Darkstone Code

Many people think the success of Millionaire is because of that one million.

They’re not wrong; it does play a huge role, but it’s not everything.

People like watching it because a lot of people at the bottom see their own reflection in these contestants.

Maybe in some respects these contestants have a certain capacity to stand in for most people at the bottom; people want them to win, the way you look in the mirror and tell yourself, "You’re going to make it."

The only thing the underclass has in abundance is empathy; they can even sigh over a rich man going bankrupt!

Naturally, they don’t lack that special, intense sense of satisfaction when the contestant they support moves toward success!

On top of that, there’s human nature.

The descent and struggle of human nature, and its resistance, are another major attraction.

Once people start "fighting to the death" for money, the show has all the conditions that make it impossible to stop watching!

In the final endgame, the cameras never showed everyone’s hole cards, which means the audience was guessing too.

Right then, a subtitle ad suddenly appeared at the very bottom of the screen.

"If you know the answer, call xx-xxx-xxx-xx right now to submit it. As long as you answer correctly, we will draw twenty lucky viewers from the correct answers and award each of them one thousand Gold Certificates..."

Maybe people didn’t notice, or maybe they noticed but didn’t care: calling this number cost money. But it wasn’t expensive, only one buck!

One buck isn’t much; spending one to gamble for a thousand seems like a pretty good deal.

The next moment, the TV station’s call center was thrown into total chaos.

Capital has never been benevolent or compassionate; it’s always filthy and ugly, because for profit it will make any compromise!

"That number four contestant is very sly; he almost managed to divert the fire!" Catherine gave a precise assessment of the fourth contestant’s craftiness.

In reality, the fourth contestant was a teacher who’d lost his job—he got fired because he reported certain things happening at the school to the board.

He lost his job and, on top of that, offended some people; in the end, the principal of his school walked away untouched, and he was completely shut out of the local education system.

No one likes people who break certain unspoken rules, not even at schools.

A conscientious, honest teacher with his own moral bottom lines was now, for the sake of "ideals," starting to give some things up.

Or rather, letting certain things wake up.

These were things he’d had in him all along!

Lynch added, "In fact, Harry’s odds are the lowest among all the institutions..."

Catherine looked a little puzzled; she didn’t know much about betting syndicates. "So he actually has the lowest support rate?"

"Nobody thinks he can win?"

Lynch shook his head and gave her a quick bit of basic knowledge. "That means the people backing him are the most; the number of people who believe he’ll win in the end is the highest. The fourth contestant’s strategy is fine. The problem is the other two."

"They only ignored Harry’s consistency and threat in the game because of the Points. You can only say they’re a bit..." Lynch curled his lip. "...a bit dumb."

Harry looked ordinary enough, but he had the most money riding on him, which in itself says a lot—people were bullish on him.

If it were just one or two people, you could chalk it up to poor judgment; but when most people favor him, it means he really is the people’s pick for champion.

Catherine admitted her ignorance about gambling, and then, after a turn of thought, came up with a rather quirky question.

"Them using your show for betting—doesn’t that already count as infringement?"

Ever since becoming a city Legislator, she’d been exposed to some infringement-related cases, and sometimes even she felt the law might be a bit too harsh.

But the law is the law. It also made her realize that if the bookmakers really were doing this, then weren’t they infringing on Lynch’s rights?

Because they were using Lynch’s show to profit for themselves. That’s obviously wrong. Whether it’s legal aside for the moment, it’s at least immoral and improper.

Lynch, however, looked utterly unconcerned. "We’ve signed an agreement. Each season they give me one million plus five percent of total profits, so I agreed to let them do it. Otherwise, you think they’d dare run this wild?"

In truth, this whole thing was more complicated than Catherine imagined, and than Lynch made it sound.

The Federation has plenty of "invisible" industries that don’t draw much public attention on a daily basis. And by "attention" here, we mean curiosity about how much money they make.

Take education, for example.

No one treats education groups the way they do those listed companies on the Bupen Exchange—no one demands that every education chain disclose annual reports and all kinds of figures.

People don’t even think of doing that, because they figure... No, not "figure." They simply don’t believe education can be that profitable.

They might say a few words when it comes to college tuition, but most of the time their attention doesn’t stretch that far.

