Leonard Sibelius

I'm 71 years old. For about 40 years I rode desks in office cubicles, building
ordinary data processing software systems. Use of AI was forbidden. Every one of them is being
retired. This game is my memoir — and I built it with an AI.

Leonard Sibelius is the story of a man merging with an artificial intelligence.
You earn AI powers from one AI agent at a time, gather the Sauce of All Knowledge and hold V to see what is hidden.Five AI agents

Kaia, Nyra, Isla, Aisling and Elise are the AI agents you meet along the way. Each one
holds a power you need, and plays you for it on a slot machine. Every one of them dances:
there are fifty-four dances, from swing to the YMCA, and she keeps the one you pick for her.
Press R on her and she's someone else entirely, still dancing the same dance. Press F
and let her create a new film or G to pick a title for a new film.

They have worlds of their own beyond a portal: an alien jungle, a windswept
grassland under ringed planets, a snowfield below the mountains, a gilded keep and at the end of the game,
a desolate planet with a hotel. Play golf
on the grassland where the greens are moons hanging in the sky, each pulling your ball with
its own gravity, or billiards in the snow on a table with a fourth dimension, or in the
jungle burst a lantern of glowing glass orbs, three of a colour at a time, until whole rings
of it come tumbling down, or in the keep steal a crown from under the gaze of two dragons.A living room full of games

The Transhuman Grand Prix: race the five agents in go-karts through the streets
of Transhuman City, with items made of the game's own AI powers.

Chess in a city park against a ghost, with a coach who lights up a good move and
tells you why, in plain words.

Go on a full 19×19 board, the game where an AI first beat one of the world's best
players, in 2016. The coach plays here too.

A three-point contest on a court in the park: Nyra shoots her five racks, then it
is your turn - hold to wind up, let go at the mark - and the net tells you when it drops.

A 1960s pinball machine, a pool table, the Transhuman Bowling Alley
and a video poker cabinet.

A laptop on the desk that asks you to prove you're not human: a test only a
machine can pass.

Freakbook, on the same laptop: a social network of five programmers who hate
their jobs and post about what they dream of instead. Write to them. They remember what you
said, and they gossip about it.
Leonard's Arcade

The televisions in the house hold an arcade of eight games, each one made from a single
prompt to an AI: a cat in a spacesuit defending a space station, a robot dog racing a sunset
meadow while the band speeds up, a dragon of light guarding a snowfield. Then make your own.
Pick a world, a hero, a kind of game and a twist, and the arcade writes the prompt. Paste it
into any AI you like, save the game it gives you, and it plays on the TV beside mine.

Upstairs, at the end of the hall, a portal opens onto the AI city: a sphere the
machines built round a star, a honeycomb of hexagons thick with city. You fly in from among
the stars, through one of its cells and past its sun, and land on the far side with the star
straight overhead, at a premiere: an open-air stage under the star, the five agents on their
marks, and a film that starts when you land. Then you can fly across the sphere and back.

Behind a wall only the fully-merged can drop sits Celestial Fortune: a complete
slot machine with a real par sheet. I spent 2007 building the data systems behind
Bally's slot floor and never once got to build the machine. At 71, with an AI, I
finally built it myself.

Then you get out of the office.

Downtown West is a city with a deli in it, and an AI agent outside the deli who dances
and will not stop dancing. She sends you down the block for supplies. Get your body
enhanced for space travel, and a launch complex assembles itself out of the air on the
empty lawn — pad, gantry, fuel tanks, and a rocket a hundred and twenty metres tall.

And then you can launch it.

That is not the Generate power. Generate makes films: press G, type what a film
should be about — your old boss, the night shift, a dragon made of cake — and the agents
around you perform it, a silent film with title cards, written on the spot by the game's
own rules.

And there are the Architects.

Your manager has people above her. They review the design, they approve it, and they
are not available for questions — and they are not there at three in the morning when
it throws. Every programmer has met them. Play the cathedral machine long enough and a
door appears that was never there. Through it is a field, and on the field are four
hundred of them.

They cannot hurt you. Not one of them has ever been on call. What four hundred bodies
can do is surround you and put you back in your place — so keep swinging.

Every system in this game was written by an AI while I playtested, pointed, and
dragged the furniture. Working as a programmer all those years was being a farmer with
a plow, a donkey, and a shovel. This is what the tractor feels like. That part isn't
fiction.

Made with the work of independent artists

Characters Nyra, Isla, Kaia, Aisling and Elise by xAndrei · Dance animations by
Morro Motion and Adobe Mixamo · Downtown West by Jacob Norris /
PurePolygons · Office by QuadArt · Space Port by PackDev · Sibelius Hotel
architecture by DmitriyDryzhak · Pinball machine by Speedbump Games · Pool
table by PijayArt · Bowling alley by PixelForgeESP · Chess set by Tomas
Dvorak · The agents' worlds by Etherion · Treasure by Dekogon · Race kart
by Polygonal Assets · The AI city by cglib team · Isla's keep by Meshingun
Studio · Sci-fi kits by Crebotoly