I’m a bit ambivalent about this one myself, but I think it’s time - with five living players remaining - that we take a serious look at ais. This might be the last opportunity to do so, and as someone who has rhetorically steered so much of the discussion I think it’s important to at least consider the question formally.

The case against ais would be as follows:

• The gap between ais’ actions and rhetoric has been great. He has consistently pushed for decisions to be made on the basis of personal utility as divined from Clearance, but has only accused players who are no threat to him on that basis, and have ignored those players from whose misfortune he has most to gain. He claims to be hunting Androids, but even this runs contrary to his previous statements, where he said that he would be seeking cross-factional alliances. (As the player who, I think it’s probably fair to say, has borne the brunt of ais’ attentions to date, I can attest that he has made no attempt to leverage his certainties about my role.)
• He has used his own credibility to endow shaky theories with the weight of truth, with only that credibility holding them together. The Brendan / Sylphrena dichotomy still rests on the assumption that ais is telling the truth.
• As an expansion to the last point, ais has promoted the idea of a factionalised game with himself as the honest broker. This has largely protected _Fox_ and Sylphrena from scrutiny while focusing attention arbitrarily on those deemed to be in the “other” faction. Again, the evidence of this factionalisation is sketchy. I admit, I feel emotionally like it might be true, but I can’t pin down much evidence of it, beside weak patterns of players agreeing with each other. This may be distracting us all from a relatively straightforward attempt to win along Human / Android lines - Bucky’s Euphoric play being an example, which ais noticed but did nothing to prevent.

So it’s not a super-strong case, and in truth I will probably waive my explicit author vote on this one. But I wanted to give people the opportunity to consider whether ais is an honest broker, or whether there is harder evidence of his humanity elsewhere that I have missed.

In any case, for the sake of form: I accuse ais523 of being an Android.