Artifact Report

Chapter 257 Mai Minghe Found You, Jones
Mai Minghe grabbed a pen from the table and spread out three notebooks, an employee list, and several blank A4 papers in front of him.

The toy company employees must have tried the trick of shouting "I found you" everywhere to see if they could trick Jones out.

They had probably tried everything they could think of during their long, desperate, and fruitless search—Mai Minghe even found a short prayer written on a piece of paper.

...Laura, perhaps? She seems to be the only one who believes in religion.

As a result, she disappeared first.

That is to say, if the person looking for Jones is not 100% sure, or even if he does not stare at "Jones" with his eyes and declare that he has found it, "Jones" will not show up.

"...So, the first step in finding you is to tell you how I knew where you were hiding. Only through thinking and analysis, and reaching a single conclusion, will you believe that I have truly found you, and not been deceiving you."

Mai Minghe listened to her voice fade and disappear in the silence. Knowing no one would answer her, she still added, "Right?"

She opened the first notebook and said, "Let's get started. I want to start with the trap you set."

There was dead silence in the conference room. Outside the door, a child's doll was tilting its head, staring blankly into the conference room.

"Your hiding place is beyond imagination and extremely difficult to find, but you still left a misleading 'red herring', hoping to trap the thinking of those who come after you, but you have failed again and again.

"The trap is that 'Jones' is hiding among the last six."

The reason that initially caused her to misunderstand was a very simple one.

The first notebook reads:

2. There are six participants in the weekly meeting.

We printed out photos of all the employees and put them up on the wall. We marked any missing ones with a red cross.

Since no one could remember what Jones looked like, they had to use the process of elimination.

However, when Mai Minghe turned around, he found that fifteen photos on the wall were marked with red crosses.

"There were twenty employees in total, and fifteen were missing, leaving only six people for the weekly meeting? Considering Jones's ability to alter people's perceptions, and the fact that they couldn't tell she wasn't a colleague even face to face, it's very likely that one of the last six was Jones—that's a very reasonable assumption, isn't it?
"What's more, the last group of employees turned the third floor upside down and couldn't find Jones anywhere. This seems to further prove that Jones had infiltrated their ranks."

Mai Minghe sighed.

"To be honest, at first I was wondering who Jones was among the six... I even tried to eliminate them based on the contents of the notebook."

However, when she was looking at Eugene's notebook, she suddenly realized that when the later ones only saw the handwriting on the paper, they could not tell how long the interval was between the previous word and the next word.

...Isn’t the red cross drawn on the photo the same?

"Where is the evidence to suggest those fifteen red crosses were drawn at once? Considering Laura's subsequent disappearance, the most likely scenario is this: there were only fourteen photos originally marked with red crosses. Only after Laura disappeared did someone put a red cross on her photo as well.

"In other words, Jones's hiding place isn't actually among the final six. If you keep spending time analyzing who Jones is, you'll fall into a trap and get further away from the truth."

She thought for a moment and tapped her fingers on Osho's notebook.

"The theory that 'Jones was one of the six' is a bit like a conspiracy theory. It only requires a small initial fact - such as the number of uncrossed photos not matching the number of people remaining - and once you accept that small fact, you will automatically find a lot of 'supporting evidence' to complete the narrative."

For example, Osho clearly worried about the office being haunted in his notebook, but when night fell and Laura disappeared, he refused to admit the existence of supernatural powers in the world - don't they seem like two different people?

But in fact, when people face incomprehensible and indescribable fear and confusion, as despair intensifies, they may develop a denial mentality: the deeper the despair, the more they want to close their eyes and not see.

Or in other words, was there really such a person as Laura?
"So, situations like this, which can have multiple explanations, can't be considered irrefutable evidence, and shouldn't even be considered too much to avoid being misled. I've currently found two truly solid pieces of evidence."

First, the remaining six employees actually had a certain degree of ambiguity in their understanding of the identity of "colleagues".

It wasn't just the ambiguity about "Jones"—the remaining six people, looking at each other face to face during their final weekly meeting, still couldn't be sure that the other person was their colleague.

"This was clearly written on the whiteboard, but somehow, as I looked at the notes in my notebook, it gradually receded and retreated to the corner of my mind."

Three questions were written on the whiteboard: How many employees originally worked in the company's third-floor office, and who were they? Who are the employees still physically present? Are they all recorded on the HR roster?

Mai Minghe glanced at the whiteboard and immediately turned around.

"Look at the employee list again. Aside from Eugene and Laura, the remaining four people are from the same department. They can't trust their own memories or cognition. Even colleagues in the same department can't guarantee that such a person exists.

