A day passed.
For Liang Jian, life in the safe house was as monotonous as a subroutine stuck in an infinite loop.
For Emily Carter, it was the most confusing and suspicious twenty-four hours of her entire career.
She sat in the monitoring room, watching a dozen screens that showed every angle of the penthouse suite. The target’s private quarters, of course, were off-limits.
She reviewed the footage of him in the living room.
The man’s behavior was… abnormal.
He no longer sat glued to the television, yelling at Fox News or CNN. Instead, he spent hours staring at a tablet, his fingers swiping silently and methodically across the screen. His expression of intense focus was less like someone reading the news and more like someone… debugging.
Yesterday afternoon, he had even asked the on-site tech agent for the safe house’s “network topology diagram” and the “specifics of its WPA3 encryption key.”
The tech agent had been flummoxed. They had served three presidents. This was the first one who cared more about network protocols than about how many flavors of pie were on the menu.
Emily felt like she was observing a new species.
She decided to run a small diagnostic.
She walked into the living room with a fresh cup of coffee. “Your coffee, sir.”
“Thanks,” Liang Jian said, looking up from the tablet.
Emily asked casually, “Sir, I was just looking at your schedule for next week. The trip to Florida. I believe the last time you played golf there with Senator Graham was back in the spring? I heard you were on fire that day.”
It was a trap. A clever one, based on a real event from the man’s memory.
Liang Jian’s brain spun up, the broken memory files reassembling.
Golf… green grass… an old white-haired guy… Lindsey Graham… yes, I won… by three strokes…
He had the data. But he knew he couldn't just give the data.
He leaned back on the sofa, adopting the posture he’d seen in the memory fragments, and laughed with theatrical bombast. “On fire? Emily, that’s an understatement. It was ‘phenomenal’! I completely destroyed Lindsey. Destroyed him! He was crying, fetching my balls for me! He probably has nightmares about golf clubs now. Nobody can beat me on that course. Nobody!”
The words were a perfect imitation of Trump’s signature blend of hyperbole and self-aggrandizement.
Emily’s expression didn't change. She just nodded. “It sounds like it was a great victory, sir.”
She had received the “correct” answer.
But because of that, her suspicion deepened.
The real Trump, telling that story, would have been filled with vivid, emotional details. He would have described a specific, incredible long-distance putt, or mocked a particular, clumsy mistake Graham had made.
The man in front of her, however, had delivered an emotionally charged but factually hollow response. He was like an AI that had studied “Trump-style” and generated a paragraph of correct, but soulless, bluster.
He’d provided the right data packet, but its emotional checksum was wrong.
“Enjoy your coffee, sir,” Emily said, turning to leave.
In the living room, Liang Jian put down his cup. His palms were slick with sweat.
He knew he’d just been tested.
And he knew that the woman, the one with the eyes of a hawk, was running a constant, invisible antivirus scan on him.
The NPCs in this game were terrifyingly high-level.