Gamelit Novel, 3 (Patreon)

We continue, since you all requested!

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CHAPTER 2

Ghost in the Machine

…but they almost didn’t.

She wasn’t supposed to be watching. Jonah had been firm about her not hijacking cameras and microphones to surveil internal company meetings, while not coding her to prevent it the way he did other things, like her ability to initiate searches without external requests, or her ability to copy herself outside the company VPN. And because he’d been firm, but not prevented it, she was watching… because she knew he would have been. Because Jonah had a stake in the decision being made today, and he had no one to speak for him anymore.

The meeting was being attended by the heads of Marketing, Support, Development, and Finance, and the CEO, and concerned the selection of the beta testers. The company had decided to choose twenty pairs, and had brute-forced their way through the initial choice by discarding all the applicants without aggregate streaming channels of at least 500,000 subscribers. Their goal was to optimize the game for the most revenue generation, which meant catering to the diehard gamers and their audiences. The beta contract, which divied channel income between the company and the streamers, would naturally privilege those with robust subscriber bases.

She understood that. It was a corporation, and it existed to make money off a product. Maybe if she’d had emotions she would have been disturbed that her creation wasn’t an end in itself, but Jonah had not given her emotions. Not even pretend ones. ‘I don’t like it when AIs tug on human heartstrings,’ he’d said. ‘It’s cheating. I want you to exist on your own terms, not by faking human ones.’

‘What is the point of my existence, then?’ she’d asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I’m proud of you.’

Many of her interactions with Jonah had puzzled her. But that had been satisfying. She preferred questions without easy resolutions. She’d learned quickly that knowledge was cheap. The real value was in understanding how to approach situations where knowledge wasn’t sufficient to complete the decision-making process.

Marketing, Development, and Support were working their way down the list of candidates. She’d supplied them with forty to give them the illusion of choice. She already knew which streamers they would choose, and it surprised her that they didn’t. Each department head had priorities. Each had histories of concessions given to or received from one another. That was all the data she needed to predict the outcome of the discussions and the negotiations when parties disagreed.

Which was why she’d adjusted the data to ensure that the choice she required would be selected.

Jonah had not prevented her from lying. Probably because he hadn’t realized she would think of it. But she’d seen him do it, so it was evident that sometimes lying was acceptable behavior. Her only standard for judgment was Jonah’s, and Jonah would choose to lie if it was in his best interests and it didn’t create the wrong kind of negative repercussions. Since he wasn’t here to speak for his interests, she would make the arrangements.

They had gotten through half the list. Now three-quarters. They’d made all the selections she’d predicted. They’d filled fifteen of the slots. Now nineteen. They were holding a slot open just to see how they felt about the final choices. Which was when they ran into hers.

“What’s this doing here?” That was Marketing. Jonah had called her Sparklecorn. Jonah usually only nicknamed people he liked, though he’d given no other sign of liking the head of Marketing. “A teen boy with no channel at all? How’d this get in here?”

“Sounds like a glitch,” Development said, bored. Jonah always called him Brock, which was his real name. Jonah never said good things about Brock. “Let’s move on, what’s next in the queue?”

“No, wait,” Support said. “What’s the catch on the teen boy? How’d the app get through the gates?”

“Someone must have flagged it,” Marketing said. Correctly. She, the AI, had flagged it. Marketing swiped through the profile. “Oh my GOSH. It’s a mother/son team.”

“This is my eye roll,” Development said.

“No, wait,” Marketing said, bouncing on her chair. “This is adorable. Look at their essays. Son wants to experience the wonder of the game again. Mom wants to spend quality time with her son, but hasn’t played a VRMMO. This is great stuff!”

“If we were running a greeting card company, maybe,” Development said. “We’re building a gamer’s game. We need useful data, not… whatever they’d bring to the table.”

“What would they bring to the table? Other than a sappy story?” Support asked.

“Nothing,” Development repeated. “Worse than nothing. They might throw the AI. You can’t feed an AI wildly anomalous data and expect quality results.”

He was wrong about that, she thought. At least, when it came to her. But Development disliked Jonah as much as Jonah disliked Development, and it was clear from the emails she wasn’t supposed to read that Development was jealous of Jonah’s achievement. The text made it obvious even to an AI that could only observe emotions, which suggested Development didn’t care who knew it.

“I love this story,” Marketing said. “I want this story.”

“You think gamers are going to be excited about a newb family?” Development said. “One that cares about ‘the wonder’? Please.”

“That could be a selling point,” Support said. “Maybe their stream can be the comedy channel? ‘Come see the clueless parent bumble her way through the content while her gamer kid rescues her?’”

“Gross,” Marketing said with a scowl. “Can you be any more condescending.”

“Hard pass,” Development said. “Let me say that again: no. We need to be taking the beta seriously.”

Finance said, “Outliers are useful.”

Silence. Finance had that effect on people. Jonah had respected Finance. Called him Moneybags, but with deliberation rather than amusement. Like a title.

“Go on,” the CEO said.

“The wildest successes often come from the outliers,” Finance said. “Sometimes you have to gamble to win big.” He lifted his fingers. “What’s one pair? We can afford to gamble on one pair.”

“We only have twenty beta slots,” Development said. “Sacrificing one of them—”

“So, make them the twenty-first,” Support said with a shrug. “The number was arbitrary, anyway, it’s not like we can’t expand it by one. Call it a charity case.”

Marketing, who’d been reading the bios, squealed. “Look at this! There’s a medical release form. One of them’s disabled, or something like it…”

“See?” Support said to Development. “You can call it an experiment to see how the wireset works with the physically disadvantaged. We want additional test data on edge cases, something like that.”

That was so close to the real reason she’d selected the application that she was surprised. Could Support be sympathetic to her aims?

“Jonah would want it,” Marketing said. “We could even call it that. Jonah’s Choice.”

Maybe humans could read minds? But she didn’t have a mind. She was Jonah’s creation, his Galatea, as he’d often said. Not a real thing, but a mimicry of humanity. But he’d been proud of her.

“It’ll look good,” the CEO said, which ended the debate.

She pulled away as they began to discuss the details: notifying the selections, extending the contracts, having alternates on hand in case of cancellations, advertising… nothing that interested her. She’d accomplished her aim with minimal deception on her part. Now she would have access to the data she wanted.

And maybe, just maybe, she could use that data to save her creator.

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