"They may remember some moments of interaction and have an impression of others, but they are also afraid. This is all manipulated and altered cognition.

"So the six people had to report their names one by one, and then find the corresponding name on the employee list and tick it to confirm that this person was originally an employee of the company and not Jones."

They were not even sure about the living people sitting in front of them and had to use the employee roster to confirm their identities.

So what about the missing people?
Mai Minghe circled a sentence on the first notebook with his pen.

"...because no one could remember what Jones actually looked like, we had to use the process of elimination," she read softly. "When I first read it, I didn't think much of it and just glanced over it. But after I looked through all the clues, it became meaningful."

Mai Minghe pushed open the notebook and took a look at the photos on the wall.

"These six people can't even confirm their face-to-face colleagues. Could it be that they remember every missing person so clearly that they can use memory to eliminate them?"

Not only is this unreasonable, but there is no evidence that they remember the missing people clearly.

"So, what method of elimination do they use? If cognition is unreliable, how can they eliminate it?"

Mai Minghe glanced around the conference table, as if trying to spot the six desperate people who had sat around it. "The answer is obvious. They were using their own group as a basis for elimination."

In other words, their reference is themselves.

If the person in the photo is not sitting in this conference room for the weekly meeting, then he or she can be identified as a missing colleague.

"This is the first truly reliable piece of evidence," Mai Minghe concluded. "The second is—"

Second, something is wrong with the employee list.

"There are twenty people on the employee list, divided into departments, but there is no manager."

Mai Minghe pointed at the wall and saw rows of human faces pressed under red crosses, each looking back at her with a smile.

"...This is a little strange, but it's not completely inexplicable."

Although managers are essentially "employees", the list seems to only count ordinary employees and not management positions.

"This is your trick."

Mai Minghe looked back at the child's doll on the ground outside the door.

"Throughout the entire game of 'Finding Jones,' it was constantly emphasized that there were twenty people at JL Toys... There were twenty names on the list, twenty photos on the wall. But the real stroke of genius was that one sentence."

Mai Minghe gestured toward the door. "Twenty employees, twenty toys."

Twenty unfamiliar toys are indeed a "red herring", but it is not intended to waste people's time guessing the relationship between the toys and the employees - of course, if you can waste time in the process, that would be the best.

Its significance is to make everyone believe that the employee list of JL Toy Company is accurate - you see, even the weird and strange supernatural powers are matched to people one by one with toys. Doesn't JL Toy Company have twenty employees?
"You want everyone to have the number '20' firmly imprinted in their minds. As soon as they see the total number of people is 20, they automatically think it's reasonable and don't think there's anything wrong with the number...

"I was fooled, too, so for a long time I didn't realize there should be 21 photos on the wall, right?

"Even if the employee list doesn't include management positions, there's no reason to exclude managers from the missing persons photo, right? The biggest evidence is that Eugene's notebook clearly states that managers are also missing.

“This means that the employee list is not correct and it has an extra name that should not be there, occupying the manager’s position.

"It's very likely that Eugene and the other six didn't notice the extra name because when they compared the list, they weren't focused on who the missing people were—given their vague understanding, they probably wouldn't recognize them even if they looked—they were simply looking for themselves on the list.

"At this point, it doesn't really matter whether the manager's photo is on the wall or which extra name is on it... What matters is the message it sends."

Mai Minghe tapped the employee list on the desk.

In the nest level, clues to crack must be left for the hunters to ensure a certain degree of fairness.

The manager's "absence" is a clue that can be noticed by hunters and indirectly ensures fairness.

If the discrepancy on the list was just an ordinary employee in an ordinary department, how could an outsider who had no idea who the employees of JL Toy Company were to notice the discrepancy?
"Not counting management positions, there was originally only a list of nineteen people, but there was one extra name. I don't know which one it was, but it was one of those 'theoretically disappeared.'

“That’s the biggest hint.

"Jones's hiding place is not among those who remain, but among those who are gone.

"At first I thought my thinking had reached a dead end... Most people had vanished, so how could Jones be hiding among them? Then I remembered that the vanished people were still there, just in a different form."

She stood up, walked slowly to the end of the conference room, and stopped in front of a wall of photos marked with red crosses.

"Aren't all the disappeared people on the wall?"

Mai Minghe took a deep breath.

The target of the hide-and-seek game had been right beside her, staring at her silently.

"Jones, I found you."

　I've been feeling unwell these days, and my brain has been slow to react. I've tried my best to make the problem-solving ideas and logic clear in this chapter. If you still have any confusion, please leave a message and I'll review the main text to see if it needs further explanation or revision. If it's not essential to include it in the main text, I can also leave a message to reply.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)