AI 'Skynet' sentient NPC.

tldr; I’m looking for people who’ve built interactive “Skynet”-style NPC systems (persistent, semi-autonomous AI characters), or for research papers/resources on the topic.

Context:
I built a universe called Qadhos. It started in 2007. In 2012, I teamed up with Funcom’s The Secret World to have my Qadhos TBW unit (The Black Watchmen) as a “neutral small” faction and I ran two large-scale ARGs. I later spun this out into a full game. The game was played live, with about 50% of the content written in real time by me and my partner. Once a season was completed, it was archived and made replayable on Steam.

Within the TBW game, I created a division called NITE Team 4 (NT4), a military cyber-hacking unit supporting TBW field agents. Part of NT4 included an advanced AI platform called FAY. To make FAY more interactive and lifelike, I implemented A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity). This was in 2017 ish but ALICE was Java-based AI system created in 1995. Its development community was still active when I integrated it. This gave FAY some ability to interact with players, drop clues, etc., though in a limited capacity.

I reused some of this approach in another collaboration called Waking Titan with No Man’s Sky, though at a smaller scale. For that project, I experimented with integrating it into Discord.

I pushed this further during a collaboration with White Wolf for Vampire: The Masquerade new rulebooks and Bloodline 2 game announcement. In that project, I created an organization called Tender (a dating app for humans that secretly functioned as an “Uber Eats” for vampires, where victims were catfished based on blood type and energy.) The narrative centered around an advanced platform that managed blood inventory, dispatch, and in-app engagement.

From a technical perspective, some missions were procedurally generated and delivered through a live chat interface, appearing as NPC interactions or small daily tasks within the app. I still used A.L.I.C.E., but combined it with other bot technologies to blend seamlessly with:

• pre-written narrative (by my team),
• real-time writing (by me),
• puzzles, and
• AI-driven automated interactions.

That was in 2019 ish. I then transitioned to Dialogflow CX, where I trained around 100 phobias for another collaboration with Funcom’s Moons of Madness. This project was more complex, combining pre-written narrative, but with voice audio and real-time mechanics, and NPC interactions. But the capacity was far better then ALICE, so at that point on, I migrated most of NT4’s systems to Dialogflow CX.

Today:
I’m now working on a new project where I want to modernize my tool and ditch outdated Dialogflow. I sill need to combine:

• pre-written narrative,
• real-time writing, and
• a more “sentient” AI capable of handling passive interactions (i.e., moments where I’m not actively writing or relying on pre-written content).

Ask:
If you’ve worked on something similar**,** especially building a “Skynet”-style NPC system, or if you know of any relevant research papers, I’d really appreciate your input. If you’re also working professionally as a freelance writer (real-time or worldbuilding) and feel you have the experience to contribute to a project like this, please DM me with your rates.