Decimation

The relic I was hunting down was an ancient one, with sparse records of its use dating as far back as Roman times. Of course, given the mythical origins of all relics, Humanity's first contact with this particular relic might have been even earlier, especially given the nature of this relic.

Its name was Decimation, so named after the ancient Roman punishment. In truth, the Roman practice was only a pale approximation of Decimation's abilities, which is rather chilling to consider. Whereas the practice of decimation was the removal of a tenth of a population, Decimation, when activated against a selected victim, erases the victim from history. And the victim's ancestors. Tenfold, back ten generations.

If observing from a point of view isolated from the time ripples resulting from Decimation's use, as allowed by certain other relics, then Decimation might be considered amongst the deadliest of relics. Entire races and civilizations have been erased from history by the removal of one or more key persons, or their ancestors.

The current owner of this relic was living in an utterly nondescript home in the suburbs, without any of the trappings of grandeur that most owners fall into. I might even have been convinced that he was unaware of the relic's magical nature, but the use of nondetection veils had already suggested otherwise.

Based on my research, he was simply a professor of history at a small university. I suppose he must have come across Decimation during one of his work trips overseas, several of which were apparently partly self-funded; it was possible that he was actively seeking out the relic through his travels in South America and Central Africa.

I waited until the professor had fallen asleep before breaking into his home. I did this with the help of a lesser relic, of course; teleporting in was the stealthiest option, though I lost the ability to make a quick escape. There was no choice. The relic had to be secured at all costs, as any use would be catastrophic.

My calculations proved to be incorrect. I did not manage to retrieve Decimation, as it was locked securely behind the steel walls of a safe. At the same time, the professor would not have been able to use the relic in defence. But he didn't need to; perhaps my overspecialization in fighting other relic owners blinded me.

I heard a distinct click in the darkness of the room. The cocking of a hammer. A human shadow against the cracks for the blinded window.

"I suppose you've come for the relic." the Professor spoke from across the room.

The distance was too far to bridge in an instant. Not all was lost, though; he seemed willing to speak. If I could drag things out, then there might be a moment of distraction sufficient for me to close in. Given the cover of darkness, he might even miss me.

"You don't know the power of what you have, do you?"

"I'm afraid you're incorrect. Regrettably, I do know."

Perhaps it was the silence of the night, or the tension of the situation, but I felt a chill down my spine. It was not possible- he couldn't have.

"D-did you-"

"Yes. But I'm not insane, you know, nor a monster. I just wanted to know whether it was all true. Whether relics indeed exist. But rest assured that I'm not insane; I'm not going to risk deleting myself and Western civilization just to learn something. That's why I'm wielding a gun, not Decimation. "

"But you did use Decimation?"

"Yes. If anything, the greatest difficultly was figuring out a scenario to apply it with minimal consequences to known history. Obviously, I couldn't use it anywhere in the modern world; people are too interconnected and interbred to take such a risk. Sure, I could be fairly confident that I wouldn't be erasing my ancestors, but I wouldn't want to accidentally eliminate, say, the inventor of the internet or some major historical figure. Any changes could easily have cascading aftereffects."

If he had used the weapon, then-

"The problem, then, was to find the least important and most isolated populations of people. Suffice to say that I've tested its effects to my satisfaction. And gladly, nothing has changed, except for a few footnotes here and there."

At this moment, I didn't know whether a good opportunity had presented itself, but I found myself charging forward all the same.

A Room of Killers I

No one else appears to be aware that everyone in the mysteriously sealed mansion was an infamous murderer.

To be absolutely accurate, not everyone was an infamous serial killer of some sort, and not everyone was totally ignorant of the criminal natures of the people in the room. I was the singular exception to both of these.

People have always commented on my problematic interest in crime news of the macabre sort. In hindsight, perhaps they were correct. The cause of these unusual circumstances might have been the result of my unique knowledge and interests. This was certainly not tempered by the fact that I had on several occasions wished to observe the most heinous of criminals up close.

Then again, if I was only an innocent party randomly inserted into this artificial situation, then I can only shudder at the outcome if I lacked my special insights.

The immediate question was, what was the purpose of this scenario? A set of rooms totally closed off from the outside, with sufficient supplies to last everyone for a week at best.

Even without knowing that everyone else is a murderer, someone will eventually come to the conclusion that the solution is to kill. 

Of course, if one was already a murderer, and a serial killer at that, then the thought process would be accelerated many fold.

And if everyone knew that everyone else was a murderer...

Judging from the state of relative calm, nobody has come to a similar conclusion yet. At the very least, nobody has acted suspiciously, or expressed any hints that they knew anyone else's identity.

A single pindrop might change all of this in an instant.

There was only one thought in my mind: How could everyone be killed?

Physical Traces

We found the victim still breathing in the makeshift operating room, her body wrapped in bandages and hooked up to an assortment of life-sustaining apparatus. Whether she was actually alive in a useful sense was something that remained to be ascertained by our medics.

Without any doubt, this was yet another incident of bodyskinning. The culprit was nowhere to be seen, but from the state of the victim, there was still about two or three days before the process was completed. And if the criminal was smart (which for this particular crime they all were), she would only return when the bodyskinning was completed and ready for harvesting.

