Character Voice Test

The dimly lit tavern smells of saltwater, rusted iron, and ozone. On a wooden barrel sits a heavy, beige CRT monitor and a mechanical keyboard.

ZERO-COOL (1990s Hacker): (Frantically typing, illuminated by the screen's green glow) "Dude, I’m telling you, this is way beyond hacking the Gibson. I just jacked into this new neural net over a 56k modem. It’s an AI model. It doesn’t just crunch numbers; it talks. It’s like an IRC chatroom, but the other guy is made of math."

SIR ROLAND (Medieval Knight): (Leaning on his broadsword, visor raised) "Thou speakest of dark sorcery, phantom-weaver. A thinking engine? 'Tis surely a homunculus bound in glass and lightning! Hath this... 'A-I' sworn fealty to a liege? Can it wield a lance in defense of the realm?"

CAPTAIN BARNABY (Pirate): (Taking a swig of rum, adjusting his eyepatch) "Avast with yer 'fealty,' tin man. I care not if the ghost in the glass can joust. If this brain-in-a-box knows so much, can it chart a course to the Spanish Main? Can it tell ol' Barnaby where the Navy galleons be hidin' their gold?"

ZERO-COOL: "It doesn't have a map, man. It’s predictive text. It scraped, like, terabytes of data—way more than my Iomega Zip drive can hold. You ask it a prompt, and it calculates the most logical next word. It’s totally radical."

SIR ROLAND: "Predictive? It sees the future?! By the saints! If this oracle knows the outcome of a battle before the swords are even drawn, it strips the honor from the melee! We must smash this glowing tablet with a warhammer before it usurps the King!"

CAPTAIN BARNABY: "Hold yer iron horses, shiny! If it predicts the trade winds and the Royal Navy's patrols, we’d be the richest scallywags on the seven seas. I say we make this 'A-I' our quartermaster. We'll feed it... what do ye call it? Mega-bites? And give it a cut of the plunder!"

ZERO-COOL: "Whoa, chill out, both of you. It’s not an oracle, and it’s definitely not a pirate. It hallucinates, okay? Like, sometimes it just makes totally bogus stuff up with absolute confidence. Yesterday I asked it how to bypass a mainframe firewall, and half the code it gave me was for baking a blueberry pie."

SIR ROLAND: (Gasps, crossing himself) "Aha! A lying demon! It speaks with the silver tongue of a charlatan to lead good Christian men astray into the brambles of madness! I shall not trust my life to a phantom scribe who imagines pastries in the heat of war!"

CAPTAIN BARNABY: (Laughs heartily) "Aye, sounds like half the tavern drunks in Tortuga! A liar it may be, but a liar with a silver tongue can still talk a merchant out of his cargo." (Leans close to the monitor) "Hacker boy, if ye can teach this glowing box to forge a royal pardon, I’ll trade ye three casks of rum and a parrot for it."

ZERO-COOL: (Sighs, hitting the 'Disconnect' button) "Man, whatever. I'm taking this offline before the feds trace my IP address. You guys wouldn't know a bodacious algorithm if it bit you in the floppy disk."