TRIAL 02

[thecomputer]

Attention, Citizens! You have ten minutes to proceed to the Loyalty Chamber. Anyone who is late to the Loyalty Chamber, or who brings any weapons into the Loyalty Chamber, will be immediately executed.

[Once you arrive, you will find a large chamber, with twenty podiums spaced around the room in a circle. On the ceiling, a massive screen showing the digital eye of The Computer, turning to look at whoever is talking.]

You have one hour to come to a consensus about who to eliminate. Ties will be broken randomly.

[The floor of the chamber begins to split apart, eventually only leaving the twenty podiums as safe places to stand, above a seemingly bottomless abyss. Each podium lights up with a touch screen showing twenty user IDs (the dead are grayed out), plus the word “ABSTAIN”. However, ABSTAIN has now been grayed out as well. The trial begins now!]

[[Vote here.]]

Comments

[alchemicals]

And maybe some people react to things like human beings. You put people in a situation like this, they're going to huddle like animals in the back of a slaughterhouse.

I have no idea why you seem so annoyed at this, Princess.

[harshwords]

... I find it ridiculous, in retrospect. If people are going to trust each other so easily, then they might as well find themselves dead. That's how the world works, after all. People are going to deceive each other whether they like it or not.

And as for my annoyance on this topic, it has to do with personal experience.

[alchemicals]

Oh, don't get me wrong, it's ridiculous as hell. Everyone's coming at this game from the wrong direction; if we all accept that we're all going to die here, we'd get a lot further. No restraint means we'll actually get somewhere just because there'd be less paranoia running rampant. Look at what happened now that Moge-ko is gone - we're actually talking like civilized people. Sometimes people have to take one for the group, and trying to dance around the idea of whether we can trust each other or not is going to fuck us over.

Because of fucking course we can't. The most we can do is get rid of the problems and hope we don't all end up in hell.

[harshwords]

That's like saying that the true nature of the game is get all of us paranoid. I'd like to hope that Yomiel-san's telling the truth for all of our sakes.

[alchemicals]

If you can come up with a better reason for all this structure, I'd love to hear it.

[harshwords]

I'll keep that in mind for the future. If we manage to get a Communist off the list today, we might be able to investigate the other rooms.

[alchemicals]

...well, I meant the setup of the game in general, but there's that too.

[harshwords]

Well, think about it this way: in the worst case scenario, everyone can die and there would be no winner. A stalemate. That would happen because nobody bothered to trust each other, and everyone was crazy trying to figure out who was a Communist and who wasn't.

I'm not really sure as to why the game was set-up this way, though Communism was rather common in the 20th Century. There's obviously a reason for it, since it seems to have occurred over 20 times, but those actual answers are unclear at this time. Plus, they're not really important for the matter at hand, anyway.