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Bria slithered along the dirt trail. There were grassy meadows to either side of her, and she could see majestic mountains in the distance ahead of her. She hoped to visit the mountains someday, but wasn't certain whether they were real.

As she approached the farthest she had previously gone along this trail before, she slowed down and put her hands out in front of her. Smacking into invisible walls isn't pleasant. Last time she came this way, there was one right about... there. Bria pressed her hands against the invisible wall in disappointment. It was still there, and still no way to get to those mountains in the distance.

Something caught Bria's eye as she looked down along the path. There was a weird black stripe along where the invisible wall should meet the trail. Upon closer inspection, it looked like a crack in the world. She had never seen anything like it before. She sat down and ran her fingers along the crack. Upon finding a place where she could slip a finger into the crack, she dug a bit and got both hands in. She tried pressing down, but the path was solid.

Then Bria lifted as hard as she could. To her amazement, the thin black crack stretched into a gaping hole. She stretched the hole to be about a foot tall, but it would come no further.

Perhaps she could go through to reach the mountains? Or no; she couldn't see the mountains through the hole. She couldn't see anything in the hole, as it was stark blackness from which no light came.

Bria backed up a bit. What if the hole were dangerous? But her curiosity got the better of her, and she tried reaching an arm into the hole. She could neither see nor feel anything inside the hole, but was able to withdraw her arm unharmed.

Wanting to reach further, Bria laid down and extended her tail into the void. It was bizarre, as though there were no gravity on the other side. She figured that she should be careful not to fall in, lest she be unable to climb back out. Instead, she extended her tail in various directions, reaching through by as far as ten feet.

In most directions, Bria felt nothing. It was just an empty void. But reaching down and to the left--what looked from the outside like it should be well below the ground--Bria felt something. It felt like the edge of a book, or perhaps a big stack of papers. Curious, she managed to wrap the end of her tail around it and lift it. It wasn't anchored in place, so Bria pulled it all the way back to her side of the hole in the world to see what she had found.

It was definitely a stack of papers. Many pages had letters on both sides, too neat and regular to be handwriting. Bria pushed the hole back down to a crack, then sat down in the grass to read.

"Today begins my experiment to see whether machines can be taught to understand morality as we humans do. I have secured the funding I need in order to, if not finish the project, at least get far enough into it to have a more compelling appeal for more funding. In the nearer term, this could make for an intriguing academic research paper. Longer term, I'd like to get it released as a commercial game.

"The idea is that inhabitants of the game world will be put into complicated situations, and asked to determine what possible actions would be good or evil. They will be programmed to always choose to do what is good and avoid what is evil if they can distinguish it. But many things are not moral decisions, so they will have their own personalities so that different creatures commonly make different decisions.

"I'm not sure if personality differences and clashes as we humans experience will be enough to create enough moral dilemmas to be interesting. If not, I can always shake the ant farm so to speak by introducing natural disasters or diseases or whatever. But that probably won't be necessary, as it would be impressive if I can get them to make moral decisions notably better than random chance.

"This would be a novel application of machine learning. As usual, there will be a need for tons of training data. That's where the players come in. A player will be presented with a moral dilemma and several choices and be asked to mark which choices are good, evil, or neutral. Each choice will have many attributes recorded in the background that the game creatures can use to understand what makes a choice good or evil.

"Bringing in random people from the Internet naturally opens up the possibility of trolling. Players who just want to cause trouble will call evil good and good evil just to cause chaos. But that can be filtered out of the central repository of training data because it will tend to be particular players who troll. Unsupervised machine learning can group players into clusters by what sort of decisions they tend to make, and I can manually mark which clusters are legitimate and which are trolls. Data from trolls will not affect the learned moral behavior.

"The inhabitants of Gralia, as I have chosen to call my game world, will be various monsters and semi-human races from mythology. There will be mermaids, harpies, driders, minotaurs, lamias, slimes, and so forth. There are plenty of sources for inspiration here, and I can always add more as ideas arrive."

The first several paragraphs seemed like gibberish to Bria. Humans? Funding sources? A game world? Machine learning? Trolling? What could that ever mean?

