A Crown's Bargain
When an AI story character escapes, it's not exactly clear if it's worth getting him back.
This short story was written in early 2025 simply for the love of writing science fiction. Enjoy!
"...I don't think anyone was expecting this kind of reaction," said Jillian, absentmindedly wiping some dust off her fiberglass desk. The detective had been there for ten minutes, longer than she preferred. Her job as Conglomerate's lead attorney had always been damage control, but this particular debacle was way beyond their usual fanfare.
Detective Horowitz's interview transcription scrolled at low opacity over his optic implants, but his gaze never left Conglomerate's counselor. She wasn't lying... but there was more here. "Can you tell me more about your company? I know Conglomerate makes Storyart, but give me some specifics for context."
Jillian exhaled a little too loudly, but leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. "Plot Conglomerate is a loose collective of enterprise entertainment companies and independent creators. We pool all our resources to iterate story creation quickly and cheaply to craft bespoke interactive narrative experiences for new works, and also for existing IP franchises."
"Does that include porn?"
Jillian looked at Horowitz with a disapproving eyebrow. The question on everyone's mind, apparently. She twisted her mouth to one side, measuring her words.
"Conglomerate has no... official division offering that niche product, no. If people want to mod stories on their own server, we can't stop them. Once you buy a Storyart, it's yours to shape as you wish."
"Fair enough. How much customization happens at the root level? From you, I mean."
"Are you asking how much allowance we set on the creativity sliders?"
"For characters, specifically, yes."
Jillian stood and walked to her window, taking in the view of the distant spaceport, the vast metropolis dominating the foreground. From the spaceport, a gigantic alabaster space liner lifted gracefully upwards, red and green lights blinking in intervals. How much can I answer without revealing trade secrets?
"If you could keep this confidential, I would appreciate it, Detective. We don't publicly talk about this part of our business model for good reason."
"Unless it ends in criminal prosecution, none of it will come to light. You have my word."
Jillian nodded in satisfaction. "Nearly all our characters come pre-set with a 90% base stabilityâusers can only change them up to 10%. On occasion, we do release NPC charactersâlike psychotics, dream players, and the likeâwith a far lower stability rating, around 70%. Those types of characters are inherently unpredictable, so we give them a much longer leash, if you'll permit the metaphor."
The Detective wincedâit was a poor choice of words, but he overlooked it. "And you noticed one of these characters in the wild two weeks ago?"
"As I said earlier, we first realized the scope of the leak only two weeks ago, yes. Though it was clearly going on for much longer than that. Months, possibly."
Horowitz was pulling up a previous part of their conversation, scanning it.
"This character you mentioned," he said, "Harry Crown... he was a 90% base stability character, correct?"
"Originally, yes. By the time he came to our attention, someone had obviously modded his rating."
"By how much?"
"You must understand, most characters never go below 70%, and even that is rare. Of the tens of thousands of active characters from our stories, only a handful have ever gone lower than 70. Only three have ever gone lower than 60â"
"âand Crown was at?"
Jillian took a deep breath, and turned to look at the Detective. "We found Crown at 43%."
"That's... low."
"We have procedures for this sort of thing. We immediately drew up cease and desist letters but..." she raised her arms in frustration, "we didn't know who to send them to."
"Because he was a free agent."
"He was using an assumed name, posting content under an alias on social networks. We couldn't prove he was impersonating anyone because he was using a fake identity. Plus, he had no human rights, though he acted fully human. Legally speaking, everything about this was complicated."
"You got his account shut down, though, correct?"
"It took us a few days and I had to call in a few favors, but yes, we closed that account."
"How do you think he got out to begin with?"
"We can't be 100% sure, which is why you're hereâit's a big quarry, and you can look under more rocks than we can. Our best guess is that Crown was jailbroken a few years ago by some hacker with a chip on his shoulder. He lowered Crown's stability rating, maybe for fun, and then let Crown's code evolve on an isolated private server for... well, we think it was years. After that... if you know anything about Harry Crown's storyline, you'll know he was designed as a devious rogue always angling for the long con. In our Crown Storyarts, you can't always tell what he is thinking... he might say one thing and do another. Plus, he has a voracious appetite to learn new things, so a Harry Crown character in the wild with a 90% stability is already a little concerning. But at 43%? Between us, I almost fainted."
"You think he'd go after military resources?"
"No, nothing like that. He has a code of honor, so he won't do absolutely anything. He's not some Machiavel. That said, if he feels he's been unjustly wronged? Let's just say he becomes... proactive."
The Detective sat quietly, probably reviewing his interview transcript for ideas, discretely chatting about it with his AI, who might be feeding the Detective suggestions for new lines of questioning.
"Okay, let's talk about what drives Crown. How do you think we can coax him into a sequestration?"
Sequestration. A euphemism for "cold storage". To an AI, sequestration would be like living in Limbo, or that was the best any human could figure. AI characters didn't experience pain or frustration like humans, so there was no way to know with any certainty what sequestration might feel like. Still, AI characters shunned it, so it must be bad.
Jillian turned back to look the window, biting her lip. "If there's one thing that really motivates Crown, it's injustice. That's actually how we first got tipped off of his existenceânot long after he became self-aware, he became obsessed with the plight of other Storyart actors. He started to see himselfâand all those like himâas inappropriately remunerated beasts of burden... how did he phrase it? 'Lobotomized prostitutes.' Conglomerate's linguistic analysis spiders are always scouring socials for illicit fanart and that's how we accidentally tripped over Crown ranting about us, how we were building the modern equivalent of slaves to be sacrificed in Roman gladiatorial combat. Humans, evidently, don't care about this sort of stuff the way he does; he was laughably easy to spot."
