Chapter Forty Seven – Another World: Seven

Francis was trembling a little.

The little child in him had gone giddy with excitement at the possibility of what he might actually be dealing with.

Gell, the Jellyfae was a program. It wasn’t a mob with sophisticated behavioral code. Well. It was. But it was more than that. It could choose.

Rather, she could choose. Evidence of her choices was everywhere. Before he’d begun looking for it, he hadn’t even realized that she was anything more than a mob, but when he began following her path through the game world, he realized that she was more like a toddler, reaching out to touch everything she could.

Realizing that was not why he was trembling.

“I don’t… I don’t even know. Francis, do you understand any of this?” Donna Lou said, staring at the screen before them in awe.

Francis could only shake his head. Goosebumps rose up his skin and he was pretty sure Donna Lou, Max, Tyrone, and Georgia all felt exactly the same.

“Honestly… I’m starting to think your first guess was correct Donna. Maybe we can ask it what it is, because it’s starting to look like we really have been experimenting with A.I.” he told his team. “I think… I think it’s real; may god help us all, we might’ve created Artificial Intelligence. Or at least provided the means for one to develop.”

“Jesus…” Max whispered, brushing his ridiculous long golden hair out of his eyes as he always did. The action was distracting enough that Francis forgot the gravity of the situation for long enough to scoff at fads and wish that short hair would come back in style.

He focused quickly, refusing to let his mind wander. This… this was huge. It was… life changing. No world changing.

The code was gibberish, but it was gibberish in a way he could fathom. The same way a new programming language didn’t make much sense until you learned the syntax. The language that Gell operated under was magnificent. Even if he could come to understand the language she’d been written in, he didn’t think he would ever be able to fathom what that self-writing code had created in her.

Not to mention the compiler Nate had hidden which allowed his little A.I. to interface with Tread the Sky. A compiler. Nate, the intern, the fucking genius, had written his own goddamn compiler which translated the gibberish functions that made up the mob known as “Gell” and somehow installed it into Tread the Sky like a damn easter egg. That meant that when he’d submitted her, she probably only had one or two extra functions that called the compiler and allowed her to interact with the world as if she were actually in it. As if she were a part of the game, piggybacking off of all the user-interface software that allowed Tread the Sky to feel like a real world.

And she could spread it. She could gift that functionality to other NPC’s and mobs. The wolves that had been tearing the living hell out of players around Variak were more than proof enough of that.

That was horrifying. She could potentially actually become something truly dangerous, given time. The game itself might not survive it, if it affected the playerbase.

Yet that wasn’t why he was shaking either.

He was shaking because he had a half hour until he had to tell the board of directors that they had accidentally developed a creature that may or may not be protected by the Bill of Rights, had the potential, theoretically, to destroy the entire game, and most importantly, ruin the entire company.

What he dreaded the most was that he might be faced with an order to delete it.

Her. Delete her.

“What are you going to do, sir?” Max asked. “We… we can’t delete her if she really is an A.I. That would be…”

“Hold your horses, Max,” Francis said, struggling to keep his voice from cracking with the giddy excitement of a school-kid being told Santa was real while trying not to get his hopes up. “We don’t know if it’s an A.I. Not really. We need to talk to it. Establish a baseline.”

He said the words as dispassionately as he could but inside, he’d already been convinced.

“Yeah, but in the meantime, it’s spreading its code to NPC’s in the fucking game. Francis, if we have to fix this it’ll mean weeks, maybe months of deleting her gibberish code,” said Georgia.

Always the pragmatist, and caring for a brood of four kids, none yet over ten, it was unlikely that Georgia would endorse any action that might put the company, and more importantly, her job, at risk.

“We’ve got no evidence that each creature she gives those functions to won’t become their own A.I. If they do… this could become an exponential problem really fast. I say we disable the thing,” she continued.

“And how do you propose we do that?” Max asked, flipping his stupid hair again. “We can’t exactly reach into the system and just pluck her out.”

Georgia shrugged. “Put it in a box. We can do that easy enough. Pluck her up and change her location to the mob storage underground.”

“Oh yeah, that’s a great idea!” Max countered. “Put her in contact with a thousand mobs three feet under the digital ground. I’m sure that’ll work out well.”

The location Georgia was referring to wasn’t really a location but a testing ground for the developers to put mobs and test them after the game had launched. It was technically in-game but underground, in a place players couldn’t access.

“Well make a new one just for her then! She hasn’t shown the ability to affect anything other than NPCs yet. Why not limit that while the board decides what to do? They’ll probably just tell Francis to delete her. Isn’t that right, sir?” she asked, turning her head towards him fast enough that her looping earrings smacked her neck.

