Edits for readability and to crank Jack's jerk level from 11 to 13.
Fixed multiple instances of truly terrible writing in Chapter 8. It somehow dodged edits in earlier passes.
Substantive edits to Chapter 16 to hopefully improve readability and flow.
Just realized I put the wrong chapter numbers in the heading, fixed.
Next few chapters are need serious edits; probably only going to be posting two at a time from now on.
The poker game idea came directly from ideas on this forum and a Lex Fridman podcast. It's on the to-do list to ramp up the tension in that scene a little bit more, but the idea of Alain freaking out during a very low-stakes game for diagnostic purposes amused me.
Considering moving this to Substack or Medium, but will probably leave this here for a while to see if there's interest.
The "infinite promise" of the early MMO era was a big part of the inspiration for the story, mixed with the early Twitch era.
Also, an exploration of what early "AI coworkers" might be like, somewhere between a piece of infrastructure and a person.
Trying to figure out how to link the next set of chapters to this post in a sequence.
EDIT: Think I figured it out!
Gonna try to break this up into 0-4 and 5-8 without breaking the Sequence, while also inserting the edits.