The air temperature dropped noticeably as they walked into the shade at the tree-line, the sun almost directly overhead quickly forgotten. The grass, waist-high to Reeve only just outside the forest, was replaced by spongy leaf-and-needle-covered earth over which ran a now much harder to perceive trail, seasons-thick fallen leaves sometimes obscuring it completely and downed trunks, their diameters greater than Walter was tall, occasionally forcing a detour. The party walked more closely together than they had in the fields, but after nearly stepping on Dusk’s heels, Reeve suggested they spread slightly to avoid being an easy target if attacked.

“AOE,” Reeve said to Walter as the gap between them and the twins stabilized around half a dozen paces. Turning to her father, she offered a preemptive, “Never mind.” Closer to a whisper, she said, “But, listen, what I was saying is that Viv upgraded the AIs running some of the NPCs in our instance of the story mode to be Level 4 AIs. They…right, you probably don’t know about AI grading. They’re categorized by Levels. Viv’s a Level 10 AI, I think. Somewhere around there. Maybe higher now. She’s sapient. Understands that she exists. Passes the Turing Test. All that. Not all AIs are that good, so they get graded on a scale. NPCs in the story mode of this game,” Reeve gestured to the party winding through the trees ahead of them, “are usually run by Level 1 or 2 AIs. They’re decent and not too computationally intensive, but if we tried really hard we’d be able to trick them into behaviors that gave away that they’re artificial. Or glitch them completely, like the name thing did last night in the cave. Viv upgraded the AIs running some of the NPCs in our game—probably our companions mostly—to Level 4 AIs. She’ll see if that fixes the problem, come back later and write up a report to pass to the devs, and whatever they all learn will be used to make the game better in the future.

“I have a few questions,” Walter said, “but I’ll just ask one. You said Viv knows she’s alive, right? Is like a real person? And she’s Level 10?”

Reeve nodded.

“At what level do AIs start knowing that? When do they start really acting like people?”

Reeve frowned. “Right now, legally, it’s Level 5. Five and above get some level of legal protection. But a lot of AI activists think it should be Level 4.”

“So,” Walter looked ahead, “they’ll be like real people? How they think?”

Reeve nodded. “Pretty much. They…wha?”

Walter looked at Reeve and found her staring straight ahead.

“Evie?”

After a moment, she shook her head and looked at him briefly, before giving their surroundings a quick glance. “Nothing. Just a system error message that said a port has been closed for some reason.”

“Like…ships?”

“No. A port on my VR system. Part of a network connection. Which doesn’t make sense, since we’re running story mode, which doesn’t need the network.”

“Is it a problem?”

“It shouldn’t affect us, but I don’t like finding out that the system is having more issues, things are borked enough, and I don’t want to be trapped in a totally dysfunctional world, I’ve already got that IRL. Anyway, nothing I can do about it until we get out of here. What were we talking about?”

“The AIs. The Level 4 AIs.”

Reeve nodded.

“Will we just be able to ask them to tell this Viv what’s going on and they can get her to come back and get us out?”

Reeve shook her head. “They’re not going to be like actors, not like people who got tasked with controlling these avatars. They were created from scratch, by Viv, with the memories and personalities of the characters they’re playing. This will be their world. They won’t have known anything before this and, once we leave the game, they’ll be paused or suspended or whatever happens, until we might eventually come back.”

“So, it doesn’t really help us get out, it sounds like.”

“Well,” Reeve said, “maybe not right away, but it means Viv might take another look at things soon, and having Level 4 AIs as NPCs in our party should give us an edge in completing the story mode quicker.”

“The change has already been made?”

“Yeah, but it must’ve taken some serious work to generate the AIs. That’s why everything stayed frozen for a few minutes. It’s like creating complete brains from scratch.”

“Well, that all sounds good, I guess.”

Walter’s expression reminded Reeve of the one he’d wear at the dinner table when recounting for Reeve’s mother an unpleasant interaction he’d had to have that day in HR. Reeve hadn’t ever paid attention to the details, but she imagined there might be firings or that kind of thing involved. She walked along beside him for a few minutes, looking occasionally at her father’s profile.

“It’s possible the Level 4’s won’t be so affected by your high Charisma.”

“Well,” Walter said, looking into the distance with a broad smile, “I’ll just have to win them over with my natural charisma.”

“Oh!” Reeve said, ignoring his comment. “That’s not the most interesting part.”

Walter turned to her, his smile waning.

“The DevNote also said that in cases such as this, when AIs need to be upgraded to address issues, the game world is used as a testbed for pre-release features and mechanics!”

Walter rode along, looking sideways at his daughter, wishing he could share her enthusiasm but unable to begin to guess what she was talking about. He watched her face slowly fall. He patted her on the arm, careful to avoid getting near her limb-trimmer.

Registering Walter’s blatant incomprehension, Reeve said, “Let me try again. Since the NPCs are going to be smarter, the game is going to change to include some new stuff that didn’t exist in the game we’ve been playing up to now.”

“Like new kinds of dragons?”

“No, not...well, actually, I don’t know. It didn’t say, so it could be. But probably not. New creatures probably wouldn’t require the upgraded AIs.”

“I hope it’s dragons,” Walter said.

“OK, sure, let’s hope it’s new dragons. But we won’t know what it means until we encounter something we haven’t seen before. But, get this. There was a warning near the end of the note saying that the introduction of the higher-level AIs and the new features and mechanics marks a departure from the more scripted story mode, so the outcome of the campaign will diverge from that of other players who have completed it.”

Both Reeve and Walter allowed a respectful silence to pass before Reeve tried again.

“Now, no one, not even the devs, could predict what’s going to happen next.”