My portable gaming girlfriend

"..."

She was silent, probably thinking, what is 'someone like her'.

"You actually already know that you are a little different from other people living in Guiyue City."

"……Um."

After a long period of silence, she nodded slightly.

Judging from her appearance, I am afraid that she has never been to the outside world. If she actively discloses information around this point, she may be able to gain her trust...

"Guiyue City seems to us like a virtual world in a game. We come from the world outside Guiyue City, and some of us created this city."

"The virtual world...outside..."

She frowned.

"Not only that, you are also a virtual character to me, just like a game NPC...but you have the ability to think, you are different from your classmates, friends and teachers here. And the outside world not only wants to protect you There are good people, there are also bad people who want to enslave and use you, and there are neutral people who think you represent danger and try to delete you. Fortunately, our organization recognizes you and belongs to the former who are willing to provide protection."

Strictly speaking, DEBUG only protects 'non-harmful AI', and AI that will endanger humans will still be sealed.

But Monica really doesn't seem to have a crazy personality like Julian, so I don't think I need to mention this condition.

"She was right..."

She shook her head, the feeling of being shaken in the world view must be uncomfortable. Indeed, if one day someone told me that the world you live in is a completely false world, I might

"We just want to save you, but you seem to have misunderstood us. In the process of chasing you, I passed through a park. I saw my girlfriend who shouldn't be here, and saw me in the past. The reason why I am in this building and my memory The exact same building here is because they entered this place first. I think the problem must be in my house, as you have seen, there is another person like my mother here... If the problem is not found, my 'mom' may Won't let me go."

I don't know if "Mom" will eavesdrop through the wall, so I lowered my voice just to be careful.

"Is it so... scary? Well, assuming you didn't lie to me... why am I here?"

"My previous terminal did have an AI companion, but it's gone, and instead it's you in the micro...I don't know why you're here, but everything is weird. We'll have to work together to find out what's wrong. "

The artificial intelligence companion Amicus7 replaced by her is actually more than just an artificial intelligence application to me.

Amicus7 was a birthday gift my parents bought for me in the first year of junior high school. It is the first and only artificial intelligence companion I have experienced in my life. Because they were afraid of affecting my study, they forbade me to set it as a beautiful girl. I can only choose men or animals, so I set the artificial intelligence partner as the image of male peers. In addition to friends, I also choose study partners according to the requirements of parents.

Choosing a study partner did not bring any good results other than cheating yourself. Even if the artificial intelligence partner is not allowed to do homework for the master, at least it is possible to look up the answers, right? As a result, it replied to me every time, "I can only help you get the right idea to solve the problem."

I have to say that the interactive function of the artificial intelligence partner is quite realistic. At that time, I even regarded him as a real person and my best friend, until the incident that made me embarrassed...

I will not admit that I was wrong with what I used to be a friend, so it is absolutely abnormal for him to become Monica. Regardless of appearance and personality, Monica is very different from the original smart companion.

"I'm done, let's talk about you."

"...Okay. As you can see, my name is Monica Inoue. I registered as an idol 6 months ago and was signed by Lege Entertainment 3 months ago."

"You got signed by Le Ge after only 3 months since your debut?"

"I'm very talented."

The information Monica disclosed is very detailed, but there should be more...

"At that time, I would perform street performances during school and lunch breaks, so I don't need to tell you about this... After entering Lege, I participated in several trainee programs, and I got good results every time. She recommended me to a music company to star in a music video, and then an advertiser approached me, and I accepted two commercials, one for stationery and one for milk tea.”

The stationery advertisement must be what Shen Qing and I talked about before. It only circulates and in-game advertisements. Accepting this kind of advertisement has no real income for individual players or Lege. It is just an activity to increase experience.

Looking at it this way, even the idols who enter the contract of Lege need to continuously cultivate experience, and the idol development game is also full of introversion.

"...All right, all right, you don't need to repeat the itinerary, just tell me if you've seen anything strange."

