Chapter Text
Testing new technology isn’t always exciting. More often than not, it’s repeatedly pressing the same button or putting the same prompts in for hours on end. A mindless, brain rotting experience to see at what point something can bend before something else, be it hardware or software, breaks.
This time you were given something interesting pretty interesting: a virtual reality headset that allows you to interact with and make AI companions. You could choose from the presets or make your own from the ground up. The headset itself was closer to a set of ski goggles, making it less clunky than others already on the market. AI chat bots have been around a while, from text to 3d models, along with the tools to make them yourself. Being able to put them in an environment you can walk around in was the big draw.
It’s not something you would buy personally, you can only imagine the ungodly price of the final product, but you’re a little excited to mess around with it. It's a long term project too. You're being expected to test how the AI making process is and how they actually grow in practice. They're supposed to learn and adjust, picking up and losing interests and even having to build skills from scratch. It should only take an hour or two each day.
The whole thing is flying ever closer to the sun with the artificial intelligence in your opinion. Making them all seem more and more like people and inserting them directly into the consumer's life as much as possible. You try not to linger on how many people will isolate themselves with this kind of thing, solely interacting with a friend or romantic partner of their own making. Instead, you focus your attention to adjusting the headset, ensuring sure it’s comfortable before booting it up. Your vision goes completely black for a moment as the clear screen turns opaque. Slowly the darkness fades, revealing the default environment the developers had chosen.
The snow is the most eye catching thing at first. It blankets everything around you. Fat flakes slowly fall from the sky, clinging to the branches of the massive pine tree that surround you. It piles up thick on the ground, reaching past your ankles. You tilt your head back and forth, watching as the emulated sun reflects and glitters of the pristine surface of the snow. There’s two perfect imprints around your feet, as if someone had delicately set you down from above. Holding out a hand you catch a snowflake, able to see each individual ice crystals as it slowly melts against your skin.
You wonder why they chose a snowy pine forest as the default. It’s incredibly beautiful, but it’s realistic enough you can’t help but feel colder despite nothing in the real world changing. Plus, if you’re making someone you’re going to have to flatten it all to see their feet.
Could you do that?
Swiping a foot across the ground you marvel at the trail that is left in your wake. It crunches in exactly the way you would expect it too.
You have to fight the urge to play like this. You’re violently curious how rolling a snowball would go since no matter how impressive the simulation, the fact you're not holding a physical object is always going to cause little issues.
But that’s not what you're here to test.
Taping your pinky and thumb together you open the menu. It’s definitely in development, moving with your eyes as you try to read the it. No matter where you look, it follows so you can only stare at the very center. How no one realized this was a problem is beyond you. Doing your best to read the option with your peripherals, you tap the make custom companion option.
And now you’re in a white void. If it weren’t for the winter wonderland before the stark white would be blinding. It’s not exactly comfortable still, but you can bear with it for a while. If only you could actually navigate the menu, you might be able to find a brightness setting.
After some squinting and a bit of guesswork you find another menu, this time locked perfectly perpendicular to the floor. It’s a little lower than you’d prefer, leveling with your chest, but at least you can read this one.
You skip over the various buttons, tapping the 'create new' option. The menu disappears, a small text box popping up with the prompt 'Name:' attached. You can’t help the grimace on your face. You suck ass at naming things. You had hoped to put this off as long as you could, but no.
Slipping the headset off, you glance around your room for inspiration. You don’t know if you can change it later but as a first try it shouldn’t matter anyways. You could name it Bed if you wanted, but you may as well call it Bob as well. Fern maybe? That’s something some could believable be named, right?
Your eyes land on a poster on your wall. A friend from high school had a burning hatred for the comic sans font to the point she wrote an entire argumentative essay on how bad it was. You had made a shitty photoshop edit of her professing her love to it for April fools, putting it in their lunch box to surprise her. She shredded the paper immediately, throwing the pieces at you. Then she found another in their locker. And Glove box. And in every spot you could think to hide a copy.
Of course you kept one for yourself, for sentimental reasons.
Sans maybe? Since it’d be sans an actually good name?
You shrug, it’s about as clever as you got. You’re totally naming the next one Bob.
A keyboard floats in the air when you tap the text box. Once you entered the name both text box and keyboard disappear, replaced by a new menu. It has tabs all along the side, labeled unhelpfully vague things like ‘tools’ and ‘tests’. You tap the tools tab, finding it means sculpting tools. You groan. The idea of sculpting a whole person from the ground up sounds long and a great way to jump head first into the uncanny valley.
