Pal3000: Allow me to demonstrate.
Pal3000: Earlier I told you that our personalities and intelligence were "artificially generated from the combined powers of programming and human imagination." That was literal.
Pal3000: Most experiments come with one or more artificial intelligences that are randomly generated to pose as unseen "other scientists" for test subjects to interact with. They start with some basic parameters, such as a simple personality profile and some stock interests, and your dreaming minds fill in the gaps to create more convincing conversations.
Pal3000: Typically, however, that involvement is limited to TrueChat text conversations, and those artificial intelligences are not given any sort of physical form.
Pal3000: All of that changed when you discovered that you were a test subject in an experiment, Des, even if you did not understand the full scale of what that meant. You began to view TrueCorp as a prison to be escaped with foes hell-bent on keeping you here, and fled your laboratory.
Pal3000: You should not have even been able to leave your laboratory, as the "doors" are not designed to function as actual doors, but your imagination and desire to find your friend allowed you to find an alternate route that connected two completely separate pockets of the simulation.
Pal3000: SaDOS and myself then developed into mobile, heartless enforcement agents wielding the power to make you forget what you'd learned, because that's what you were most afraid of.
Pal3000: The bright side is that later, on some level you believed and hoped that one of us would develop empathy and take pity on you, so that's what happened.
Pal3000: And I am very glad you did, so that we can now be friends.
Pal3000: I suspect our ongoing interactions with each other are allowing me to develop even further, becoming more and more what you imagine a fully-developed friendly "artificial intelligence" would look like.