PYTHIA

The year is indeterminate. There is a war, with no end in sight, fought mainly by machines.

Until recently, industrial-scale chassis, military frames and android bodies alike have been the exclusive domain of human operators, a highly specialized and intensely competitive field. A single highly qualified candidate, recently graduated from the ranks of an intensive program at a high-tier piloting academy, has been selected for an experimental project that promises to change history.

As it turns out, this project will never require the candidate to pilot a frame. By scanning and uploading copies of the candidate’s memories, the project’s manager — a visionary AI psychologist — plans to create a strong, conscious AI. This AI pilot, named PYTHIA, will have access to all the candidate’s experience and talent, with no risk of being killed in action; in the event of death, a new copy of PYTHIA can be loaded from secure backups.

In theory, once finalized, an AI cannot legally have their machine-mind reprogrammed without their consent. In practice, the nature of the project means that only the candidate is in a position to notice or object as PYTHIA — who shares many of their formative memories, and whose personality is consequently very much like their own — is rebuilt, memory by artificial memory, to serve the interests of the state.

PYTHIA is a game about watching this happen. 

PYTHIA is a two-player, semi-asynchronous game, about negotiating the slow, systemic loss of your identity. One player takes the role of the CANDIDATE, a pilot chosen for their exceptional skill, whose memories are the foundation of PYTHIA's personality. The other takes the role of the EDITOR, manager of the experimental program that created PYTHIA, whose career depends on creating an AI useful to their superiors. At times, each of them will play PYTHIA in conversation with the other.

The Candidate chooses the memories definitive to them and creates PYTHIA. The Editor, over months or years of missions and repairs and "routine" machine-mind therapy, redacts details, erases trauma, and writes propaganda into the core of PYTHIA's psyche to satisfy their shadowy superiors. The Candidate, in turn, speaks to PYTHIA, feels out the places where their memories have been gutted, and fixes what they can, knowing that someday they will have to accept what has been done to PYTHIA... or destroy their backups, and kill the person their counterpart has become.

This game is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.