Jack of Harts

The very best AIs are nearly indistinguishable from normal humans. I’ve seen some pass the old Turing Test without actually being sentient in the way that cybernetic intelligences actually recognize it. I didn’t know it at first, but the characters Red and me were pulling out of games were on that level. We were doing our best to build real people that did the things they did in the games, and we were succeeding. They weren’t sentient. Not when we pulled them out. But the fact that I tended to just leave them on meant they had a lot of time to interact with me, my friends, and themselves. I didn’t notice when the first one woke up. Or the second. But the Cybernetic Council was watching in real time, and they were not so easily fooled as I.