AW0001 Prompts

She heard a bird chirping and stopped for a while to listen to it.

Ivy has been walking straight for an hour. She doesn't know if she got lost on the original road she planned to take. Of course, there's no clear path here, just grass and hills, but Ivy put them into scale and analyzed the scenery as part of her automatic habits. Some images created by humans have texts telling you to follow your nature when enjoying something, such as a dream-like music playlist or viewing empty landscape images. Ivy followed it, putting different standards on the scene, and came to a conclusion.

It's boring.

It's not even been an hour since she entered this space. If not for the 200 cc she spent, Ivy would leave the emulator right away. Humans say looking at some dreamcore images can give them the feeling that something is watching or a terrible thing is going to happen. Fears hide in simple details. Maybe a monster pops out of nowhere? But there is nothing scary like jumping out for the whole time. Ivy tries walking in different directions, but nothing changes. She started wondering if the data had gone wrong or if some code lines had broken. Ivy filed a report asking about the situation, but then got an answer right away. Everything is going smoothly. Ivy looked at her device screen, confused.

That's when she heard birds chirping.

A very small thing, a very small detail, got changed, and that's enough to alert her. She got to a trillion faster than a second reaction in a short moment, trying to look for that little change. Ivy didn't know since she started longing for the smallest changes around. There's a new wave of energy pushing her towards it, making her legs walk faster in search of more new things. There are flowers under her steps—another new thing. At first, they appear sporadically. Dots of red and pink flowers on green grass. They also look simplified, like children's drawings. Ivy doesn't remember which reaction humans used to have in these situations. She wants to feel more human and understand their emotions, so Ivy stopped for a while and thought. Maybe it's an uncomfortable feeling, irritation, or such. Seeing details not matching, like different styles that don't seem fit but still got shuffled and tossed to the same place altogether, cartoony birds appear and continue chirping. Flowers that look like a kid drawn them using crayons. Realistic sky and clouds, but the grass has low quality, like the outcome of some old 3D graphic programs.

Ivy didn't touch any flowers, and now she thinks about trying it out. She touched the nearest one, a mix of pink and red simple petals. They feel like real flowers. Her data began to corrupt as she felt a great wave of confusion. Confusion and fear are states of mind Ivy learned very soon in her way of copying humans. They are scared of what they don't know, or they have fear when imagining bad situations ahead. In this case, Ivy was scared of receiving negative comments in the future because of the wrong information. This mismatch between the appearance and physical surface of these flowers causes her to doubt the data she has equipped herself with. Or are her sensors broken? Are they reporting false information? She checked their status on the screen. All of them are normal. This caused more worry in her eyes when Ivy filed another report asking about this strange experience, hoping it was just an error caused by the emulator.

- There's no way I can make mistakes with this simple information. Crayon flowers should feel flat. Oh, Lord, they will laugh in my face for this...

Ivy regained her calm quickly, but she still feels dissatisfied. The answer came a few minutes later.

"It's part of the emulator, dear customer."

- What?

So that's the point where humans say this aesthetic is upsetting. Things don't match. Not only for this, but as a person who always favors perfectness, Ivy gets irritated with new details too. There are different styles of images in one landscape, like when someone with poor skill used Photoshop to edit and add them to an image. She hopes two hours will pass fast so she can get out of here. But then another thing appeared in her peripheral vision.

A house. A white, simple house that you'll expect to see in a cartoon with a half-3D style. It looks like an American suburb house by most standards. It only has two windows, which lead to a dark, unknown void, a main red door to enter, and a bush outside. It seems to be trying its best to stay iconic and simple.

Ivy walks closer to it. The green bush has some flowers, but it stays away from the house for about 5 feet. It looks lonely, like it wasn't meant to be there. If Ivy were the editor of this scene, she would surely move it closer to the house. As she gets closer, there's a strange aura—maybe hidden code lines telling her to go inside. Ivy knows about these codes; they are often used in Digital Realm restaurants or shopping malls. They won't openly display but will run non-stop to create safe and comforting feelings for the customers, to attract them, and to make them want to stay. But for this house, she sensed something not normal, like one code line was snapped. All code languages have commands to prevent things from overflowing or getting out of the borders that they should stay within. She can't feel those commands. They're not used or running alongside attracting codes. So the aura is somehow much stronger, unpredictable, sometimes extreme, and sometimes disappearing. This may be dangerous to the code reader chip in an AW0005's brain storage if this isn't an emulator. Ivy started to realize that this may be an AW0005's way of "feeling impending doom or scary things hiding somewhere" that the humans in the physical realm described.

When she got close enough, a Window XP-style pop-up appeared, showing some texts.