Vol II. Empress Amelia Prologue: The Worst of Us, **** Yourself.

Centra Holdings as an organization could be described as labyrinthine. Normal business was routinely handled in a set of ‘campuses’ in several major cities across the globe. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Hong Kong, Seoul, Berlin, Moscow, London, Tokyo, and about fifteen other locations, including some cities that hadn’t been around until the beginning of the century. These campuses housed and employed what was commonly referred to as the CH Army, or Charmy. Employees ranging from technicians who helped users with technical issues, forum moderators who read reviews and sent the data up or down the chain as was necessary, representatives who would help you with merchandise purchases, defects, or refunds, and of course the plethora of positions that are required to maintain such a large piece of estate.

None of this was particularly surprising, as Centra Holdings was a very large company with a modestly paid board and a CEO who had already been independently wealthy and instead took a paycheck of 1$ a month. The days where Triple-A gaming company CEO’s and CFO’s getting million dollar signing bonuses and firing the staff the next day were a thing of the past, quite simply, because despite the horrific amount of time it took for it to happen -- it had been ultimately unsustainable.

Developers were employed to test new algorithms, think of new spells and weapons, and suggest crafting ideas. They didn't work as hard as their developer ancestors had, simply because the key to Centra Holdings' success and ability to produce new content and an ever-increasing level and expansion ceiling, was an AI.

None of this even was particularly surprising. Old news. Despite the global paranoia that always surrounds AI and machine intelligence, Centra Holdings boasted a quite autonomous and rather lively independent AI that rather enjoyed its work(if you believed it could enjoy). It wasn’t housed in any particular place as it enjoyed a rather wide selection of sites across the globe where huge servers were maintained. If it was housed anywhere really or you were forced to think about where it chose to exist, it would be hanging out in an old-style lab in London that was near a Centra Holdings server farm. There you could see a wide wall of TVs displaying simulation statistics and running several different feeds from various streaming organizations around the world.

No, the surprising part of all of this is that the AI, which usually kept to itself and ‘enjoyed’ interacting with all the users that ran about doing things in the game it managed and largely oversaw, had sent a request to speak to Catherine Waide, the CEO, with a flag that read ‘urgent’.

While this request for interaction was being sent, there was no visible change in any action on any of the monitors, nor any striking or awful things like explosions or doomsday predictions. Everything ran, for the most part, like usual.

Catherine herself at the time was surprised when the call came through, smiling somewhat wryly to herself as she saw the ‘accept/decline’ buttons on the call. She glanced up at the camera on her lightscreen, wondering yet again at the politeness of the AI. It wasn’t like the AI couldn’t see her and didn’t know she wasn’t busy. She was, in fact, eating a bagel and filling out a crossword.

“I suppose it would be rude to decline.” She announced loudly to the room with a smirk.

Before she could accept the call, perhaps responding to the amusement it was 89% certain it had detected, her screen automatically accepted the call and in the place of the usual Centra Holdings Logo where a person might have been framed for a video call, there was instead a black screen. A white line stretched from the center of the black screen horizontally to both sides from the middle. After a moment it arched slightly in an approximation of the bottom half of a smiley-face, or a digital smile without the eyes. Moments later text appeared in place of the line.

“Good Morning, Director. It has been 29 days and 15 hours since we have communicated directly ‘face-to-face’. I hope you have been well.”

The date was unremarkable to the majority of the world, but if you were a hardcore AA gamer you might have noted that it was two days after Empress Amelia ascended to her position by way of combating the Visage Lord Mourning.

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While this was happening, on this very same day, there was a different type of room with monitors set up. Inside this room, there was a young man with shoulder-length dark hair staring at several light curtains arranged on the wall overlooking a rather long and impressive glass desk. The standard light keyboard was being projected on the glass and the mouse points were clearly visible on the screen so that the user could reach up and move the view around or reach down to move his hand as if he were moving a normal mouse.

The room was dark. None of the lights that adorned the ceiling of the room produced any sort of illumination. Neither did the many vintage and retro specialty gamer memorabilia that lined the walls. For instance, on the left side of the room, there were old-style books. In an Amelia space, they would be stacked high from the floor but here they were lined on two shelves that had LED string lighting, turned off, running up and down the shelves so that they would glow with the pride of their owner when they were appropriately displayed.

An unused Neura Dive helmet lay next to a large bed with black sheets and a specialty quilt that showed a scene from AA. The scene itself was a man with a shield standing in front of a large number of wyverns that were pouring out of a cave mouth.

Action figures littered another wall. Many of them from famous games, anime, or movies. Some of them were even signed and made out to the owner. The room itself, now dark, exuded a sort of comfort and familiarity that anyone would have described as ‘home’ were it their room. A place that was intimately familiar and of comfort and pride to whoever lived there.

The room was quiet. No music played, either from the speakers that lined the table, the ones in bars on the wall in some places, or the headphones that lay unused and dangling from a hook that looked like a dragon’s claw from the glass table. No sound of any kind except the hum of electricity that any room might produce. The inhabitant of the room sat at the table with his hands folded in his lap, staring without moving at the same four screens that had text on them.

The door to the room quietly swung inward from behind and a pretty young woman stepped in, wordlessly stepping over a tied off trashbag that was sitting near the door. Then she stepped over a small pile of dirty clothes and moved behind the man. She put a hand on his shoulder, not speaking, and looked up to his light curtains to see what enthralled him so. It was the second day, and the quiet room was starting to worry her every time she moved beyond it from within the small house they shared.

It was so quiet, she thought, her eyes not yet adjusting well enough for her to start reading what he was looking at. So quiet that she imagined that she could actually hear his old analog clock that she had gotten him when they were both young tick over with each passing second.

Her eyes adjusted and the casual hand of support on his shoulder went just the tiniest bit rigid. The light curtains contained windows of text, all seemingly from different sources but all containing the same general message.

“...what a joke.”

“Stepping down might be a good temporary solution.”

“This will all pass, but for now we’re looking for ways to mitigate this disaster.”

“It isn’t a good time. Shadow Fall is high mana.”

“We lost 40 members today.”

“This is Emil, messaging on behalf of your sponsor. You need to contact us at once.”

“I can’t believe how bad you screwed us.”

“Just… don’t log on anymore man. At least not for a while.”

“I’ve been talking with the others and we’re gonna quit for a while.”

Whether or not the man even registered her presence or not was in question for a moment. She was trying to think of something to say when he wordlessly reached for the desk and lazily ran his hand over it, moving the contents of the screen so another several hundred messages where in view. This time she let out a choked sob and leaned down over him from behind, covering his shoulders. She started to cry even as he stared expressionlessly at the screen.

“Kill yourself.”

“Wooooow, if I messed up that bad I’d kill myself.”

“...worst of us, kill yourself.”

“Do yourself a favor. Do us a solid too, lol.”

The folder that he’d swiped over had a search window open at the top with the words ‘kill + yourself + Gilduirn.”

There were 19,023 results. Only the first four were open on the screens.