Rilanya: “You’re not like the others, are you?”
Darin: “What do you mean?”
Rilanya: “I… do you know why I first fell in love with you?”
Darin: “For my good looks?”
Rilanya: “My whole life I’ve felt so alone. The people around me… they just seemed to be going through the motions. Like they were asleep, or drugged, even when they worked, or played, or got drunk, or made love. They all think the same things in the same way. Each day the same. Repetitive. Like they’re only shadows of people.”
Darin: “Everyone feels that way sometimes, Rilanya.”
Rilanya: “But you’re not like them. You say new things. I don’t always understand them, especially your jokes, but they’re new, and that’s the important thing. Darin, can I ask you a question?”

I looked at the screen for a few moments. Rilanya’s rendered graphic was looking at my point-of-view with a pleading expression. Plot point, I thought to myself, and typed: “Anything, Rilanya.”

Rilanya’s figure took a deep breath and leaned close to my point-of-view. Her animated lips moved and her voice issued from my headphones: “What’s an NPC?”

“What?” I said, out loud. Then I started laughing.

Rilanya went on talking. “In the tower of Ashel, when you rescued me from the prison chamber… the guards were dead outside my door. I’d never seen blood before. And you said… I remember your exact words… ’Don’t worry, babe, they were only NPCs.‘ And then that time in the tavern, when that man only wanted to talk about the Plaited Road, you said… ’Guess the NPCs here aren’t programmed for deep conversation, huh?’ You use that word… the same times when I get that feeling, that all the people around me are only shadows.”

I just looked at the screen for a few moments. I was getting ever so slightly creeped out. I knew that this was some programmer’s idea of a practical joke, I knew it solidly and with every ounce of my common sense, and I wanted to see where it led, but I was still creeped out.

Darin: “We’re all ultimately alone in this world, Rilanya.”
Rilanya: “You’re not from this world, are you, Darin?”

I looked carefully at the two sentences, still blazoned across the bottom of my text screen. Rilanya’s response had something of an “I wanted an excuse to say that” quality – a canned line, maybe? Of course it was.
Oh, well, what the hell. I’d saved my place only ten minutes back, might as well take this as far as it could go.

Darin: “No, Rilanya, I’m not.”

Tears started from Rilanya’s eyes. “I thought so,” she said, her voice quiet in my headphones. “Darin, ever since I met you, I’ve had this feeling of… unreality, of the whole world being… arranged, somehow. Not around me, but around you. Things just… happen to you. People have been searching for the seven Diamond Keys for… thousands of years, as long as recorded history remembers. Sometimes someone finds one, and the world changes, but… five in a row? I don’t believe it, Darin, and I don’t believe all the neatly arranged events that led up to it. The Emperor’s daughter is sick and a fairy you saved in the forest just happens to have given you an aildonna root? I don’t believe it any more, Darin. You’re… arranging things somehow. From… outside.”
Darin: “That’s not exactly how it works, Rilanya.”
Rilanya: “Did you arrange for me to fall in love with you?”
I actually felt wounded.
Darin: “You ask that after everything I went through? Someone may have fated you to fall in love with me, but I wasn’t controlling you. If I was, I wouldn’t have made me walk through a snake pit as proof of the purity of my love. Not to mention the other two side-quests you dreamed up back when you were a virgin princess. I swear I spent more time on you than I would have on a real girl.”
Rilanya jerked back as if I had slapped her. Her eyes widened in the same way I’d seen in one of her earlier deaths, when a crossbow bolt from a rooftop suddenly went through her heart. Rilanya’s lips moved. No sound came out. Then her lips moved again, and I heard a whisper in my headphones: “…real…girl…”

“Okay, this isn’t funny anymore,” I said out loud. “I don’t know who programmed this, but you’re a sick bastard.” I hit the pause button and Rilanya’s gently waving hair, the only visible indicator of ongoing time in the game world, froze in place.
Ten minutes later I’d failed to google any online accounts of the Easter egg, but I was fortified with the knowledge that NPC AIs, though they are flexible enough to understand real-time conversation and manipulate the user into perceiving emotion, are definitely, positively, absolutely not conscious. AIs can be fed canned conversational maps of “the mystery of subjective experience”, and make around as much sense as human philosophers, which is to say, not much. But no AI has ever spontaneously said anything about a sense of its own existence. Conversation controllers are standard software, not research AIs. NPCs may remember events in their history, but their underlying cognitive programs are inflexible. The words on my screen could not possibly reflect anything except a passionless conversational AI, given the goal of making me attribute emotions to a nonexistent entity called Rilanya.
I knew all that, and I was still disturbed. “I’m sorry, Rilanya,” I typed. I thought for a moment. “It’s not your fault you’re not -” I backspaced, and wrote: “The person who programmed you must have had serious -” Then I gave up, deleted that too, and just hit return.

Darin: “I’m sorry, Rilanya.”
Rilanya: “Darin, please explain to me. I’m frightened.”