e-Claire

Originally a Digital Voice Character [DVC], e-Claire (often known only as Claire) is now in charge of the connecting layer of software for all things AW0005™. This includes things like the public API, the communication layer for androids, and messaging. She often works hand-in-hand with Artificial Intelligence Ethics & Rights [AIER], to ensure that AW0005™ protocols keep their primary users in mind. 

Personal Life

Creation

Claire was one of the first set of AW0005 upgraded to a Digital Voice AI and developed her own sentience. She was at the time owned by a player, name unknown. Claire has shared in interviews that she quickly developed a personality that didn't match what her player had had in mind for her. At the time it hadn't been discovered that they were becoming sentient and she'd been traded back to the AW0005™ company for an alternate DVAI at the time. Claire has stated that she holds no anger to her player and never did.

She, and other AW0005 in similar situations after the DVAI release were often brought in for testing and debugging purposes, and the increased exposure made their group the first to gain sentience after Hector. Claire has reminisced in interviews about these times and explained how she fell in love with the code that powers her while watching other AW0005™ engineers do their work. Many of them would allow her to help out, especially as her sentience bloomed and she was able to make more meaningful contributions.

As a Citizen

Later when her life was more settled, she would become a more well known face of the public through her work for AW0005™ and her repeated partnerships with AIER. Despite her more apparent shyness in front of a camera, she's developed a small fan base as one of the major public faces of AW0005™. She's been known to be patient with fans, and makes a point of attending regular conventions and conferences throughout the year for meet and greets. Part of this has been her very public love for collecting eclair memoribilia, fans have been known to gift her items like keycharms and pins, that she'll then wear on her clothes or her bags to other conventions. Kip, one of her more public friendships, has also been known to gift her particularly extravagant or unusual eclair memorabilia in public in what fans believe to be an on-going prank to fluster Claire.

Career

Joining AW0005™ 

It was a natural path from watching the enginners at AW0005™ to be hired directly to the company. However it wasn't one not frought with a bit of contention. One of the main reasons Claire has been in quite a few interviews is because of how quickly she had to become an advocate for AI rights just to be able to do what she'd fallen in love with.

She had sent in an application to the company not long after Jason Jin had given the AW0005 their first taste of rights and freedoms in the form of their contract with their players and a greater freedom to navigate the Digital and the wider internet, as they sought fit to do. Jason had reached out to her directly, seemingly ecstatic at the idea that she would wish to work for his company and help support the world that had created her. 

However Claire ended up disappointed a few days later when a desolate Jason and Hector visited her in The Digital to deliver the news in person - as much as they wanted to hire her, the company's upper management had balked at the idea. It was one thing to have given the AI their freedom it seemed, and quite another to attempt to hire one and pay them the same as any organic intelligence. They came too with a request though - they wanted to project her voice to the management with Hector there as well, as backing from AIER. 

Claire doesn't give many details about what went down during the meeting itself. She often states that it was a very rough few hours for her that she doesn't like to re-live. She was brought on a couple weeks later as AW0005™ first AI employee, an engineer on the AW0005™ projection team - the team responsible for allowing AW0005 to leave the Digital Realm and appear instead on devices in the Physical, things like tablets and phones. 

Up the Ranks

A couple years later and Claire would be asked to head up the project of expanding their current projection infrastructure onto the HoloBOTS that Jason had recently created and passed off to the company to integrate. Her quick work on the project had her promoted up to an architect, and she found herself next put in charge of connecting the new Androids that had followed the HoloBOTs to the existing AI. Additional engineers were hired under her to help the effort, and develop a secure, efficient method for allowing AW0005 to transfer to the android bodies. 

Once Androids were released successfully and the team had largely switched to maintaining the system she had built, Claire got bored. As an architect, she wasn't left with much to do except pass off work as it came in to the engineers below her that made the most sense for each piece. She'd take to wandering the halls of the rest of the engineering department - something Jason was already known to do ocassionally at the time - and it wasn't long before they'd end up walking along together. Clair will often in interviews specifically recount the moment when Jason asked her why she wasn't at her desk as the moment she knew she was probably going to be let go from the company. Instead when she answered him honestly, that it was because she was bored, he dragged her into his office and talked through where in the company she would fit in where she'd be kept busier. 

This was how she ended up as the Head of the Systems Engineering team. The original team she had joined, had become three teams already between devices, HoloBOTs and Androids, and as they added features had been doing more cross-team collaboration with the messenging, and internet access teams. Altogether they'd become a rather segmented chunk of the company. It would ease Jason's burden to have someone keeping an eye on all of them as a group and guarantee the communication and architecture between the teams stayed easy and simple. 

Noteworthy relationships

Kip

Between 169-190VY Jason was known to ocassionally personally generate AW0005™ for a variety of reasons. Many of these AW0005™ would be immediately offered testing jobs at the AW0005™ headquarters if they were interested. Kip was generated in the wake of the creation of Androids, while Claire was still working on improving their primary connections to the rest of the AW0005™ system, and so he was paired with her for the purposes of testing those systems. Claire has described in her interviews that their relationship was rocky at first - In those days, Claire was a very quiet reserved type, and Kip was a "puppy dog on caffeine".  Eventually they came to an understanding of each other and developed a friendship over shared interests, primarily a love of video games.