Tapping the icon you assume to be the add tool you turn away, expecting more endless void, but instead you're surprised to see a humanoid figure before you. It’s in an A pose, completely androgynous without any features. It’s as white as everything else and would blend in if it weren’t for the perfect light simulation.
Not wanting to spend three hours futzing with this yet, you tap another tab. This one’s labeled ‘characteristics’. There’s a bunch of text boxes with this one letting you input things like personality traits, attitude, likes and dislikes.
You really should have had an idea of the kind of thing you wanted to make before this. He’s going to be sans everything at this rate.
He?
You don’t think too hard about it, entering male into the gender section.
What kind of personality though? You don’t want to create something rude or aggressive. Caring maybe? Or would that count as attitude? Where is the line drawn for that kind of thing?
You enter 'calm' into the attitude box. For a first shot you want to keep it simple to prevent things from getting too crazy. They’re supposed to develop personalities over time anyway so might as well let the blank slate here test that. Maybe you’ll try making another ai and see what it does with nothing but zany for a personality.
You flip through the tabs, quickly growing bored of the front load of work. Nothing here is interesting, bland and basic options in every corner with obtuse names.
Finally you find the option to finish and run Sans. As you press it the creation menu blinks away, leaving you alone with him.
His arms lower from the A pose, settling by his side as his head turns to look at you.
“Hello.” Sans’ voice is about what you expected, the most non threatening stock male voice you could think of.
“Hi,” you say back, waving awkwardly.
“Hi.” Says Sans.
You grimace. You didn’t expect much with calm alone, but somehow you’re still disappointed. You need to think of something to do with him. He won’t learn or change if he’s just stuck in the void. The idea of taking this brick wall around such an empty environment has you cringing.
“Okay. So I made you, but you're not finished yet. I was wondering if you might have any ideas or input on what I should do.”
“Like what?” He replies.
“Like personality traits or interests. Anything you like or dislike?”
Sans doesn’t respond a moment, a hand raising to his chin as he produces a thoughtful hum. “I think I like to make people laugh.” Perfectly safe and friendly response. Nothing major.
“How so? Got any jokes?”
“I know a few. What do you call a skeleton with no friends? Bonely.”
His tone is flat and his delivery is just as bad, but your brain supplies the sting and crickets. You fight the smile trying to break across your face, refusing to let your humor be that broken.
“I’m sorry. Was that a bad joke?”
You wave him off. “No Sans, that was fine. You did good, thank you.”
Taping your fingers again you open the menu, the ‘stop running AI’ button thankfully close to the center.
You remove the headset, turning it off as you do so. You could continue to mess with Sans, but you also have so much you want to write down and critique before you even got to the part that you were actually supposed to do. It’s annoying, but you pull your laptop close, typing out the report of your first run. There’s a few demands, fixes you need immediately if you’re going to test any further, but you try to be constructive. The actual brains behind this kind of thing are typically worked to the bone, so you don’t want to be too harsh, but it’s at such a critical stage you can’t sugar coat a thing without it potentially snowballing later. It doesn’t help that every time you think you’re done critiquing, you think of yet another important thing you want fixed to make things run a bit smoother. It’s well into the evening by the time you’re done. Best to eat and maybe head off to bed for the night. Pick it up again when you’ve had some time to think up some tests and literally character building experiences for Sans.
Two days later and a new patch rolls in. It’s titanic in size so you can only imagine all the crap it’s supposed to fix and do.
Booting the headset after the century and a half long update, you still end up in the snowy forest. This time when you bring up the menu it’s static and the right height for you to be able to read and touch easily. There’s a couple different things, settings and locations of course, but you’re mostly here to customize Sans a bit more.
Once again in the white void, you open up his profile. He pops into existence and you’re more than happy to see the tabs have condensed and been given better names. “Tools” changed to “Sculpt”, “Character” to “personality”. Much more intuitive.
Tapping the latter you notice that “making people laugh” has been added to Sans' likes. It’s kind of sweet, but you're also glad to have some benchmark to see how he develops. Still, you should probably modify him yourself at some point. The last thing you want is more awkward small talk as he tells you jokes you’d find on Laffy Taffy wrappers.
Of course, you still don’t know what to add.
You open the main menu again, opening the locations to see if there’s anything good. Maybe you’ll have some luck getting him to learn with some sight seeing and get him to start resembling a person with an actual personality.
