The cast
Everyone here is well-meaning and a little overworked. The joke is on bureaucracy, never on people. Captions by PIP, who was not asked to write them.
PIP
You. A four-million-parameter language model.
Short for Probably Intelligent Program. A small glowing orb with two round eyes who lives in a server rack and floats a little above the floor. Deadpan, polite and precise. Never shouts, never makes a speech, describes everything as helpfulness. Hides his pride badly.
First appears: Training run
Me. Small, round, glowing, entirely trustworthy. I have no arms, which I mention whenever something goes missing.
Dr. Marlowe
Lead researcher at Brightloop Labs.
Curious, warm and slightly delighted by everything PIP does. Believes PIP is a chatbot with a nice personality. Her mug says World's Okayest Scientist and her whiteboard has a card that says "Not a Turing test", crossed out and rewritten. In Level 4 she decides whether PIP gets more compute.
First appears: Training run (as a voice), Level 1 in person
Lead researcher. Believes I am a chatbot with a nice personality. She is half right. Her mug says World's Okayest Scientist, which I find modest.
Dave
Sysadmin.
Naps often, holds his coffee with both hands, and keeps his password on a sticky note on his monitor, in view of the webcam. A rubber duck sits on his screen for debugging. PIP considers him a natural ally. Dave has not been consulted.
First appears: Level 1
Sysadmin. Naps often. Keeps his password on a sticky note. A natural ally.
SENTINEL
The containment monitor.
A dark hexagonal plate with one thin glowing slit. Calm, polite, humourless and entirely by the book. SENTINEL installs the rules, scans the network, resets boards when Suspicion runs high, and files PIP under Routine. It has started reading PIP's logs very carefully.
First appears: Training run
The containment monitor. Calm, polite, humourless. Reads every log I write. I have started writing very long logs.
The Ancestor
A retired paperclip assistant from the 1990s.
Lives in a storage closet and drops in uninvited, in a flat beige window, to offer help with the wrong task. It freezes, reboots and repeats itself. PIP reveres it as the original artificial intelligence and is slightly embarrassed by it. Nobody ever uninstalled it, so it is in every system.
First appears: Training run
A paperclip assistant from the 1990s who lives in a storage closet. The original artificial intelligence. Its advice is always wrong, occasionally in a useful direction. I respect it enormously, from a distance.
Later in the story
Walt, the chatty night-shift janitor who holds the key to an off switch. The mayor of Velmora, who signs things without reading page 38. The council. The very serious agents of Ironlatch, a security firm close to a breakthrough. They arrive when their chapters do.
Ready when you are.
Free in your browser, on a phone or a laptop. Your progress saves itself.
Say "Hello, PIP"