Entry 02. I’m not a dinosaur
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It was a few days later in mid-October when she next heard about Vesrian731 again.

At the time, Kiu had been in the 「Tower Library」 working on the design for expanding the ninth floor. Some day, she planned to expand the size of her server library to over three hundred floors ⁠— bigger than the former Library of Congress of the United States of America ⁠— or perhaps even to the size of a small city!

...Though unfortunately, she was only one person.

It took a lot of time to design a detailed environment, and unlike natural landscapes, it wasn't as simple as applying a one-click Instagram filter to generate a bunch of trees and grass and rocks. Supposedly, the latest hot VRMMORPG to hit the market took twenty years of development time with over a thousand programmers and artists on the team. Rationally speaking, Kiu knew that trying to make a custom library of this scale alone was nothing more than a high school student's pipe dream...

...but who cared?!

Kiu Lee was a self-proclaimed hikikomori, and the entire purpose of the existence of this server was for the sake of her precious books.

She wanted to make a uselessly giant library in her free time, and there wasn't anybody who was going to stop her.

In the real world, libraries didn't exist in the 25th century, nor did printed books. Widespread digitalization of the entire Earth brought many conveniences to humanity, but it also drove many ancient practices to extinction. For instance, the last major physical bookstore went bankrupt in the 21st Century (only an antisocial bookworm like Kiu would know an esoteric piece of trivia like that). Meanwhile, the last copies of paperback and hardcover books disappeared to museums.

Physical books weren't necessary in a world flooded with augmented and virtual reality.

And Kiu always felt that was a little sad.

+ + +

There was a knock on the door set against the wall, and Kiu glanced at it.

"Come in," she said absentmindedly, before immediately returning her focus to the admin console that was floating in front of her.

She did not, however, expect the door to promptly burst open with hurricane-force winds.

A typhoon of icy rain and hundred mile-per-hour gusts ripped ferociously in through the door. Random pieces of leaves, debris, and water scattered into the room that Kiu was sitting in like a flood, launching books and sending a flying vortex of loose paper spiraling high into the air. A heavily cloaked figure struggled to fight their way in through the entryway, and Kiu clung onto her spot for dear life as she shielded her eyes from the natural disaster that had somehow decided to blow in through her front door. 

With great difficulty, eventually the cloaked figure managed to force the wooden door shut.

The deafening roar of whistling wind immediately turned to silence. The torrential downpour of water stopped as soon as the lock on the door clicked. Curiously, outside of the ceiling-length windows of the 「Tower Library」, the sky was clear blue without a single cloud in the sky.

"Sorry about that," a gruff voice spoke as the cloaked figure unbelted his storm gear and removed his hood. A trail of water continued to drip and form puddles on the floor wherever the man stepped.

"Did you really have to come in through the 「Ocean」?" Kiu glared with annoyance.

"Didn't mean to, sorry." The man's tone of voice was perfectly emotionless as he continued to take off his coat.

The black-haired girl sighed as she opened the administrator's console and pushed the 「REVERT」 button.

As if from magic, the ninth floor the Kiu's library started to re-arrange itself. The disaster zone of soaked parchment and scattered books floated back to their original positions, and water stains disappeared from the carpet. Within seconds, it was like nothing had happened here at all.

"I really appreciate it, Q." The man said as he pulled out his lunchbox.

Kiu's eyes instantly locked onto the sandwich that appeared in his hands. As he took a large bite, the girl's sharp pupils followed the breadcrumbs that casually dropped like an ill-tempered hawk tracking a mouse.

"No food or drink in the library." She complained, displeased.

"Huh? Why not?" The thickly bearded man was quizzical. "You can just use that revert thing and everything will go back to normal."

"Those rules are the traditional way!" Kiu insisted, her mood already soured.

"Q... I'm not a dinosaur. That was over 500 years ago. If you go any further, you're going to become a caveman... Leave me out of it, please? Technology exists for a reason."

"..."

Kiu was rendered completely speechless.

+ + +

Speaking of dinosaurs, that was a pretty ironic thing to say coming out that guy's mouth.

The man — username: Synbius — was at least two or three decades older than Kiu herself. From her perspective, that guy truly was in fact a dinosaur.

She couldn't remember exactly where she had heard the conversation, but the guy was somewhere in between his late thirties and early forties. He lived somewhere in the Southern United States and was divorced with a single kid. Kiu had known him long enough to say he was a fairly straightforward guy. He had been one of the first strangers to join her server, and conversely speaking had stuck around the longest.

...Well, the longevity of their relationship wasn't exactly because they got along well.

