As far as the incurious gaming community, I think your hypothesis about HR burying the story with a “nothing to see here” is pretty sound, except that HR would probably go with “needs further testing, still in beta” rather than “failed experiment.” It’s better business to present failure as “pre-success” wherever possible. More on this, again, in Chapter 27.

The thing that strikes me is that neither the public nor personal acquaintances or the gaming press was asking too many questions. After those pre-game interviews with the Five, you’d think there’d be a few game journalists queuing up for post-game interviews, and parts of the gaming community impatient to read/hear/watch them. There should be a reasonable crowd of people at least asking questions.

Of course, HR might have played it by publicly claiming that the experiment had failed and they weren’t able to play the game, therefore it’s sadly not worth doing any interviews, and the Five have been sent home with some consolation prizes — but that’s me making up stuff.

That said: Carol’s cooperation in Ferris’ … “dismissal” … stumped me more than that. HR is using magic, so during the first read I assumed he’d probably solved that situation using some of that, and assorted other means. But I feel as if Carol was a much too nice person to simply accept this mission from HR without either arguing A LOT and finally succumbing, or some form of visible motivation to not just help cover up (nay, prevent!) an unfortunate accident, rather than murder. I imagine she’d have accepted if HR had trapped Ferris and kept him confined to some closet in the basement. She’d feel bad about it and would compensate by bringing him nice food and explaining to him why it’s for the good of the company and so on. This still seems a bit too much.

Putting it like that, it then becomes clear why he became so obsessed with the Five. If he is god, then their existence is thwarting him and his ego. Which is why he keeps banging his head on the wall and trying to prove that he can bring them back, because a god would be able to do that. Except everything he tries to do with them keeps telling him one thing: You are not God. Which he can’t accept and drives him to keep looking, keep trying, and between that and listening to Brother Tom….I guess he finally broke underneath it all and then something put together a humanoid figure out of the broken shards

http://www.rachelbernsteintherapy.com/indoctrination-podcast/