Authors: Shawn Speakman
Jeri flushed the toilet and rushed back to the bed without taking the time to wash her hands. She checked the bars on her portable hot spot, logged into the DysanSoft network, and started downloading the most current version of the game. Once the progress bar was snailing along, she grabbed her iPhone. Normally a dedicated text-based life form, Jeri shied away from calls, but she made an exception this time. Muting the television, she held down the iPhone’s power button.
After the musical chime, she said, “Siri, call Ajit.”
The iPhone’s virtual assistant echoed back, “Calling Ajit.” The irony was impossible to miss.
Two-fifteen in Portland and Ajit picked up on the first ring. “’Bout time, Jeri.”
“Talk to me.”
“We’ve got nothing back here. Customer Service woke me about four hours ago because of a flood of support tickets. Forty-five minutes later Twitter exploded. I got the team together within an hour.”
“So it’s not you or anyone else messing around?”
“Nope. We’re all in the conference room, and this kind of interactivity can’t be programmed. The conversations are fluid and responsive.”
“How many servers are we talking about?”
“Just Angoth. Troth is well behaved in staging and he hasn’t done anything freaky on the other servers.”
“Sounds like a hack then. Danny maybe?”
Jeri felt the list of possibilities dwindling fast. Despite what she’d told Meriwether, she suspected it
was
someone from her team—someone retaliating for so many long hours leading up to this weekend’s GDC East. She expected the guilty to step forward and apologize profusely. Then she’d take care of smoothing things over with the brass and write a carefully worded press release. The possibility that a hack might originate outside DysanSoft was a bigger concern.
“Danny wouldn’t do it,” Ajit replied.
“He might.”
“He was pissed about being fired, but he wouldn’t. I don’t even think he could. Jeri, Troth isn’t in even in Eridia any more. He’s in
another
zone. Hell, I wouldn’t know how to do that. Do you?”
And there it was. The elephant that had been in her room since Meriwether’s call now waved hello with his trunk.
“Jeri . . . Jeri? You still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Just checking my download. Almost done. So what’s going on now? What’s the current status?”
Jeri tabbed out of the download window and brought up Chrome. Doing a search on Troth returned 323,000 results. “Is this a game?” was in the title of the top seven.
“It’s late, but it didn’t take long for people to swarm to the Forest of Dim,” Ajit said. “We were afraid of a crash with so many players in a single zone. Game play was laggy as hell. So we kicked everyone off the server and disabled logins. Only Zach is in there now.”
One more possibility down.
The thought of a hacker was a thread she had been holding onto, but now even that tendril to reality snapped.
Or has it? Anyone who could figure out how to puppet a non-player character across zone boundaries might be bright enough to have their own hidden access. Right?
“Can Zach still interact with him after kicking everyone off? Is Troth now on what appears to be a programmed script?”
“Nope, no change. Zach and Troth have been having quite the conversation.”
“Tell her about the parents.” Steve’s voice came from the background.
“What’s that?” Jeri asked.
“Well, of course, we wanted to see things firsthand, so Zach hailed Troth. Sure enough, instead of giving the cloak quest he says, ‘Hi, my name’s Troth. Nice to meet you.’”
“At least he’s friendly.”
“Oh, he’s that all right. Then Zach says, ‘I’m in search of the Spectral Cloak.’ You know, to see if that would jar anything. Guess what Troth does?”
“He doesn’t give the quest, I take it.”
“He asks Zach if he remembered what his parents looked like.”
“You’re shitting me!”
“No! But that’s not all. The two of them have been having a conversation for hours—
hours
—about families and memories. I gotta tell you Jeri, I’m no Turing judge, but if I were, I’d say Troth passed with flying colors.”
“What does Steve say? He’s the AI egghead.”
“Steve has been feeding Zach prompts, and he concurs.”
“You’re telling me a guy with a PhD from MIT can’t tell if Troth is real or code?”
“No, not at all. I’m saying he
can
tell, and he’s convinced Troth
is
alive.”
“Alive?”
“Sentient.”
Ask me if I know what sentient means and I’ll fire your ass right now.
She actually paused to see if Ajit would.
