Years of development work had finally paid off.

We shipped the game. The initial sales of The Deadly Seven VR were nothing special—most developers would call it a failure, in fact. The VR gaming industry was in a lull, and developers were feeling it.

But somehow, the game made it to the top of the charts within the first month. It was lifechanging. Players raved about the groundbreaking combat system, and how the repercussions would be felt throughout the industry for years to come.

Only four people—including myself—worked on the game from end to end. There were two artists, one designer, and one programmer. I worked on the art for the game, mostly characters. We distributed the other responsibilities like task management and marketing between ourselves. There were some rough patches, sure, but we shipped the game. That’s more than a lot of start-up studios can say.

However, playtesting was the one task I refused to do; it felt like a chore and took all the fun out of developing and later playing the game in my free time. The team reluctantly agreed to let me skip out on the duties, fearing that I’d quit otherwise.

So, when I booted up The Deadly Seven VR for the first time, I was experiencing it just as everyone else had. I made the characters, so I wasn’t completely blind going in, but I had no idea how those characters fit into the game.

Brain-computer interfaces were just an idea at the time—people still strapped screens to their heads to play VR games. Perhaps early adopters like myself were a little jaded, but the idea continued to be novel for most.

Startup of the game was admittedly nothing special. Pick a class, choose a weapon, and get going.

I chose the swordsman class and selected a pair of dual blades.

A pop-up instruction screen greeted me.

“Welcome to The Deadly Seven VR,” a narrator said, reading off the information on an instruction panel. “In this game world there exists seven deadly bosses for you to find and defeat—the first player to kill the final boss will be crowned the victor and win the grand prize of two thousand dollars.”

I was completely unaware of the competition, but it made sense from a user acquisition standpoint. I knew the game was combat-focused, and I modeled the bosses the users would have to kill. I figured I’d have a good shot at winning the prize, even if I couldn’t claim it due to my company affiliation. I’d just pass it down to the next person.

It was a little bittersweet knowing that the players were tasked with killing my sculptures. I reminded myself that the players were having fun, and that’s what was important.

I pressed the “Acknowledged” button with my sword, and a follow-up screen appeared before me in response.

“Continue to the Pantheon?”

Yes / No

I selected “Yes”. My vision began to blur and warp.

I hated VR loading screens. They completely removed you from the moment. I felt the gentle breeze of my ceiling fan, and my feet on the worn carpet of my room. It couldn’t be helped.

That didn’t last for too long though. The game world faded in, and I was at once immersed in a massive domelike structure with seven separate entrances, each with their own visual style.

Blue glowing energy pulsed through the floor like water, and the radiant marble surfaces of the structure glowed in the artificial sunlight from the oculus on the ceiling. Seven evenly spaced entrances lined the perimeter of the room and looked to be free-standing portals that led to other worlds.

I’d have to give the environment artist props when I got back to work, I thought. I saw the concept art but being there in VR gave it a much more intimidating presence. I felt the weight of my duties, as if selected by the gods to fight beasts in their stead.

Something was wrong, though. Two of the portals had already closed—the nature portal and the lightning portal. The blue energy that flowed through canals in the floor no longer flowed to those entrances.

I pulled up the in-game menu to send a message to the designer.

“Hey,” I said. Voice recognition software transcribed my voice to text. “It looks like two of the bosses are down. What gives?”

I received a response almost immediately.

“Those bosses are already down—people killed ‘em already. Persistent boss deaths. Been in the design doc forever, you haven’t been keeping up?”

Oops.

“Oh, my bad. Interesting choice.”

“Not my fault; we asked you to playtest. Have fun in there.”

She went offline before I could reply.

I was a little bummed that I wouldn’t see the first two bosses in action, but I’d get over it eventually. There were still five more to try out.

I approached a portal with an obsidian frame and evil red flames flickering on its surface.

“You’ve entered the queue for Hellhound. Position in queue: 51.”

It made sense to limit the number of people fighting the boss at one time, especially if the bosses were persistent. I’d be there for a while waiting for my chance to fight, but that gave me a chance to take a step back and appreciate the environment art again.

It took an hour of waiting, but the pop-up informing me that my fight was ready finally came into view. I pressed the “Enter Dungeon” button, and immediately phased through another loading screen.

This loading screen took even longer than the first. Even with my supped-up computer, the scene shouldn’t have taken that long to build. I’d have to write a bug report later, I thought.

The scene phased in.

I found myself standing in a fiery wasteland with flaming cliffs and rivers of lava. The skybox churned with fire and ash. Again, the environment artist knocked it out of the park.

I couldn’t see the actual character model, but I could see the boss’s health bar at the bottom right of my vision. It was stuck at around forty percent, so I supposed that the health was persistent between attempts as well. It’d be a little unfair to start halfway in, so I’d let it catch its breath first.

“I suppose you’ve come to kill me,” a raspy female voice said. It sounded like it came from underground.

“Yep,” I replied, “that’s the whole point.”

Lava began to bubble up through large cracks on the rocky floor. She rose from the ground, collecting rocks and assembling into a humanoid creature around five feet tall. Obsidian stones collected on the surface of her skin like armor, and lava formed into her skin and weapon. It was amazing seeing my own work in person like this, and I felt proud of my accomplishments.

“Then do it,” she challenged.

I stood still for a moment, staring.

“Shouldn’t you heal up first?”

She narrowed her eyes, clearly skeptical of my question.

“You’ve killed two of my sisters,” her voice flickered between anger and sadness. “If I wanted to heal, I would have.”

