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.
Due to these findings and the obvious realization that subjects were not making important use of their minds while asleep anyway, it was decided that wide-scale harvesting would be done only on sleeping subjects.
As a brief overview, night harvesting works like this:
Software bots called “crawlers” are constantly parsing over the mind interface chips of players in search for sleepers. Minds that are asleep leave distinct brain signatures and are therefore easy to identify by crawlers.
Once a sleeper is identified, it is added to the billions on the harvesting list.
The OverSoul, and the Game presided over by her, uses this list as a resource for queries and information gathering. For example, if the OverSoul wants to know whether a war permit should be approved, she may ask a random set of sleepers from the two opposing houses. In addition, she may select a few unassociated sleepers knowledgeable on war to make an unbiased cost-benefit analysis.
Of course, given the complexity of the Game and the needs of the OverSoul, there are billions of such queries going on at any given time.
Not only does AI make use of sleepers, but sleepers make use of one another. Sometimes the sleepers are known to each other, and other times they are paired together by the crawlers. In this way, the OverSoul is able to cobble together entire unconscious teams that can solve difficult problems, problems these same teams would have difficulty solving when awake. As mentioned, conscious subjects are hampered by their emotions and biased by their desires and prejudices. In addition, sleeper teams are more efficient than their conscious counterparts because they share their minds freely. Such raw blinking with strangers is seldom done by conscious players due to security and privacy issues…
Truly, night harvesting has thus far outstripped our expectations in that it has since become the lifeblood of the Game and bestowed upon the OverSoul historically unsurpassed wisdom, and thus divine credibility.
D_Light opened his eyes as he finished the summary. “We are all harvested without consent, without even knowledge of it?” His head hurt from trying to process what he had just read.
“Yes,” answered Hal, “but that is beside the main point. You are part of the OverSoul. We all are. Therefore, why don’t you take your newfound perspective and leave?” Hal waved off the intruder.
“This is unbelievable…I…” D_Light’s words trailed off as he discovered there were no words to convey what he felt.
Hal paused while his eyes glazed over as though communing with a spirit, and he continued conveying information to D_Light. “I see you…Yes, there you are in the harvest log. You, your Mother Lyra and Father Djoser, even that bodyguard…even the one you seek to destroy now, Lily, she too was harvested. And others…” Hal paused again. “My Soul! My own father? The doctor is involved?” Hal asked himself out loud in disbelief.
D_Light shook his head emphatically. “No, I did not make this. Lily did not make this game.”
As Hal continued to speak, he found it easier. His vocal system was shuddering back to life. “You did create this, and now you come to me, break my instruments, and demand that I fix your game because it has not gone the way you want!” Hal rasped out the condemnation.
D_Light shook his head again. “It cannot be…I have not been harvested. My dreams?”
“Your dreams are fabrications!” Hal wheezed. “What would happen if night harvesting was common knowledge? Players would try to game the system. Your dreams were like everyone’s-pleasant but uneventful. Just a filler to run over the top of the real work going on in your mind.”
“But my familiar-”
Hal interrupted impatiently. “Your archival processes, including those run by your primitive familiar, are bypassed. You cannot replay something that is never recorded to begin with.”
“I did remember though…I saw Ascara in a dream. She was hunting me?”
“ You were hunting you! Your NeverWorld character-that witch-was merely a flimsy subconscious caricature of yourself revealed, no doubt, by emotional stress. Do you remember at the groksta how the Authority made you famous in NeverWorld so you could be easily found? That was your idea.”
“Who better to hunt myself than myself?” D_Light scrunched his forehead and tapped it lightly with a closed fist.
“But why didn’t I just tell the Authority where I was?”
“Again, because sleepers are unaware of their identity during harvest. Otherwise, your personal interests would contaminate your analysis. For example, what if you did know who you were? Would you help the Authority hunt you down? You see, harvesting does not strip you of conscious free will; however, through anonymity, harvesting makes free will irrelevant.”
D_Light’s face was expressionless. “So why am I here?”
Hal sighed. “Allow me to summarize it for you, after which I hope you will leave me alone. Keep in mind that I am mainly drawing this analysis from harvest log files. I do not have direct access to your personal archives; therefore, you will have to do some thinking of your own.”
The analyst paused as he closed his eyes. “You are here to fulfill a prayer, a prayer you recently sent. You asked the OverSoul, ‘What is the nature of my God that she is so cruel?’ Well, the MetaGame brought you to one of the few places in the world where you could find the answer. And incidentally, I’m fulfilling this prayer of yours right now.”
D_Light tilted his chin up as Smorgeous confirmed that D_Light had indeed made that prayer soon after he fragged Fael. It was only a week ago, although it felt like another life. “It was my destiny to know, to find out about night harvesting?” D_Light asked.
“I wouldn’t call it destiny. I would call it opportunity. The OverSoul is the most powerful entity in human history, but she cannot control fate absolutely.” Hal’s patience was wearing thin.
“But why not just send me straight to Dr. Monsa? Why did Lily need to be involved?”
“You are not the only sentient being served by the OverSoul, D_Light,” the analyst sneered. “My father had a prayer to fulfill too. The demon girl is for him, for reasons not specified in his harvest log.”
“Lily’s coming here was the doctor’s prayer?” D_Light was puzzled even more.
“I said you would have to think, not simply repeat everything I say!” Hal’s voice cracked. “Yes, it was his prayer. Why else would the demon follow a fool like you? Given that my father is interested in her, I suspect she is smarter than that. In her harvest she complied, and in her waking time…No doubt she felt compelled. Intuition, as you humans call it. Although she did not consciously know it, she was being drawn to him.”
“And that was why we got the quest to become demons. Otherwise we would have turned her in. She hitched a ride with us…Dr. Monsa’s prayer hitched a ride on my own,” D_Light murmured.
For the first time, D_Light saw the slightest smile appear on the analyst’s face. “Indeed, efficiency is core to the Game.”
“And this quest, where we hunt down and kill Lily-whose prayer is being answered now?”