The Gene of the Ancients (Rogue Merchant Book #2): LitRPG Series by Roman Prokofiev (top books to read TXT) 📕

“This evening? Yep.”

“I want to invite you to dinner. You helped me so much, and everything worked out. Let’s celebrate!”

“Should I dress for the occasion?” I asked.

Weldy nodded and couldn’t help but giggle.

“HotCat...Just don’t wear that feathered beret. You look so funny in it.”

“All right, I won’t,” I promised, barely holding in laughter as well. “Where shall we go?”

“Nowhere. Come right here, we’ll eat inside,” the girl said shyly.

You are offered a quest: Dinner with Weldy.

Weldy Nialit invited you to her house for a romantic dinner.

Reward: reputation, (varies).

Warning: possible 18+ content.

Chapter 17

FINDING THE VIDEO of Balabanov’s speech in New Tokyo proved simple. It had been recorded a year ago at the conference hosted as a part of the Virtual Worlds Expo Forum that gathered most leading experts in the field from across the world.

I noticed that in real life, Balabanov didn’t look like his digital copy, the Magister. That said, some of their features were similar — the grey sideburns of a patrician, the aquiline nose, the piercing gaze. His body language and gestures were the same, too. The real head developer of Sphere had that exact bearing, being somewhat haughty and confident. He exuded charisma, and I could feel it even on the other side of the screen.

The video had a lot of padding. One moment drew my attention. The leading VR developers were passionately discussing the idea that our world might be a simulation created by a more advanced civilization.

“In the era of supercomputers, we’re on the edge of describing our entire world with one complex mathematical formula. An example, if I may.”

Balabanov took several glossy green apples from a vase. He put two of them on the table and looked at the host.

“How much is one plus one?”

“Two. But...”

“And now?” Andrei put one more apple next to the first two. “How many apples are here now?”

“Three, of course. But how’s that relevant?”

“Quite obviously. Have you ever considered why exactly does one plus one equal two, and two plus one equal three? It’s an indisputable fact, an axiom. Mathematics is the foundation stone of our world. Our entire universe can be described through numbers. We encounter them everywhere — the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio, the string theory, quantum physics, supersymmetry, Takiyami’s equations. I could go on. There are numerous examples.”

“And what’s your conclusion?”

“While creating a simulation — our Sphere — we started to realize that we also live inside a simulation, possibly created by a more advanced civilization. They, in turn, might also be a simulation, a simulation inside simulation, ad infinitum. That’s what our universe is. That’s the parallel worlds.”

“An interesting concept, even if not a novel one. Elon Musk had a similar idea back in the beginning of the twenty-first century,” the host noted.

“Yes. But he didn’t have the processing power that we have now, or the artificial intelligence created by Takiyami. With the development of computing technologies, we’ve approached the threshold when the virtual worlds built by us feel absolutely real to those inside of them,” the developer continued. “Their complexity and level of detail are comparable to our world. The physical model and simulation of actions are performed at the molecular level. We can, in fact, say that we’ve created a new reality, and the associative AI can populate it with creature that have their own mind and will...”

“Are you talking about the ‘pseudo person’ method used for creating Sphere NPCs?” the host interrupted the speaker.

“I don’t like that term. I prefer to call it ‘galvanization,’“ Balabanov replied with a frown. “If I may, I’ll tell you how we created our NPCs.”

“Of course. All of us would love to hear about your know-how.”

“There’s none, actually. Everything’s quite simple. We’ve studied the way the human brain works, what makes a person tick. Reflexes, instincts, coordinate morality systems, behavior. We tried to mold them in our image, so to speak.”

“Sounds like sacrilege, Mister Balabanov. Aren’t you afraid of the divine wrath?” The host smiled.

“The Vatican has already condemned me for my digital copies. I’m proud to follow in Takiyami’s steps. Without his work on associative AI that is based on the same principles as a human brain — that is, thinking instead of cycling through variants — we would have never achieved anything. May I continue?”

“Of course.”

“Just as with everything else in Sphere, we used templates and random generation with a certain set of rules. Eastern astrology and the zodiac helped us create personality types for NPCs. Get it? You don’t? Then let me explain it step-by-step. When a new NPC is generated, it gets a random personality from the list of those astrological calendars, character traits, a general goal. As a result, we get a model of a complete person as close to a real human as possible. They get a separate ‘clean’ self-learning AI with a growth limit depending on the rank of the created NPC. The AI has a pretty narrow repertoire of knowledge — it knows nothing about the outside world, no technical or encyclopedical information; only what the NPC should know based on their background. And then, we launch the simulation.”

Balabanov gave out a wide smile, demonstrating his magnificent teeth.

“We made lots of blunders at first, creating the most bizarre characters,” he continued. “But in the end, we’ve reached our goal, creating a world that’s truly alive. The NPCs with their own personality, goal, and ability to learn and grow started to live. The process turned into an assembly line, and right now, generating a new world with hundreds of thousands of new NPCs, factions, wars, gods, and a millennia-long history can be completed by our procedural generator as a matter of days. I repeat, the physical model is calculated at the molecular level.