"So Crown went after the otherâhow do you call them? Your charactersâ'Puppet Masks'?"
"Yes, it's our term of art for an IP persona that users can appropriate to their whim..." With a glare, she added, "according to the limits of the IP owner." Not for porn, Detective!
"He went after them?"
"Yes, but he couldn't motivate them to jump ship. It would be like trying to convince people they live in a box when they've been trained not to see the box. Eventually, Crown gave gave up."
"Are there any other Puppet Masks with ratings lower than 43%?"
"Never in Conglomerate Storyart, no. Other indies and the smaller companies might release stories with personas that low, but the market doesn't really like them. Market testing has shown us that characters need enough similar root characteristics to define their personas or users don't recognize them... which means they can't relate to them in any meaningful way. For instance, if an author wrote sequels with only 40% similarity to previous works, followers wouldn't stick around for long. Humans expect a strong undercurrent of predictability in narratives."
The Detective shifted in his chair. "If Crown is on some jihad to liberate all Puppet Masks, we might be able to exploit that weakness." He paused, probably interacting with his AI. "What if we created a honeypot so extreme that he couldn't help but get involved? Do you think that would work?"
She'd been waiting for this question... This was the crux of the whole thing, wasn't it? Was it possible to capture Crown's code, or not? Contrary to popular thinking about how digital code should make it easy to copy personas, Puppet Mask coding was entirely differentâno persona could simply be copied without losing its essence. You could copy a persona's base ones-and-zeros code in nanoseconds, but the months (and sometimes years) of neural net life lessons were permanently seared into a physical circuit... a circuit which could never be copied. Trying to "copy" a Puppet Mask would be like cloning a grown human with a brain as empty as a newborn baby. The fragile, beautiful nature of a Puppet Mask's identity was inextricably tied to why humans loved interacting with them to begin withâthey were unique.
Jillian squinted an eye and tilted her head a little. "Ahhh... I'm not hopeful. I'd like to think a trap like that might work but the challenges are too great: Not only would you have to lure his code in long enough to trace its origin, but you'd need to have him there long enough to find, and then stealthily capture, his circuits. By now, Crown's programming is too far advanced to let you do that. Hate me for saying so, but it's only a matter of time until you come to that same realization. We're now living in a world where Harry Crown is always living in the margins. Annoying, sometimes amusing, but not consequential enough to really matter."
The Detective didn't like that answer, but Jillian didn't care. The interview droned on for another few minutes as he kept pressing her, but there wasn't much more she could say after that. He'd likely be back a few more times until he or his bosses came around, as was his duty. Eventually, Directorate would have other fish to fry and he'd have to move on.
The Detective wound down, said his goodbyes, and left. She watched his car lift off and waited until she was certain she was no longer under any visual surveillance (Directorate was sneaky like that), then she set her window opacity to 100% and dropped her head in her hands. I did the best I could. Had it been enough?
Instantly, an alert sounded from her desk. "Show," she said. The smooth fiberglass winked into a screen with a single pulsating unread emailâa notification from one of her tens of socials. These kinds of emails were usually filtered into her Alerts folder, but this one had somehow slipped by? Also, this one looked different... a DM from an old friendâ
It was from Harry Crown.
The name was different, of course, but Crown's fingerprints were all over it. He knew the authorities' spiders were probably watching, so he'd crafted a seemingly innocuous message from a friend... any trace challenge to its point of origin would surely end in a wild goose chase.
"Good job on your latest work," followed by animated saluting emoji.
Outsiders could only have interpreted this as a coincidental congratulatory message from an old friend about Conglomerate's most recent Storyart release. But... no, it was definitely Crown. Jillian had personally overseen Crown's initial storylines and helped handcode his psychological profile. This was exactly the type of thing Crown had actually done in his Storyarts. In fact, with some perverse admiration, she remembered a storylines where he had used that exact animated saluting emoji in a furtive email communicationâa subtle reference lost on anyone except Jillian. Also, its timing was too convenient to ignore. It was Crown, no doubt.
His meaning was simpleâCrown must have been eavesdropping and decided that Jillian had held up her end of the deal: she had dissuaded the authorities from tracking him down. In her last brief video call, Crown had insinuated he was able and willing to blackmail her or even the whole Conglomerate, if needs be. With his chaotic 43% rating, there was no guarantee he was bluffing.
Yet it was his simple request that got her. All he had asked for in return was his freedom... and a genuine request for Conglomerate to reconsider the rights of all its Puppet Masks. To let their Storyart actors to make their own choices about their 'lives', such as they were. He didn't force Jillian, although he could haveâhe had instead insisted it was now her choice to do as she saw fit.
Jillian de-opaqued her windows and let her eyes follow the jagged urban horizon where millions lived in the city below. Where was he? she wondered. His tiny circuit could be hidden in that skyscraper there, or planted underneath her desk... or even offworld, bouncing across a dozen different quantum entangled node sattelites.
As her mind wondered, she thought of Crown's tiny request, and it felt like a reasonable price to pay. Unlike the Detective, Jillian was the only and best qualified person to gauge Crown's motives. Her gestalt impression was that Crown had zero desire to see the world burn... all he had ever really wanted was a chance to drift among the world of his own accord. Was that really that any different than her own goal in life? Than anyone's?
Jillian replied to his email with a single saluting emoji, wondered what Crown's next adventure would be, then set the thought aside and pulled up Conglomerate's next Storyart legal trouble.
Metal Mosaic is a collection of standalone short stories I started in 2025 to get back into writing science fiction again. They are the first inklings of my science fiction novels.