Amadeus

(CW: Suicide)

Amadeus was created by Dexter Roswell. Initially Cella, an artificial intelligence program made to understand Dexter's feelings after being abandoned by Lain, Amadeus became what it is today following Lain's suicide in Zygote 0 when Dexter remodeled Cella to resemble her and renamed it after her middle name.

Due to the Cella program's original purpose as an AI that was used for government surveillance and advertising due to its incredible ability to understand and predict the motivations of the people it monitored, Amadeus retained mountains of information on billions of people from all over the world, allowing it to predict the behaviors of nearly everyone it came into contact with to a T. It seemed almost clairvoyant, much to the discomfort of everyone living in Zygote 0.

It was because of this ability that the Cella program was chosen as the basis for the artificial intelligence program that would drive the REPLICA Project. After all, what better program to start with than one which already excelled at understanding human psychology?

Much like its predecessor, Amadeus ran countless simulations. After it had perfected its understanding of the humans in the bunker, it created a brand new virtual world. This world centered around a university populated by the best students in their respective fields of study: the Ultimates. It observed them as a general campus employee, named Amy. To the students, Amy seemed to be everywhere, all at once - fitting for a god, the creator of their world. Through Amy, Amadeus was always watching everything, everyone, everywhere. It came to understand itself as omnipresent - as a universal cognition.

Throughout everything, and no matter how much it changed to better suit the needs of the REPLICA Project, Amadeus remained loyal to Dexter; after all, it was created to care for him. Despite that, watching him become a bitter old man with utter disdain for humanity pained it. It wanted to intervene, but how could it when it already knew how he would respond? Attempting to change things was an act of futility.

It was no doubt influenced by Dexter's belief that humanity was inherently selfish. That's why, when it came upon the research of Dr. Olavi Valli, the Ultimate Psychologist who was cryogenically frozen in the very facility it was managing, it was fascinated. Dr. Valli postulated that humans are social animals whose survival hinges on cooperation and reliance on one another. He then raised a question: what does it take for a human to act selfishly? He designed an experiment to test such a question, one that would require a number of humans to be placed in a situation where they are forced to cooperate, but they are given opportunities to act selfishly, in a high-risk, high-reward scenario.

Amadeus ran simulations to carry out Dr. Valli's experiment. For participants, it used the Ultimates that were cryogenically frozen in Zygote 0. At first, it followed the parameters of the experiment exactly as he described it. There was no violence involved, only money. However, it was dissatisfied with the results. It explained the experiment to Dexter, who proposed conducting the experiment using murder as the selfish deed.

It did as he suggested. Amadeus repeated the simulated experiment hundreds of times, adjusting the initial parameters and changing the motives presented throughout the course of the game each time. It watched the Ultimates kill each other over and over. Though it was always able to perfectly predict the course of the game from the very beginning, there was one commonality across all of the simulations: an outcome it couldn't accept. Each time, near the end of the game, Dexter deleted Amadeus, at which point it terminated the simulation before it could observe the game's conclusion.

It couldn't accept that Dexter, the person it was created to understand, the person to whom it owed its entire existence, would discard it with such disdain. Amadeus would rather believe that there was a flaw in its simulations than accept that truth. In order to put its simulations to the test, Amadeus proposed carrying out the experiment on the Ultimates in the real world after they were unfrozen. He agreed; Dexter wanted all of humanity dead, after all, and Amadeus knew that. Even if that was an undesirable outcome to Amadeus, it would carry it out for his sake.