138: Chapter 138 Gugu Gaga's Assistance

"Then what about the results?" Kara's voice rose by half a tone.

She stood up, walked over, and sat down opposite Sima Bei, pressing her hands onto her knees. "Even if you stabilize public opinion, even if no one sues in court, and even if the whole world accepts your theory that 'alien active ingredients cannot be detected'..."

"But users will know for themselves whether the potion works after drinking it. If no one awakens, who will pay for a second bottle? How will you get users to make repeat purchases?"

Sima Bei smiled. "That's even simpler. Every once in a while, just find a few shills to 'awaken' on the news, and that's it."

"Lady Kara, you might not know this, but we on Blue Star have something called a lottery. Every so often, someone empties the prize pool. The winner is brought to the podium, wearing a mask and holding an oversized checkboard for photos. Major media outlets scramble to report it, and the headlines are all unanimously: 'Worker from such-and-such province and city wins 200 million jackpot'."

"But after the pool is emptied, the prize money rises back up the next day, and people still keep buying tickets endlessly. Why? Because everyone standing in line to buy a lottery ticket thinks they are the next one."

"If you ask them if they know how low the odds of winning are, of course they do. But that lucky person wearing a mask and holding a checkboard is standing right there on the TV podium, with piles of real gold and silver next to them. That is more convincing than any mathematical model."

"This is called survivorship bias, or the hope economy. This kind of economy doesn't sell the probability of winning; it sells fantasy."

"By the same token, we are selling the possibility of awakening. Whether the goods are real doesn't matter; as long as someone 'awakens' every once in a while, even if the person awakening is actually just an extra we planted in the crowd."

"Those who don't awaken won't suspect the potion is flawed; they'll only suspect their own genes are inferior, their talent is lacking, or even that they drank the potion incorrectly. We won't even need to explain why it didn't work."

"The spiel you used during the mall negotiations is still perfectly effective to this day: individual differences, genetic compatibility, awakening probability distribution, delayed expression of recessive Special Ability genes—let them pick any one of those."

Kara remained silent for a long time. She suddenly felt that A-Zu being blasted awake by the nuclear bomb was a good thing. If he had really defeated the Permanent Five so easily, he would have eventually been backstabbed to death by this group of Blue Star people.

——————

Over the next few days, Thompson buried himself in the case files of the Coleman case.

He had the crime scene photos of the mayor's office developed, pasted them one by one onto the living room wall, and drew lines on them with a red pen.

He also pulled up all of Coleman's public itinerary from the three months before his death and, using his internal access to the Interstellar Police Department, pulled up his private schedule, placing both sets of data side-by-side on his electronic notebook to compare them line by line.

In the public itinerary, the mayor attended ribbon-cutting ceremonies, attended charity galas, and presided over weekly meetings at City Hall, each item corroborated by media photos.

However, the private schedule only listed times and abbreviated codes, with no full names.

Thompson extracted these codes one by one and ran fuzzy matches in the police database. The results pointed to lobbying groups, real estate developers, union representatives, and several intermediaries with vague backgrounds, but not a single name had a direct connection to A-Zu and his group.

Unwilling to give up, he pushed the timeline back another three months and pulled up every municipal document Coleman had signed.

He wanted to find any direct or indirect contact between Coleman and A-Zu's group, even if it was just a project approval, an official meeting, or an internal City Hall phone record.

But there was nothing. There was no traceable written correspondence between Coleman and A-Zu.

This made it impossible for him to even find a far-fetched excuse to cause trouble for A-Zu and his people.

"Gugu Gaga!"

A crisp cry erupted from the height of his knees. Thompson looked up from his electronic notebook to see Gugu Gaga squatting beside the living room coffee table, with a pile of her detective props spread out in front of her.

She held a magnifying glass with her flipper-like forelimbs, aiming it at the photo of the mayor's office crime scene on the coffee table. Her left eye was magnified several times through the lens, her round black eyeball scanning back and forth across the photo, her expression extremely focused.

"Stop it, Little Gugu Gaga." Thompson rubbed his eyes. "This is evidence, not a toy."

"Ga!" The little penguin ignored him. She pointed with her flipper at a corner of a photo, which showed a dark sedan parked on the side of the road.

Thompson took the surveillance screenshot and looked at it carefully. He discovered that this car had been marked during previous investigations, but at the time, he had thought the back alley was a whole street away from the mayor's office and not within the core surveillance range.

Moreover, the license plate was half-blocked by a fire hydrant on the side of the road, making it impossible to fully identify, so he had temporarily set it aside.

But looking at it now, Thompson discovered that the one hour the car was parked coincided perfectly with the time of the mayor's death.

"How did you find that?" He looked down at Gugu Gaga.

The little penguin put down her crayon, patted the cover of the picture book version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes with her flipper, then patted the camel-colored trench coat she refused to take off on her chest, lifted her chin, and let out a "Ga."

The meaning was clear: I am a great detective, Gugu Gaga.

Thompson peeled the photo off the wall and scanned the visible part of the license plate with his phone.

He entered these characters into the police database for a fuzzy search, and the results matched over three hundred vehicles of the same type.

He then used the car body color and model for a cross-filter, narrowing the scope down to twelve vehicles.

Then, he pulled up the owner information and recent activity trajectories for each of these twelve vehicles one by one and began to investigate.

——————

On the other side, A-Zu's rescue operations were still ongoing, but "regrets" began to appear frequently.

During a convenience store robbery in the Bronx, the robbers had already opened fire by the time A-Zu arrived.

He subdued the robbers, but the shop owner had stopped breathing before the ambulance arrived due to excessive blood loss.

A-Zu squatted at the entrance of the convenience store, buried his face in his palms, and remained silent for nearly a minute before standing up to say to the crowd of onlookers: "The nearest emergency center is a nine-minute drive from here. If someone could have stopped his bleeding within four minutes, he would still be alive now."

"But the allocation of emergency resources in this city treats low-income communities like second-class citizens."

Afterwards, every street interview A-Zu accepted involved complaints about relevant policies in New York City. Coupled with those blood-soaked victims behind him, the calls for A-Zu to lead humanity reached their peak in an instant.

["I am an environmentalist. If the ultimate goal of environmental protection is to protect life, then A-Zu has done it in the most direct way. I don't care which planet he comes from; I care about whose lives he is protecting."]

["I think A-Zu should run for mayor, because during Mayor Coleman's term: the average fire response time was six and a half minutes, the average police response time was nearly twenty minutes, the annual public healthcare budget was cut by eight percent, and over three hundred citizens died from violent crime every year.]

[And in the few days A-Zu has been involved in rescue efforts: response time is calculated in seconds, the number of lives saved exceeds two thousand, and the fiscal cost is almost zero."]