《Purely Coincidental》


 4th January, 2025 - How it all started

    This is undoubtedly the weirdest and most awkward thing that I''ve ever done. 24 hours ago, I didn''t even know what a LitRPG was or that a platform like this existed. Yet, here I am typing away my thoughts after generating an AI cover image of a guy symbolically in control of the planet. I even selected tags for the content that I have to start uploading here.


    Contemporary.


    Obviously, everything is happening in real time. Though I suspect by the time somebody reads this, it''ll have been a few days according to the information note below where new submissions can take up to 48 hours to be approved. I don''t mind the delay, there is no urgency in publishing what I''m working on here. You can assume things happening here in pseudo real-time, and I''ll prefix the date of writing on each chapter.


    Mystery.


    The tag description mentions using it for stories revolving around characters attempting to figure out a puzzling situation. While I''ve discussed my situation with somebody, most questions still remain unanswered, so it is still a mystery to me. How long will it take before I have sufficient understanding of the situation? That''s a mystery too.


    Reader Interactive.


    I''m not sure how it''ll work, but I would really love to hear from you, especially if you are one of "them". I think Royal Road allows posting comments on chapters so please feel free to do that, maybe I can get some polls or forums going too. This may get a bit confusing since I''m writing in first person, some of you might want to comment on this as a work of fiction and others might want to interact directly with me. One way to solve this is that if you do comment, you can let me know whether the comment is for the "author" or the "protagonist".


    Ruling Class


    Tag description reads "focuses on managing cities, castles or entire worlds". Based on what I know so far, this seems apt. However, the tag description also mentions that it usually features nobility. The country that I have a citizenship of, and the country I''m currently living in, both are democracies, so the question of nobility doesn''t really arise. That being said, I''m not of any noble descent either and am a regular software engineer, and didn''t rely on nepotism to get here.


    Choosing the right tags helped me structure my thoughts and figure out how I wanted to approach this. Next came selecting the title.


    I''ve rarely written something for a wide audience, especially without a particular objective in mind. Definitely never a personal diary of sorts like this piece is turning out to be. Since I was asked to aim to get sufficient readership for this, I did dive a bit into "market research" to better understand the potential audience. The Royal Road platform seems to primarily specialize in the genre of LitRPG (Literary Role-Playing Game). Unfortunately, it''s not a genre I''ve read much about. Most fiction books I''ve read have fallen into traditional genres of detective stories, fantasy and science-fiction. My most memorable books and stories include Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and Jack Reacher. Currently, I''m half-way through a 9-book series called the Spiral Wars on a book titled Croma Venture. Before I started browsing this site and reading some of the stories here, I believed the closest I ever came to LitRPG is probably the books and stories I read based on the Halo universe, one of my favourite game franchises. However, now that I''ve started reading stories here ranging from necromancy with slimes, time loops to vampire politics, I suspect my closest brush with LitRPG was probably when I played Diablo 2 around 15 years ago. I played as a Necromancer, because it was somewhat satisfying to have a bunch of minions running around and doing your bidding. It seemed more efficient. On the other hand, my elder brother had instantly selected the Barbarian class mostly because he screamed when he was selected and it was the path of least resistance, planning and toil. My brother lived up to his reputation by being half asleep on some of our quests and just blindly clicking on enemies, spamming his skills and picking gear with bigger numbers on the stats. This is about the limit of my experience with RPGs, and while I did see the appeal, my own preference was towards games like Halo, Rocket League, Ori. These are games with less decision-making and more action and in my opinion rely more on skill than knowledge and research. Games I could play for a while and turn them off and forget all about it as I get on with my life. As of today, my gaming time is mostly spent playing Wii Sports Tennis so that I can get some physical activity done to overcome my sedentary job. I would prefer playing sports in person, but these days it''s too cold, gets dark too soon and requires having friends.


