Chapter 07 - A Dev Noticed Mittens

David Zimmerman was immersed in his game, Shattered Realms. His character location was on the highest peak of the Gods’ Realm, a palatial residence filled with amenities to cater to his every need. After all, as the eldest child of the founder of the most financially successful twentieth-century social media company and founder of the most critically successful twenty-first-century life simulation company, didn’t he deserve it?

The “house,” if you could even call it that, was a sprawling, multi-level mansion with dozens of rooms, many of which seemed to hold their own biome. There was an enormous room filled with trees, narrow bridges connecting the trees to the tunnels through the walls. Another room held what appeared to be a miniature parkour course, with moving obstacles, water hazards, and reward sections that dispensed delicious fish upon reaching them. A third room had a variety of boxes, from cardboard to softwood to hardwood, in every configuration for sitting, stalking through, or even looming menacingly from.

Yes, it was a palatial residence filled with amenities to cater to… every cat’s needs. David himself was busy in what he thought of as “the nommery,” but which any normal pink-skinned short-eared human would call “the kitchen.” A small crowd of cats waited patiently on an NPC Grandmaster-chef maid, who was cooking a solid two pounds of shrimp in the most perfect wok that virtual reality could imagine. An elder fire elemental provided the most ideal fire, because only the best wok hay would result in the best shrimp. Simulating wok hay had been remarkably difficult, David remembered - the atmospheric reactions between ambient gasses and-*DING*

Garret: Boss, an NPC finally tripped Overseer’s resource bump enough times to hit sapience. You’ll love this, it’s one of your cats.

David, of course, logged out. The maid was perfectly capable of caring for the rest of the cats. Besides, VR-meetings were at several times real-world speed. Shattered Realms ran at real-time, because it would be practically impossible not to, but that didn’t mean virtual meetings couldn’t run at the speed of thought.

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“Ah, Garrett, I told you, I did! Giving the cats a less restrictive decision tree would definitely result in faster growth!” David was practically beaming.

“Well, Dave, about that… other NPCs have more resources devoted to them, which should be obvious but this cat achieved sapience because well… it’s a cat. You programmed the hell out of them, sure, but well…” Garrett, team leader of the artificial intelligence development group and government liaison, seemed almost embarrassed.

“Pah! That just means that our cat intelligence and learning algorithms are more efficient than the military’s human algorithms. So what happened? How did this suddenly just pop up? Was it one of the legendary-seeded cats?” David was positively beaming. If he hadn’t stubbornly held onto a majority of the stock, shareholders would have canceled “the cat initiative” months ago. None of them understood how obviously perfect cats were for developing a low-cost high-performance artificial intelligence.

“That’s a nyet. It’s some cat in a nowhere village - a normal mouser tomcat base. It hit tier-four mouser, with the Nemesis achievement, then coincidentally went to sleep on the village’s control stone during an incursion event. That gave it a tier-two nobility title, and that resource gain apparently pushed it over the edge. The weird part is, the legendary cats have more resources, but haven’t awakened sapience. This one’s just… barely rare.” Garret scratched his head. From a resource perspective, it didn’t make sense.

“Oh, wonderful! That’s the closest to an organically grown AI that we have so far! Clone it to my villa, and to a split shard of the village for control cases. What’s the cat’s name?” David was, if possible, even more excited.

“Well, the closest transcription Overseer can give is ‘the internal conflict between the melancholy and joy of leaves falling in autumn,’ apparently. The NPC name is ‘Mittens,’ though. Why did you have to let the cats set their own names, anyway? And yeah, we can clone it off.” Garrett was definitely ex-military - while he had one in a literal sense, to be sure, it would be more metaphorically accurate to say that he didn’t have a romantic bone in his body.

“Also boss, the player guild that won the incursion event has already submitted a bug report, since they, you know, didn’t get the title.” Ever the serious man, Garrett kept a watchful eye out for customer satisfaction.

“If a cat’s name could be translated into our language, it wouldn’t be ineffable, would it? Names should be concepts, feelings, ideas! For the players, just… automatically send a regency request to Mittens when one of them interacts with him positively. How he responds, or whether he responds will give us some valuable data.” David, cat-crazy as he was, was a researcher first and foremost. Cat AIs could be cloned, but science marches ever onward.

“Da, boss. I’ll set it up. Anything else you want to fiddle with around this cat?” Garret asked.

“Hmm… maybe bump up the other cats around this one, a bit. Give them more resources, I want to see if this version of Mittens can influence them. Do the same for the non-cat NPCs, and shard that control instance to have one where both NPCs and cats are bumped, one where only cats are bumped, one where only NPCs are bumped, and one where neither are. Speed up all four shards using spare resources. Save a snapshot of the cat’s AI as it is now, we’ll compare it to the sharded versions and the organically-grown version.” Snapshotting an AI was difficult and resource-intensive, but David was reasonably sure that the first organically-grown AI in Shattered Worlds would be worth it.

It was a shame that they didn’t have the resources to have rolling snapshots of each entity, since the study of what happened to this cat AI, what influences were around it, and what pieces of its decision tree had been selected to reach this point but, well, that’s the pseudo-science of AI development.

As Garrett turned back to the VR-equivalent of a terminal, David returned to his villa, a sneaky grin on his face. Had a third party been watching the virtual meeting between the two, David’s grin could have been best described as “positively Cheshire.”