He didn’t. Instead, he lowered his voice and said, “Things are kinda freaky back here, Jeri. I’ve asked security not to let anyone out of the building, and you wouldn’t believe the number of news trucks in the parking lot. Pinkerton has called in extra officers. And Samuel is roaming the halls proclaiming the Good News of Troth like John the Baptist.”
“Our Sam? Samuel Mendelburg, the atheist and professional skeptic formerly of Staten Island? That Sam?”
“A total convert now. He actually called it a
miracle
. I shit you not.”
Samuel famously refused to accept that the country of France existed, because he’d never personally been there. When Julie from the quality assurance team explained she’d had a layover in Paris the previous summer, he replied, “That doesn’t prove anything. All you know is that you sat inside an airport for a few hours. They all pretty much look the same. You could have been anywhere.”
Jeri sighed. “Let me guess. You guys have been glued to the television and Internet sites, haven’t you?”
Ajit sounded defensive. “Well, yeah, a bit, of course, but I wouldn’t say
glued
.”
“I think you’re getting wrapped up in all the hysteria that’s out there. Maybe you should try doing something more constructive. Of course Troth can pass the Turing test—because a
real person
is puppeteering him. I want you to go through all the files on the server and compare them to the files in the staging area. My guess, you’re going to find something that’s been changed, or shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
“Jeri, we aren’t complete morons. We did that already. The code is
exactly
the same. And before you ask, all the firewalls are in place, and there are no connections except for Zach’s, and he’s logged in through a hardline. I’m telling you there is no one running Troth, and the mirror system has him doing exactly what he’s supposed to.”
“Well, there has to be something. Maybe there’s a trigger that sets Troth into some subroutine and he just
seems
self-aware. My money is still on Danny.”
“If Danny added this sub before he left, then firing him was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done, because Danny has to be a genius. I mean he’d make Einstein look like Homer Simpson, seriously. But I don’t think our systems even have the computing power needed to do what Troth is. It’d take something like IBM’s Watson, and even that falls short of what I’ve been watching these last few hours.”
“Do you have any idea how crazy you’re sounding? Or just how serious this is outside our company? Meriwether is dodging calls from the White House, for Christ’s sake. He wants this dealt with—
now
! Why don’t you just shut down, reformat the disks, reload the last code from before Danny left, and I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“I can’t,” Ajit said.
“Of course you can.”
“Okay, let me rephrase: I won’t.”
“Ajit, did you put your kids up for adoption recently? Because I could swear you still need a paycheck, right?”
“You won’t fire me. You need me.”
“Excellent point. I’ll just tell Steve to do it. I can afford to lose him.”
“He won’t do it either. I doubt you’ll find any of us who will. Listen, I’m telling you, no one could code Troth to do the things he’s doing. And since the system is secure, no one can be running him. I think we have to accept that when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Jeri sighed again. “Ajit, I’ve read Arthur Conan Doyle too. But do you know what Edison said? ‘When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this—you haven’t.’”
“But Jeri, what . . . what if this
is
real? What if Troth is—I mean he could be the very first man-made, sentient artificial intelligence. A new life form. You coded Troth, Jeri, so in some sense, you could be considered his God.”
“Project Lead is fine by me, thank you. I’m sure being God has its perks, but I don’t think the insurance plan includes dental.”
“And Project Lead doesn’t grant you unlimited power. Can you reload the server from Indianapolis?” Ajit asked.
“You know I can’t.”
“Then you are reliant on us, and I’m serious about no one here being willing to jeopardize Troth’s existence by resetting the server. But you haven’t seen what we have. Before you make any decisions do me this favor—see for yourself. Look, I’ve already opened a password-protected port for you to log in with. Go, talk to Troth, and afterward, if you still think it’s Danny burning the Golden Gate behind him, then fine.”
“You’ll reload the previous version, then?”
“No—I’ll resign. I’m not a Nazi.”
Jeri opened her mouth to admonish him for making such an insensitive joke. She wanted to let him know this was serious. Before she could, Jeri realized Ajit wasn’t joking. His tone was dead flat. He meant it.
“You’re serious?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
Jeri looked at the clock on the nightstand: 5:25. “I’ll humor you until four o’clock your time, that’s it. What’s the password?”
“I_am_the_lord_your_god.”