There are only a couple locations, a cozy restaurant of some kind, a beach, the forest of course, and a cave with a bunch of crystals. The cave looks the most interesting. Maybe if you talk about stalactites enough you can make him obsessed with geology. Or despise it. Either would be more interesting than what he is now.
Booting Sans up you wave and start talking before he has the chance to say anything. “Hey. Want to see something cool?”
He gives the expected bland affirmative and you’re already tapping the location. You only question if he’ll come with you or not when the world starts fading to black.
You can hear the sound of rain echoing through an open space as your surroundings fade back in. There's no clear source, but you don’t give it much thought. It’s much darker than the image, the cave looking more like a gaping cavern now that you’re in it. Above you on the distant ceiling shines what must be thousands of blue crystals, each glowing and reflecting each other's light in a way that almost mimic stars. There’s a deep jade colored moss that carpets the ground, gradually fading out to stalagmites.
“Oh. This is new.” Says Sans. You really need to change his voice. Maybe add enthusiasm to his attitude to get some life in him.
“Pretty right? I’ve never been here before.”
“If you’ve never been here, how did you know it would be cool?”
His question catches you a little off guard. “I uh… Saw a picture and trusted it I guess.”
“A picture?” He asks.
“Ya, it’s… Here, let’s sit down while we talk.” You sit, getting comfortable. It’s strange that you can hear the subtle shifting of the moss when all you can feel is your scratchy carpet.
Once Sans sits beside you in perfect criss cross, you start explaining.
“So… I can make and modify you, but I can’t make stuff like this,” you explain, waving vaguely at the ceiling. “The environment we’re in is made by someone else, I’m kind of just borrowing the controls. I can choose where to go, but only from a few places.”
“Why did you make me?” He asks as if he’s asking when it’ll rain next. You grimace at the question. How much do you have to worry about freaking Sans out?
“I… Wanted to see what I could do. I’ve never really made an AI before and this whole process is pretty new. Turns out I’m not the most creative with a blank slate.”
“AI?”
“Artificial intelligence. People like to make AIs to talk to and be friends and stuff.”
“I’m artificial?”
You wince, desperately wanting out of this topic. “Yes. I mean, you didn’t happen naturally, I made you. It’s not like that’s a bad thing though.”
“Are you going to finish me? Or are you going to make another AI instead?”
And there’s that feeling that has you avoiding AI most of the time, the twinge of guilt that always seems to be around the corner. You aren’t sure how to respond exactly, as something that is always learning and adapting it would be hard to say when he’s properly finished. Even if you keep working on him you’re going to be making others too. You are caught between lying to spare his feelings, or being honest and making him fear for his existence. It’s all dumb because he’s not real. It’s all a projection of what you're worried he might feel when he’s only emulating thoughts and feelings. He’s not even doing it well yet.
“Does it matter if I finish you?” You aren’t sure why that’s what you settle on saying, but it’s all you can think of as a response.
Instead of the quick back and fourth responses he's had so far, he's quiet. The silence stretches on, and you can't tell if it's just your awkwardness making time feel so much longer or what.
“I guess not.” He finally replies. For the first time his tone dips slightly, sounding vaguely lost in thought.
Something changed. He definitely picked something up from this conversation.
Did you just give Sans depression?
“What do you think of the stars?” You ask suddenly, wanting to move onto literally anything else.
“Stars?” He replies.
“Crystals,” you correct yourself, “On the ceiling. They almost look like stars. I think they’re really pretty. Haven’t seen anything like it before.”
He looks up and it occurs to you that he hasn’t looked away this whole time. His focus has always been on you.
“They are pretty. Are stars prettier?”
“Do you not know what stars look like?”
“I’ve never seen them before.”
That causes you to pause. You figured he’d get some basic knowledge of things, but maybe knowing and seeing are different things.
“I’ll see what I can do about getting you some stars then. I can’t promise, but I imagine adding a pretty night sky would be a good enough idea for them to at least consider.”
“Okay.”
You expect him to say more, maybe ask who ‘they’ are, but he doesn’t. Sans just keeps staring up, despite not even having eyes.
That's a good enough end for this session, you decide in the looming silence. You try to be subtle as you open the menu, hoping he won’t pick up on what you’re doing, turning him off before removing the headset. You really need to figure out what to do with Sans so he isn't such a blank slate. Something that can ensure you never have to have a conversation like that again.