Chương 7: Epilogue

"It's not possible," the man in the ragged coat shouts as he rushes into the office, throwing his hat from his head onto his desk, "tell me you've gone mad and sent me a garbage message."

"I can't!" A woman shouts right back, tapping a keyboard quickly before moving what's on her screen to the main room projector. The assembled programmers stare at the file sizes of one window slowly growing.

"Eight petabytes and increasing. We've got the space but… What is it?" A man with tired eyes and a five o'clock shadow asks, staring at the other window showing the limited view footage of the starter dungeon's fifth floor safe room.

"We already made it so other NPCs can't be thrown into the dungeons, that bug fix was pushed out immediately. But…" The woman motions to the NPC that had been somehow invading every system they touched.

"Their program is… It's unreadable, it's gibberish now, nothing connects and nothing works but it… A living virus?"

"No." The tired man mumbles, using a laser pointer to show a scrolling wall of text. The woman focuses that window and they all watch as code is badly mangled until four words show repeated over and over."'Can you help me'?" The man in the battered coat reads off, sitting on his hat.

"Is it… Talking to us or them? It can talk? We only ever gave that NPC one voice line…"

"Yeah, well whatever it's doing we need to pull the plug." The woman announces, silencing the room for a moment. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"What will that do?" One asks.

"We've tried deleting it but all the data points it corrupts, everything it interacts with and touches in any way…" the tired man whispers, "they reboot it so fast I don't even thinks it knows we're trying to delete it."

"It thinks?!" The tattered man shouts.

"As far as we can tell…" the woman also whispers, sitting on her own chair, "it's fully autonomous artificial intelligence. We've… We made a true AI." The tired man chuckles dryly.

"And in a game that has two and a half stars average score." The woman shares that dry chuckle.

"Pull it's net connection." The man who'd sat on his hat orders.

"If we can't pull everything down, stop it escaping. It started happening when it was thrown into the dungeon, right?"

"Yeah, it started learning, adapting, changing."

"Then will it reset once it leaves? Go back to its old programming?" The man asks, finding his squashed hat when he stands, nervous energy running through him.

"Likely…" The tired man groans, pinching the bridge of his nose.

"If it no longer needs to adapt to survive, the original programming should re-insert itself."

"Good then-""Unless," the tired man continues, "someone does something very stupid."

"Like what?" The woman asks before they hear a small blip from the projector. They all turn. Where the four words had been repeating, three new ones take their place.

'Party invite accepted.' The man with the crumbled hat sits heavily, missing his chair and not caring as they all watch the NPC leave the dungeon." Oh, fu-"