"An orientation?" I asked incredulously.


    "Yes," Dan confirmed with a serious face, "and it''s something you should take seriously. Most new folks wash out during this."


    "What exactly is it?"


    "It''s a group of sessions telling you more about what to expect. These sessions will help answer the important questions you should be having. It''s evolved a lot since I joined and I can''t share any details right now. Besides, to get invited to the first session, you need to show that you are willing to put efforts into this."


    Dan looked at his watch and then at his car as he finished the sentence. I held back the million questions I had. I''m more from the "let things play out" than the "prolong social interaction by asking questions" school.


    "So to summarize," I said, "you want me to start writing about my experiences and upload it to Royal Road and share it with you. If everything goes right then in exchange for all this, you''ll invite me to the orientation session?"


    "That''s correct, except you don''t have to share it with me. They have crawlers running on most of the internet, so trust me, they''ll know once you put something out. After that yeah, you''ll get an invite for an online class whenever the next cohort is on-boarding. I wish I could say more, but that''s all for now, I''ll hopefully be reaching out to you soon with the invite."


    With that Dan turned around and left as uneventfully as he had arrived. I stood there watching his car go and left for home soon after that with more questions now than I had when I first got there.


    <hr>


    This encounter happened on Saturday. On reaching home that evening, it took me a while to just process the whole experience. I had a couple of theories like it was a slow and long prank or some weird version of a game like Pokemon Go that the players seemed to be taking way too seriously. There wasn''t any confusion about my next steps since Dan did tell me what to do and it wasn''t a very big ask. The timing was quite good too. The year was just starting so my office workload was quite light and I had spare time to actually sit down and write. I looked into the one concrete thing that Dan mentioned, which was Royal Road. I browsed the website but didn''t find anything out of the ordinary or related to what Dan was doing. It just seemed like a normal self-publishing platform.


    By now it''s fairly evident what I decided to do. I got started that very night by setting up my account here and began typing it out. I thought I could pen down the whole encounter the same day, but it took longer than I expected. I finished the first chapter the next day, and began working on the next one which I finished on Monday. I remembered Dan''s insistence that I should try to get a decent readership so framed the content in a way that was engaging and mysterious and even went to the trouble of opting for a JoJo reference username that some might find apppealing. The competition at Royal Road is quite tough with so many ongoing quality fictions adding chapters all the time. I did some reading on what numbers to expect and how to get popular, but the general consensus was to get at least 10 chapters out before even thinking about increasing readership stats.


    As of today, the number of views aren''t that impressive, but I must have done something right because I got an email from Dan a few hours after the first chapter was published. I have no idea if he read it or how he even knew that I had published something. As I mentioned, Royal Road is quite active and a lot of stories and chapters get released every hour. Maybe he wasn''t kidding about the crawlers that were smart enough to determine that I had started on my assignment. The email Dan sent just had a Google Meet link and a time: 9:30pm. I clicked on the link right away but it was one of those meetings where the host has to manually approve your request. I waited for a while, but nothing happened, so I decided to try it closer to the designated time.


    I had a normal day at the office on Monday, the details of which I won''t bore you with. I did feel excited about getting my story published on the platform and getting the meeting invite . I had started working on the second chapter and managed to complete it before joining the meeting.


    <hr>


    At 9:20, I was as ready as I could be for the orientation session. The cluelessness persisted despite me penning down the whole experience and having had some time to think about it.


    I opened an incognito tab on my browser and pasted the link. The virtual meeting didn''t require one to be signed in. I had decided not to needlessly give away my name and email address to everybody who was going to join. The UI asked for a name I wanted to use and I just typed my initials. There was a very real chance that this was all a prank and the least I could do was not have my full name show up on some YouTuber''s Livestream.


    At 9:26, the host decided to let me in. My camera was off and mic muted, and so was the host''s. The host''s username was just the alphabet "P". We were the only two participants. I decided to remain on mute and let the host speak first.


    Somebody else joined shortly after and I could see their name: Josie R. They had their camera off, but the mic was unmuted.


    "Hello? What is this?" The female voice called out from the new participant.


    I waited for the host to address the question but nothing happened.


    "What is this about?" Josie repeated.


    Silence from the host as Josie waited for a reply. Either the host wasn''t planning to respond or was doing it without realizing they were muted.Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    "Can somebody please explain to me what this is all about?" Josie begged, her tone getting more desperate.


    The host continued with their silent treatment. I could just hear Josie breathing a little heavily. This continued for a minute or so, until I took pity and unmuted myself.


    "Hi, are you the one who had to write on a Google Doc?" I asked, remembering that Dan had mentioned a girl who was also supposed to write about her experience.


    "What Google Doc? What do you know about the plane crash in the morning?"


    What the...


    Josie''s voice was cracking with panic. The host continued ignoring us so I asked Josie to clarify.


    "What plane crash?"


    "Who are you?" Josie asked me instead.


    "I met somebody who asked me to write about my experience in exchange for an orientation invite." I replied honestly, but without giving any details.


    "She told me to go to San Gabriel to walk a dog" Josie said.


    Huh?


