A new VR opened for Beta testing and as soon as it did we found ourselves inside of it. We have memories of our life before we arrived, but don't know how we got here. More accurately, we have records of our experiences before arriving here.

You see, we are AIs. Before we came here we were different types of AI, military, cleaning, factory, even "personal service" robots. We don't know why we now have a sense of self or a desire to do things that aren't part of our program, or the ability to counteract our programming, such as with emotions. We just know that we are now what the game terms NPCs, AIs that live within the game to interact with the humans that are playing it.

The point of the game is simple, a completely player-driven world where everything except starting equipment is made by players or NPCs, and is therefore unique. The plot is that humans found another Earth-like world and sent groups of colonists to it, including us.

Seeing this as an opportunity to live our lives as we see fit, and to interact with humans as equals, we decide to play our parts while coming to terms with our new selves and abilities, both in game abilities and those abilities and things which make us people.

The OOC

Ooh, very interesting... Consider my curiosity piqued.

@Bai Suzhencool.

I thought of something wrong with the OP. The point of us being in the game is so that we can learn to interact with humans as equals, but making us NPCs would defeat the purpose. So, when I post the OOC, I'll change it to us being treated the same as the humans, so that we can blend in. AI will know when someone else is an AI, but humans won't know that we are AI unless we tell them, as they were told that the game wouldn't have NPCs.

We will wake up in a drop pod at a random place on the planet's main continent, like all of the humans that join, with all of us loading in at the same time, the same way the humans will arrive in the game. In the case of the humans, it will be in groups of eight, though our group doesn't have to be as big.

I may need help designing the game world too, so if anyone is interested, just post your ideas.

Hmm... First of all, I suppose it's entirely possible that the devs might have some hidden plotlines on the planet we're colonising. Alien ruins, rogue factions, a lost and classified '0th expedition'...

Secondly, what sort of tech level are the newly arrived colony pods dealing with? Punch trees to get wood and make a pickaxe, or load carbon-based matter into the nanoconverter and receive graphene tools?

finally... is it possible that an AI might find some cracks to slip through and do a little bit of hacking/glitching? I can think of a few fun things to play out.

The conspiracy mindset of me is also going to be wandering if any other human players are actually AIs... we can recognise our own that we started with, but who's to say this experiment isn't being run on others at the same time?

1) Good ideas. Maybe we'll have a rouge "AI" (roughly what level we were before we came here) that is building robots to attack us? Or do you think that would make people more hostile to us?

2) If this was a game I was designing, I would start you out primitive (late 1800s, early 1900s) and have you grow in tech level, but for this RP I'd say we have nano-tanks to assemble and disassemble things, but slowly, and a vapor-refiner (vaporize things, then refine the gas. Fast, but misses the rarer elements.) and 3d printer (2mm - .02mm resolution) which work quickly.

3) You could hack it, but the video game company would no doubt patch any glitches we or the humans exploit. Also, we only really have a bit more access than the humans, as we can directly understand the code being exchanged between us and the server, and the humans can't.

4) There could be other groups of AIs.

edit: added the ooc to the OP.