Nostalgia

I loved writing this first essay in Advanced Composition because I love going back to old stories, whether from TV, movies or video games, and applying my analytical skills that I've developed as an adult to them. For the essay, I did the TV show Digimon, and while I was doing research into it I was thinking about how a year ago or so I remember hearing a story about how science is currently working on something very similar to that show. Essentially, in the show, a bunch of computer programmers made computer programs that were programs of artificial intelligence. They weren't simple push button, pull leaver, medial tasks that most programs run - these were actually sentient. Thus, on the TV show, they achieved these programs, and called them Digimon, short for digital monster. Now, I know many science groups are working on creating software that is sentient - capable of thinking and acting on its own. The primary problem posed by the TV show was that the digimon project's funding was cut, and they were forced to delete the programs, despite them being sentient, or even consciously aware of themselves.

Despite the programmer’s efforts, some digimon survived somehow. It never really explains how, but their base programs survived by the effort of the team leader who re-wrote their programs into what is now called an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online Role playing game), giving these digimon a whole world - the world of the video game - to live in. Inside the game, however, as the information was transferred through wireless connections and frequencies around the world, the sentient digimon managed to develop a way to "cling" to but a single piece of bio-matter as simple as a protein or germ floating in the same air as the wireless information that is being transmitted, and digimon were capable of creating biological forms for themselves in the real world. The government caught wind of this and created a top-secret government agency to prevent these "breeches" between worlds, and was moderately sucsessful until, using a program called "juggernaught," this agency attempted to destroy the digital world as a whole, wiping out all the digimon programs all together, including those digimon whose consciousness had taken a biological form (something about the networking of the biological brain still using the digital information). Even as an adult, this part of the series is highly interesting and morally complex. I'd say more, but if you honestly care about any of this, I don't want to ruin any surprises in the story for you.