They are all fake people

Bai Cha said with difficulty: "Sister Mute, you scared me again."

"Ha." Whiskey sneered, "What a weird woman."

Cuihua asked in a deep voice: "When we went to check the stairwell door, what did you see when you were sitting by the pit?"

The mute didn't say anything, so the Memory Master said directly: "Go in and take a look and you'll know."

She led the way toward the meeting room.

They opened all the cabinets, big and small, in the conference room, and soon the sound of Bai Cha retching could be heard.

"vomit--"

A dried corpse was turned out by Bai Cha.

The illusionist squatted down and took a closer look. He found that the mummy was a female. Her clothes were intact. It was as if someone had treated the mummy as a rag doll and dressed her up.

What's strange is that Danjiang City is a coastal city, and the city's climate makes it difficult for mummies to appear.

An incredible thought flashed through the memory master's mind - the clothes were what the mummy had worn when it was alive, and the mummy died because something had instantly sucked away all its vitality.

She was startled by her own strange thoughts. The mute leaned against the door and watched them: "I said, the murderer is hiding in the conference room."

Whiskey yelled: "Did you hide it?"

Everyone knew that it couldn't be hidden by the mute, including Whiskey who asked the question; everyone felt uneasy and couldn't help but believe in the existence of the fake person.

The mute asked tiredly: "So who among you is the one in the group? Tell the truth."

The illusionist did not hesitate: "I am late."

Cuihua, who was comforting Baicha, said: "I am Apple."

Bai Cha looked up at Cuihua in surprise, then took two steps to the side.

Whiskey finally said: "I am David."

The mute pointed at Cuihua and asked Whiskey: "What is her full nickname?"

Whiskey replied gruffly, "Apples! What else?"

"You really are not from the group." The mute's tone was very flat, "Ever since you kept attacking me with mental illness and said there were no normal people in the group, I felt that something was wrong with you."

"Because you don't know, to join the group you need to provide the group owner with a test report from Anding Hospital and promise not to mention anything related to the disease in the group. Apple wants to turn the group into everyone's last safe haven."

"I'm not David, so what?" Whiskey said, both angry and proud. "David is my colleague. It's better for me to take the money than to let that psychopath take it."

Whiskey turned to face the Memory Master, desperate for an ally:

"Hey, you don't have the same idea as her, do you? I just pulled you out of the pit. I'm your savior. If it was David, that weakling, you would have been-"

A sharp blade was inserted into his neck, and the unfinished words were stuck in his throat.

The mute standing behind him loosened the handle of the knife without saying a word and slowly took two steps back.

Whiskey squeezed out of his throat with a few gurgling blood bubbles, and then fell to the ground with a thud.

The illusionist reached out and felt his breath.

Dead.

Bai Cha had long forgotten to scream. He had moved from Cuihua to the side of the illusionist without knowing when, and was now hiding backwards like a quail.

The Memory Master and Cuihua asked at the same time:

"Why kill him?" This was Cuihua's voice.

"Where did the knife come from?" This is the voice of the illusionist.

The mute seemed extremely tired, as if she was marinated in some kind of great fatigue, which then took away her soul.

She placed her hands under her ribs and rested for a while before she could gather some strength to slowly answer the question:

"Killing a fake person where did it come from? Why did you take the knife from the box?"

The mute propped himself up and stood up, and the other three took a step back at the same time.

The illusionist rushed to the box and found only a host manual. She stuffed the manual into Jing Ke's backpack and put the bag on her back.

Cuihua looked at the corpse on the ground with fear: "Compared to him, you who hide a knife and kill people are more like a fake person."

"It's so stuffy. It's going to rain." The mute let out a long sigh.

She tore off her mask and glasses, then bit her bloody gloves and took them off and threw them away.

Bai Cha blurted out: "Zheng Haibin!"

It turns out that the mute is Zheng Haibin, the president of Huanyu.