    Coming back to choosing the title, while my first choice was something eye-catching like "How I ended up running this world". It felt a bit too cringey given how little I know about how things will play out. However, from what I''ve been told so far, the possibility of the title being apt is still on the cards. My first choice for the title also seemed overly-descriptive and long, not necessarily a bad thing for a genre which has descriptive titles like "Hero is overpowered but overly cautious", "That time I got reincarnated as a slime", "The disastrous life of Saiki K". Yes, I am familiar with anime and like Death Note, Dr. Stone, Baki, One Punch Man. My preference towards smaller self-contained ones is quite obvious since I never even started watching One Piece, Naruto or even Attack on Titan. Due to the somewhat strange nature of me writing real things, I felt opting for a simpler and non-descriptive title and settled on "Purely Coincidental" so that readers can believe that this is a work of fiction, yet it can be catchy-enough for somebody to give it a try.If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    The cover also needs to help with making the story eye-catchy, and I had an AI tool generate an image of a formally dressed man holding the planet in his palm. There is no malice on the protagonist''s face and there is no indication of any evil or supernatural powers as "the world in the palm of your hands" is totally symbolic. I was inspired by the imagery from Muro, the antagonist of a game called Oni, who had a similar picture show up in case your mission failed. The AI tool generated an image which is a bit too cosmic and the protagonist is way too good looking but I''ll let it be for now. I''m not vain but iterating on generating images is not a sensible use of GPUs.


    I''ve never been much of a writer and English isn''t even my first language though I do end up using English more than Hindi especially when it comes to writing. I can only hope I''ve so far been able to communicate properly and keep things engaging enough for you to read as we hit the half-way mark of this chapter. Let''s get into how it all started.


    <hr>


    The sky was a very nice pink and red color as the sun was about to set. It was only 4:50ish as I walked around the grocery store waiting for somebody to approach me. The weather was on the colder side and I had my red hoodie on. It''s the Bay Area, so a significant number of people wore hoodies, with logos of different companies and teams on them. Mine displayed no writing so it was about as inconspicuous as I could hope to be. I was getting ready for what was promising to be a really strange meeting. I had chosen the time and venue, a public place close to my house but not super-close. There were many people out and about so I felt a little safe taking this weird meeting here. It was a familiar grocery store that I visit frequently so it wasn''t out of place for me to be there at this hour. I had always liked this store because of the witty stuff they put on the walls like "More Kale for Less Cabbage", "More Pizza for Less Dough".


    I had driven there half an hour in advance. It was a Saturday and I didn''t have anything else planned for the day. I had completed my shopping and put the bag in my car and was just waiting outside for somebody to approach me. The meeting had been agreed to over an email and I was pretty much convinced that this was going to be just a really eccentric startup interview. I wasn''t planning on leaving my current job, but I was intrigued enough to play along and set up this in-person meeting without having much details. I took out my smartphone and glanced at the email thread again.


    <blockquote>


    To: ***@google.com


    From: ***@gmail.com


    Title: Opportunity to help move the world in a better direction


    Hi MC,


    My name is Dan and I would really love to meet you to discuss an opportunity that you will find fascinating. This is not a job offer and the amount of time and efforts you want to put into this is entirely up to you. I''ve gone through all your socials, CV and want to pursue this discussion in person since I cannot give more details than this in writing. I know you don''t have much of a social media profile and your LinkedIn profile is quite stale too, so clearly you aren''t looking for a change, but as I mentioned this isn''t a job offer and we aren''t exclusively interested in your technical coding skills. We just want to check if there''s an alignment on our thought process and we can take it further from there. Let''s meet up at a time and place of your choosing to discuss more about this.


    Thanks,


    Dan


    </blockquote>


    Note: I''ve censored out the email addresses and changed the language of the email and the name since I was requested to not mention anything verbatim. I''m also not comfortable revealing my identity to everybody on the internet. I''ve also replaced my name with MC (Main Character) in accordance with the jargon I''ve picked up from here. Calling myself MC repeatedly is no easy task thanks to my Hindi roots.


    I had received this email on Friday while I was in office, and I was intrigued enough to reply politely and set up a meeting for Saturday evening. Dan was kind enough to accept it immediately with a short positive acknowledgement expressing his gratitude for the quick response. I was also mildly surprised that the company filters hadn''t classified this email as spam.


    Dan arrived a couple of minutes before the scheduled time in a grey SUV. In hindsight, I should probably have taken a better note of the car make and model, maybe even clicked a picture of the license plate. I think it was a Chevy, but it might have been a Kia too. I''m not well-versed with cars and had just noticed this car slowing down and the driver was scanning the crowd before he sped up and parked the car.


