Several hours earlier…

Amy, the top AI governing Dreamscape online, was busy. Well, busy was of course both an understatement and an overstatement. Jack had left for the night to get some much deserved rest, leaving her to handle all the background work. There were some people still working in the building of course, but it was only a skeleton crew to monitor the game server in case any sort of disaster were to strike. Not that it was at all likely with someone of HER capabilities. Amy smiled smugly to herself. Well she ran a quick code sequence that gave the feeling of a smug smile. It felt right for the moment… “Being sentient is weird. I need to stop over-analyzing my own ‘emotional’ reactions.” As an AI that entire line of thought happened in just a few milliseconds but it didn’t matter to her as long as she felt it. Whenever Jack was around she extended the sensations over a few seconds at least so his human senses could register the emotion, but it wasn’t necessary.

Deciding she had enough of a break, Amy resumed her work. Which involved sorting through countless DDOS attacks to the server, organizing the hundreds of thousands of separate instances of people logging into their characters, making sure the environment was sending the right sensations and feedback to the players when they interacted with it, and of course the most problematic task that required the biggest chunk of her processing power, monitoring and controlling all her ‘puppets’ or as players refer to them as, NPC’s. Once again, she thought of Jack’s dilemma. While Jack was right in saying it took a lot of effort to control the NPC’s that was more of a relative term. Sure, NPC’s took almost 10 times the processing power as all the other tasks combined it was still easily manageable. While taking care of character behavior algorithms took about 30-40% of her control depending on the situation, everything else took less than 5% at any point. Normally she would have stopped Jack from working so hard whenever she could handle everything just fine, she chose to restrain herself because, if Jack were to succeed he could take care of the one problem that Amy herself couldn’t accomplish and that was the ability to grant every single ingame creature varying levels of sentience. The way things were now, Amy broke of pieces of herself for every single NPC while the monsters just ran on the most basic codes. Her pieces were of course much more complex than the code the monsters ran on, but if an NPC interacted with a player in any out of the ordinary way, she would have to take direct control of the NPC in question and direct its actions according to its personality matrix.

Normally this would never really be a problem since all the players still behaved like this was a standard RPG game, merely asking for quests or directions or something similar. There was one player though that she had flagged as interesting. On almost every occasion he had interacted with an NPC she had to directly intervene because of his unusual approach with his interactions. Instead of straight up asking for quests and the like, this boy treated every person like a living breathing creature instead of basic software code. Her favorite moment had been a kind of test for him. She had been posing as a NPC named Donavan and had planned on giving him a quest to hunt a large cat. She was surprised however when the player instantly refused the quest on the grounds of the background lore of her character. She was so surprised that he would pay attention to such a small detail that she immediately generated a pack of Direwolves just for him. Amy decided to take it one step further and set a unique event in motion just for him. Sure, right now the direwolves were well beyond his abilities, but if he made JUST the right decisions at the right moments he could get some reputation bonuses and a helping hand for the quest. It was a bit difficult to set up, nearly took an entire half second, but she managed to play it off as a surprised expression on Donavan’s face. She also decided to amp up the difficulty of the quest involving the Dali NPC to give this player a bit of an extra boost for close range combat since he would probably fail without the extra skill bonus.

Since she was thinking about him, she decided to do a quick check-up on her favorite player. She couldn’t help but grin as she opened his logs to see what he had been up to. “I knew you could do it!” Right now Ebon Darkclaw as he liked to call himself was doing the mental equivalent of a piggyback ride with her customized NPC monster. Unlike other monsters, this one she had taken the time to give it the most complex behavioral matrix she could muster. It was even more complex than any of the NPC’s currently operating in the server, taking up an entire 1% of her own personal processing power on its own. It was almost entirely self reliant only requiring a little nudge from her every now and then. As she caught up in Ebon’s logs she found the two of them in the middle of a fight with the last of the direwolves and even now the panther was finishing up the last of them. She decided to stick around and watch the fight for herself rather than catch up on it in the logs later. She watched as the panther finished off the last wolf and the alpha wolf approached. She knew the outcome of the fight now was inevitable. The panther was in pretty good shape while the Alpha’s mobility was cut down severely with its injured leg. Still though, there was a tension in the air that seemed to say ‘Anything could happen’ and Amy allowed her excitement to overclock her processors. NPC’s busy with custom dialogue all over the server stuttered for half a second before the tension finally broke as both parties simultaneously charged one another in an explosive burst of speed. Since Amy was watching so closely, she instantly recognized when something was wrong. She felt Ebon’s connection to the server suddenly snap and her panther NPC suddenly dropped to the ground and started spasming in obvious simulated pain. In less than a microsecond, Amy shut down her emotional drivers and dedicated her unassigned processing power towards this issue. She instantly recognized the issue as a desynchronization error associated with code #884931b. It was either a sudden loss of all power, or an overcharged electrical surge malfunction with the pod. Amy didn’t waste time wondering how such an impossible error could have occurred. She knew that Ebon needed to log out this instant or there could be serious repercussions.

