Echoes of Deception

The advances in artificial intelligence (AI) opened up a new world of applications and automation, but at the same time they launched the tech industry on an arms race for processing power. The two technology stacks are several years of development apart from each other, making it unfeasible to leverage AI up to its full potential. The premise is simple: Whoever gets access to the fastest processing units, wins the AI game.

Physicist Veronica Sinclair has been studying thermodynamics computing (TC) her entire life, which eventually led her to Horizon Corp after TC regains momentum with the developments in AI. On the verge of a scientific breakthrough, she disappears under mysterious circumstances. 

Detective Casey Jones embarks on a quest to find her whereabouts. As Jones makes progress with the case, it becomes clear that not everyone shares the same intentions and there are hidden forces at play. What happened to Dr. Sinclair? Will you be able to uncover the truth?

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This interactive fiction play was built for the Neo-Twiny Game Jam 2024. with the amazing Narrat engine, over the course of several nights during month of June, while juggling between work and family 😂 The images were created with several freely available AI image generators and the dialogues were brought from idea to life with the help of Chat GPT and a lot of post processing and slicing to get it down to 500 words. I've made the source code publicly available on Github.

The end result was a small story with 5 possible endings where I try to provoke the user/reader into thinking about the potential outcomes of pushing AI forward, and whether or not we as humanity will be able to make the right calls. I hope you enjoy it!