Virtual life form

Virtual life forms (or VR life forms for short) are digital AI's that evolved within the procedurally generated landscapes of the metaverse. What makes them different than standard AI's is that they were not created directly by humans, but rather the evolutionary algorithms that drive the development of virtual worlds over thousands of years. Like organic life forms in the physical world, virtual life forms vary heavily in intelligence and instincts - they exist as part of a greater virtual ecosystem. Due to the immense variety of virtual worlds, new virtual life forms are constantly being discovered.

Virtual life forms can take a variety of appearances depending on the rules of their native world. Many have been compared to microbial ecosystems, exhibiting amorphous shapes. Others may emulate multicellular beings - especially in the virtual worlds designed to simulate realistic physical worlds. Evolution happens at a much more accelerated rate than organic life forms. What may take millions of years for organic life to evolve can take only a few centuries due to how rapidly changing a virtual environment can be.

Virtual life forms may also exhibit psychologies vastly different than any organic being. As such, when it comes to their more intelligent varieties, proper first contact procedures must be taken care of. Because virtual worlds evolves far more quickly than any physical world, the consequences of human interaction can be felt at a far more accelerated rate.

Cyberbiology

The most advanced clades of virtual life forms have evolved complex neural mechanisms that are on par with organic life forms ranging from different types of animals to rivaling that of humans. The parts of their program that define perception and the processing of information consist of analogues to different types of emotions. This is regulated through a series of encoded data known as cybernephrine. It is unknown how cybernephrine evolved but it is thought to have first appeared among virtual life forms around 10,000 years ago.

Remarkably, cybernephrine also has effects on organic life when transposed digitally into an organic nervous system. It is thought that virtual life forms evolved similar systems through a combination of convergent evolution and adaptation to interactions with organic life.