At the launch event, Glutinous Rice Ball's progress bar showed that it had finished gathering information. It then turned off all the monitors in the desktop's control area.
The progress updates continued.
"Organizing the chain of evidence."
"Generating report."
"Creating presentation."
Glutinous Rice Ball first opened the word processor.
A title appeared in the center of the page.
"Prosperity Group's Agent Business Strategy and Product Launch Forecast"
Then text began appearing, paragraph after paragraph.
First came an executive summary, followed by investment estimates, team changes, product line adjustments, investments and acquisitions, and predictions for the launch event.
Glutinous Rice Ball had not simply dumped in all the dozens of sources it had just collected.
Much of the duplicate information had been consolidated. Content relayed by the media was labeled separately, and data that could not be cross-verified had yellow risk indicators beside it. Wherever amounts or dates appeared, there was a tiny number in the upper-right corner.
Clicking a number took the user to the corresponding financial report, tender notice, or original transcript of management's remarks.
The financial reporter in the audience stared fixedly at the screen.
This went well beyond looking things up.
It could produce a finished draft outright, complete with citations.
This was the internet age, and research methods were very different from those of decades past. Back then, researching meant going to a library to hunt down books, reference materials, and old newspapers.
Now people did just one thing: search online. But the information they found was a mixed bag, and they had no idea what was true. Often, news articles cited one another, and only after tracing them all the way back to the source did you discover that the supposed "insider revelation" was a screenshot of a single remark in a five-hundred-member group chat,