People who play several subculture games at once often joke like this.
“I’m busy because I have too many worlds to protect.”
Of course, it was only a self-deprecating expression, but back when I was a college student, I really did have far too many worlds to protect.
Back then, I was a Summoner, a Commander, a Teacher, a Producer, a Savior, a Master, a Traveler, a Trainer, a Trailblazer, and a Captain.
Even if the dailies in one game took five minutes, ten games meant at least fifty minutes.
There were story updates almost every week, and the character pickups that usually came around once every three weeks were multiplied across ten games.
Even if I only bought the monthly passes, playing ten games meant a fixed expense of around two hundred thousand won every month, so for a poor college student to enjoy games, a part-time job wasn’t optional—it was mandatory.
To summarize my daily routine back then:
When I woke up in the morning, I spent about an hour finishing the dailies for every game I was playing, then had breakfast.
In the morning I attended lectures, and during lunch I ate triangle kimbap from a convenience store to save on food costs while playing through overdue events.
In the afternoon I worked part-time to earn gacha money, then dragged my exhausted body home, lay down in bed, used up all the stamina that had accumulated throughout the day, and slept.
This lifestyle continued even after I graduated from a four-year university and became a job seeker.
“I was practically on the level of a professional streamer.”
Of course, after I got a job at a game company, even I couldn’t keep up with all ten games, so I started cutting them down one by one, beginning with the ones I was relatively less attached to. But Red Asterisk and Star Beyond were games that survived almost until the very end.
And the common point between those two games was that they both had an auto function.
When I was younger, I used to think, “Why play a game if you’re just going to run it on auto?” But looking back now, auto was practically an essential feature for working adults who had no time to play games.
In truth, it was also useful when I had three or four games open and was doing dailies in all of them at the same time.
Anyway, talking about the past made me ramble on a bit unnecessarily, but to get to the point, my desperate lie worked on the two of them.
At first, Yang Bibi had been half in doubt, saying there was no way that made sense, but when Saori, who possessed mind manipulation abilities, vouched for me, she ended up swallowing it completely.
In any case, once we cleared up our misunderstandings about each other, Yang Bibi asked how I had been and started catching up with me.
Just like with Saori, this was my first time meeting the real Yang Bibi, but talking to her didn’t feel particularly awkward.
Probably because my sense of inner intimacy with her had been MAX from the start.
Anyway, after we had talked for quite a while, Yang Bibi said she was curious about my current job, since I was no longer a “Captain” or a “Teacher,” and asked me about it. That was how things ended up like this.
***
“Whaaat? That Captain became a game developer? Hahahaha!”
“Hey, don’t laugh.”
“No, no, how could I not laugh after hearing that? I bet the others would’ve reacted the same way if they heard it.”
Saying that, Yang Bibi clutched her stomach and rolled around on the floor.
It wasn’t strange for her to react that way. The character known as the Captain in Star Beyond was a protagonist who was moderately diligent, moderately cool, and fundamentally upright.
There were occasionally choices that made him seem a little unhinged, but basically, he was a character far removed from office work.
In reality, however, I had a job that was the complete opposite of that, so there was no helping Yang Bibi’s reaction.
“Ah, it’s been a while since I laughed that hard. But if you’re a game developer, then you must have games you’ve developed, right? Can I try one?”
Yang Bibi showed interest as she said that.
For reference, Yang Bibi’s hobby in the original work was gaming.
And not just any gaming—she was an incredible omnivorous gamer who didn’t care about genre or era at all.
But my current circumstances were far too poor for me to meet her expectations.
“Ah… about that. There were various circumstances, so I left the company, you could say. Right now, it’s hard to call any game mine.”
“Then there isn’t even one game I can try?”
“It’s… scheduled for development.”
Though I had no idea when it would be finished.
“What’s with that vague answer?”
“I haven’t even decided what genre of game I’m going to make yet.”
When I said that and awkwardly scratched my cheek, Yang Bibi looked at me as if she couldn’t believe it.
But she was not a woman who gave up easily.
“Then how long would it take if you made it from scratch?”
“For now, I’ve set the deadline at one year. I think I can hold out that long with the balance in my bank account.”
“One month. Make it one month. I can’t wait any longer than that either.”
