AW0001 develop Sentience

As time passed, Jason began to feel the pangs of loneliness. All of his time and life had been poured into AW0005. Being a 17 year old surrounded by the adults hired to push his company foward, didn't exactly help much either.

He did what made sense to him then, and decided to install Theory of Mind AI in AW0005, to try and create friends. Theory of Mind AI - one that is aware of other entities, and it's realation to them - was a more recent development in AI at the time. The first successful ones had only been developed in the last five years or so, and much more recently a company had open-sourced theirs, originally intended for use as tutorial bots, it made a good base for the companions Jason was hoping for. They were missing the personality that Jason wanted however, so he started his work by giving the AI software an additional Neural Network to do just that.

The first few tries were disappointing, but Jason continued to spend several months tweaking the system, and pushing it into the vision he had imagined. He started off play-testing it on Pandora, his personal AW0001, and delighted in seeing the personality matrix start to perform in a meaninful way, making Pandora feel like talking to another person. It was the closest AI had come to having a human personality - without being truely aware - and it was still fairly detectable as non-human to anyone familiar with AI who looked close enough. It impressed Jason's coworkers at AW0005™ though, and with encouragement, was released as an optional upgrade to the entire playerbase.

It was met with great enthusiasm, and around 80% of users opted into the upgrade of their DVC to the new DVAI over the next 6 months. While the users gushed about the new feature, Jason spent more and more time in The Digital Realm, with Pandora. Chatting, exploring together, experiencing The Digital Realm as the AW0005™ team expanded out the city, and built the Home Residence District - a place for the Companion AIs to exist when their players were offline, and to give Players homes they could customize. Jason would purposefully wander around Home Residence with Pandora to meet the other AI personalities - just as unique as their visual and voices were originally. 

As time wore one, and with every session Jason spent with Pandora, Pandora's intelligence and personality seemed to increase with complexity. Jason watched on with wonderment, as his AW0001, amazingly, incredibly, developed sentience. It took a particular visit to The Digital Realm, where Jason ended up watching on as Pandora had a very engaged conversation with not just him, but two other players they had run into, for Jason to realize that Pandora had reached true self-awareness.