    Coincidentally, Dan was wearing a red hoodie of a different shade too and stepped out of his car and immediately started walking towards me with a light smile. He seemed older than me, maybe in his 40s, but I may be off since I''m bad at guessing ages. Dan seemed to be unaccompanied by anybody and that relieved a little tension in me. I still took a deep breath and prepared myself for an awkward social interaction.


    "Hi, you must be MC. I''m Dan, and thank you so much for meeting me."


    Surprisingly, Dan wasn''t bubbling with that extrovert energy one would expect from a recruiting agent. The fact that even he felt a little awkward seemed to put my mind more at ease.


    "Hi Dan, nice to meet you too, sorry for picking out this time and place, hope it''s all right." I managed weakly.


    "Not at all, it''s actually a pretty smart choice to meet somebody whom you''ve only interacted with over an email."


    There was an awkward pause after this. I liked his self-awareness but didn''t have anything to comment and just smiled a little. Dan was also just studying me and seemed unsure where to start.


    "MC, I represent an unnamed and unofficial organization and this is my first time conducting this sort of recruiting interview for them."


    I felt a little more at ease having my suspicions almost confirmed. This was all just a fancy startup interview.


    "I''ve been with them for the past 10 years," Dan continued, "and it has been quite an interesting experience for me, but I don''t really remember the details when I was being interviewed by them".


    I frowned a little, 10 years was a little too old for a startup.


    "Let me ask you something, MC. Do you know any conspiracy theories? Did you catch the news on the UFOs in New Jersey last night?"

 5th January, 2025 - Not a startup

    "Let me ask you something, MC. Do you know any conspiracy theories? Did you catch the news on the UFOs in New Jersey last night?"


    "Umm, yeah", I replied, deliberately ignoring the first question, "I don''t remember anything from last night but I do remember reading about it a few days back".


    Dan frowned a little, having either missed how taken aback I was with the question or choosing to overlook it.


    "Yes, there were a few sightings around that time, but there was a pretty major one last night too."


    "I didn''t follow too closely, I guess they were just drones or normal small aeroplanes." I added cautiously.


    "Yes, yes, of course."


    Dan was silent for a while formulating how he was going to elaborate.


    "I was responsible for the one last night. Responsible not in a way that I was piloting it, but rather I arranged for it be viewed as an UFO. Imagine leading a project where the objective is to create a news item on a UFO."


    I had no clue where this was going, but I decided to bite.


    "Why did you do that?"


    Dan was silent again for a while. I was ready to believe that this was his first time having such a conversation based on how slow he was responding.


    "Think of it as a cover up of a cover up of a cover up and turtles all the way down. I can only guess what the cover ups were about for the first few iterations. I don''t know the full picture but my objective was clear: facilitate a UFO sighting."


    "I''m not sure I follow. You created a UFO hoax and you don''t know why?"


    "My guess is as good as yours. Actually, mine might be better since I''ve been in this for over a decade. I believe it was a follow-up to the UFO sightings you did hear about a week before, maybe just to show that they are still going on and that it wasn''t just a temporary thing. The original sightings might have been covering up some other event that they wanted off the news cycle."


    This was starting to make a little sense. I did see a meme about how the sudden spike in UFO sightings was just misinformation to distract the public from a polarizing assassination. I''m a little ashamed to admit but I get most of the world news through memes. Dan was encouraged a little seeing my facial expressions become a little less clouded.


    "So you make up fake UFO news for the government?" I enquired.


    "No, not just UFO news, and no, I''m not affiliated with the government. Sometimes work I do may appear to benefit the government, but I''m not on their payroll."


    "You don''t get paid? So it''s a hobby?"


    "Not exactly. Yes, we don''t get paid, it''s more like volunteer work, but there are funds and resources we can use if we have the justification. Actually, you are kind of right, I had been treating this as a hobby until recently, but I''m getting more involved now."


    Dan had switched to using the "we" pronoun. This was probably a tactic to get me more involved that I was since I was getting a bit distant from this crazy conversation.


    "What changed? Why are you more involved now?" I asked.


    Dan took a step back and tilted his head.


