“Alice, good morning!”
Rosalie waved at the girl on the screen from where she lay in bed.
“Good morning, Rosalie!”
The little girl waved back, then held up a sign reading “Today’s Schedule” and called out cheerfully, “You and Mark have your audition at Bell Films today, don’t forget!”
The girl on the monitor was the AI program Mark had spent the past few days building for himself, an assistant he’d named Alice.
Her appearance was a composite Mark had put together, blending the best features of a handful of well-known Hollywood child stars.
Without proper hardware to back her, Alice was, for now, mostly just a pretty face, useful only for basic day-to-day tasks.
Anything remotely complex and her processing power buckled, her responses slowing to a crawl.
As for network offense and defense like Jarvis performed, that took a level of computing power Alice was nowhere close to reaching.
Still, Rosalie had gradually grown fond of having her around.
“Alice, put on something relaxing for me.”
Rosalie said as she got dressed and out of bed.
“Sure thing, Rosalie.”
The moment Alice answered, a gentle country song filled the bedroom.
*”Country roads, take me home…”*
*”To the place I belong…”*
On the screen, Alice swayed along to the music.
“Sweetheart, you’re a genius!”
Once Mark was up, Rosalie scooped him into a hug and planted a kiss on his cheek.
“I love Alice so much already, it’s like I’ve got another daughter now!”
“Alice is still brand new.
She’ll need a lot of refining.
Eventually I want her handling everything around the house, food, chores, scheduling, all of it, like a real smart housekeeper.”
Mark laid out his plans for her.
Of course, making any of that a reality meant he’d need money first, and a lot of it, to afford the hardware upgrades Alice would need down the line.
He’d briefly considered building antivirus software or offering network security services to other companies as a way to earn cash.
But after realizing SHIELD might already have their eye on him, Mark had decided it was too risky to keep leaning on his hacking skills to make money.
*Maybe I should start with some low-budget computer games.
Could be a good way to earn my first real chunk of capital…*
Over breakfast, a plan slowly started forming in his mind. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
He’d briefly entertained the idea of jumping ahead and building something like Facebook, or some other platform destined to blow up down the line.
But without any real capital to fund its growth, he’d almost certainly get swallowed up by some tech giant or copied outright, doing all the work just to hand someone else the payoff.
Video games, on the other hand, could be copyrighted outright, making them far harder for anyone to rip off.
After breakfast, mother and son caught a cab together to Bell Films.
Caleb had already made up his mind to cast Rosalie and Mark, so the audition was really just a formality for the investors and studio executives watching.
It went smoothly, and afterward, Rosalie signed the contract right there on the spot.
“Here’s the full script.
Take it home, get familiar with it.
You’ll be heading to New York with the crew for filming in about a month.”
Caleb handed Rosalie the complete script and reminded them both to keep the details confidential before sending them on their way.
On the ride home, Mark flipped through the script in the back of the cab and had the entire thing memorized word for word without even trying.
The film was called *Dreamland Kids’ Park.* The story was simple enough: a single mother working at a children’s amusement park called Dreamland, struggling to raise her son on a shoestring budget.
The entire film was set within the park itself.
The story split into two threads.
One followed the mother’s perspective, showing the grind of raising a five-year-old alone, living out of staff housing, working long hours from dawn to dusk.
The other followed the child’s perspective, showing him slipping out of the dorm the moment his mother left for work to run wild through the amusement park all day.
The first thread was heavy and somber, the second bright and playful, the contrast between them forming the emotional backbone of the film.
Along the way came moments of warmth, comedy, heartbreak, and family bonds, all building to a classic happy ending, textbook Hollywood fare.
“There’s so many lines, and so much screen time!”
Back home, Rosalie flipped through the thick script, her face twisted with dread.
This was her first time headlining a film, and only now was she realizing just how much a lead role actually demanded.
She wasn’t a trained actress, had never had any formal coaching, and the thought of memorizing every line while also figuring out how to actually perform it felt genuinely overwhelming.
She was, after all, an ordinary person, without a level six Super Brain like her son’s.
“Mom, let me help!”
Seeing her struggle, Mark eagerly stepped in to offer his help.
Rosalie’s face lit up with hope.
She’d learned by now never to underestimate her remarkably gifted son.
“Just wait and see, Mom!”
Mark sat down at the computer with total confidence and began writing code.
Over the following week, he built two new pieces of software: a video generation program and a text-to-speech program.
The video generator could pull matching images off the internet based on a written description and stitch them together into a video.
The speech program could take a script and read it aloud using voices of different ages and genders, simulating a range of emotional tones.
Mark rolled both programs into Alice first.
With them integrated, her movements became noticeably smoother and more complex, and her voice carried far more natural emotion than before.
“Alice, generate the film based on the *Dreamland Kids’ Park* script.”
Mark instructed her.
“Sure thing.
Beginning generation now.
Estimated time: eighteen hours.”
Alice responded promptly.
*This computer’s processing power really isn’t cutting it.*
Mark shook his head, resigned, and settled in to wait.
By the next day, the film was ready, and Mark sat down to watch it immediately.
The entire thing had been assembled from images scraped off the internet and stitched into video based on the script, and the seams showed, rather badly in places.
The characters all wore the faces of recognizable Hollywood actors, but their expressions came off stiff and wooden.
Mark had only just built Alice, after all; some rough edges were unavoidable, and she’d need plenty more refinement and growth.
Still, on the whole, the film had faithfully brought the entire script to life.
“Mom…”
Mark called Rosalie over from where she’d been grinding through her lines and had her watch the newly generated film.
“Oh my god!
Mark, how did you even do this?”
Watching *Dreamland Kids’ Park* play out on the computer screen, Rosalie’s eyes went wide with disbelief.
If Mark hadn’t told her it had been generated by computer, she’d have sworn the film had already been shot and released for real.