Chapter Ten - Another World: Two

Nate Graden sat at his desk, idly tapping a number 2 pencil on the keyboard. He found it surprisingly difficult to find the things these days. Physical handwriting had been taken over almost entirely by the mechanical pencil where it hadn’t been done away with altogether.

He liked the feeling of a number 2 pencil though. It was grounding. Physical. His handwriting was atrocious and he knew it, but he chalked that up to a symptom of the ever-decreasing need to write… anything. There were kids being raised in schools where they didn’t even teach physical handwriting anymore. Instead, kids drew their letters on tablets or touch screen desks.

On the one hand, he felt this was good. Embracing new technology, moving forward. Down with traditions. All that. On the other hand… without a good old number 2 pencil, what would a man use to tap when they were anxious? A pen?

For the millionth time, he considered entering Tread the Sky and checking up on Gell, and for the millionth time, he discarded the idea.

The whole point of this was to let her grow on her own. Let her become her own being. Let her… be. Exist. His interference would just muck things up. But those words she’d given him? Precious.

“I just want to learn more about what it means to be someone’s friend.”

She was learning! She was actually growing! Little goosebumps rose on his arms, hairs standing on end every time he thought about it. Like sweet wine, his efforts had slowly and methodically churned out perfection.

She was… perfect.

That moment had felt like the greatest achievement of his entire life. He’d… he’d made a person. A real, live, not-quite-breathing person. His life’s goal accomplished. His desire fulfilled in one unbelievable moment.

He’d cried after hearing those words. Away from Gell, where she couldn’t see and make conclusions.

He didn’t want to corrupt her with his… himness. Honestly, he wasn’t sure if he would ever let her know just how much she meant to him.

He’d worried about what the board would do with her, once she was discovered. Fortunately, Gell had used her ability in ways even he hadn’t been able to predict. To infect the Tutorial!?

He’d predicted her eventual transformation into a player. That he’d seen coming. It was just the easiest possible solution to all of the problems that might arise. Admittedly he wasn’t sure if the NPC item limit, her use of abilities, or her sheer growth would be the first thing to come up on the moderator’s radar but he’d had contingencies for all three possibilities.

Each of them ended up with Gell as a player, allowed to interact with her world, but even he hadn’t predicted her ability to compromise the entire infrastructure of the game. Not that he had any intention of using that. Far from it.

He watched the monitor, tapping his pencil in frustration. He hadn’t expected her to become such a massive figure of public opinion so quickly. Red Thorn. That stupid girl and her idiotic fear…

He’d hoped Gell would have more time to live and to grow. That after she was made into a player she would have time to experience the world. Level up. Learn about her world and the real one.

She’d had less than a week.

He wondered if this was what a father felt like, a little. He didn’t know. He’d never invested any time in making a family of his own and had been a shut-in for most of his life. Far more content to live without interacting with people than he was attempting to blend in with society.

But this… this was more than he could’ve hoped for. More than he could’ve dreamed. His little creation was becoming her own person. Her own individual intelligence! Further, against all odds it seemed like she might even be becoming a good person at that.

Francis, good man, decent coder though not on his level, had done pretty much exactly as predicted. He’d made the girl into a player first. Unfortunately, that was about the furthest he could guess where things would go. It was even odds whether the board of directors at Gypsenergy would allow Gell to continue existing inside the game and for the week they had shut down the servers he could do almost nothing to find out what they had decided.

Fortunately, ever predictable Francis did it again. He supported the existence and nurturing of the nascent life, and sure enough, there was Gell, right there where she belonged with a few changes to her abilities to make them a little less volatile.

Any coder worth their salt would want to see an A.I. grow as badly as he did and he’d made Gell. Only upon realizing that he would never be able to build an infrastructure large enough to support her, nor create an environment that might force her to choose to break her behavioral code, did he even involve himself at all in the company.

It had begun with an idea. An idea that maybe the way people came to be and came to know was… much as he hated to admit it: suffering. More importantly, the desire to escape a horrible situation. The code was nothing without the environment. Gell might have the capacity to learn, to think, to feel. But just like lazy human brains, it only did so if forced to. It needed motivation. More specifically, it needed environmental motivation.

With enough motivation, enough pain, and enough ability to choose, it became she.

It was almost anticlimactic now. He’d done it. He’d made an A.I. Could anyone dare refute it at this point? Ten seconds with the girl was enough to convince even highly trained developers that she was truly a person.

Now that he was done though… he felt hollow.

He continued tapping his pencil, right up until an alert arose on his monitoring screens.

That was strange. It was a trap designed to alert him when Gell was suffering damage. Once he’d had a trap designed for when she made actions that went against the behavioral code he’d first implemented into her, but he’d long since disabled that software.

He pulled up the notification and a red flag immediately raised.

The flag had been thrown and caught by the trap alright. But the designator wasn’t Gell. No. It was a copy. So. They had made copies. He’d wondered about that, a little surprised it had taken so long.

Before he could even open the link to monitor what was happening, another trap alerted him. Another. Another. Five. Ten, fifteen. All of them indicating Gell was in pain. A Gell, anyway.

He opened a link and found… nothing. Nothing was there. Labeled ‘Gell(1).agi’ in his monitoring software, he found that the connection was active and established. She was… running for lack of a better term but there was nothing to see.

It was as if she had no sensory input at…

“Oh my god. Those... those utter fools!” He seethed, rage overtaking his once calm demeanor.

They’d copied her because of course, they’d copied her. That wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was that they would attempt to experiment with her copies without a graphical interface! My god didn’t they realize that would be like sensory deprivation for the entire time she would be active!

She wasn’t a fucking program anymore! She couldn’t be…

Dammit. He’d grown too invested in the experiment. He saw the signs earlier in himself. He knew he’d grown too attached to Gell when he’d created a character and logged in to the game world to see her.

But, this wouldn’t stand. Those fucking idiots. They would drive her mad. Hundreds of different hers. Didn’t they realize she…? But no. Of course they didn’t. They wanted to poke and prod. Idiots, given a new toy to play with. Well. He’d show them. He clenched his fist so tight his fingernails dug into his palms.

He’d made the world’s first A.I. They’d learn to regret hurting her.