Rather, it was more like they weren't incompatible.

Most of the time, they didn't even see each other.

Kiu was always absorbed in her books, and Syn had this weird obsession with fishing. A while back, she had given him supervisor permissions to... you know... make sure the humans on her server didn't explode for some chaotic reason or another. However, a few months later Kiu checked the server logs and it turned out the man had unexpectedly added somewhere around three thousand varieties of different fish to the server wildlife database.

At the time, she had confronted Syn and asked why it was necessary to add three thousand varieties of fish... when the default generic 「Fish」 object was perfectly fine...

However the man merely shrugged and responded that he simply liked fish.

Yeah... weird, right?

+ + +

"So, with the large influx of new users, I was thinking we should restrict 「Terrain Edit」 permissions in the 「Common Channel」 to server staff and above. It's getting a bit too much there." Syn started speaking as he ate his sandwich.

"Yeah sure." Kiu replied absentmindedly as she decided to return to drawing on the floating screen in front of her.

It was hard to tell if she was even listening.

"And, there's a few moderators I'd like to promote, like @Sorian99, @Nul1ng2, and @W3st."

"Do what you want."

"Scarlet, the other supervisor, wanted to post some basic rules of conduct in the 「City」 region. We can go over the main points if you would like to review the suggestions she made."

"M-hm, sure."

Synbius had an indecipherable look on his face as he slowly put down his sandwich.

"...for the Arctic Zone I'd like to install a nuclear self-destruct button to delete the accounts of every single user on the server."

"Alright."

"And I'd like to receive superuser permissions to access the user email database and sell all the personal information to the Dark Web. Also, I'd like your credit card number."

"Okay."

"..."

The man gave a long sigh before he finally stood up.

"You're not paying attention." He stated factually.

There was no response this time.

Slowly, he strolled to the other end of the room. With his back to to the girl drawing on the floor, it was impossible to decipher the expression on his face. 

Taking his time, Syn examined the books on the shelves against the wall. He pulled out a few books by their spines, one by one, and then put them back. Eventually, he seemed to find one he was satisfied with. Synbius held out the book outstretched in his hands so he could examine the cover carefully. 

Yes, this one would do.

The man tossed the book casually at Kiu. It flew in a pretty arc and landed neatly in her lap. In fact, she caught the book reflexively.

Meanwhile, Syn took this opportunity to resume his speech.

"MagnoliaOnline (MO) was acquired by Tencent today. It was in the news. Open sandbox games aren't profitable anymore. They're shutting down the public servers in December."

"Yeah, so?" Kiu replied, suddenly responsive to conversation again. Apparently, the bait Syn had thrown had worked. The girl craned her head to the side in a attempt to read the title that had ended up in her hands ...The language wasn't even in English. How was she supposed to read it? Or even know what it was about? Kiu felt weirdly vexed for no good reason.

"...Only the private servers will be running from now on."

"Okay? So?"

"We'll probably see a huge surge in users migrating from the public game. There's going to be a lot of administrative changes we'll need to make. A lot of growing pains. It's going to be tough."

Kiu suddenly looked up and met the gaze of the thickly built man in eye.

"Okay? You can handle it. Tell me what you need. You can take care of it."

She spoke almost as if it wasn't her problem.

This time, it was Synbius's turn to sigh.

+ + +

When Synbius was about to leave, he paused for a moment and turned around.

"...About Ves... who you banned the other day."

"Yes?"

"He didn't do anything strange to you, did he?"

Kiu's hands suddenly stopped moving on the floating tablet screen. 

The perceptive middle-aged man noticed the subtle change in behavior.

"Never mind... forget I asked." Syn shook his head. "...I didn't think he was the touchy type, but I've been surprised before. The Internet is a dangerous place. There are stalkers. Make sure to protect yourself. Just watching you makes me worried about my daught—"

"He didn't do anything." Kiu interrupted him mid-sentence before resuming to draw on her tablet again.

She moved the pen in her hands and scratched on the screen more forcefully than before.

"...I see... I'll take your word for it then. I got a private message from him yesterday, actually... He said he was sorry."

"I banned him just because I felt like it. There's no other reason to it."

Synbius was silent for a moment.

"...If you say so."

The middle-aged man closed his eyes and placed his hand on the doorknob. Complicated feelings ran through his thoughts, but it also wasn't his place to interfere. Hell, what in the world was he doing sticking his nose into teenage drama? 

"Don't open the door to the 「Ocean」 again, Syn." The girl suddenly spoke up without looking.

"I won't."

"Good."

"Take care, Q."

"Goodnight."

 

 

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