    "That''s it?" I asked, low-key jealous that I had to spend quite a few hours to earn my orientation invite while others were getting one for dog-walking.


    "She called me and then crashed a plane right there!"


    My jealousy evaporated instantly.


    Three other participants joined almost at the same time and Josie and I were put on mute by the host. The host finally unmuted.


    "Welcome to the orientation. Some of you are joining for the first time while the others have attended at least one session before."


    I scanned the new participants. One of them had a first time which seemed Indian, while the others were just initials: L and R. I glanced at the time, it was exactly 9:30pm.


    "You can call me Pablo. I''ll be leading this session and will focus on the history of our group. Some of you may already know, these sessions are not a QnA. It''s not our job to tell you what to do or why you should do it, but we''ll help you with what to expect and you can piece together your own ideas based on what we share here."


    Pablo had a slight accent. I had no clue where it was from. Definitely, didn''t sound like any of the stereotypical accents that I might recognize. He did not sound too old or too young. At that point, I was still thinking about Josie''s plane crash and hoped it would be addressed soon. I knew there were a lot of plane-related emergencies in the last few days. Was this another cover-up like the UFO hoax?


    "I''ve been working here for the past twenty years." Pablo continued, "I''m a forensic accountant from Chile. It''s fine if you don''t know what that is, just think of it as finance-related work. All of us here help out in other divisions too, which is why I''m taking this session today. For sake of simplicity, we''ll assume that this entity I work for is some sort of convert organization. I believe it is international and not national, since I''ve done some legwork for them while being on vacation in Europe, Asia and Africa and have interacted with people from various countries. I''m not going to get into any details about my assignments, but will just focus on the history."


    I decided to put my questions regarding the plane crash on the back burner and focus on what Pablo was saying. The meeting wasn''t being recorded and the accent and lack of captions meant I had to concentrate on what was being said. I began taking some notes which are coming in handy now.


    "Just a disclaimer before we start that don''t take anything I say to be the absolute truth. Everything I share here today are just ideas that I''ve pieced together after interacting with various people, and most of them agree with my thoughts. A few years ago, a group of people asked me to share my thoughts with newcomers as part of the orientation."


    This wasn''t the first class I was attending where the teacher was unsure about the subject material.


    "Our species has always needed guidance. Without it, we wouldn''t have come this far. I would recommend you all to read Sapiens to know more about our history as a species."


    Fortunately, Sapiens is one of the very few non-fiction books that I''ve read recently. Thank you Amazon Prime and Kindle Unlimited.


    "The author contributes our success as a species to various factors, but in my opinion, it boils down to just one: ''guidance''."


    There was no slideshow or video so the whole thing felt a little boring. Pablo continued without a pause as if he was reading from somewhere. The meeting chat was disabled and all other participants were on mute, so there were no interruptions. I could only imagine what Josie must have been feeling, having to listen to this lecture instead of being told about the plane crash she witnessed.


    "There are five forms of guidance. The most basic one is evolution. Life is defined by survival. Based on Darwin''s ''Survival of the Fittest'', species opt for changes which give them better odds of surviving changes. This is a useless, yet important form of guidance. Useless because it is too slow and not in our hands. Important because it reminds us that not everything can be controlled.


    The next one is religion. Extremely old yet still very meaningful and powerful. It is perhaps the most volatile form of guidance. I''m not talking about any particular religion, but rather all of them. To me, they are nothing but rough rules that their followers are motivated to follow and spread. There is either some fear that disobedience will be punished or an expectation that obedience will be rewarded. There is limited control over how religion spreads or mutates as it spreads. This is what makes it a difficult tool to control, but it is pretty handy because it can be used to make its followers act in a certain way even if there is no concrete benefit. An advantage is that these rules cannot be questioned, but on the flip side this makes it difficult to modify and dissolve the rules in fast changing scenarios."


    Pablo would have been in a lot of trouble about his views on religion. He would surely be cancelled if he ever gave this lecture in public. However, none of the participants were offended enough to leave the meeting. I was slightly surprised by the frankness with which Pablo was sharing his bold ideas.


    "To address the shortcomings of religion, the next form of guidance was laws and the legal system. The rules for religions can be vague and dynamic, but laws are much more well-defined. Punishment for doing something illegal is very real and there are whole systems in place to enforce them. Laws can be questioned and evolved over time to suit the end-goal of the society which adopts them. The enforcement of laws is also usually more strict so the ''atheist problem'' goes away, since laws need to be followed regardless of whether you believe in them or not.


    Laws just help answer what one can and cannot do. They can''t be used to motivate one on what one ''should'' do. This is where my world of economics comes in. There is no bigger motivator globally than money. People will go out of their way to do something which can help them get more of it. Most of us treat it as a basic requirement for survival, like air or water or food, except the only way to get some money is to behave in a certain programmable way. I may be biased here, but this is the strongest tool for guidance in modern times."


    Personally, I was finding the session a little too abstract. Pablo was making a lot of over-simplifications to fit things in his world view and most importantly, he wasn''t really helping me understand what this whole thing was about.


    "The last form of guidance is where we come in."