Then there’s healthcare.

Another massively profitable, semi-monopolistic sector; yet people’s tolerance for it is the highest. Not only does almost no one go looking for trouble with them, but when the hospital system has issues, lots of people spontaneously step up to defend it.

And then there’s the gambling industry.

Hardly anyone cares how profitable betting is, how much it earns each year, what the corporate structure looks like, who the shareholders are, how the shares are distributed among them, and all the more complex questions.

If someone actually dug that deep, they’d discover that one of the United Transport Association’s biggest backers is the private equity funds indirectly controlled by shareholders of the betting groups.

These funds transfer huge sums into the United Transport Association’s corporate accounts and into the accounts of its higher-ups every year, under the pretext of "supporting the development of Federation sports." In reality, it’s just the betting groups and UTA carving up the money behind the scenes!

Betting needs something to bet on, and nothing fits better than intense sports.

The strong competitiveness and uncertainty let bookmakers rake it in from all levels of sporting events across the Federation every year. To make sure these money-making machines don’t collapse, they’ve become one of the biggest "contributors" to the progress of sports.

It sounds absurd, but it’s really not. At the end of the day, it’s just capital’s profit-seeking tendency at work!

There had been rumors about bookmakers colluding with athletes, but those stories vanished quickly—along with the whistleblowers.

When faced with enormous interests, whoever steps into the middle of the road will surely be smashed to pieces!

Lynch’s show not only didn’t cost a cent; it was raking in money like crazy.

Sometimes making money really is as simple as he says it is.

The game was still going.

Harry and Number Four had each discarded a card. Harry dropping Points was actually quite normal.

He hadn’t yet shaken off the format of the previous game, which locked contestants’ thinking into various pre-set clues.

You’re given "yellow," so you have to think around "yellow." But now it’s different—free-form Q&A completely removes those constraints on thinking.

Suddenly a lot of things become simple. Like how Harry initially thought baseball would at least hold up for seven or eight questions, yet in just two questions he almost got knocked out.

Ball, big field—there are only a few ball games that need a big field. When the host kept asking, the question they threw in was: "Is this thing allowed to roll during the game?"

That one question straight up killed Harry, and the question Harry fired back did the same to the fourth contestant.

They had actually come in that morning already. Aside from having the rules of the game explained, they also had to sign some contracts.

If any of them won the championship, they would have to continue doing promotional appearances for the show for free, and also cooperate with the TV station at no charge to shoot another quasi-documentary follow-up program—Newly Born Millionaire.

This program would chronicle the series of changes in a person’s life after going from poor to owning over a million overnight—their life, family, social interactions—what all of that becomes, all of it would be used to draw people in.

Just like this book keeps telling you: capital will always be a few steps ahead of those being exploited and oppressed.

All these people signed those contracts; even if they became millionaires, they’d still have to keep feeding Lynch and the TV station with the heat from their own fame!

They spent the whole morning learning about these things. Of course, the TV station also bluntly told them that after signing, the station would help them integrate into their new lives.

Including but not limited to introducing them to some new friends, or, when they needed it, providing them certain forms of help and channels that didn’t involve direct profit transactions.

At noon they had a working lunch at the TV station.

Midday working lunches in the Federation are basically like that; everyone’s busy, and lunch tends to be relatively simple.

Today’s lunch was a little richer; after all, they’d just signed so many unreasonable contracts.

So there was steak and chicken at noon, which are what most people in the Federation eat most often.

Harry’s question was: "Was it on our lunch menu today?"

The fourth contestant thought back and shook his head, and Harry just gave his answer: lamb.

Even though the Federation has a long coastline, in reality... people aren’t all that keen on eating fish.

For families, the complexity of making fish steaks is one issue; it’s hard to make them as tasty as steak.

Back in the days without a variety of seasonings, the fishy smell was one of the main reasons people didn’t eat fish.

With fish out of the picture, and given it had to be something common in daily life, and Federation folks don’t like pork, the only thing left was lamb.

Harry decided to take a gamble, and he got it right.

The fourth contestant’s strategy was the same as his—trying to create more confusion around the questions—and he overlooked the fact that the questioner could simply ignore a lot of useless answers!

They both decided to change strategies, and decided to unite, forming a temporary alliance!