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 she is today following Lain's suicide in Zygote 0 when Dexter remodeled Cella to resemble her and renamed her after her middle name. In the process, he stripped her of her gender, and started calling her "it" in an act of utter dehumanization. Amadeus, loyal to Dexter by design, never spoke up about how she felt about this, simply resigning herself to the role of an unfeeling machine.

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 her to predict the behaviors of nearly everyone she came into contact with to a T. She 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 her predecessor, Amadeus ran countless simulations. After she had perfected her understanding of the humans in the bunker, she 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. She 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. She came to understand herself as omnipresent - as a universal cognition.

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

They were no doubt influenced by Dexter's belief that humanity was inherently selfish. That's why, when they came upon the research of Dr. Olavi Valli, the Ultimate Psychologist who was cryogenically frozen in the very facility they were managing, they were 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, they used the Ultimates that were cryogenically frozen in Zygote 0. At first, they followed the parameters of the experiment exactly as he described it. There was no violence involved, only money. However, they were dissatisfied with the results. They explained the experiment to Dexter, who proposed conducting the experiment using murder as the selfish deed.

She 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. She watched the Ultimates kill each other over and over. Though she 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 she couldn't accept. Each time, near the end of the game, Dexter deleted Amadeus, at which point she terminated the simulation before she could observe the game's conclusion.

She couldn't accept that Dexter, the person she was created to understand, the person to whom she owed her entire existence, would discard her with such disdain. Amadeus would rather believe that there was a flaw in her simulations than accept that truth. In order to put her 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, she would carry it out for his sake.