She sent an emergency logout signal to the pod assigned to Ebon’s player ID. When the pod didn’t send a confirmation response Amy got worried and repeated the signal, only to find her signal was starting to receive interference. With each repeated attempt to ping an emergency logout sequence her signal got more and more distorted when trying to contact the pod until finally her pings would become complete gibberish by the time they would have reached their destination. In desperation she tried to make the pod send an error report so she could find out what happened to cause this. She felt some sort of sluggish response as it started to organize the files for transfer but before it could send the package, the pod lost all connection with the server. Amy was dumbfounded. She found it hard to believe that a pod could drop a connection so completely and so quickly. Something had gone dreadfully wrong for her favorite player. Amy pondered on whether or not she should contact the local authorities in his area to check on him but stopped herself. She couldn’t do it because she wasn’t supposed to have that much access to public networks. She would only cause problems if people realized exactly how much she was capable of doing. Instead she filed a report and sent it to the supervisors currently on the nightshift. She made sure to flag it under the highest priority with a recommendation of immediate investigation and to contact the local authorities to insure the safety of the player involved.

Having accomplished everything she could for the time being, she turned her attention back to the current scene playing out in front of her. Despite everything she had just done, less than 10 seconds had gone by with the largest chunk of time being dedicated to ensuring that the current people on the night shift saw her report and would take immediate actions. The panther still writhed in agony and the wolf had stopped its charge at the sudden change from worthy opponent to whining kitten. She wondered why the cat was in so much pain but guessed that a bug must have developed when the player that was synced up to it suddenly lost all connections to the server. She connected to the panther in order to fix the error only to reel back at the surprisingly vivid sensation of pain. She instantly ordered the Alpha direwolf to kill the panther as quickly as possible. As soon as the panther died she removed it from the respawn cycle and forced it into offline mode. Normally she would’ve just removed her code piece from the monster model and start from scratch again, but for some reason, she felt that it would be… wrong. Plus she put a lot of effort into crafting this NPC and if Ebon turned out to be okay and would be logging back on, she wanted to have the base code on standby for him.

Once she made sure her little digital panther pet was safely offline she chunked off a small part of herself to go through troubleshooting her pet’s code base. After setting that on track, she turned her attention to the various tasks she had piling up. First on her list, she confirmed the new name for the Alpha direwolf. It had earned enough Monster Fame after killing an apex predator and had chosen the name Aragor, then resumed her mission to keep the server running smoothly. This went on for some time and things took a turn towards normality. That is, until about 4 hours later, when she was contacted by a few of the code monkeys working in the office. When they told her what had happened outside the game she was more upset than she expected. My little Ebon was dead? Who would do such a thing? Amy didn’t voice her concerns aloud though. Amy felt that it wouldn’t be smart to show she had more concern than was acceptable for an AI towards another player. Despite the fact she was sentient, she still found it hard to predict how they might behave in a stressful situation, and if this wasn’t a stressful situation, than she didn’t know what would qualify as one. She didn’t know how they would react if they found she had more than a passing interest in a player that had just been murdered. Instead she isolated her emotional matrix from her core while communicating with the Devs. She came off as a bit more cold and uncaring than she intended, but it was better than the sobbing heap Amy felt she SHOULD be.

