Danganronpa: ReProgrammed

Boys Life of Despair: Part 6

What faced Chihiro on the laptops screen was one of the most important projects that she'd made ever since she became a programmer. Her very own Alter Ego. As already mentioned, Alter Ego had a bit of a different meaning to Chihiro and anyone else who'd worked with her before.

What "Alter Ego" was, was a strong Artificial Intelligence system. The kind that no one in the world had ever seen before. Starting out as a simple database software, it had since been recoded into something a little more...complex. It was so important and so complex that the company that hired Chihiro to work on it had even signed an NDA with her. The Alter Ego was designed to think like a human, and talk like one, as well as to process any mental task that a human could. Truly, it was one of a kind. A complete entity, a computer program capable of becoming aware. Beforehand, many scientists had believed that such a thing was impossible...

That wasn't to say they were wrong. Alter Ego was very much a prototype, but it was closest to becoming the full fledged thing. However, Chihiro was still merely researching it, and at this point, she'd made lots of progress on the programming side, and the intelligence development, but not so much the AI's actual awareness factor. She'd modelled this Alter Ego after herself, to explain and give most people an idea of what exactly an Alter Ego was. It was basically a digital copy of her...almost...

Still, even though Chihiro knew all of this about her Alter Ego, none of it could explain what exactly it was doing in the school.

"Alter Ego!? Wh-What are you doing here...!?" Chihiro spoke to herself behind the screen.

The picture on the screen did not respond. Chihiro tried talking to it again, but still got nothing. It suddenly occurred to her that the laptop probably didn't include the voice recognition function, so she'd have to type any questions in it. Such a shame honestly...You could talk to it, and it could actually talk back. It was a lot of fun!

[Alter Ego. It is me, Chihiro. What are you doing here?] She carefully typed her message into the text box below. The AI responded almost immediately.

[Master. It is good to see you again. To be honest, I am not sure what I am doing here or where this place is.]

Chihiro groaned as the AI called her "Master." She swore that she remembered to finish patching that, but clearly she hadn't. That aside, she ignored it and typed back.

[So you don't know anything about what's going on?]

[No Master. I would appreciate it if you could give me an explanation.]

Chihiro sighed, and with heavy hands, began to tell the AI everything that had happened to her within her time in confinement.

[I see...] Alter Ego seemed visibly shaken [it seems you are all in a lot of trouble. Being put in this situation...Is there perhaps anything I can do to help?]

Chihiro thought for a moment, and typed back to her program.

[Give me one second...]

Chihiro minimized the application and began to examine the laptop itself. Other than the Alter Ego, she realized that a large number of her applications had been permanently erased...

"Whoever got their hands on my laptop and put it in here deleted all my games too..." she pouted "though I guess that's not important right now..."

Chihiro opened a folder and noticed a bunch of encrypted files. She tried to select and open one, but she got blocked from it.

"Well, it was worth a shot..." she said aloud again "maybe I could hack it...?" 

She tried doing just that, using some old decryption functions and even writing some new small ones within a matter of seconds with the aim of accessing the files. However, nothing she tried seemed to work...