Zheng Haibin suppressed the sticky fatigue in the corners of her eyes. There was no light in her dark eyes. She forced a smile:

"You are the youngest son of the Bai family, right? I have seen you before."

Bai Cha whispered: "It's not the case anymore."

"The fake man is dead, go open the door." Zheng Haibin took the lead and walked out of the meeting room.

The remaining three people followed her from a distance, watching her walk straight into the deep pit.

"Zheng Haibin!" The illusionist shouted her name almost screaming.

Fatigue and Zheng Haibin fell into the abyss together.

Deathly silence permeated the entire 13th floor, as if this place had really turned into the cursed land in Western mythology.

No one expected that the first person to break the silence was the cowardly Bai Cha. He grabbed the illusionist's hand and ran away like crazy.

The illusionist shouted: "Where are you going——"

She took a mouthful of cool air and no matter how hard she tried she couldn't break free from Bai Cha's hand.

Bai Cha took her around in offices like a headless fly, and finally rushed into one at random.

He closed the door, locked it, and propped the door against it with a cabinet, doing the whole thing in one go.

The Memory Master took off the bag from her shoulder and slumped down in the chair, gasping for breath. She really couldn't run anymore.

Bai Cha took off her glasses and mask and took the initiative to explain: "Sister, listen to me, Whiskey is not a fake person."

He has a delicate appearance, like the sickly childhood sweetheart of the heroine in a girl's comic.

The illusionist took a deep breath and said, "There are no fake people at all."

"No." Bai Cha grabbed the arms of the illusionist with both hands, "The Cuihua outside is the fake person. She is not Apple. The real Apple is the mummy."

"Have you ever seen an apple a day?"

"I have seen her." Bai Cha's eyes sparkled. "I saw her at an event last month. She said she didn't expect me to be so young. She told me to go to the doctor and go to school, and give up those bad thoughts."

Bai Cha was very sad: "She was wearing the clothes of the corpse that day. She seemed to like the clothes very much, so she wore it to seek relief, but she didn't expect to be targeted by a fake person."

The illusionist did not refute him. Without absolute evidence at the moment, she could not make Bai Cha give up the concept of pseudo-human.

She asked Bai Cha: "Can I ask you a question?"

Bai Cha nodded: "Sister, you say."

"Before entering the utility room, what did you talk about with Jing Ke alone?"

Bai Cha was visibly stunned. It took him a while to come back to his senses: "I thought you wanted to ask something else."

"Something else"

"Everything else, such as why Zheng Haibin said I was the youngest son of the Bai family, and why Hei Cha in the group was a female, but I was a male."

The illusionist was confused: "Do these questions matter? You are just you. It doesn't matter what gender you are or whose child you are."

Bai Cha released her arms: "I will go find Jing Ke alone, and tell him that there is one more player according to the part-time job guide. Because I knew Apple would come, but I didn't see her tonight."

“Has Apple ever asked you to do part-time jobs?”

"No." Bai Cha thought for a moment, "I have never been approached. I don't know about others, but Apple always advises everyone to make money and then see a doctor."

The Memory Master opened his backpack. In addition to the laptop, there was a part-time job guide, a host manual, and another piece of paper.

Jing Ke’s part-time job guide is exactly the same as that of the Memory Master, both of which guide players to participate in script-killing tests.

On another piece of paper were two lines of red writing:

[Congratulations! You are the first one to arrive.

Take the backpack and pretend to be the host. You will get a bonus of 100,000 after the task is completed. Open the computer to check the detailed process. 】

In addition to the normal process instructions, the host manual only has one sentence:

[If someone reports to you alone that there is an extra person among the players, then this person is a fake person. Do not let him/her realize that he/she is a fake person. ]

Baicha protests: "I am not a fake person!"

Then he realized: "So Jing Ke is not the host, he is also a part-timer who comes to test the book."

Putting the three pieces of paper together, it is not difficult to infer Jing Ke's movements.

After receiving the part-time job guide and deposit, Jing Ke came to the building as a test player. He was the first to reach the 13th floor and saw the lonely backpack and a piece of paper with red words on the ground.