Two or three days meant that she could really be anywhere in the world, much less this country. Particularly if she was wearing a suit. After all, one of the key advantages granted by a suit was untraceability. Be someone somewhere for a day, and another for the next. That's why catching a criminal is so difficult nowadays- how many people do you need to keep a look out for?

Of course, thanks to this successful raid, we had already learned several facts about the criminal. This was one of the chief benefits of finding a victim still the midst of the bodyskinning process, the small prospect of rescue notwithstanding (most victims were braindead, as sentience was not a requirement for bodyskinning). Our new knowledge about the criminal were obtained not from physical evidence left behind on the scene, nor from circumstantial witness accounts, but from the simple fact that nobody makes a bodysuit for fun.

A bodysuit is made to be used.

With high certainty, the criminal, or at the very least someone involved in the transaction, was female. And thanks to the more identifiable nature of a female body, we also were able to narrow down the range of heights and bust-waist-hip statistics for the criminal.

The Efficiency of Voting Selfishly

Is it more efficient to vote in our own interests or in the interests of the society? Prima facie, this seems to be a useless question with an obvious answer.

I approach the question using the framework of efficiency; that is, the extent to which preferences are satisfied by the allocation of limited resources.

 

It is almost certain that we are much more privy to our own preferences than the preferences of others, much less that of society as a whole. Thus, if the sole metric was to be the maximization of our preferences, it is clearly more desirable for the resources to be allocated with our own hands. After all, nobody ought to know our needs and wants better than ourselves. 

If we acknowledge that our intuitions on our preferences are more accurate, and if we were to consider voting as a means to most accurately determine the preferences of society, then it follows that voting is more accurate if everyone were to vote in their own interests, rather than in their guesstimates of what the common interest is. By adopting the pretense of voting in society's interest, there is a risk of converging on something which is merely a fiction, a perceived preference instead of an actual one.

A Career Advisory Form

I would have imagined that following the instructions of the career analysis computer that the government spent millions developing was the safest, if not the soundest decision of my life. The algorithms might not have suggested the most profitable profession, but were at least guaranteed to propose a career that would provide me with the most satisfaction. 

Unfortunately, I was apprehended almost immediately after committing my first murder.

My defence lawyers very quickly informed me that having "Serial Killer" on the career advisory form was not the same thing as having a license to kill. 

In other words, this was all a mistake.

I guess I should have realized it all along. After I committed the murder, I felt no satisfaction. I had initially attributed this to my swift arrest; since I had only killed a single person, I would not have qualified for the term "Serial", hence I would have not felt any satisfaction. After all, the career form did not say "Single murderer" or "Casual killer". 

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, any person would have realized that "Serial Killer" wasn't a career. But how could I have known for sure? Some careers are notoriously unrewarding, especially in economic terms; perhaps this was merely one of them. If I were to bear any fault, it was that I had too much blind trust in the system.

How was I to know that I was supposed to work at a TV network boardroom, deciding upon the fate of shows and seasons? Nobody would have come to that conclusion! Sheer negligence on the programmer's part.

And that's the line my defence lawyers are taking.

Echo Recorder

Part of my responsibilities as a server admin is to clear out inactive websites on the server. Very often these are personal websites created out of passing impulse, never updated after initial creation, so it was easy to detect and delete them simply by their lack of traffic and updates. Still, the rules were that I had to make a cursory inspection of the site before performing the site delete.

One particular website consisted entirely of a single website, which was itself almost entirely devoid of content. It contained descriptions of an experimental sound recorder that cancelled out the original sounds, and only captured the remaining echoes of the initial sound.

The webpage also described further improvements to the device, by stacking the voice-processing unit onto itself. This allowed the initial echoes themselves to be removed, while preserving the reverberations resulting from the primary echoes.  When paired with a sufficiently sensitive microphone, this stacking could be repeated to capture even more subtle levels of echoes.

There was a bolded disclaimer- that there was something wrong with the implementation of the sound recorder, an untraceable error that had yet to be debugged. There was a link to an audio file that supposedly contained an example of the audio artifact.

Unfortunately, the link was broken, as it led to a now-defunct file-hosting site.

Whatever could "othervoice.wav" have contained?

The Scam of the Mysterious Adventurers

I have long since come to the conclusion that the "rat menace" is actually an elaborate scheme to defraud the town of its money. The warning signs are all there, so clear as day that I wonder why anyone else hasn't caught on yet.

First, these "adventurers" that mysteriously appear out of nowhere, dressed in exactly the same attire, all so coincidentally mute. They'll approach me to be "briefed" on the rat problem, but many simply skip through my introduction as if they've heard it before. I suppose they must have, for immediately, without even doing any prior research, they know where to head in order to hunt rats.

It's almost as if they have some magic arrow that points them in the correct direction.

Then, as quickly as they leave, they'll return with evidence of their successful eradication campaign. Interestingly, the proof is always 50 rat tails, not one more, not one less. Not rat pelts, nor complete carcasses, always rat tails. And once they collect the reward, they'll never appear before me ever again, even though the bounty still remains.

It's clearly a scam, isn't it? For all we know, they could literally be farming rats somewhere right outside of town.

The joke's on them, though. I've managed to convince these adventurers to accept most of their bounty in the form of an entirely imaginary reward. It's not money, or weapons, or any real or physical material. Yet for some reason, they all seem exceptionally delighted to be informed that they have received 'XP'...