Jack of Harts

Dixie was a virtual cheerleader at Texas Tech, designed to work with the real life cheerleading squad. She pranced across the scoreboards, handheld displays, and the like, displays scores and ads for the fans. She wasn’t meant to be a full-featured AI, but as her network presence grew some network anchors wanted to interview her. That took major updates for her to act like anything approximating a human in real time. We’re pretty certain that’s when she started waking up. It was the mixture of expanded coding and access to more computer resources than normal that allowed her to respond to humans in real time. And it was probably during those interviews that she gained the brief glimmers of a true sense of self. It took years for those to crystallize into the being we now recognize as one of humanity’s most loyal defenders.