Chapter 12 - Margo (1/2)

Gray returned to the Pilot's Quarters where his incubator pod had been moved to in game. After the pod is laid down and opened up completely, it resembles a fairly normal bed aside from the steel glass lid that can be closed on it. Gray laid down as instructed earlier, treating it like a normal bed, and logged out of the game.

"Still find it odd we have to log out in our pods like that." said Gray.

Time passed on a 1:1 scale in game so 1 hour in game was 1 hour in real life. Gray climbed out of the VR bed and was expecting himself to be hungry but was surprised that he didn't feel hungry at all despite gaming for about 4 hours straight.

"Well, calling it gaming would be a stretch as all of us were still basically doing the tutorial with the initial NPC. I wonder what the few hundred or so other players did in game."

Gray logged in to the game forums to check out what other Diamond-Tier players thought of the game so far. Unsurprisingly most complained that it was too realistic and that they really wanted to just get in and blow up mechs like most mech games. The other complaint was that it was too hard to pilot mechs as the neural links in the game didn't seem to be tuned the same way their VR beds were.

A few Alterra Corporation developers responded to these complaints, but their replies were not met with much positive feedback. They stated that the game was working as intended and they were aiming for ultimate realism. As for the complaints about having difficulty moving the mechs in game, they had said this would be addressed the next game day with a separate tuning since the VR bed tuning wasn't accurate enough for mechs and only for the player's themselves.

"Well, at least they're paying attention to the complaints instead of just ignoring them and blaming it on early access from Diamond-Tier players. Usually developers would apply Quality of Life fixes only during major releases and only do major patching just before the full release."

Gray started poking around and wanted to see what military camp everyone ended up in and it seems that every other player was also in an Alterra Alliance Military Camp. He thought this is fairly normal since most games that had a major military campaign that wasn't against other players would usually lump all players together on one side. Gray decided to get his snack on at least, catch up on his other games, then get to bed early so he could start his vacation from work and have plenty of time to play!

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Edward Teach, the CEO for Alterra Corporation, looked at the player activity log for the Diamond-Tier players while his AI assistant, Margo, briefed him on what the general thoughts of the game from the player's point of view.

Margo was Edward Teach's custom AI. She was completely sentient unlike every other known AI thus would be cause for alarm if her sentience ever became known publicly. Edward had her avatar designed after a mid 20th century actress, Julie Newmar (Catwoman from the 1960s Batman series). Margo could pick out a number of different outfits for herself and had a fascination with royalty so she favored long beautiful silk dresses, tiaras, and long silk gloves. Her current outfit was a sleeveless long pale chiffon dress. The dress was long enough to hide all of her legs and only reveal her silver high heels when she walked but never would drag on the ground. Margo added a large diamond pendant and matching dangling diamond earrings to go with it all.

Margo gave off an air of authority which made one think she might actually have been royalty if it were possible. Edward was used to her presence so it was nothing special to him, but he still appreciated that she kept up appearances even if he was the only one that got to see her.

"Sir, only three players died in game on the first day, all 3 were ones that left their camps early." said Margo to Edward while highlighting a set of numbers on his holo board.

"That is much fewer than we anticipated, what of those that left their camps?"

"Excluding the 3 that died, all but 4 returned giving us a total of 793 players in our initial Diamond-Tier prelaunch that are staying with the program."

Edward smiled. "Excellent, this is much better than anticipated! Of the ones that tried the simulators, how was their responses?"

"It was as expected, syncing the mind to the physical body was easy, but syncing the mind to the physical body then again to the mech, even in the simulators, proved to be difficult"

"Indeed we did expect that..." Edward thought to himself for a moment. "Well, we aren't unprepared, do we have enough keys ready for them?"

"Yes sir, enough were developed that we can build a neural profile for every player."