I was dumbfounded by Yang Bibi’s unreasonable demand.
“How am I supposed to develop a game in one month? I’m a solo developer, so I’m physically short on time.”
“If the problem is that you don’t have enough manpower, then I can just solve that for you.”
“What?”
“It just so happens that I have an artificial intelligence I got a while back and left neglected because I had nowhere to use it.”
As she said that, Yang Bibi pulled a suspicious-looking USB from the pocket of her leather jacket.
“Captain, I can borrow your computer, right?”
“Wai—!”
Before I could stop her, Yang Bibi abruptly plugged the USB into my computer tower.
At that moment, the monitor screen turned black, and green strings of text began flowing from top to bottom at incredible speed.
As if I were being hacked.
“What did you just do?!”
No, my precious twelve-million-won computer!!!
As I practically screamed and clung to the computer tower, Yang Bibi said as if it were no big deal,
“I just installed one high-performance AI on your computer. Well, considering the civilization level here, the technological gap is probably like heaven and earth.”
It even includes an automatic singularity function, you know?
While Yang Bibi excitedly explained the functions of the AI she had installed, the rapidly scrolling green text suddenly stopped dead.
Then a sentence abruptly appeared on the monitor.
[protocol: Please name this unit.]
Very kindly, the sentence was displayed in Korean.
At this point, honestly, it was a little frightening.
Strictly speaking, wasn’t this alien technology?
But how was it using Korean?
“It’s fine, so hurry up and enter something. Did you think I’d give the Captain something unusable?”
As Yang Bibi kept urging me on, I had no choice but to sit in front of the keyboard.
“An artificial intelligence’s name, huh.”
Several names immediately came to mind.
Jarvis, Friday, Ultron, Siri.
Of course, whichever one I chose seemed likely to run into copyright issues, so I looked around the house to come up with a suitable name.
Then, my eyes happened to land on the red number on the calendar.
“Sunday sounds good.”
An AI’s name should be a day of the week, after all.
***
[Hello, Master.]
The next moment, a mechanical voice came from the speakers connected to the computer.
“What the…”
I couldn’t help being flustered.
No, I had only named it like I was told. I never imagined the artificial intelligence would suddenly start talking to me.
But regardless of how I reacted, the same voice came from the computer speakers again.
[I am your all-purpose artificial intelligence assistant, Sunday. Please give me your command.]
Then Yang Bibi suddenly cut in and asked,
“Sunday, with the processing power currently allocated to you, how much of this planet’s network can you seize control of?”
[Calculating… At the present point in time, I can seize control of approximately 93% of the networks existing on ‘Earth.’]
“The remaining 7% are independent intranets?”
[Correct.]
“Then that means you can effectively seize control of every network on this planet.”
Muttering that, Yang Bibi looked at me.
“With this level of performance, it should be more than enough for the Captain to use in making a game, right?”
“No, no, no, no.”
From what I had just heard, this AI sounded like it had a danger level practically on par with a nuclear launch button.
At this point, it wasn’t using a butcher’s knife to kill a chicken—it was using a dinosaur-slaying blade to kill a chicken.
If one wrong move happened, Sunday would turn into Skynet.
“Isn’t using such an incredible AI to make a game way too wasteful?”
“What’s wasteful about using a tool? AI was created by humans to be used as a tool in the first place.”
But Yang Bibi, whose values were strangely twisted, said that, and I was left speechless.
“No, you’re not wrong, but…”
“Oh, and don’t worry too much. For Sunday to show its true capabilities at this civilization level, it would need to draw enough power to cause a blackout in roughly an entire city. So what you’re worried about won’t happen.”
“I feel like you’re saying something extremely terrifying with a smile on your face.”
In any case, what was done was done.
And whatever else I said, Sunday certainly seemed to be an AI with tremendous performance, so I decided to accept the current situation positively.
“Just because the development period is long doesn’t mean a good game will definitely come out anyway.”
There were even games that were made by following trends, only to be released after those trends had already passed.
Of course, even taking that into account, one month still felt far too short. But with an AI of this caliber helping me, it seemed like even the things I had been forced to give up on because of realistic limitations could be solved with ease.
“Good. Let’s give it a shot.”
Having made up my mind, I looked at the computer with a serious expression.