For those not already in the know, I managed to pass that tricky test and get the second highest number of likes, or so I thought until I joined the next session.

  The email which congratulated me on passing the test had two cryptic things about it which I didn't really pay much heed to when I read it. First, it gave the virtual meet link and said the next session would start at 9:25pm. The first session that I attended had started at 9:30pm on a Monday, this next one was starting five minutes in advance.

  The second and more cryptic point was the language used. The mail said that I have passed the test and that of all the people who passed, I had the second highest number of likes at the time of the submission deadline. I didn't think much of the added qualifier in that sentence, the one that specifies "of all the people who passed". Since they had said those with the highest number of likes will pass, it was obvious that I was the second highest whether you include those who got eliminated or not.

  I was pretty wrong.

  I joined the meeting a bit before time and was only let in when it was 9:25pm. There were three other participants, presumably we all were allowed to join the meet at the same time. The microphones and cameras were centrally disabled and the speaker for this session was using the username 'CoderBoi'.

  The other two participants were Josie and R. I was somewhat relieved to see Josie there, but a bit disappointed to see that the person whose name sounded South Indian wasn't there. Actually, since I don't know their identities they could easily have been somebody else who just changed their usernames, though that seems highly unlikely and pointless.

  Since the last chapter, things have worsened in the Los Angeles wildfires so I was glad to see that Josie could make it. Clearly, she was well enough to be in a position where she could join this weird unpaid video call. My super loyal reader also commented that I wasn't being paranoid about linking the plane crash to the fires and there might be a larger conspiracy afoot. That conspiracy looks like a pretty minor one compared to the ones I've encountered these past few days in my office and on some 'online communities' (too ashamed to call them meme platforms). There have been mentions of arsonists spreading the fire, unbelievable fire patterns bypassing vegetation to burn houses, even insurance companies being blamed that they spread the fire to avoid paying out insurance claims by making it a larger issue requiring government involvement. There have been parallels drawn to the fires in Hawaii and how this was all planned to clear land for larger housing projects and greedy companies, or it was done by environmentalists to showcase the urgent need for reforms to combat global warming. The conspiracy rabbit hole is endless.

  I don't subscribe to any of these views above, nor do I want to give this unfortunate event a political twist, because I have never voted and more importantly I have no idea how the government functions. The whole thing combined with my recent interactions with these people has just served as a reminder to me how easy it is to distort things with misinformation and how Pablo's Invisible Influence is already pushing people to commit to narratives that they find appealing instead of everybody attempting to unearth and agree upon a common truth.

  Since CoderBoi had muted us all, I couldn't get a first-hand account from Josie and even if I was unmuted, I don't think I would have gotten a chance since CoderBoi began speaking almost immediately after we all joined the meet.

  "Hey Guys! Great work on the assignment, just wanted to discuss the results very quickly."

  CoderBoi had an unmistakable Indian accent, or at least a South Asian one since I'm not skilled enough to pinpoint beyond that.

  "You all did quite well, let me just share your scores. I'll call you by your handle for this meet and respect your privacy for now. R got 34k likes, MC got 11k and Josie had just 838 likes. I'm not going to reveal your comments or anything, if you want you can discuss among yourself later on. What I wanted to share was that L scored 72 votes and Anant got 131k likes. How did Anant manage to get that many likes? Is he a celebrity? No, he just hired a click farm in Bangladesh to go and like his comment and paid them. Whatever you all think you learned from this assignment, you can forget that and just remember this one crucial thing: you need to understand the assignment. That is the most important part. Next comes discretion, the task needs to be executed without involving a large number of people. It's okay to brainstorm or discuss with people, but try to minimize the number of people who are complicit and involved in the actual execution. Lastly, there's frugality. We have a very ambitious mission and very limited resources, so don't waste them. In summary, if you end up paying 1.5 lakh ($1700) and involving a hundreds of people whom you don't know to do something which rouses their suspicion, then you have failed the test because you are the opposite of what we are looking for."

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  Whoa! People were willing to spend their own money for an opportunity that doesn't even pay? Somehow even the thought had never entered my mind that I could cheat or get the likes through some nefarious moves like this.

  "Good talk. Class is about to begin see you all there, here's the link."

  CoderBoi shared the link of the class in the chat. It was a different meeting than the one we were currently on. The time was exactly 9:30pm when I clicked the link to join that meet where again all participants except CoderBoi were muted.

  "Welcome everybody to the orientation class. I used to usually take the final class of the orientation series back in the day, but a new rolling format is being tried right now so this is the first class from some of you, so welcome and hope you have fun in today's class about our org's capabilities and how to thrive in such an environment."

  The speaker sounded a lot younger than Pablo. His chosen username was also a dead giveaway of his maturity level.

  "Let's start with capabilities, right? Now, I can explain all about quantum computing, qbits and Shor's algorithm, but it'll go over your head, so let me just demonstrate instead? There are 6 of you here right now."

  After our assignment discussion, three new people had joined the call too with alphabetic usernames: A, P, X.

  "So there is X, R, the odd woman out: Josie, A, MC and P. Interestingly, most of you have chosen not to reveal your names so we'll keep it like that. Hope all of you are ready for a magic trick?" CoderBoi asked excitedly to the muted audience.

  "Now, 5 of you are on your web browsers and one of you is on an app. Hold your applause, that's not the magic trick."

  I was a slightly impressed though. I wasn't aware Google Meet had a feature where you could see the participant's device or maybe there was some other way to determine it.

  "Now, I want you all to open a new tab on your browser and navigate to any website you want. For the one on the phone, you can instead open some new App on your phone. Once you've done that, navigate back to this meeting."

  It was a strange ask, but I did as I was told. I was tempted to open Google's page by default, but thought that would be too typical, so I navigated to Royal Road instead.

  There was a short pause, and then CoderBoi began blurting out very quickly.

  "Let's go. Josie on the app opened her Insta, nice pic! X navigated to Wikipedia and they haven't donated yet. What the hell is RoyalRoad.com? Whatever it is, MC's tab has that site open. Mr. P has..."

  CoderBoi didn't finish his sentence. There was another awkward pause and then I got kicked out of the meeting.

  What just happened?

  What CoderBoi just did was not possible. Different tabs of a browser cannot communicate with each other like that. There's no way for anybody to know what website you opened if you aren't sharing your screen. I still don't know how he did it, but even in hindsight all I can think of is some vague ideas related to reading cookies or having access to our ISP's (Internet Service Provider) logs.

  I was so shocked at how CoderBoi guessed the website that it took me a while to realize that I was no longer a part of that meeting. I was confused if that was deliberate and there was some secret test that I had failed or something. Fortunately, I had the link he shared still in my clipboard, so I pasted it again and hoped that I could rejoin the meeting.

  Nothing happened for five long minutes. The screen just showed that it was waiting for the host to let me in. The longer it went on, the more I felt convinced that I had been eliminated, even though I was unsure what I did wrong. Surely, navigating to Royal Road wasn't that big of an offence that they'd fire me. It was literally these guys who introduced me to the platform. It turned out that the explanation was much simpler than that.

  "Welcome back!" CoderBoi announced as soon as I joined the meeting and saw that all initial members were there too, "Sorry for that, I got disconnected due to some technical difficulties. Kind of ironic, since I'm literally the tech guy here, but even I don't have control of electrons and lost power to my machine. All good now, but we'll finish the rest of the magic trick later, though I'm sure most of you are impressed."

  I most certainly was.

  "I know all of you are just dying to know who I am and how I can do all this cool stuff, but before we get into this, let's start with this class's assignment. It's really simple, you just have to kill something."