While Jeri waited for her computer to boot, she found the television remote, and the flat panel came on. Jeri typed her logon name and password, then rushed to the bathroom while the machine finished loading.

“. . . . that would kill Troth, wouldn’t it?” a male voice from the television asked.

Troth! Holy shit! They’re talking about Realms of Rah on TV!

“That’s unclear,” another man responded.

“I think we should repeat that a lot is unclear at this point. DysanSoft has yet to make any statements other than to say they are looking into the situation,” said a third person, this time a woman.

Jeri didn’t recognize the voices, but it didn’t matter. Morning news shows were all the same: a bunch of men in suits and a blond woman in a skirt.

“It’s probably just some form of guerrilla marketing. Some gimmick to get free advertising. Well, I guess it worked, but it could end up backfiring. If your brand scares people, it becomes toxic. The creepy Burger King commercials lost the fast food giant market share,” added one of the men.

“Well I, for one, am plenty scared,” the woman said. “I’ve never cared for video games and don’t let my kids play them. They’re dangerous—they really are. How many Columbines do we need before people start realizing this? Millions of kids are being desensitized to violence, losing what little social skills they might have, and becoming psychopathic shut-ins. Am I right? I mean if Congress would have passed some legislation to regulate gaming, we wouldn’t be here. We have no idea what this Troth guy might start telling our kids. With all the hype, they’re bound to listen to him. This could be the start of some online cult, a way to mind-control our children!”

“Well, if it is a person or a corporation that’s doing the puppeteering, for whatever reason, that’s one thing,” one of the men interjected. “But let’s go back to the idea that it might be real. That changes everything. In a way it’s like discovering life on Mars, right?”

“I think it’s dangerous and should be turned off, unplugged, or whatever the heck they need to do to protect our children.” The woman again. Her voice grated.

There must be thousands of applicants for every opening on television. Why do they have to hire every reactionary, irritating moron with a teeth-drag-on-fork voice?

“But if it isn’t a hoax—and again I want to repeat for our viewers that nothing has been confirmed—let’s consider the possibilities. Artificial intelligence may have advanced to the point of achieving sentience, and Troth is—”

“What do you mean by sentience?” the woman asked.

Jeri cringed. Are they paying her to act stupid?

“I mean I know what it means,” the woman said, and Jeri imagined she had gotten some rolled eyes from the others. “But I’m sure someone in our audience isn’t familiar with the term. It’s just not that common of a word, you know?”

“Self-aware,” someone else said. “Troth appears to be self-aware, the definition of intelligent life. That would mean he would have rights, including the right to exist. Turning off the server could be interpreted as murder.” This voice wasn’t as clear as the others, and Jeri guessed they had a specialist weighing in via satellite.

“Which brings us to the Amnesty International petition which now has over 325,000 signatures.”

Jesus, how long has this been going on? I only went to bed six hours ago!

“Which is just ridiculous,” the woman said. “I still think the person behind this is a pervert trying to lure our children away, or some cult leader. But even if Professor Hubert is right about this whole awareness thing, it doesn’t change the facts. This Troth character is not alive. He’s a bunch of electronic dots, or what do you call them? You know, pixies.”

Several people laughed.

“Pixies?” Jeri said to the bathroom tile, which gleamed under the overhead light. “C’mon. “My grandmother is seventy, and even she knows computers aren’t made of fairies.”

“Pixels,” someone corrected.

“Whatever. As I said, I’m no expert on video games. I thought I established that.” Her tone was defensive. “But this Troth doesn’t even have a body, so how can he be alive?”

Any doubt that the woman was more than a talking head vanished. No journalist would tarnish her own industry this way, just as no priest would admit the Bible was on his to-read stack right under Fifty Shades of Grey.

“An amoeba is alive; a germ is alive, and they don’t have bodies—not like we do, at least.”

“But this Troth thing can’t exist outside of a computer.”

“And people can’t exist outside Earth’s atmosphere, either.”

“Of course they can!” the woman nearly shouted. “They’re called astronauts.”

“Astronauts aren’t existing outside the atmosphere, they bring it with them, contained in ships and suits. Troth could do the same thing. Just put a laptop running Realms of Rah on a spaceship.”

“But that’s not the same. Troth can’t build a spaceship and pilot it.”

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.

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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.”