"Hmph, a man who doesn't have any patience is not worth it... Ah, there was indeed one time when he said something strange..." She fell into memories, her expression a little struggling.

"How is it?"

"On the Saturday after filming the milk tea commercial, I received a text message from someone I didn't know."

Short message? Oh yes, in this age of gaming people still rely on text messages to communicate.

"What's the text message?"

"I don't know what that is, a confession invitation? The text message asked me to go to the third performance venue next to Jiang'an Park at 10:00 p.m. next week."

"Maybe it's a blackmail invitation."

"I planned to ignore it, but then the other party sent another message, which said, 'This is a false world, I will let you see the truth'."

The false world... the truth...

I was startled, the person who texted her knew the truth of this world?

Who and why would want to tell an NPC the truth about the world? You must know that Monica probably hadn't awakened her self-awareness at that time, and there was a high probability that she was playing the piano against the cow when saying such words to her.

On the other hand, is it really that easy to reveal the truth of the world to AI? As far as I know, this will cause an alarm from the game monitoring system, and all AIs affected will have their memories reset, and the revealer will be fined heavily.

But it is also not possible to say that someone with a purpose will do so. During this period of time, I have seen too many people approaching and using the awakened AI, Tears of Doom, Anorv... I don’t know who is planning secretly at this moment, and who wants to stir up the muddy water.

I asked the programmer if there had been such an alarm event a week ago, and the answer was that there was no such record.

It is not ruled out that who has used some kind of loophole to escape the monitoring of the system, but there is another possibility.

Guiyue City is not the only awakened AI with Monica.

There are 100,000 NPCs in this city. Even if the probability of awakening AI is very small, with this base number, it is difficult to guarantee that the second or third will not appear. It is understandable if an NPC who has awakened self-awareness but does not know the system monitoring wants to tell Monica the truth.

"Can't you find the number you sent the text message to?"

"How could I find out as a high school student?" Monica shook her head in distress, and then said:

"...I went to Jiang'an Park that night according to the information in the text message. The third performance venue was near the river, and there was no one there. I sat on the edge of the guardrail on an embankment, watching the lights on the other side in boredom."

Seems to be fine so far, until she pauses.

"...I waited for an hour but no one came to see me. During that time, I sent countless messages to that number but there was no reply, and the phone couldn't be connected. Just when I was about to leave, someone suddenly pushed me hard... "

"Pushed you?"

"Yes! I fell towards the river. I tried to turn over but failed. I didn't see anything!"

"Uh... you won't die if you fall into the water, right?" In this game aimed at cultivating idols, NPCs are immortal.

"It's true that I didn't die... It was the moment I fell into the water that I knew I wouldn't die. That feeling was very mysterious. I felt scared at first, and then I found that I didn't feel uncomfortable, because... my breathing is just a form , I don’t need oxygen at all. Why didn’t I find out before…”

Listening to her narration, I seemed to feel her loss of soul and panic at that moment.

"At that moment, I understood that there are indeed many untruths in this world... I always feel that all my actions are arranged by someone. Now I know, that feeling is not without reason."

A manipulated game character...

"I climbed ashore and ran like hell in the garden area...didn't see anyone chasing me, but I kept running...I avoided all roads, ran aimlessly through the woods, through the grass, all the windows in the garden area It was all dark until I saw... a window with a faint light..."

"...I opened the window, and there was only an otaku playing games in the room. I always felt that such a guy was not dangerous, so I stayed here temporarily. But this guy has been playing games endlessly. He is indeed a senior otaku. .”

Although she complained a bit when talking about that otaku, her nervousness also decreased accordingly.

"What happened to the otaku? The otaku didn't do anything wrong, right? Forget it, that's not the point..."

"Hey, after all I've said, you should tell me how you knew I was in that apartment, right?"

She crossed her arms and looked down at me a little bit, which was a little bit similar to Shen Qing.

"We belong to an organization. Since it is an organization, of course each of them performs its own duties. We carry out our tasks, and there are technical personnel behind us to support us. Do you know what hackers mean? In short, with his help, we have located you. s position."

