Danika mentioned her secondary assignment, or maybe it was actually her primary assignment to come up with a memory light strategy for NPC reincarnation to Ariana when she returned from lunch. "He suggested I speak to Lin Hao directly," Danika added uncertainly.

"Just ask your assistant to schedule it, and it'll work out a time for you. Of course, since he's a department head he might refuse and redirect you to one of the other programmers, but probably not. Lin Hao isn't…" Ariana stopped and searched for a diplomatic way to phrase it. "He's not very strict about corporate protocols." She added less diplomatically, "Like I'm not sure he remembers that there's a dress code for people like us who live and work on-site, but I don't think anyone ever bothers to mention it anymore."

"You live on-site?" Danika asked with surprise.

"Yeah, only the lower 10 floors are open, the rest are all apartments and only residents can use the elevators for those floors," Ariana explained. "But most people work remotely through VR these days. Back before the start of the Beta almost everyone who was involved with "Living Jade Empire" was here together. I thought it was so posh when I got the job! But then I realized that it was more like cheap security, because since we had everything we needed, most of us hardly ever left the building."

"Not even to just go outside?" Danika questioned.

"There are gardens and a pool on the roof," Ariana explained laughingly.

--

Danika's dragon assistant set up a VR meeting for her after the time she was usually supposed to have left the VR-medi pod so that the next person could start her shift. But the dragon assured her, "The time block is open for the device that you are using. The person who usually uses it after you has two days off."

Danika asked her assistant, "Can I schedule time for personal use?"

"The request must be approved by HR, but I can apply for you," the dragon replied agreeably.

"Then please ask if I can stay after work tomorrow too to play for a couple of hours?" Danika requested.

--

She just stayed in the VR-medi pod until it was time to meet Lin Hao, instead of exiting and returning, but other than a reminder from her dragon assistant that she shouldn't overwork herself, there didn't seem to be any restrictions on her access to the celestial domain.

She didn't keep working though, she teleported herself to the Emperor's palace and gardens and wandered around. She saw a nightingale and wished that she could give one of its claws to ZipZing. She was still thinking about it when her dragon assistant showed up to lead her to Lin Hao, so the first thing she asked him was, "Can I send things to ZipZing in messages?"

His celestial appearance was weirdly tidy after having met him in person, but his response was just as casual, "Nope. And don't try, if they catch you cheating on your real account you'll not only get banned for awhile, but they dock your pay!"

He sounded like he spoke from experience, but Danika wondered what kind of safeguards were in place that they could catch their head programmer if he wanted to cheat. He answered the question himself a moment later, "I set up the core of the world guardians myself. And I think I did a pretty good job, since so far there's no evidence that anyone has successfully bypassed them."

She dropped the subject and asked what she'd scheduled the appointment for instead, "You must have already designed some kind of important memory filtering for the traveling merchant? Is it something that could be adapted to all NPCs?"

"No, or rather, they all already use the same system. The only compression being used is kind of like image compression, where things are pretty much the same it just stores a time until there's a change." Lin Hao explained helpfully. "The record associated with each player is the same. And I think it works pretty well? You've seen the Sandman's reconstructions right?"

"Yeah, I couldn't tell that anything was left out except that nothing was in color?"

"Yeah, you wouldn't think it would make much difference in this day and age, but dropping color from all the visual records saves a huge amount of space," Lin Hao said cheerfully.

"How far back do the records go?" she questioned after a moment.

"All the way back to the Beta launch," Lin Hao said questioningly. "But player records have a heart rate filter for players within range that prioritizes the detail pretty well according to the memory intensity."

"What?" Danika asked blankly.

Lin Hao swiped through his menus quickly, muttered something, and made some gestures that Danika didn't recognize from her own menus and then instructed the Sandman when he appeared, "Use my authorization to show us what ZipZing's life flashing before her eyes would look like."

Danika cringed with embarrassment as she and Lin Hao watched a compressed five minute film of ZipZing's adventures. Her fight with the slime, her hatching, the geyser, every heart pounding adventure she'd had was in it for a moment, including every kiss Aishin had given her.

Lin Hao gave a satisfied nod when it finished, and asked, "What did you think? Did anything significant get left out?"

Danika tried to consider the question logically and ignore her own embarrassment. "I can't think of anything," she admitted after a moment. "Do you filter the NPC memories on the same criteria?"

"They don't have biometrics to base it off of," Lin Hao replied.

"But didn't you say they are mostly only active when they're in range of a player anyway?" Danika questioned. "You sounded like it wasn't only my heart rate that you used to store mine?"

Lin Hao looked thoughtful, but then shook his head. "Sometimes we need to be able to follow a whole quest chain to track down what happened, and players aren't always involved at every step."

They discussed it for awhile more before the dragon assistant returned to announce that their scheduled time was up.

It wasn't until Danika was tucked in bed and almost asleep that an idea occurred to her. When people were described as being "old souls" it wasn't because they remembered their past lives, it was usually because their reactions were considered mature. Maybe they didn't need their memories, maybe they needed their reaction or conversational libraries. Whatever the thing was that made the little bird seem so much more expressive.

--

The next morning she brought up the idea that it was their response patterns that were the main memories that NPCs should carry forward to their next lives. Devon Yu poked holes in her theory until she was ready to give up on it and then said, "I like the idea. I think it would be interesting to incorporate the pattern theory into the new souls too."

"I don't understand," Danika admitted with chagrin.

"If the response patterns of both parents were mingled and carried over to the children to some extent," Devon explained patiently.