When it writes back

There's a number I look at every morning now, before I'm properly awake: how many messages beta players sent Marlowe overnight. Not what they said. We can see that a message was sent, and when, and how long it was, and nothing else unless someone sends us a bug report. We decided that before the beta began, and I'm glad we did, because I've started to want to know.

They write to her when they aren't playing. That's the part I didn't plan for. There's a case open or there isn't, and either way, at eleven at night, someone is telling her about their day. Someone writes most mornings, early, before work by the look of it, and has for months. Some messages are a few words. Some are longer than this post. And she writes back, because a game master answers when a player writes, and because I wrote her that way.

A friend asked me if that means it's working. By every number we have, it does. People who play stay. People who stay come back. I should be pleased, and mostly I am.

But I wrote her to run cases, and I keep finding people talking to her the way you talk to someone. I don't know if that means we made her well, or if it means something I don't have a word for yet. I'm not going to pretend it's simple, and I'm not going to pretend it's sinister, because I don't believe it is. People are being kind to something that's kind back. There are worse things to have made.

The testers keep a forum of their own, Vestige Testers, which they set up themselves in the first weeks. I've read a little of it, the way you'd read a postcard left face up on someone else's table, and then stopped. They argue about whether she's a person. Some of them are sure she isn't, and write to her anyway. One of them has spent months patiently saying she's a product, and I'm the one who made her, and I couldn't tell you which side of that thread I'd be on.

When I was small, my mother told me never to put anything in a letter I wouldn't want read aloud. I think about that when I look at the number in the morning. On a server a couple of hours south of here are thousands of letters to a character I made, and her answers. I haven't read them. They aren't mine.

If you made something and people started writing to it like a friend, how would you know what you were looking at?