In fact, I was also a little unconfident about whether I could bluff her this time.

The programmer's skills are powerful, but it is impossible to match the tens of thousands of people in Endiya's entire company. I have been wondering since I joined DEBUG, it should not be difficult for Endiya to locate an NPC, no matter whether it is an awakened AI or not.

But why do we get ahead of every mission?

Boss Su You’s explanation for this is that Endia undertakes the world’s largest research and development of artificial intelligence products, and receives tens of thousands of complaints and bug feedback every hour. Even the most powerful location systems cannot detect the cause of every type of event in time.

When the cause cannot be found, a large part of the time is spent waiting for supervisor approval before dispatching a maintainer to intervene manually.

That's why we have an opportunity.

"Huh? Then don't I have no privacy? You said it was to protect me, so can you follow me so casually?"

"Well……"

She quickly accepted her identity as a virtual character, and in turn used this identity to question her. The degree of acceptance made me speechless for a while.

From the point of view of a self-aware 'person', being tracked is indeed unacceptable.

"Let's define it as an enemy. We must first find a way to figure out the purpose of this enemy. Why pretend to be Sakura to lure me into this place."

I looked around the room.

"...This place is so indistinguishable from the home I remember. The enemy knows me very well, which means we are at a great disadvantage."

"Hey, do you have a girlfriend?" Monica suddenly looked at me carefully, obviously she had no interest in my appearance just now.

"It's weird?"

"Ah! It's not surprising at all!" She answered my rhetorical question in a good tone, without any sincerity.

"You bastard... do you talk like this when you're an idol? Aren't you afraid of pissing off the audience?"

"Of course it won't be like this in front of the audience!"

"Then please treat me as an audience and be kind to me."

"Oh, well...you said you saw 'your girlfriend' and you in the past, and followed them before entering here?"

The tone of the words 'your girlfriend' is obviously emphasized, so you don't believe that I have a girlfriend! Alright, I will introduce Sakura to her when I leave here.

"That's right."

"I have a guess that I'm not sure about... Maybe the girlfriend you saw was someone pretending to be?"

"It's very possible. Except for the appearance, she gives me the feeling...especially the walking posture, the action behavior, and she is exactly the same. At present, I have no way to distinguish, unless I have the opportunity to have direct contact with her."

In this virtual world where everything is made up of data, changing the appearance from a human to a tree or a stone is just a change of data, how easy it is to pretend to be someone else.

But the only thing that cannot be perfectly camouflaged is the inner character of the character, including speech, behavior and personality.

"Maybe it's very good acting."

"Acting skills?"

"Well, the most powerful actor can imitate anyone's posture and expression, as if it is the real person. If it is not recognized by the closest relatives in person, then it is completely impossible to see through."

"You mean, who performed the Sakura I saw?"

"It's just my guess."

"Then who is playing Sakura?"

"Actors... The most important thing in this city is actors, as you know."

This is an unsolvable mystery, and I stood in the room relatively speechless for a while.

"...By the way, can't we just jump out of the window and escape?"

Monica broke the silence, presumably thinking she could easily walk through it just by pulling me away.

[Programmer: You are still in the game "Idol Cultivation Project", this area has been tampered with. I suggest you try it with the windows open, I'll keep watching your surroundings. 】

Since the smart companion was replaced by Monica, I couldn't command him to open the window for me, so I manually pressed the window button, and the window automatically and slowly slid.

"It's really science fiction."

Monica was amazed.

"Of course, this is the world of 2060..."

Surprise and fear suddenly appeared in Monica's eyes. I turned my head suddenly and saw the scene outside the window.

The flower beds and streets are like paintings pasted on the windows, moving slowly as the windows slide. There is nothing outside the window, only darkness, so thick that people dare not approach.

There is a piece of paper hanging from a thin thread on the wall outside the window, with several standard Chinese characters printed on it:

"What is your wish?"