Unable to resist the temptation of a tenfold bonus, he put on a backpack and pretended to be a host.

The Memory Master said: "After reading the part-time job guide, I thought the host must be someone from the organizer."

“I thought the host was the part-time publisher himself, because the guidelines mentioned many times that we need to cooperate with the host.” Bai Cha agreed.

The illusionist recalled the scene when they first met by the deep pit: "We were all deceived by Jing Ke, but this cannot explain why he treated me as the second host."

Bai Cha sighed: "He acted so well."

The Memory Master shook his head: "Thinking carefully, his behavior is very contradictory."

Bai Cha looked at the Memory Master blankly.

"He knew I was a player who came to test the game, but he deliberately used words to guide me to pretend to be a host, as if he wanted to give me an identity to distinguish me from other players."

"Arrangement," Bai Cha repeated in a daze. "If it were me, no matter how he arranged it, it would be useless. I don't dare to pretend to be the host."

"He tempted me with the host manual, so I followed his words and lied that I was the host. Then he said the manual was locked in a box and could only be unlocked after playing the game."

Bai Cha's eyes were clear and stupid: "Then why did he arrange a host role for you?"

The illusionist was silent for a while, then reluctantly admitted: "I don't know."

"My intuition told me that something was wrong with Jing Ke, but I couldn't analyze his motives, so my reason told my intuition: You think too much."

Bai Cha guessed: "Maybe he wanted to hide his identity. It would be easy for him to be exposed as a fake host, and you are more convincing."

The illusionist didn't think two fake hosts were any better than one, but she really couldn't figure out Jing Ke's purpose.

In fact, compared to Jing Ke’s purpose, the illusionist was more concerned about the two marks on the outer wall of the pit, so she decided to go to the scene to take another look.

"Don't go out, there are fake people outside!" Bai Cha stopped her in panic.

"Fake people don't exist. Cuihua is a human being."

Bai Cha stubbornly stood in front of the door, and the Memory Master patiently explained:

"Look, in Jing Ke's eyes you are a fake person, in your eyes Cuihua is a fake person, in Cuihua's eyes the mute is a fake person, in the mute's eyes Whisky is a fake person, in Whisky's eyes I am a fake person."

"This fully proves that the fake people are fake, and are a concept made up by the mastermind behind the game in order to make us hostile to each other and kill each other."

Bai Cha said seriously: "The fake person is real. The script writer even reminded us that the fake person is Cuihua. Her lines imply that she is a fake person who has completely turned into a human."

"The role books and speaking order are all randomly selected."

Bai Cha shook her head desperately: "It's not a coincidence."

In the short theater, Cuihua’s lines are: A person, no matter whether it is him or her, if he looks like a human, feels like a human, and speaks like a human, then he is a human.

Rule 4 of this weird story: If something looks like an apple, feels like an apple, and tastes like an apple, then it is an apple.

The two sentences have the same meaning, and they can both be explained by Descartes' skepticism.

Descartes' point is that our senses may be manipulated and we cannot be sure whether we are living in an illusion.

We think that apples are apples and we think that people are people, but we cannot prove that apples are apples and people are people.

The crux of skepticism lies in doubting knowledge because the way to obtain knowledge is unreliable.

So the whole question returns to the original origin: Do pseudo-humans really exist?

The fake person must not exist, all the deaths are caused by super-powered murders, and there must be a real culprit behind the whole incident - this is the result preset by the illusionist.

However, at this point, as a detective, she began to waver in her most basic judgment.

The illusionist felt an absurd pain. In her cognition, the fake person = a ghost. It would be better for her to kill herself than to let her admit that the fake person killed someone.

She flipped through the group chat history, going over the entire process of the test again and again, and the circle that Jing Ke had arranged appeared in front of her eyes.

After reading the chat records for the past two weeks, the Memory Master looked up and said to Bai Cha: "According to the small theater, all of us are fake people."