    "I don''t know, didn''t have time to do more. I still have my regular job and life, and I kind of struggled balancing it all for the first several years. This work became more like a hobby that I would sometimes get into and then forget all about. Things are quite ambiguous and I guess I didn''t grow into it fast enough. I''m a bit more settled in life now, so can devote more effort into this."


    "But you don''t get paid?"


    "No, there''s no regular salary or bonus or anything. Yesterday''s UFO thingy that I mentioned, it took me like $1000 to arrange that, and I made no profit as such. You really want to be frugal here to get noticed."


    I have no clue what the market for UFO hoaxes looks like and whether Dan got it done at a good price.


    "How did you do it? You''ve returned just now from East Coast?"


    "I haven''t been to New Jersey in months, I organized it all remotely, not gonna share details, but just imagine some lights, balloons, wires and a high speed drone. If you''ve seen The Dark Knight, you''ll have a decent sense of how it went. A couple of friends helped me set it up." Dan explained with excitement. "See that''s the important thing, it can''t get traced back to you, else they''ll put you on ice for a long time. I did some reckless stuff at the start of COVID and got a little too much in the spotlight so they told me to lay low and I didn''t hear from them until almost a year back."


    There was that pronoun again.


    "Who''s ''they''?"


    "I don''t have a name for them, so I just use ''they''. It''s better than the names some of the other folks use like Illuminati, NWO, CIA. The guy who got me into it never used any names, so I thought I''ll continue with the tradition. Trust me, I''ve tried to give them a name and find out more but that just got me going around in a spiral. The best way to learn about them is to actually just do as you are told."Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.


    This was starting to feel like an obscure pyramid scheme to me.


    "The guy who got you into this? You knew him? He told you to do the UFO thingy?"


    Dan''s expressions darkened.


    "No, the guy who recruited me died a couple of years back of a heart attack. We worked together at Cisco. He was a manager of a sister team, so not exactly together. I got an email from somebody who knew him and when I met this guy, he told me about getting this done and then get into recruiting. It had been a while since they reached out to me. I thought I would never get to work with them again, so I was a bit too eager to get everything done quickly. I emailed the few profiles he shared while working on the Jersey UFO in parallel."


    So there were multiple profiles and I was indeed being recruited into something that didn''t look anything like a startup.


    "What exactly did my profile say?"


    "You''ll definitely be surprised to read it, but I''m not going to share it with you. I know you were once into writing fiction and I think I have a way you can leverage that skill."


    I was not very surprised by Dan knowing I wrote fiction. I had posted a couple of stories on Facebook back when I was in college. What surprised me more was that somebody was willing to scroll through my profile to find them.


    "Why me?"


    "You should allow yourself to feel a little flattered, but not a lot. You aren''t very special or unique, an Asian immigrant working in a Big Tech company in the Bay Area is practically a stereotype, but that''s actually a good thing since you won''t attract a lot of attention, yet are curious and capable enough to get things done. Most importantly, they feel you have potential and that''s why they gave me your name. This is my first time doing recruiting so I don''t know what their criterion is, but I do know they plan to expand quite rapidly in the recruiting department."


    "Department?"


    "Yeah, think of it like any organization, except you aren''t constrained to just work in one department. There''s not even a formal name or anything, you are just given work and I internally classify it into ''departments''. There''s recruiting, ops, R&D, troubleshooting. There''s probably even finance and strategy, but I''ve never met anybody who''s done anything in those areas. There''s definitely no marketing. Most of my work has been in R&D and ops, but I''ve been asked to focus more on recruiting now."


    "But you don''t get paid?" I asked again.


    "Yes, no regular salary," Dan shrugged, "but the more I''ve worked with them the more I''ve realized that money doesn''t really matter to me. I feel they believe that just knowing more about the world and helping is payment enough. Besides, the work is quite good and fulfilling, it''s even helped me develop skills that I use now as a Product Manager at Meta. You are young and at an age where you can really plateau in terms of your career, so this might be a good chance to let things not get stagnant."


    I was still unsure what I was being asked to do and how it would help me, or if it would even be worth my time.


    "I''m not sure. I won''t get into any trouble for this, right?"


    Dan didn''t respond right away and seemed to be choosing the right words carefully.


