Facts and Trouble

The report on the other side of the video call was not yet over, but the audience was clearly starting to lose focus.

An elderly man who had deliberately dyed his hair black and wore a pair of reading glasses held a shorthand notebook in his hand. He nudged the person beside him with his elbow. "What did the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences say?"

The middle-aged man, whose thoughts had been interrupted by the nudge, did not get annoyed. He merely chuckled, looking rather honest and simple-minded.

"We still can't be certain. From the perspective of AI technology, if information overwriting effects theoretically exist, then in a virtual-reality metaverse, it wouldn't be impossible for a virtual character to realize that they were an NPC in a game—"

At that point, the middle-aged man raised a hand to scratch his scalp, and his tone slowed. "But what we're afraid of is—"

"Old Xie, you must have heard as well. That Alien Whatever, Alien Mephilas, negotiated with different people one after another, attempting to directly read the relevant users' brain information. After failing, he went on to use methods resembling hypnosis, guidance, and temptation, offering extraterrestrial resources and technology in exchange for what they knew—"

The middle-aged man could not help clicking his tongue. "Resource asteroids, and a complete theory of matter reconstruction based on Planck Units—"

"If most of those benefits had not belonged to the mission worlds themselves, and if we had not lacked the ability to verify the authenticity of even that level of technology... Moreover, the Main God had explicitly forbidden the disclosure of relevant information to individuals within mission worlds—"

"Ah."

To be fair, that alien was taking this far too seriously, and his attitude was far too ambiguous—

"Yes. He was taking it far too