Delayed Transfer

Mark, Sam, and Blake went to the net gaming tents. When they entered the tent, Sam and Blake looked surprised. They probably didn’t expect that the inside of the tent would be a tad luxurious with its thick carpets, air-conditioned temperature, dim lighting which was done by magic instead of technology, and several Star Wars-themed decorations.

“The air-conditioning and the lights are made by magic runes done by the elven ladies that’s playing there,” Mark said then he pointed at the three elegant elven ladies playing the game in the managers’ chairs.

When Eilintraee noticed Mark who brought guests, she tapped her sisters' arms to inform them of their presence. They exited the game and joined Mark, Sam, and Blake in the lounge area. Sam and Blake were surprised to see the coffee vending machine that was being managed by a person.

“Why is there a person in the coffee vending machine and he was just standing sitting there?” Sam whispered.

“I told them many times that the vending machine was supposed to be self-service but they still wanted someone to manage it,” Mark whispered back.

The sisters, of course, overheard them.

“We know that it’s supposed to be self-service but due to its popularity, the ingredients needed to be filled every hour so we decided that it would be more efficient just to hire somebody to look after the machine every hour. You don’t need to worry, we know your customs. The employees we hire only work eight hours a day with two breaks and a lunch and they’re receiving generous compensation,” Mentorra said.

Blake who was staring at the beautiful and otherworldly elven women got confused at the modern employee rules coming out of the mouth of creatures that were considered as the epitome of beauty of many otakus even those otakus that liked men.

“The sisters are connoisseurs of our movies so they know a lot about Earth,” Mark told the two and Sam and Blake nodded their understanding.

Mark then introduced his best friend and his fiancé to the three elven women. He informed them that Sam was a better expert when it came to technology so they could ask their questions about the internet café.

Surprisingly, the three elven women didn’t ask about the game or the café but asked about the internet.

“Is there a way for us to establish our own international network?” Mentorra asked.

“Mark told me about the status of your world and right now, you can’t establish a network. It’s because of the size of your planet and the way beings and creatures here behave,” Sam explained.

Blake added that to create the internet, physical connections between cities needed to be established through cables, and those needed to be protected which isn’t possible based on what Mark had told the two. Not only that, they would start from the beginning, collecting a very large amount of data before they manage to reach the information available that could be accessed by people.

Sam continued that as of right now, the only way for them to establish the internet was to connect to Earth and even if that were possible sooner or later, the government would notice the connection.

“If you’re permanently staying in a single location like a secure city, we can develop the infrastructure that would allow you to create much more robust servers that would allow you to establish a limited network connection but all the data would still be dependent on Mark stealing data from Earth. Even if it was just movies, games, anime, and books, it’s still stealing,” Sam said carefully.

The elven sisters nodded their understanding and admitted dealing with the Earth’s officials was something a small circus like theirs could not handle.

“If the government became aware, they will try to introduce “freedom” to your planet for the sake of resources,” Blake said while laughing.

“The situation will not be the same as the anime “Gate,”  I think. Even if they found a large enough gate that would allow them to bring modern equipment, the power of the beings in here is not something that can be handled by cold weapons,” Mark said.

“What is that anime?” Solinae asked.

“It’s about a gate that was discovered by the citizens of another world and tried to use it to try to conquer a country on Earth but was easily destroyed by Earth’s weaponry then that country which was Japan, went inside the gate and established camp in that other world. If you want you can watch it. I’ll give you a copy of the anime later,” Mark said and Solinae nodded.

“What we can do is optimize the servers and game program so you can add more gaming computers here,” Sam said.

After their talk, Mark, Sam, and Blake went to the tent behind the main tent. It was where the generator and the servers were located.

Sam and Blake reviewed all the equipment and declared that the large generator should be able to support up to fifty gaming computers and ten servers since those were the only equipment connected to it. It would have been less if air-conditioning and lighting were being handled by the generator but since those were handled by magic, the specific generator that Mark chose was enough.

After inspecting the servers, Sam and Blake asked Mark to provide more CPUs that would act as servers until there were a total of ten of them. They began the process of optimizing the programming and the servers.

A couple of hours passed and Mark kept apologizing to his best friend and his fiancé about the work they were doing.

“I’m sorry. You should have been outside having an adventure but here you are doing some work,” Mark said.

“Don’t worry about it. We have all the time in the world to explore later,” Sam said.

It was around noon before they completed the optimization. There was an instance though when they needed to shut down all the computers in the gaming tent for at least two hours which caused complaints by the players but since there was nothing they could do about it, they just waited.

Mark explained to the elven sisters that after the optimization, they could add more computers in the gaming tent until there were forty of them. He also said to the sisters that they would need to set aside at least three hours a week for maintenance of the servers and that meant that the game would not be available during those hours.

“It would be better if there is a dedicated team that will look after your servers if you wanted to increase the number of your gamers,” Blake said.

“That’s not necessary for now since we’ll limit the number of computers and we’ll only run Star Wars The Old Republic online game. Once everyone is tired of the Star Wars franchise, then we can switch to another game,” Mark said.

“When I included the data that would allow you to create gaming servers in the data I stored in one of your hard drives, I never expected that you would use it to run a gaming café,” Sam said while shaking his head.

“How much game server data did you include in the storage items?” Blake asked his fiancé,

“A lot! World of Warcraft of course is included, Lord of the Rings Online and more. Besides I’m not the one who did the work. Mark was paying a ton of money to acquire tons of data and I hired a team of computer nerds who were happy getting paid to steal data,” Sam said while laughing.

After their work, they restarted the game and the gamers in the other tent happily logged in to continue their play and the three of them went back to the RVs to eat lunch.