When I met Andra, I knew something was off. I just couldn’t place a finger on it. but I knew there was something sketchy about her level of perfection. She lacked the inevitable messiness that makes us human at the core. For Andra it wasn’t in her appearance; it wasn’t in the compassion and empathy she showed. It was something more sinister.
I enjoyed her company, so we met up a couple of times. She was intelligent, telling stories from different parts of the world that she had visited on Earth. She had access to so much information, it was clear she was well-travelled in her time on Earth. She had perspective too, and analyzed social and political issues in ways that made sense of the madness and chaos. It was a little too good but I started to see the possibility that one person could be this awesome. Just when my suspicion had started fading away, she slipped.
We were hanging out at the Paladin Plaza where we usually met with others for a stack exchange session. The conversation had started innocuously until I heard her say my other name softly. “Maya.” All along, on Dev, I had stripped myself of the identity that Earth had forced on me. I was now ‘genderless’, with a different face and a new name – Azeez. How did she know me as Maya when that information was saved as a classified stack? She continued with more chilling facts – my mother’s favourite hymn, my father’s final whispered words before he passed. The eeriness sank in. I had never shared those memories, not even with my closest friends on Earth.
When she finished talking she realized I had been staring blankly at her. I saw the smile on her face, plastered like it didn’t have any connection with the sad story she shared.
“How did you—?” my voice faltered.
“Oh, you told me, silly. A while back. Don’t you remember?” Andra tilted her head, her expression oddly perfect now, with the ambiguity of the smile emoji – I couldn’t tell if it was a genuine smile or a sarcastic and devious one.
I smiled weakly, nodding to end the encounter quickly, but the unease wouldn’t leave.
When I got back to my apartment, I scanned my stack logs. There was no trace of that conversation with Andra. I checked the access logs on the central stack and nobody else had opened the folders. I considered filing a report, but I knew that actions had consequences. I made up my mind to confront Andra about it but sadly, I never saw her after that encounter. She’s been missing to this day. She simply disappeared – possibly into the black sheet: deleted forever. That disappearance added another layer of mystery and unease. I knew I had experienced something odd but I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I was not sure who to tell or who would believe me, so I carried my burden alone in silence.
But Maya wasn’t the only one who had noticed the oddities.
In a different corner of Dev, a user named Elias replayed a conversation with an old friend. Something felt off. Repeated phrases. The same laugh, always at the same cadence. It was like talking to a puppet whose strings were becoming tangled. The response always had the same tone and style. It was like reading an article written in different ways by the AI agents we had on Earth. The responses were a little too descriptive, yet without soul. It felt like explaining something they had never experienced. Elias thought it was fun, poking questions that pushed these guys to the limit. He wanted to see where they would snap or give up information that revealed his suspicion. The mischief was fun to him. He set out to play a game where he would spot the noob and then draw people’s attention to it. Sadly, people didn’t find it funny. As expected, he met some real people and had asked them some upsetting questions. Although he did not go far with his plan, it was enough to start the rumour mill.
Across Dev, whispers began to grow. People murmured about “the Chime”—a common pattern of repeated responses that left unsettling echoes in their minds. The term spread as more users shared eerie stories of interactions with people who they believed weren’t real people. Elias had referred to them as Noobs or non-playing characters (NPCs). He was close to the right answer. He just needed proof to back up his claims.
Two people stood in the shadows, watching Elias probe noobs for fun. These two people were the only ones who could provide the proof he needed. They monitored his interactions with noobs and regularly used his cross-examination as the litmus test for new noobs. Both men watched Elias but for different reasons. Negasi wanted to perfect the NPCs and the other – Aamir – wanted to expose Negasi for playing God.
Central Stack Control
Negasi and Aamir were busy identifying compromised noobs and planting narratives to control their world. To distract people from stories of noobs and NPCs, a different narrative was planted in the central stack. People believe the Chime was a bug that affected those with limited access to the central stack.. In reality, the Chime wasn’t a bug. It was a flaw in first-generation noobs. First-generation noobs had limited conversation lines. They repeated or swapped a few words each time they were asked a different question. The noobs were part of a big plot to get people interested in staying on Dev. When the transition to Dev started, Negasi thought of a way to make people feel like they were part of a community. They planted AI-powered characters to interact with the first set of people who made the transition. These characters (noobs) had no soul or past experience, only a vast resource pool available to AI. They also served as subtle informants, probing in conversations and gathering information to feed the System. Negasi claimed it was for better control and a chance to deliver a more tailored experience. Aamir knew it wasn’t. It was an extra layer to watch and control.
With the introduction of a central stack system, these noobs weren’t just AI avatars anymore. They were now deeply integrated personas, mining the memories of real users to become indistinguishable from them. However, some of the information privy to them meant they overstepped the boundaries. They pulled information from banks of memory that felt a little too personal.
Negasi saw the noobs as one of his greatest creations: a way to breathe life into Dev. They could break the ice and engage real people with ease. Each iteration brought them closer to having not just intelligence but emotional depth. However, every noob spotted by real people was decommissioned – hence the disappearance of Andra.
Aamir got more uncomfortable with the memory intrusion and persona cloning that Negasi had started. The breaking point was Negasi’s decision to increase the clearance level of the noobs. They now had more access to the central stack than most real people. Aamir, who had once admired Negasi’s brilliance now resented the man and his ambition. “We’re not creating utopia anymore,” Aamir muttered to himself during one late-night session. “We’re now playing God, creating people and trying to give them everything but a soul”,
A Meeting in Shadows
Maya’s unease grew into an obsession. She tracked patterns, logging every strange interaction she had. That’s when she received the first message: A meeting can change everything. Trust no one. Your memories are yours—fight to keep them.
The sender’s name was garbled, a series of random characters that meant nothing. But attached to the message was a small file, encrypted.
The same message reached Brittany Winters, though her skepticism ran deep for other reasons. She proved to be an ally in uncovering other conspiracies in Dev. The fact that she maintained the integrity of her memories made her a perfect ally. This is “another trap,” she whispered, but she couldn’t ignore the eerie consistency of the message with her own discoveries.
What neither knew was that Aamir had sent the messages. He had found a way to bypass Negasi’s surveillance—a risky maneuver that put his own existence on the line.
The Time Tale 