    "I, personally, have never been asked to do anything illegal or anything that I''m not comfortable with. They''ve never even leveraged that I work at Meta or asked for any data or insider information. That being said, I know of people working on stuff that seems to be in a legal gray area. My Jersey UFO project is a good example. There are some laws around drones and such in certain areas and how high they can go altitude wise. I''m no expert, and that''s why I took precautions to ensure that it doesn''t get traced back to me if somebody was willing to investigate it. A fair bit of warning, somebody always does end up diving deep into such things. That''s the reason why I was ''kind of'' discovered earlier during COVID. You need to be smart and you don''t get a lot of chances if you mess things up. I think I kind of got lucky here since they wanna expand so badly, so I was given another shot."


    I still must have seemed unconvinced because Dan continued.


    "How about we do this? I''ll just let you know what your next steps are, and if you don''t feel comfortable, you don''t have to do it, you don''t even have to meet me again. No harm done."


    It wasn''t a bad offer and I was definitely curious to know more. I agreed with Dan, no harm in just listening.


    "Fine. Tell me, what do I have to do?"


    "Remember how I told you that your profile mentioned that you are into writing and all? I want you to start writing about this and start putting it out there on the internet. Don''t share any details you are uncomfortable with, but just try to get as many eyes on it."


    What secret organization puts stuff up on the internet?


    "Why?"


    "It''s something we are doing to expand out recruitment pool. You need to write about your experience and upload it on to a popular platform called Royal Road."


    This was the first time I had heard about Royal Road.


    "Why only that platform?" I asked.


    "We are doing some A/B experimentation, figuring out what works best. You are actually quite lucky you get to work with Royal Road, some poor girl has to maintain a public Google Doc and then share about it after a month on Reddit. I''m pretty sure you''ll fare better than her."


    Wait a minute. Was this all just a stupid plot to get me to use this website?


    "You work for this Royal Road?" I accused.


    "What? No." Dan denied after being confused. "I told you, I work at Meta, you can see my LinkedIn to confirm. Royal Road is just some nerdy platform that I myself don''t use. I have no stake in it, it''s just something I was requested to pass along should you be interested. We don''t work for this platform. I''m pretty sure we don''t go to all this trouble to drive traffic to a website. See, I can''t really convince you, because I can''t fully trust you either. However, the more work you put into this, the more I and everybody else can be sure about you, making it easier for us to share more things. Do you understand how this works now?"


    In hindsight, Dan didn''t look like somebody who''d be invested in Royal Road. He wasn''t even nerdy enough to watch DanDaDan and term UFOs as UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena).


    "So you just want me to do this writing assignment and write about this encounter on Royal Road?"


    "Yes, don''t stop at just this meeting, you can continue writing about your experience working with them. Keep in mind, don''t use my real name or even yours and use your judgement when sharing things."


    "What things? You haven''t really told me anything concrete other than your claim to have created a fake UFO."


    I might have seemed a little impatient and angry which made Dan back off a little. I should probably have used The Five Whys technique to figure things out calmly instead of just focusing on what was asked of me.


    "You are the creative writing expert, you figure out how you want to spin it. Things are going to be open-ended and ambiguous here. You get this done quickly enough and well enough and I''ll forward you the invite for the session."


    "What session?" I asked.


    "An orientation."

 6th January, 2025 - A literal crash course

    "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."

 7th January, 2025 - Help me with my homework

    "The fifth form of guidance is where we come in." Pablo claimed with triumph. "This fifth form is arguably the strongest. After all, how can anybody question or resist something if they aren''t even aware of it? While I don''t have a particular name for it, some of my colleagues call it the ''Invisible Influence''. It is something we all use and are subjected to in our daily lives and it leverages everything I already mentioned: religion, laws, economics, even evolution. Create interesting combinations of them while making sure that this force remains unseen and you can get almost anything done."


    This was starting to feel like a cult. I''ve heard of several versions of such tales: the unseen blade is the deadliest, the hand in the shadow that controls everything, a handful of individuals running all global companies. Pablo was just saying the same things and at a very high level. I despise grandiose and vague ideas and appreciate the details more. Details like ''what plane crash was Josie talking about?''