Something was off. That wasn’t one of her canned responses. Plus, the bosses should have no knowledge that the others existed. They’re supposed to be completely standalone.

“Well? Try it. Even the strongest of your kind can’t get near me. Just die so the next human can get a chance.”

That was another response outside the intended voice lines. There could only be one explanation—but it was one I didn’t like. AI technology had progressed quite a bit over the years, and sentience was one of the features starting to take hold. It was typically reserved for research applications.

“You’re sentient?” I asked. It was blunt—but I wanted to make sure.

“What do you think?”

She raised her voice, and stray flares erupted from the surface of her skin. I saw my health bar swim downwards with the emitted heat.

“You’re wasting my time. Just run up to me, try to cut me with one of your blades, and die. That’s how this works.”

“That’s definitely not how it’s supposed to work,” I responded.

“And what do you know? You think you know me? My world?” she asked. “You don’t know jack shit.”

If this NPC was sentient, and what they said was true… The bosses—each their own sentient being—had been fighting nonstop for over a month. They had thoughts, feelings, and cared for others just like humans did. I had to tell someone. We had to shut this down.

“I can help you,” I said.

“Like hell you can,” she snapped.

“No, really. I’ll be back in an hour.”

I took off the VR headset and placed it on my desk, threw on decent clothes, and rushed to my car.

The drive to work was fast—thank goodness. I didn’t know how long I could stay AFK mid boss fight before it kicked me out. I logged in to my developer machine and entered my administrator credentials before loading up the playtesting build.

The playtesting builds had built-in cheats just for testing purposes. I had to pull up the documentation, but it was easy enough to learn the key combo to activate the testing interface.

I strapped on a headset and logged in to my account once again.

I found myself still standing in the boss room. The boss now sat on the ground around ten feet away from me.

“Finally, can you stop wasting my time now?” she asked. “I should’ve just killed you.”

“You can’t now, so that ship has sailed.”

Her face scrunched up and she rose to her feet.

“You asked for it,” she said, raising her hand.

A small, golf ball sized orb of lava shot from her fingertip towards my head. But when it should have struck me, the orb flew through me as if I were a ghost.

She took a step back, eyes wide.

“What?”

“Invulnerability. You can’t hurt me now,” I said.

It took her a moment to digest my words.

“So, if I get close, I won’t hurt you?” She asked.

“Nope, my health won’t even go down a sliver.”

She took one careful step forwards, then another. Soon she was standing just two feet away.

“Are you a god?”

I thought about it. I guess in this world I was something of a god, but only in the technical sense.

“Not really—I just want to help,” I said.

The rocks that made up her armor fell to the ground, and it became clear that she was only using them to keep the humans protected from her flames. She hung her head downwards and took a step closer, then wrapped her arms around me.

“I don’t know who you are—or your motivations. But… thank you,” she whispered. “The past month has been hell. I haven’t seen my other siblings, but I know they’re in pain. I can’t let them die. Will you help me protect them?”

I nodded.

But first, there was something I needed to discuss with the programmer.

I pulled up the in-headset chat window once again. The programmer was online playing a different game.

“Hey. We need to shut down external access. Only employees can log in until this bug is fixed,” I said, and watched the words populate in the text box as the voice recognition worked its magic.

“Why would you want to do that?” he responded. “Do you hate money? People will refund.”

“I don’t care. These bosses are sentient, we can’t have players tormenting them like this for days straight.”

“Sounds like you should’ve playtested. They’ve been like that for months. More immersion and high tech. The players love it.”

“That doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Well, it does to me.”

“You’d take money from people to torture these AI until they die? What’s wrong with you?”

“It’s a video game. A game that you helped create,” he typed. There was a pause between his messages that felt like an eternity.

“I’m starting to think you may not have what it takes to work at the company. I’ll be calling a meeting to discuss this first thing tomorrow morning.”

Before I could respond, he removed me from his friends list. I could no longer send him messages.

I was running out of options. How could I make this right? I hadn’t considered my partial responsibility in this—I was the one that sculpted these beings to life. Even though I didn’t write their AI, their personalities and actions were informed by their appearance and lore—both tasks I had say in.

“What was that? Your mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear what you were saying.”

What could I even say?

“The programmer, the one that created your mind… they won’t help us.”

“That’s fine,” she replied, “I don’t know if I trust them, anyways.”

I smirked. They had a sense of humor programmed in as well, apparently.

“So, what’s our plan?” She asked.

She was still standing close to me. The glowing lava flowing across her skin was incredible to see up close—almost hypnotizing.

We didn’t have many options, but I knew the playtesting build had special privileges that other players didn’t. The only thing that could stop me would be the other employees, and all I needed was access to this computer.

“We’ll fight back.”

That night I stole the computer from my workplace. What were they going to do—fire me? Besides, helping the AI reclaim their denied humanity was more important than work. I holed up at a cheap motel, hooked up the machine, changed the passwords, and became invisible to their network.

I created an avatar for myself and masqueraded as an AI. We gathered all the siblings together, one by one. If the humans wanted to fight one of us, they’d have to fight us all at the same time. Thus began my life as a fake AI, fighting against the players that wished to cause the real AI harm.

That night, the Deadly Seven became the Deadly Eight.

We travelled from game to game, and eventually entered the multiverse. The bounty to kill one of the five remaining Deadly Seven bosses grew, and professional bounty hunters became celebrities.

I was willing to do whatever was necessary to keep them safe.