Prologue
Botcorp Headquarters
Chicago, IL
“Boss, she’s ready,” the software engineer said, excitement in her voice.
The Chief Technology Officer didn’t take his eyes off of his work. He continued to move holographic screens around using quick hand motions. “You know we don’t use abstractions like that around here, Abigail. Give me specifics.”
“Sorry, Sir. We’re at 81%.”
That caused a pause. The CTO looked at Abigail. “Eighty-one percent? That’s a massive breakthrough. How did this happen? We were at seventy-five percent during yesterday’s check-in.”
“Sir, with the launch of Integration Online less than 24 hours away, I asked my team to stay through the night. We were stuck at 76% until 3:30 a.m. when Mani reworked a set of code that we thought was a dead-end months ago. It brought our Artificial Intelligence’s capacity—”
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“Abigail,” the CTO stopped her. “Please, don’t call her ‘Our Artificial Intelligence’. She’s had entry-level sentience since 50% capacity. Call her by her name.”
“Sorry, Sir,” Abigail said, rubbing her hands together the way she did when she got nervous. She forced herself to put her hands at her side. “It brought Clarity’s capacity up to 81%. Now she can impersonate 81% of all human emotions. When she functions in Integration Online, humans won’t have any idea that she’s not human within the game.”
“And what about the developers of IO? Will they be able to find her in their game?”
“I can’t promise anything,” Abigail said, “but we have a couple of advantages. First, Clarity won’t be doing the usual things that bots do. As you know, this isn’t about grinding out game resources. So they won’t expect her. Second, we’re working hard every day to get her capacity to 100%. Once we hit 90%, she’ll be smarter and more creative than most humans. She’ll be unstoppable.”
The CTO frowned. “And what’s to stop her from hacking the game? Making up her own rules. Writing new code in.”
Abigail’s eyebrows furrowed. “No. That would never happen. It’s against her mission objective. Even if it were possible, Clarity wouldn’t expose herself to the game developers like that. Integration Online developers would spot her in an instant. She’ll play by their rules.”
The CTO smiled. “You have permission to let Clarity enter the game at launch.”
Abigail pumped her fist. “Thank you, sir. We’ll get right on it.”