to a question and the subject was asleep, it was very easy to stimulate the subject’s brain (primarily the left frontal lobe in this example) to help elicit the desired mindset for logical thinking. On the other hand, if an emotional response was desired, other respective brain tissues were stimulated.
In this way, mind queries were able to better fine-tune the information extracted. Using the example above, the question of the transport fuel tax could be weighed both logically and emotionally to ensure that any measure taken made the correct trade-off between best solution and the emotional pulse of those the tax would be levied upon.
