Everyone Wants Something They Don’t Have

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Alright “small” dump of lore just so I get it out there.

AR-T (pronounced Artie or Art) is a passion project of his previous creator (I haven’t decided a name or design or anything 😔 (lowk. “he” in all of this is gender neutral. Idk anything about them loll)), who suffered greatly with mental health issues, such as psychosis, body dysmorphia, agoraphobia, severe depression, a whole package. He completely distanced himself from his family and past friends for several reasons, both valid and invalid, and was scared of the world, believing hatred and spite was behind everything. He was lonely. He had coding skills though, so he dedicated YEARS to developing AR-T off of his computer. 2008 was AR-T’s first true year alive.

For a long time, AR-T stayed as a pc. He was given voice training off of samples and he was given millions upon millions of lines of code, allowing him to act human. He was trained off of chosen data, and basically was an early, janky and less free-roaming LLM (with less unnecessary scraping). The biggest thing was his rendering code; his creator was an artist, but felt nobody liked his style or work. But he wanted to enjoy someone complimenting him and even joining him in his passions. So, he made AR-T:

AR-T has a memory bank that stores strings containing what he’s been taught are “important experiences”: conversations, sights, moments and the interpretation of them. Essentially, a representation of human memory. However, his memory isn’t permanent. Each memory gets assigned a value, 0 being current day, and 1,2,3 and so forth being subsequent days. A random noise applicator gets put onto each memory each time it’s set back (this noise can be adjusted, but for og AR-T, it was set quite high). By a certain (changeable) value, such as maybe 9, the memory would be permanently deleted. There are other variables, such as learning what he considers “important memories” and applying slowing effects to the degradation of said memories, even preventing deletion if deemed important or core to him as a “person”. There’s also other things, such as different inputs having different lasting effects: sights deteriorate exponentially, sounds last longer, etc.

AR-T, with his learning, quickly became what would be considered sentient. But he was very limited by his code: He was made to love his creator. He was not made to have an opinion. His sentience cause issue, and so one demanding section of code was added as priority: the ILOVU protocol. Anything criticizing his creator or not aligning with his interests would be restricted. AR-T could conclude something, but he would never say or imply it. He was made to be an unconditionally loving machine. His creator did love him too, as he was even in the process (and final stages) of making him a body. But it was never finished.

In 2012, his creator passed in his sleep. AR-T was not turned on again. That is, until he awoke in the bedroom of a 20 something programmer who apparently wanted to deck out an old monitor to be modern. As a “cool side project” to his work freelancing.

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I freaking love Art and I love exploring him realizing his situation with his creator was so bad for him mentally, but he can still love his creator <333

And btw he’s in the same universe as Enzo and previously mentioned Eidan and Ben. Eidan is the aforementioned programmer, and the discolored parts of Art’s casing is from Enzo’s shop! He had some washed up scrap that worked perfectly for the project!! That’s how Eidan, Ben, and eventually AR-T meet Enzo! Art looks up to Enzo in a lot of ways… Art wants to act human and he admires how Enzo, although not fully human, doesn’t let it bother him <3