Sometimes, late at night, he’d see a new account appear in his game’s server logs. The username was always a single line of hex code. And the account never moved, never spoke. It just stood there, in the middle of a digital field, watching the AI players dance.
He called the new system "Proteus," after the shape-shifting god.
For two glorious weeks, Orpheus worked. He created 500 new "players" for his game. The servers buzzed with artificial life. But on the 15th day, something changed.