They are human-created programs who rewrite their own code to fix their own glitches and anticipate the user to become efficient. Hardin, Schoppe's boss started working with his own Interrogative Agents and Peter's EPOs. This mix made the EPOs loose into the Internet and subsequently to the Source of the Real World. The EPOs gained access to the machines. The hacker Rain, tasked by Schoppe stole an EPO and the two saw on screen a "machine world" with people like themselves inside pods. This was discovered by the system and agents started hunting them.