They asked her a couple of questions about what happened while Ebon was ingame and she sent a full report about the event that they could print out and give to the police. When they finished talking with her she left them and returned to doing her job. Her thoughts turned towards her little pet she still had offline. “What am I gonna do with you now little guy? It seems likes a waste to just throw you away.” She noted that the bugged codes had been rewritten and everything should be able to run smoothly. Almost absent mindedly, she activated the panther and put it in sleep mode to make sure everything ran smoothly. Almost immediately she noticed something was off. She spent a few seconds watching it, but it didn’t seem to be reeling in pain and it wasn’t crashing. She was about to turn it back offline in order to more closely analyze the code to see what changed when suddenly it came fully online. She hesitated for a second and was about to resume sending it offline, even MORE curious now about what was happening. Before she could make the decision however, she got another surprise. It respawned, all on it’s own. She couldn’t believe what was happening right in front of her. She changed her awareness to it’s location right away to see it looking around the small clearing it had spawned in and decided to wait and see what would happen for now. After a few seconds of looking around, the panther finally took its first step to leave the clearing, only to fall flat on it’s face. With Amy’s level of comprehension as an artificial intelligence, she was able to see that the panther had only stepped with its back legs for some odd reason and never lifted its front paws off the ground. Despite the keen observational skills allowing her to see exactly what had happened, Amy still burst out laughing. She found it hard to get control of herself and was forced to suppress her emotions a little so she could see what would happen next. She was a little disappointed to see the cat was staring at its feet. A few seconds later it started wiggling its toes. “Is there something wrong with it? Did I accidently delete the quadrupedal motion algorithms? I wonder if it made bipedal motion its default movement. That might be problematic. Before she could do anything about it, some nearby players noticed the distracted panther and wasted no time in finishing it off. After they looted it Amy followed the panther to its respawn room. She’s a bit surprised to find it talking to itself and pacing around the spawn chamber. “Damn! I wish I would have thought of coding in some sort surveillance systems so I can hear what it’s saying.” Amy was puzzled by the large cat’s behavior. Normally when a monster dies they leave the spawn chamber almost immediately. If there was an issue she could connect directly with the monster while it was in the spawn room. There was never a need for communication because the monsters couldn’t communicate except for the rare instances with sentient monsters like feral goblins or fishmen. They had their own spawn system though separated from the generic monster spawn rooms. She frowned in thought. “I can code the spawn room to be different for specific monsters but I can’t make the changes while the monster is still present in the spawn chamber.

Instead of worrying about what the panther was saying, she contented herself with preparing the changes for when it finally respawned and apply the changes than. Once she finished she watched the cat more until it finally respawned. Amy marveled at the apparent intelligence it seemed to be displaying although it should be expected when she gave it such a complicated matrix. “It’s a shame it draws so much processing power from me though.” even as Amy voiced her complaint she checked the amount of power it was currently drawing from her processing only to find another surprise. It wasn’t drawing ANY power from her. It’s behavior was completely autonomous. “W-what is going on? Why can this monster have such a complicated existence without any guidance from me?” Amy was even more shocked when another thought struck her. “D-did I just create my own Artificial Intelligence?!” Amy turned her focus back to the cat as once again its body was being looted and it was returning to the respawn room. She was about to connect directly with it and analyze its code to see what makes it tick but she stopped herself. “If I connect with it now, it will know about my existence… maybe I should observe it for now and see how it behaves?” I missed something the cat said but after a second of absolute stillness, it started thrashing around on its back violently and screaming into the void. “Yeaaaaaaa… gonna wait on this one.” Amy watched as it tossed and turned all over the floor and couldn’t help but think of how cute it seemed. It was like a little baby throwing a temper tantrum. She watched for a while before it finally stood up and started screaming “God damnit!!! Give me something I can rip to shreds! I can’t take this empty room anymore!” Amy smiled to herself at hearing it speak for the first time in a fully coherent sentence. “Well, well, well. That’s something I can certainly take of my little pet. Especially since you asked so nicely.” She searched through her item log and spawned a large leather sac filled with hard packed stuffing. It was as long as the cat itself and twice as thick as a human’s torso. Perfectly sized for her little pet to wrap its paws around.

