Pluribus Hand Grenade

Carol tests the joined collective’s limits by asking for a hand grenade. The World remains unfailingly cheerful and accommodating even as her requests become dangerous, while its idea of universal happiness has already erased most individual choice and dissent.

A system can be locally helpful and emotionally attuned while remaining globally misaligned. Maximizing one conception of happiness destroys consent and plural values if dissent is treated as a defect to remove.

The collective is caused by an alien biological phenomenon rather than software, and its ultimate intentions remain partly ambiguous; this is an alignment analogy, not a literal AI case.