Puzzle Madness

Chapter 51 Doubts
Richard scratched his face. His eyes, blurry without his glasses, trembled and spun around at the sky, as if a meteor shower was about to fall at any moment.

"Well, Doctor, what you asked earlier is correct. As long as we can observe the scene in the sky with the naked eye, we can basically confirm that the signs have appeared."

"Then, the larger the entity, the more active and complex it is, the stronger its representation should be. In other words, is it more powerful? More powerful? A wider range of influence? It's hard to say."

"But—the entity witnessed was able to completely obscure the entire field of view directly above. How—how is this possible?"

The mathematician then looked up: he intuitively felt that this was the moment when Richard would reveal his inner thoughts most tonight.

Doudou raised his thumbs and pointed them towards himself, his mouth wide open to reveal his gleaming teeth:

"Eh? So, am I really that good? I think I'm pretty good!"

Richard covered his face with one hand, and through his fingers he could see his eyes, which were wide open to the extreme and his eyelashes trembling.

"I don't know either. I've never heard of such a—such a—I don't know how to put it. It would be better if the Department of Analysis could come and examine you, or maybe not."

The mathematician could not empathize with the shock Richard showed at this moment: in his opinion, Doudou's previous performance was much more terrifying than seeing the [size of the strange thing].

Looking at the densely packed tiny red lines on Richard's whites of the eyes, the mathematician decided that it would be better to continue thinking about the problem.

Doudou once again raised his head towards the sky, waving his hands as if in greeting:

"Oh, never mind. I'm really awesome, haha. Hi! Hi! I'm having a midnight snack. It's super hot in Mong Cai today. Oh, these two people? They're both new friends."

I don’t know who Doudou was talking to, but his voice got lower and lower, and in a moment he could no longer be heard.

But the other two present could not remain as relaxed as he did; the mathematician also followed Richard and immersed himself in thought:

"So this is some kind of indicator or index, positively correlated with the strength of superpowers; but it can only be verified by the superpower holder themselves. The colleague you mentioned earlier can also see it? What's the difference between what he sees and what Doudou sees?"

Richard regained his spirits, but his eyes kept gazing at the cloudless sky over Mong Cai. It seemed the mathematician's question had distracted him a little:
"Yes, of course he could see it. From the onboarding test to the final inspection before his death, the size of the observed anomaly remained around ten meters, and it remained in a fixed position, showing no signs of movement."

"The [neck rider] I mentioned before also had a very high intensity of his hallucinations. Although the company didn't directly contact him or conduct any testing procedures, the [neck rider] himself went to a psychiatrist and described the hallucinations he saw. According to the records, the scenes he could see were roughly estimated based on a scale: several hundred meters, but only low-frequency activity." "This is the most outrageous case I've ever read—equivalent to looking up every day and seeing a magnified version of Godzilla or some other giant monster; it's unbelievable, but now that I think about it, it's just child's play. It's really funny; I wonder if there are any other records with even higher visual proportions."

His voice became lower and lower, and his eyes began to look at the shoes; the hair on his forehead was soaked in the bowl, but he was unaware of it.

The mathematician moved his bowl and chopsticks on the table, gesturing with his fingers. The more he thought, the more questions he had:
"But why? What's the connection between these things? The so-called [image in the sky] sounds like an illusion: different observers get different results for the same object. In this case, it can only be an illusion."

"Also, this is easy to verify. Has anyone actually come into contact with something they saw in the sky? Not just seeing it. Like communicating—Doudou saw his parents, right? Could he talk to them?"

He lowered his voice and used his chin to gesture to Doudou, who was waving his hands around beside him:
"Look at him now, isn't that a possibility? Could this actually be a visual manifestation of some kind of mental trauma? Or perhaps a contagious form of schizophrenia that no one has ever discovered? Contagious mental illness sounds outrageous, but is there anything more outrageous than—well, you know—"

"Oh yeah, why can it only be seen outdoors? Do we view the sky as an abstract concept? Does a sky depicted in a painting or on a screen count? Does the time of day, place, or weather affect the hallucination? Perhaps it's a pre-existing mass hysteria?"

"And if it's not an illusion, can we achieve physical contact by approaching through an aerial vehicle? Does the distance between a person in ecstasy and these hallucinations remain constant? And what if we go into outer space—"

Faced with the mathematician's barrage of questions, even Richard was at a loss for words—it seemed as if he hadn't been given time to think, or even to answer. The mathematician's questions were so dense that it seemed as if he didn't need to leave any room for pause:
"Okay, stop! I don't know. I don't know anything. How should I know? I don't work in the Department of Analysis, and I'm not crazy."

"Those [higher-level offices]—people at higher levels—must have understood or deduced, or at least done a lot of experiments, but I didn't know. My former colleagues didn't know either: we were just small-time field staff."

"The Eurasian Post is a behemoth. And there are several other giants like it. No one knows how far the research and development of [Ecstasy] has progressed, but it's definitely not stopping. If you want to ask, just go ask the company yourself!"

The table fell into silence for a moment.
Doudou, who originally loved to join in the conversation, was making gestures and muttering to himself at the sky above his head. He seemed to be drunk like the middle-aged people with red faces at the next table, and he didn't care about the weird question-and-answer session between the mathematician and Richard at all.

The mathematician had a gloomy face and was scribbling on the plastic tablecloth with his index finger, but he didn't throw out any more messy questions; while Richard grabbed his hair with both hands, rubbing his upper and lower teeth together, and making a hissing sound while breathing out through his nostrils.

Suddenly, there was no one left who was willing to talk.
-
"Wait a moment, now that the topic has stopped - I want to ask something."

Perhaps to ease the gloomy atmosphere between the three of them, the mathematician suddenly raised his head and, in a rare move, initiated the conversation:

"Since you were talking about the Eurasian postal service and its development earlier, Richard, I have something I want to ask you."

(End of this chapter)