“Cute.”
* * * * *
Jeri sat at the little desk in the corner of her hotel room wearing pajamas that consisted of sweatpants and an oversized T-shirt that read:
Come for the breasts. Stay for the brains.
The only noise was the gurgle of the little in-room coffee maker drooling into a paper cup and the rhythmic pattering of her avatar’s feet racing through a dense forest of ancient trees while on
auto run
.
The clock read 5:45 when her avatar reached the Chimera Tavern, built in a lonely section of forest cleared of trees, where stumps had been lazily left behind. The stumps were a telltale sign that the Tavern had, at least originally, been a player-built establishment. NPCs were programmed to clear stumps and fill in holes. The rickety one-story public house with quad dormers looked like a cross between a dive bar and the log cabin on a syrup label. The roof had a dusting of snow, as did the ground and the pine trees around it.
Realms of Rah
ran on half-scale time—for every one day in the real world, two passed in-game—so the two worlds were rarely in sync with each other. While it might be the heat of summer on earth, winter was coming in the Forest of Dim.
Jeri’s avatar paused on the porch.
Inside the hotel room, the coffee maker had stopped gurgling. Jeri crossed the room to add cream and sugar to the pale-gray dishwater that bore as much resemblance to coffee as the movie
I, Robot
did to Asimov’s book. Feeling chilled, she adjusted the room’s thermostat. Outside, a faint dawn competed with the parking lot’s floodlights for the right to illuminate the world.
She sent a text to Ajit, asking him to tell Zach to log out. She didn’t want to talk to her lead programmer or Zach for that matter. When Ajit texted “Done,” she sat back down at the computer, sipped from the coffee cup in one hand and entered the tavern by right-clicking on the door with the other.
The sound of the door creaking played through her tinny laptop speakers as a room lit by the warm glow of a fireplace and three candle-filled chandeliers was revealed. Two NPCs sat at a table in the middle of the room, playing checkers. The one on the left was Dashion the Huntsman, a gimpy one-time hunter who gave out a series of low-level quests: gathering wood for the fire, killing an elusive but nonaggressive stag, and then a more challenging quest to eliminate an aggressive bear. Upon finishing those, a final quest for Dashion’s bow was granted, sending the player deep in the forest to a cave filled with spiders. When the gamer went there, he or she could find broken remnants of the weapon. Returning them to Dashion, he’d fixed the bow’s broken string and give the player a “+10 to hit” weapon, explaining that he was too old to use the bow anymore.
Across from Dashion was Edgar Sawtail, whose only purpose was to play checkers with Dashion. Neither NPC ever left the tavern. They didn’t even get up to stretch or eat. These were two of the lobotomized inhabitants who had caused some of the most talented game developers in the industry to leave DysanSoft.
Realms of Rah
, presently in its fourth year and fifth expansion, was unlike its predecessors, such as the once popular
Everquest
,
World of Warcraft
,
Control Point
, and
Elan Online
.
RoR
reached for the Holy Grail of MMORPGs—a living world. Seven years of development had resulted in the creation of an autonomous simulated ecosystem. Chaos-based weather patterns eroded landscapes, while winds dispersed seeds from mature plants. The seeds could sprout if they landed on good soil. Herbivores ate plants; carnivores ate herbivores.
The alpha version of the game was just the framework, a natural world with no intelligent life. Wind could snap trees, and lightning could spark fires. Rivers could be rerouted or made into lakes if something dammed them. What’s more, all changes were just as permanent or as transient as in the real world. If animals weren’t killed, they died of old age or sickness. A random drought could devastate plants, kill weaker root systems, and allow new species to dominate.
After the ecosystem was in place, Jeri’s team introduced humanoids: men, dwarves, elves, and goblins. A handful of other beings were dropped in with the first expansion. Although they appeared to be typical computer-controlled non-player characters (NPCs), they weren’t. All of them were endowed by their creators with the best artificial intelligence the developers could dream up. Just as the creatures imitated the behavior of living animals, the races simulated human beings, with their own needs and motivations. Each programmer tried to outdo the others, and it was interesting to see characters acting on what they saw fit. None of the programmers was exactly sure what would happen once their creations were released into the virtual world, but they had great hopes.