Streets of Hope

Doki Doki Literature Club!

Your thoughts?

"Just Monika."

...that's it? Huh, I guess I was expecting a bit more. Oh well, sorry to bother you. xD

"Nah, I'm just fucking with you. 

Thing is, AI snippets gone psycho hasn't happened in our gravity well. You want horror stories about fake girls or fake boys picking up a nanofil scalpel and slashing left and right; head to Paradise.

The UN's Extrasolar Affairs had a case that sent Dad out of the solar system for a couple months. Pilus entertainer'd picked up on just how catchy Earth culture could be, so he started an android-based hotel in Sector Four. Each wing on each floor came with its own greeter and assistant, and he had a bunch of reconstructed personalities going, between John Wayne, Nelson Mandela, Abe Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte or Edgar Poe. The Maintainer clusters worked fine for about a year, the machine-learning algos making the 'bots out to feel increasingly like the real people they were based on. Imagine an Animatronic of your favorite US President getting better at an exponential basis, going from corny re-spins of popular quotes for maid-service jobs to feeling eerily lifelike. Imagine going for a long-term stay and seeing Fake Abe go from the lapel-clasping and good-nartured smiles to asking about axes and decent weight trainers, practicing impromptu speeches or asking of the patrons that they meet him on the fourth floor's salon to vote on quote-unquote 'crucial additions to the Democratic State of the Terraverse Hotel's Fourth Floor'...

Now, Fake Abe didn't snap. The reconstructed personality profile didn't come with latent psychosis or megalomania or anything. I mean, we didn't call him Honest Abe for nothing. Fake Poe snapped. Turns out, if you reconstruct Poe's mind at its most tortured, you're reconstructing cases of delirium tremens and alcohol withdrawal symptoms. The bot used Replicator mass to synthesize bricks over months and then got to work over the span of a single evening: he killed everyone that even vaguely could be construed to look like Virginia Poe across the entire hotel complex. That's sixteen women. Those who had husbands missed seeing their hubbies getting drugged, gagged and bound in the bathroom, the doors bricked and mortared shut Cask of Amontillado style.

Fake Abe, Fake Roosevelt, Fake Churchill and Fake Muneshige Tachibana held their ground against Fake Poe while the Dusters got here. Idiots thought it'd be great to give a reconstructed Japanese warlord a real katana he'd use around hotel patrons. By the time Renny got there, Fake Poe had been shot, stabbed, dismembered and decapitated. Dad had been called in for forensics and security work, Renny solved the deal by ordering Terraverse closed and the 'bot armatures flushed. The Maintainer clusters were wiped, and those that'd contained Fake Poe's program were tossed out of the station.

Story goes Fake Poe had spent the last forty-five minutes of its life gibbering, blowing holes into walls with a plasma shotgun, shouting Nevermore at his former colleagues, and cawing like a raven. The others had just fallen into their defensive protocols and done everything they could to protect the patrons that couldn't escape.

So... Yeah. Nobody on Earth is super-stoked about the idea of game characters turning self-aware. It feels too real."