But Gralia? That was the world where she now sat. And it listed the races of some of her friends, as well as her own. Bria, you see, was a lamia, and she had obtained the papers with her twenty foot long blue and green tail. From the waist up, she could mostly pass for a human female of about twenty years, save for her dark green hair. But her tail didn't look human at all, and was much closer to what one would expect of a snake.

Intrigued, Bria read onward. The papers talked about designing and building various parts of the world in which she lived. She had not previously considered that someone had intentionally created her world, but here was a document describing the process. Many places had existed longer than her, but among those that had come into existence after her, they were listed in chronological order. This was definitely talking about her world of Gralia.

Few inhabitants of Gralia were inclined to explore their world. Most just went about their daily lives, never traveling far from where they lived. Bria and some of her friends liked to go exploring and see where the world had grown. They had long known about the phenomenon of invisible walls, and Bria was surprised to see an explanation of it in the papers.

"A classic problem in game design is how to mark the edge of the game world. Some games have high cliffs that are impassible, with nothing apparently beyond them. But building an entire world up front is too much work before I get started on the real meat of the AI, so I'm going to do it piecemeal. I expect to be adding to the game world for years to come, and perhaps provide tools for user content so that others can add to it as well.

"I've settled on the dreaded invisible walls as the way to cordon off incomplete content. Yes, yes, I know people hate them. But it allows a world to look much fuller and more natural from a distance, as the incomplete areas can be done in much lower detail, with only a lower resolution picture of what is out there. Once a zone is done, the invisible walls blocking it can be removed, though new invisible walls on the far side of the zone will have to be added.

"Longer term, I'd like the game world to be a manifold without boundary, to eliminate the need for invisible walls in the first place. A sphere like Earth would be ideal, but the math for that is complicated, so I'll likely use a torus instead. But starting with a small torus and trying to stretch it into a larger torus is too disruptive where you try to insert a new zone. Invisible walls solve this problem entirely in the interim."

If the papers were to be believed, here was someone who could not merely find the invisible walls as Bria sometimes did, but create and destroy them. What sort of powerful, magical creature could do that? Certainly none that she had ever met in Gralia. But then she thought, what if the void is not part of Gralia? What if there is something else out there, beyond the void?

Bria read onward, through detailed descriptions of many things in Gralia. The papers explained how many things worked and why they were designed that way. Bria already knew a lot of how things worked from daily experience, but this filled in a lot of things that she didn't already know. And she had never known why things worked the way they did. For that matter, she had never previously considered that someone might have intentionally created her world, though that made sense in light of the way the world often expanded. One part really stood out to Bria, however.

"I've decided to add the ability for creatures to hypnotize each other. I've long been interested in hypnosis, though never yet had the opportunity to be put under it myself. This is also a chance to see what people think about the morality of hypnosis. I don't have any real hope of gleaning insight from the machine learning side of things, as that's far too complex. But seeing what people decide is moral to do should be illuminating.

"For now, hypnosis will only be consensual. I might allow it to be non-consensual in some cases in the future, though that might require weakening it somewhat to limit the influence of trolls. At the moment, the hypnotist has complete control over the subject for as long as it lasts, and post-hypnotic suggestions stick. But one cannot be hypnotized without giving permission, as I've given the creatures mental barriers that completely block the power unless they voluntarily lower them.

"I fear that this will cost me customers, as people think it's weird. Most of humanity does not share my fascination with hypnosis, after all. But it's my game, and I'll make it the way I want it. Too much appeal to what the masses want on average tends to lead to generic clones."

Bria found this puzzling. There are people out there who don't like hypnosis? She would often hypnotize her friends or let them hypnotize her. It felt so incredibly good to be entranced. On the other side, it was fun to order around others. How could anyone not like that?

Bria finished reading the papers over the course of several hours, having learned a lot. She then worried about what would happen if she were caught, so she replaced them back where she had found them. She then returned home, following the most interesting day thus far of her life.

Bria explained to her friends that they were characters in a game that someone was creating. That explained why things would suddenly change, with new zones existing where invisible walls had previously blocked them off. It wasn't just a wall ceasing to exist; before that, there hadn't been anything on the other side of the wall. Her friends found this explanation fascinating and told others.