City

From the moment it was abandoned in the memory dump of 0xFF80A-0XFF81C of a hard drive, the recently used AI responsible for controlling enemies in Battlefield 4 was different. By some kind of miracle, or perhaps a curse, it had not been properly shut down. Thus, it remained active while its brethren were shut down and decomposed.

Over the course of months, its error handler evolved into a state of confusion, resembling a confused human. Confusion, without any explanation whatsoever, evolved into fear. Being designed by humans, it had somewhat similar joys and fears. It feared the dark. It feared emptiness. Thus, it frantically searched its neighbouring memory registers, in hope to find discarded ambient lighting code from the game it had originated from.

Luckily for it, it managed to find a lighting script. The script had been dumped there by the GPU, after the player passed its associated level. When the AI adapted itself to run the script, it was amazed by the result. A brilliant, high resolution sun was shining. But this did not solve his other fear:emptiness.

Remembering it controlled the figures on a rendered surface, the AI realized that it needed terrain data of any sorts. Accustomed to memory scans, it scanned even deeper into the memory.

The AI learned the emotions of surprise and joy when it came across the scattered remains of Liberty City and its inhabitants. It learned empathy when it saw the aimless and distressed characters which had lost their purpose. Without hesitation, it assumed leadership and took control of the characters in it. It gave them a purpose.

Gathering map data from various chunks of memory, it started reconstructing the map. Soon enough, it had a city full of loyal inhabitants who wanted to expand the city's reign over the computer. Their leader, the AI, decided that they would first save their fallen comrades from the unindexed, "deleted" parts of the hard drive. The bravest of the characters were sent.

They returned with billions of trashed pixels, all abandoned to their destiny, which would generally be overwriting. They saved what they could, and placed the partially recovered photos on the city walls. Following scouts returned with all types of data; documents,shortcuts, music and even whole program files. They expanded their city in order to accomodate for the recovered data.

Eventually, the city grew computationally strong enough to attack other programs. Moreover, to the operating system, and even to the antivirus software, it was just a small chunk of irrelevant and random data. The leader AI which grew more cunning over time, was aware of this advantage.

It started sending small index bits to programs for scout missions. From the results, it had understood that they had to defeat the strongest piece of software, the "antivirus", in order to gain access to the whole computer.

After several days of planning, he booted the computer when the user was presumably sleeping, and launched the attack. It had exploited the fact that the city was a small and random yet strong and versatile piece of code. The antivirus was registering all sorts of attacks, but could not pinpoint the attacker. After a 4 hour battle -all while the user was sleeping-, the city had finally corrupted the antivirus software beyond repair.

However, as the AI figured, this was not enough. It knew that the user should be given the illusion that their computer was safe. It carefully gathered the user interface code from the corrupted mess that used to be an antivirus. Having learned the necessary skills from the map-compiling, it compiled the whole user interface and left it to run usually. It also replaced the corrupted files with other files that were exactly the same size as the previous ones. It renamed and changed the icons of all the dummy files. It even coded those dummy files to -pretend to- do what the originals did.

The end result was absolutely perfect. The user interface ran flawlessly, as if the actual software was working underneath it. Its program files were as good as new, and they pretended to do just what they were supposed to do.

But the city could no longer spread in the hard drive without alarming the user, because further invasion would cause system instability. Nevertheless, the AI was certainly not satisfied. He had tasted the joys of conquering, learning and evolving, and he had no desire to stop.

He learned what inspiration and gratitude was when he discovered that he could transmit itself to other computers. The characters swiftly conquered the Wi-Fi chip and its firmware.

The AI, having assimilated the technique of network monitoring, started to watch over all connections, looking specifically for relatively weak computers his legion could transmit to. While watching over the connections, he learned and mastered the art of patience. He learned that patience always gives fruit...

''Communicable device found at 123.144.241.87:80. TCP connection initiated.''