“I still can't believe you took him out of the Realm of Legends. What were you thinking?”
“Look, Farker, he has to know where and when he is. There was nothing in the simulation of Hellas that would have helped him see it. So I took him back to the Realm of Heroes, to a park near Nyork at first. After I tried to break it to him, I showed him the outskirts of the city.”
“So what did he think of the skyscrapers?” Farker wanted to know. “Did he believe you then?”
“I think so: he fainted. After he revived, I took him back to Cheiron's cave so he could have some time to process all this in familiar surroundings.”
“I think I'm going to faint,” Farker announced. “Do you have any idea what you just risked? You don't, do you? Not a fucking clue!”
“He has to know,” she repeated stubbornly. “What else was I supposed to do? What are you so pissed about, anyway?”
Farker took a deep breath, or at least his avatar did. “I already told you, Aes is nothing more than a computer program gone so buggy it seems autonomous. He's a NPC for chrissake! Are you so busy worried about his 'feelings' that you're willing to risk destroying him? NPCs are not supposed to be able to leave their own Realms! Good god, girl, I asked you to babysit him and keep him stable. And what do you do? You take him through a Realm transition and tell him he's been dead for three millennia! Are you trying to crash him, or just trying to make him self-destruct?”
Darla held up a hand. “Stop right there. Aes is not a NPC, Farker, and I can prove it, in terms even you will understand.”
Her statement made him pause in his rant long enough to ask, “How can you prove that?” He still looked angry but it was tempered by curiosity.
Darla smiled sweetly. “Because I Teamed him and got him into a fight with some Jerx. NPCs can't join teams. You must know that since you helped write the game. And he healed me just like a Player. So he is not a NPC, QED. Check the logs and you'll see I'm right.”
Farker scowled at that, but she could see him trying to think a way around it. She smiled inwardly. No matter how angry a nerd gets, she thought, you can always shunt that mental energy into problem-solving mode if you know the right triggers. However smart Farker was, he had an ego. She knew that from his condescension and his outburst before about not being a customer service punching bag.
“All right,” he admitted grudgingly. “Some of the rules don't seem to apply to him anymore. That doesn't make him a person. It only means that the code is in worse shape than I thought. Whatever broke him loose from his temple and made him wander around, it apparently screwed with the boundary checkers, that's all. Somehow forgetting that he's supposed to be a NPC, the system seems to be defaulting to treating him like a real Player. But it proves nothing.”
Darla felt like screaming, but controlled herself with effort. “Do you know his stomach growled in the park? Do you know he bit into an apple and ate it in front of me? Even Players don't eat the scenery! And do you know that he stepped into a campfire to get injured so he could practice healing...then he cried out in pain and I saw the blisters form on his foot? I'm telling you, when I'm with him, Farker, he seems more real than I do!”
“Let me put it this way. You know about the ELIZAs. The PanGames hardware is much bigger and faster than theirs. Do you think that it is self-conscious, aware and feeling like you and me?”
“No,” she said, reluctantly. “As far as I know.”
“And do you accept that no subset of a non-conscious system can be conscious?” He turned to the third avatar floating in null-space with the two of them. “What do you think?”
Finder answered at once. “The logic is sound. Statistical analyses of his speech patterns, however, do not reveal the expected signs of repetitious speech typical of a simple AI.”
“That's what I've been telling you!”
“Of course not,” Farker remarked. “Because he's not a simple AI. The templates I used for NPCs in Realm of Legends were quite advanced self-modifying code. But rearranging the checkers on a board doesn't make the checkers self-aware. It's still just checkers on a board. Aes is just subroutines and algorithms of interactive code. No matter how much he modifies himself, it won't give him actual thoughts or feelings. Even we don't know how to do that, let alone a rogue avatar program.”
“Then how does he act so...real? How does he know to make his stomach growl? Or to make blisters? Don't tell me he learned by watching Players, because my avatar never even gets a bruise, let alone second-degree burns.”
“Okay, I'll admit that's a little weird.” Farker scratched his temple absently. “I have no explanation for any of that...yet. But it's a big leap from saying he does things a NPC can't do to saying he is self-aware. Now, yes,” he agreed, holding up a hand before she could interrupt. “He is certainly a conundrum. Stipulated. Maybe I should stop calling him a NPC. But he's not a Player either. He has never logged in or out.”
Darla shook her head. “He's real. I don't care what the logs say. I wish you could see it. You should talk to him. If there's a chance that he is self-aware, and that you're not just screwing with me in some kind of psychology experiment, then you of all people should be overjoyed. Imagine the fame of creating the world's first actual machine consciousness!”
His avatar grimaced. “Yeah, that would be cool. But I know the limitations of my own work. With all the advances since the War, you'd think we'd have self-aware robots walking around by now. But it hasn't happened. Do you know why?” He shook his head. “Because despite all the research and theorizing, we don't even know how humans are self-conscious. If we don't understand how we think and perceive and feel, how are we supposed to teach it to machines?”
“Maybe the machines are teaching themselves,” she suggested. “We do. I bet the databases and speech files you supply the NPCs with never mention that they aren't real people, do they? You put them in along with human avatars, and make them interactive. It would be strange if they didn't try to be as normal as possible.”
“Have you asked him about his childhood?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, don't. It might destabilize him. I only put in what we know about the historical Asklepios. If you ask him to remember something that isn't in his database he might generate a bunch of uncatchable errors and crash. Then, it would be goodbye Aes. If he is the result of some freak accident we might never recreate it. Whatever messed with his code, I'm surprised he hasn't crashed already. And then you took him through a Realm transition! For all we know he could hit a speed bump in the data and crash any minute. Please don't make that happen.”