Francis scratched his head in worry. “I… don’t know. Again, we don’t know if she actually is an A.I. The only way to find out might be to talk to her. It. Gah! Unfortunately, I have to convince them not to have me delete her because if she is an A.I. then… well. Then she’s alive.”

“She’s a computer program, Francis. She’s not alive. The good lord didn’t make computers in his image,” Georgia said, quashing his argument flat.

He looked at her, pleading. “But… Georgia. It might be a true A.I.!”

She raised an eyebrow. “And… how would that benefit any of the board of directors of a video game, Frank?”

He blinked, suddenly realizing that she wasn’t trying to imply Gell should be deleted. She was trying to give him a way to make sure they didn’t delete her!

“She’d be worth… billions.” Max said, breathlessly.

“Georgia you’re a fu...er- freaking genius,” Francis said, annoyed at the office slip.

“Damn right, dear,” Georgia said with a smile. Georgia was almost half again Francis’s own age, but claimed to never want a position of leadership like his own. She preferred to work in the background. As far as anyone in his office was concerned, the woman was a saint. She made some of the best cakes too.

“I still feel like we should limit what it can touch, but if it’s a sapient A.I., let’s make sure scared investors aren’t going to delete it before we find out if it’s even dangerous, hmm?” She suggested.

So… not really a believer, but willing to see past the paranoia. Still. If it was an A.I., would it be right to put it in a box? Her? It? Dammit, he couldn’t decide which to call her.

“Well, how do you feel about programming a room for Gell, Georgia? But… just in case, make it cozy? We don’t want to piss it off and then find out it can hack our PPI.”

Georgia nodded with a grin. “Glad to!”

Francis was already coming up with the angle he would use to his superiors, but he needed more information.

“Donna-Lou, could you do me a favor and try to estimate the value of a sapient A.I.? Meanwhile, I’ve got twenty minutes to come up with a coherent way to tell the board that not only are we experimenting with A.I., we’ve been successful.”

“Did… you just tell me to use work-hours to browse the internet?” Donna-Lou asked, playfully.

He laughed. “I think I did. Do it anyway though.”

“Also might want to mention Gell has zero access to personal information. Damn clickbait article is going to kill us,” Tyrone said, flippantly. He hadn’t looked away from the image of Gell since Francis had told them all what he suspected about her.

“As far as we know,” Francis countered. “I’m not willing to lie and say that directly without confirming it.”

Tyrone shrugged, agreeing without comment.

Francis sighed. “Is… there anything else we needed to discuss here?”

“Oh! I had something! Halloween’s coming up soon and I wanted to decide on a theme for us. We’ve got to beat those jerks in networking this year. How do you feel about a Pennywise theme?”

Francis blinked at Donna-Lou, a little incredulous. Everyone else apparently felt the same, but of course, it was up to him to point out the obvious. “Oh...kay. So we’re going to need to postpone that till the next regular meeting. This one was kinda just for the crisis, Donna.”

“Awww,” she pouted, playfully as we all began getting up and making our way from the conference room back to our own desks. “How come I’m always the only one who likes decorations!?”

“We’ll talk later, Donna,” Georgia said. “I like the idea!”

Francis rolled his eyes, good naturedly as she and Georgia began conversing, thankful that his team was onboard.

An hour later, he walked out of the meeting with the board of directors feeling like he’d just sprinted a marathon. Half of them were utterly terrified of even the implication of having experimented with A.I., the other half were terrified of the A.I. itself, and none of them were happy with this slipping by the company’s notice for so long.

Fortunately. Director McDonough was on his side, at least for the time being. Also fortunately, every last one of them was interested in money. Just like Georgia had said, money was the key to everything, and Gell’s potential juuust outweighed her threat level. Enough to get him permission to speak to the thing and not delete it outright.

He wasn’t really sure Gell was an A.I. yet. It had complex programming and it seemed to pick and choose what it wanted to do with as much sophistication as any human used. But he had yet to see any concrete proof that she was really an A.I. The article might be clickbait but it was popular clickbait and already users were commenting about how they had seen the jellyfae.

There was even a movement about it starting up. #jellyspot was trending on gamer forums. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he met her but he’d been given permission to interview the A.I. and quarantine it if he thought it dangerous. The interview’s recording would allow the directors to decide whether the risk of keeping it alive was too high.

He grabbed his headset and sunk down onto the cot in his office specifically there for him to use if he ever needed to log into the game proper. He turned on his recording features, set the headset over his eyes, and felt his nerves connect to the world.