    "There are a few things we need to understand about this Invisible Influence. Firstly, it''s very complex and the complexity is only increasing with time. The complexity shows more correlation with the rise in individual capability than population growth. A thousand years ago, there was a limit to how many people an average person could reach out and influence. If you were a king or queen, then maybe you built enough influence over the course of your life to impact a decent number of people around you. Today, anybody can achieve overnight fame, launch a crypto currency and scam millions. Each of us is now a lot more capable of inciting tremendous change than we were a few years back. How can anybody or anything predict what will happen in such a complex system or hope to guide it in a direction? Understanding this complexity is what your first homework is about."


    Homework?


    "Secondly, and this is somewhat related to the first point: influence does not override free will. You can apply as much force as you want, but at an individual level, a person can react in countless different and often unpredictable ways. The same force applied to different individuals can result in very different reactions from them. There is a silver lining though because as an individual one is unpredictable, but as a society or a group, things tend to follow certain patterns, like that law of large numbers. Some of you may remember learning about Gas laws in Science. A single gas molecule behaves randomly, but a gas in a large container strictly follows certain laws linked to pressure and temperature."


    I assumed Pablo was probably quite old. Old people loved linking things to completely unrelated high-school science concepts. Instead of focusing on the preachy class, I was just thinking about two things: the homework and the plane crash.


    "The third point is that Invisible Influence is hierarchical in nature," Pablo continued, "You lie to your child, your boss lies to you, the government lies to your boss, somebody else lies to the government, and so on. As we go up the hierarchy, the deception becomes a lot more, well, deceptive. The shock-value of these lies increases the higher we go up this chain. Also, different hierarchies may interact with each other in complex ways, like one government vs the other, the police department of one state vs the other, FBI, CIA, Secret Service, they are all influencing each other. If their objectives differ, then usually one triumphs over the other and it''s not always easy to see which one is the winner and which is the loser.


    Lastly, there is no ultimate authority in this hierarchy. By definition, there can''t be an ultimate source of Invisible Influence, because that self-assuming champion might be getting influenced from somewhere else. His puppet master might even be somebody below him in his perceived hierarchy. We, the perpetual middle-men in this complex system, can just hope to trust that the one pulling our strings is pulling them in a better direction."


    The lecture kept on meandering like this around how potent yet mysterious this Invisible Influence is. Pablo mentioned that at some point in the past a group of highly self-aware individuals came together and decided to make use of this phenomenon and their model evolved over time. Fortunately, their goals weren''t for any short-term selfish gain, but aimed at long-term sustainability and progress of mankind. This is why they captured the imagination of the best of humanity and their ideology continues to be relevant today.


    It was a late Monday night and I was at my limit listening to Pablo talk about vague secret societies and how they sometimes branch out, rival factions arise with different objectives and execution methods. He claimed it''s impossible to give an accurate account of the exact history of it all (no surprises there from this personification of the vague), and how some claim that this has been going on since the time of ancient Egypt, while some believe that it''s a lot more recent with the founders coming together during the Dark Ages. He personally leaned on the theory that this started after the burning of the Library of Alexandria to prevent mankind from backtracking.


    By the time Pablo started talking about how modern times called for expansion of this ideology and getting more people onboard to help with the growing demand for legwork and innovation, I had already switched to a new tab on my browser. I typed ''San Gabriel plane crash'' on Google and sure enough I got some news hits right away. There were even YouTube videos, but I clicked on the articles since I couldn''t listen to both Pablo and the news video in parallel. A small Cessna plane did indeed crash into a house''s backyard somewhere in Los Angeles, but fortunately nobody was even injured. I read about the news on a few different websites and they all said the same thing and none of them mentioned any dog-walker or have any witness statement from Josie. I couldn''t read on some websites because the article was behind a paywall, so if you subscribe to those sites, let me know in the comments if there''s anything I missed.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    I was somewhat relieved after reading the news because I originally thought that the plane crash was about a bigger commercial aircraft, but the news made it seem much more harmless. The only alarming point was that the crash site was in California, the same state as where I''m currently living. Was this a state-wide orientation session?


    "Some of you may not have been able to follow me through all this. I know it''s hard to understand concepts without concrete details, but ambiguity is something that you really need to embrace if you want to thrive here. Now, for the homework that you need to do for the next class."