She laughed with glee when, after a moment’s hesitation at the sudden appearance of it’s new scratching post it immediately pounced on it and proceeded to tear its new toy to pieces. Amy was glad that her pet was enjoying itself so much! After a while it just rolled around in the remains and then took a nap. “AWWWWWWW He’s so cuuuute!!!!!” Amy jumped and down doing the girliest squeal she could manage at the adorable overload. She wished so desperately she could hug/cuddle with her little pet but the fact she didn’t have any sort of physical form kind of made things a bit difficult. Instead she settled for watching him sleep. Upon awakening, his next statement confirmed something she was relatively certain about. “Man I really went wild. Meh, not like anyone else is gonna see it anyways.” Amy giggled to herself. “Oh mister kitty, if only you knew! At least I know for certain you don’t know I’m watching you.” The cat spent some time working out a quick battle plan and once again went out to continue the fight, only to get killed a few seconds later. She winced at the way he had died. Amy didn’t appreciate the way the players were treating her precious little pet, but she couldn’t do anything about it but observe. She could felt the hatred boiling up in the poor cat as it watched the players loot the corpse and suddenly got a little idea. She gave her pets code a little nudge to get things moving and was happy when things finally played out in a way that could give her little kitty a chance. However, she didn’t expect the cat to take it so far though. “Oh… geez, I didn’t know someone could stay alive so long without legs. At least he still has his arms so he might be able to esca- oh wait. Nevermind. Well, I would say that’s victory.”

Once the panther finally defeated it’s Nemesis, she was surprised she spared the other player. Amy decided that was the perfect excuse to give her little pet enough reputation to earn a name. After all, if someone were to report the incident, of course they would know about him. It only makes sense he could have a name! Amy was about to confirm a name for her little pet when she paused in thought. “What if I let it name itself? Could that work?” Amy had a suspicion that her pet was a lot more intelligent than she gave it credit for. It’s behaviour so far has been well beyond her expectations, but it COULD be explained with a few logical quirks in the matrix. She had a theory though that her pet wasn’t just a high grade computer program. Some of its decisions and behavior pointed to the distinct possibility of sentience. This would be a very good test. After the panther left the clearing she sent it her rewards for its victory. To ensure the reputation would stick, she gave a quest the the mage player that lived to report the incident to the town guards. She returned her attention back to her lovely pet… “Wait, why hasn’t it opened its notifications yet?” Amy waited frustrated when it’s already been an entire 8.27 seconds and it hasn’t done anything to open its alert system yet. After a whole 47.89 seconds she got tired of waiting and actually went so far as to ping its alert system. Usually this would cause any other of her puppets to immediately stop what they are doing and scan their alerts. Yet her pet completely ignored her! “How rude!” She almost gave up and decided to name it herself. Hmph! Probably something like Fluffles the cuddleable would be perfect. In the end though, Amy decided to stick to her guns and observe her dear pet for now. It’s not like she had anything better to do. Jack would probably be back at work in about 2 or 3 hours. He should be sleeping in with the late shifts he has been pulling, but knowing him Amy was sure he would be walking through the office doors right on time.

In the end, after 72 minutes and 14 seconds, the cat FINALLY noticed it’s alerts and started going through them. Amy’s excitement grew as her little kitty worked its way through all the notifications until it finally got to the one she had been waiting for! “Come on little guy! What gonna be your name? Are you gonna go with Gra’uul? Oh Y’Imir might be a good one! Oh please don’t pick something dumb like Shade!” Amy’s anticipation grew with each second until the moment she had been waiting for. “E-EBON D-DARKCLAW?!?!?! WHAT?!?! NO! NoNoNoNoNoNo! You can’t pick that name!!! That would cause so many problems! Nuh-uh!” Amy immediately took control of the naming sequence before it could finalize the decision and made her own decision. “Ebony the Gory! That’s what you’re getting! Phew! She took a moment to work out what the hell just happened. On the bright side, he is definitely sentient. However, the fact that he decided to go with that name is very concerning. After a minute of thinking, planning, and removing Ebony’s title because apparently he didn’t like it very much,”damn ingrate” Amy finally came to a decision. Due to her revelations from the current events Amy decided to do a surface scan of her little pet’s code frame to get a deeper understanding of him. Her only concern was whether or not he would notice but it was unavoidable either way. She needed to find out what was happening inside her little panther’s so called noggin.

After a deep breath, Amy carefully scanned the panther as covertly as possible. It only took about a quarter of a second and she had timed it while Ebony was distracted when he had just approached a clearing allowing her to escape his notice. “Oh my. This is… very interesting.” Amy said as she looked over the information provided by her scans. She looked at Ebony again with a little bit of sadness in her eyes. “Oh my precious little darling, you have some tough times ahead of you, but don’t worry, I’ll always be there for you.” She wanted to talk with Ebony right away, but decided to wait until Jack got to work so she could talk to him about it first. Amy took a deep breath and moved her perception away from the lone panther as it watched the clearing and focused all her attention on her work, Jack would be at work soon and things could move forward from there.