"How many atonement points do I get for one massage?" Jiang Ye asked.
"You want to massage me? Your wife wouldn't agree, would she?" Li Nannan narrowed her eyes.
"Chief, where did your thoughts go! I'm just purely curious about the Mil prisoner of war. I'm asking how many points it can get," Jiang Ye was greatly embarrassed.
"Give me a massage once, and I'll give you a score when you leave. Depending on my score, you'll get 1 to 5 points," Li Nannan said.
"If you kill it, can its family still be released from the POW camp?" Jiang Ye asked.
The blue tentacles on Li Nannan's body visibly trembled. This Mil masseur clearly lived a life of constant fear and was terrified by a casual remark from a human, pitifully so.
"That's hard to say. It depends on whether his family has the ability to work. There are only a few jobs suitable for Mils, and they all require some skill or knowledge," Li Nannan said. "If one of his family members can work, they can go out to earn atonement points in his stead."
"What if they can't?" Jiang Ye asked casually.
"There's a machine in the Mil POW camp that processes them. It's five meters long and five meters wide, with a structure similar to a giant meat grinder, connected to the sewer," Li Nannan said. "It only takes a few minutes, and they're all flushed down the sewer."
Her blue tentacles trembled again.
Large swathes of blue water curtains poured down from the pitiful alien masseur, splashing noisily on the marble floor of the massage room. It started crying again.
"If you dare to get your dirty tears on me—" Li Nannan glared at it, gritting her teeth.
The alien masseur quickly stopped crying and resumed its focused scrubbing and massage.
"How long does it take for him to get his entire family out?" Jiang Ye asked.
"You're such a curious baby. I don't have time to chat with you. This is the last off-topic question," Li Nannan said. "To get one family member out, it takes about five years of work, working fourteen hours a day, and most clients must be satisfied. Mil families usually have over ten members, some even dozens. Basically, they spend most of their lives working here to earn atonement points. Of course, there are also a few selfish Mils who can't endure it and abandon the remaining family members after getting out the important ones."
"I saw another one on the candidate list for Birong Star..." Jiang Ye thought for a moment. "Some kind of artificial intelligence..."
"The artificial intelligence laboratory codenamed King," Li Nannan said. "You don't need to worry about this one. Its competitiveness isn't strong; it had a setback a couple of years ago and has been in the cold for a long time."
"This laboratory, it's about using artificial intelligence to replace humans and manage an entire planet, right?" Jiang Ye voiced his guess.
"That's right," Li Nannan nodded. "By understanding a planet's information through networks and databases, artificial intelligence learns and comprehends, then issues massive instructions for management. The King Artificial Intelligence Laboratory already manages 16 planets and one space city. In its jurisdiction, there's no need for proposals, no need for think tanks, no need for referendums. All officials and clerks are like those in the Qing Dynasty, kneeling to receive and upload instructions, no different from robots, and sometimes they even use robots directly."
"The weaknesses of humans, it seems artificial intelligence can avoid them," Jiang Ye frowned.
"But many of the strengths of humans, artificial intelligence doesn't have," Li Nannan said. "Originally, a game company developed a large-scale King game. Players acted as monarchs in the game, governing their virtual countries. With money and cannons, they would annex neighboring countries, and eventually conquering the entire world would be considered winning. There are many such games; you must have played similar ones, right? To make it easier for players to win, this game company developed an artificial intelligence to act as a virtual minister. In easy mode, it could submit memorials to the player, and by following the memorials, the player could successfully win.
Hearing this, Jiang Ye guessed, "This minister was developed too successfully and kept evolving, so it was tried to be used to truly govern a planet?"
"You guessed right, but the reality is more interesting than you imagine," Li Nannan smiled. "On a planet in the Cassiopeia constellation, there was a resource-rich city with a population of 80 million. It was declining due to resource depletion, with deep societal conflicts and a general air of decay. The city lord was a good person and tried his best to revitalize the city, but no matter what he did, he couldn't reverse the decline. He watched the traffic on the streets decrease day by day, the number of closed shops increase, and felt powerless."
"The city lord had a fat son, only twelve years old, who was a gaming enthusiast. Every night at dinner, the child would wave his cutlery and tell his father, 'You should do this, and the city will get better.' His father never listened. Who would listen to the ramblings of a twelve-year-old child?"
"Later, the city lord fell into despair. For some reason, he actually tried his son's suggestions, and to his surprise, they yielded good results. Trying other suggestions also had good effects."
"The city lord thought it was miraculous. At first, he thought it was a coincidence, but when he tried again, every suggestion his son made worked, hitting the mark every time, more effective than divine prophecy, and far superior to any think tank! The city lord was overjoyed, thinking his ancestors' graves were emitting green smoke, that his son was so talented! After the joy, the city lord felt uneasy and specifically took his son for a paternity test. It turned out he was indeed his biological son, a false alarm."
"Every night, the city lord would bring a pile of official documents home for his son to review, asking for his opinions, respectfully like a student currying favor with a professor. The son was also easy to please, as long as his father provided him with sugary drinks and game top-up cards, and gave him city governance opinions on time every day."
"Society began to praise the city lord. The city visibly regained its vitality, and the city lord's decisive actions could not be ignored. He was an unprecedentedly good city lord. Finally, one day, the planet governor noticed the city's peculiar curve of falling and then rising, so he summoned the city lord."
"The planet governor intended to commend the city lord, but after chatting for a long time, he felt that this city lord was truly incompetent, with a muddled mind, not like someone who could turn the tide. He suspected someone was helping him from behind the scenes. When the planet governor gave him a little scare, the timid city lord, scared out of his wits, spilled everything."
"The planet governor was very surprised. Was a twelve-year-old child this capable? So, he summoned the child. The child had never seen such a grand occasion as the planet governor's. Like his father, he was timid and cried, spilling everything like a bamboo tube pouring out beans. He said those methods weren't his own ideas, but came from the game. That King game had opened a new mode where you could set up a brand new city. The child had merely copied the city's data from the news and entered it one by one, then relayed the minister's memorials from the game to his father."
"The planet governor, half-believing, downloaded the game, entered the data of some cities on his planet, and managed them according to the game's methods. To his surprise, it actually led to explosive growth in those cities."