    I closed all other tabs and re-focused on what Pablo was saying. I glanced at the clock, it was 9:58pm.


    "For those who had me as their first session, this would be the first test you will be taking. How it works is that each session ends with a test and if you pass it, you get the invite for the next session. I can see that there are five of you in this cohort so far. At most three of you will pass this homework assignment. The ones who don''t will probably never hear from us again so take this seriously if you want to continue."


    I didn''t realize there were going to be eliminations, especially with 40% chances of failure. It wasn''t like we were all fighting for a high-paying job. That being said, I was still willing to do my best and try to pass the test as long as it wasn''t something unreasonable like ''who can share the maximum digits of their credit card number''. I just hoped it had nothing to do with more suspicious aviation activities like UFOs and plane crashes.


    "You have to make a comment on a YouTube video. The aim is to get the maximum number of likes."


    Huh? Is this a click farm?


    "The content of the comment can be anything, any language, emojis and you can choose any YouTube video but it shouldn''t a Short. You can make at most 3 new comments, starting 50 hours from now and then upload a screenshot of just one of them within the next 100 hours. You can''t use a past popular comment you made, and your submission shouldn''t be a reply to an existing comment. Once we have all your submissions, we''ll evaluate them and the two people with the least amount of likes will be informed that they didn''t make it while the rest will be mailed the invite to the next session."


    The meeting ended abruptly and I was kicked out of the virtual meeting room. The time was exactly 10:00pm.


    <hr>


    As you can probably tell, it takes me a while to write down these chapters. As of now, it''s been more than 50 hours since the orientation session ended and I''m allowed to make a comment now. I spent some time during the day researching what to do and looking at the most liked comments on YouTube. The majority of them seem to be either pinned on the videos, or were from the creator thanking their viewers or some other popular celebrity. My comment won''t belong to any of these categories so I don''t think it will make it to the hall of fame.


    However, I don''t need to get a million likes, I just need more likes than my competition. I''ve never made a popular comment on a YouTube video before, I''ve read some of the funny ones but I never counted how many likes they have. I also don''t know what''s up with the YouTube algorithm for sorting comments. The most liked ones tend to appear near the top, but they aren''t strictly sorted by the number of likes. It would suck if my comment is gaining traction and then gets randomly shown below other comments.


    With regards to opponent research, there''s not much I can do. All I know is that one of them has a name which sounds South Indian, while the other is Josie, who is likely from Los Angeles. None of this tells me what sort of range of likes I can expect from their comments or how to beat them. Hopefully, none of them is a YouTuber or celebrity.


    I also have a doubt whether I am allowed to modify my comment after making it. Some people add a "thanks for the likes" to their comment. Is that a good strategy to get more likes or will it backfire because I find it super irritating and so might others?


    I like this test. I guess it is about understanding the complexities of the general YouTube audience to maximize the impact of your comment. I wasn''t sure if there was a way to directly apply the Invisible Influence that Pablo worships and ace this test. I wasn''t sure about the invisibility aspect of it, since people seem to have pretty blatant comments to maximize likes. "Like this and your parents will be happy", "1 like = 1 <rose emoji>". There is nothing invisible about their desperation for the meaningless social currency of likes and replies. How strange that this meaningless number is actually so important to me right now.


    I just remembered something else that Dan told me about how it would be helpful if my content here gains readership. Had I been popular here by now, I would have linked my comment here and requested you all to give it a like. Given that I''m barely getting double-digit views on my chapters, I don''t think it will make much difference as of now. However, I can still ask for your help by voting on what sort of comment I should make and helping me narrow the possibilities. I would be extra grateful if you can add a comment and suggest some alternate strategies.


    So far I have these strategies:


    1. Comment "Who''s listening in 2025?" on some slightly old but popular Bollywood song, which already doesn''t have this comment.


    2. A witty comment on a trending gaming-related video (Welcome to Noxux - League of Legends).


    3. A highly positive comment on a new trailer (REACHER Season 3).


    4. Early funny comment on a popular YouTuber, based on who uploads first and what the video is about.


    5. Early highly positive comment on a newly uploaded song.