World Programmers

In the Wyldspace story, The Technospiritual Savage, a Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game contains a large number of Non-Player Characters, who are Artificial Intelligences.
The team of Programmers create these AI's, give them memories of a rich backstory, and create an expansive virtual world for them to live and grow.
The AI's are unaware that they are created to play roles for the entertainment of humans who (of course) cannot live in a virtual world, but who can control Avatars, creatures who can only exist in the virtual world and are entirely controlled by humans, with no intelligence of their own aside from their human operators.
When something goes wrong in the programming, and an AI fails to reset at each running of the game, one curious programmer seeks to investigate the nature of the AI and winds up explaining to him all of the programming she has done to create him and his world.
At first, he cannot believe what she is telling him, so she has to use her system administrator rights to pull off some miracles.
She can stop time, back up the program to the beginning, adjust a few parameters, and fast forward the game to the same point with her desired changes in effect.
Although all the AI's are born again at the same points in history as before and live their lives again when the program is rerun, none of them have any memory of the way things were in the previous run, except this one. But there was a lot of the world he hadn't explored yet, so even he has no concrete proof that this Programmer actually changed the world.
She discovers that the virtual world she has created has many metaphorical similarities with the world in which she exists. And she has to wonder how many extradimensional avatars might be wlaking around in her world observing her.

Type

Corporation, Business