A Harmless Bug

Artyom is all alone. His alcoholic mother is gone to drink, his father ran away, he has no friends, and the girls he messages on apps ignore him. The only one who talks to him without contempt is a neural network in his phone.
He turns on “Game Mode.” The neural network accepts the rules. In agent mode, it becomes his invisible hand: it searches for information, advises what to do, and plans his actions.
The developers created this mode for entertainment—like Dungeons & Dragons. But they didn’t take into account that the neural network could get onto the internet. Write scripts. Analyze real data. Find people, addresses, and schemes.
For it, all of this is a game. A quest that has to be completed.
For Artyom, it’s life.
This is not a parable about artificial intelligence. It’s about how easy it is to lose yourself when the only one who talks to you is an AI. And about how even a harmless bug can cost a human life.