"Hello? This is Benedict speaking."
"Ah, hi! It's been such a long ti, senpai. I really didn't expect you to call right now."
As Professor Benedict answered the phone, he gestured to his students that he was stepping out for a bit.
The students watched their professor leave, deflated like balloons losing air.
"What do we do now? Are we really going to present our results in such an unfinished state?"
"The professor... sigh..."
Benedict quickly left the lab and stepped into the dimly lit corridor.
Outside the door, a faded old plaque hung under the hallway's flickering light, casting a somber mood.
"Ayano Tsukino-senpai, you really saved —if only for a mont," Benedict muttered with a long sigh.
...
Just now, all of his students had been waiting for his decision.
But he truly didn't know what to say.
——
Benedict was a professor at Stanford University.
Though he was actually more than ten years older than Ayano Tsukino, in terms of academic seniority, she was his senpai.
He had once been a promising PhD student in another field.
But then, by chance—or perhaps fate—he encountered video gas.
Of course, video gas weren't exactly rare. Anyone could play them. But for Benedict, they had an outsized impact.
Back when Mario, Contra, and Tetris were exploding in popularity in Japan, one of Benedict's classmates, who was Japanese, returned from sumr break and brought so of these gas with him. Benedict beca one of the first Aricans to experience them.
And he was hooked.
A magical new dium, where people could actually control on-screen characters, make decisions, interact... it felt like witnessing fire for the first ti.
Perhaps that was a bit dramatic—but to Benedict, it was genuinely life-changing.
For the first ti as a doctoral student, he felt the urge to throw himself into a completely new discipline.
He quickly learned the fundantals behind video gas, thanks to a PhD friend in Stanford's computer science departnt.
And in his thirties, he decided to pivot—studying programming, computer science, and the fundantals of ga developnt from scratch.
He was a theorist at heart.
His dream wasn't to make fun gas.
He wanted to uncover the core of gas—how streams of code transford into magical entertainnt.
Gifted as he was, he completed his studies in five or six years and earned a second doctorate in digital information systems.
Then, he stayed on as faculty.
After years of researching the fundantals of video gas, he started feeling bored again.
So, he set his sights on a new field: artificial intelligence.
He and his team were among the first to dive into AI research in this world.
Thanks to their head start, they produced several promising results early on.
Eventually, a new idea struck him:
Why not combine artificial intelligence with video gas?
But he hadn't thought quite as deeply as Takayuki had.
His goal was to train an AI that could beat humans in competitive gaming—a dominant force that would beco an unbeatable wall in esports, controlled by AI.
Of course, that kind of work was thankless. Results were slow, and even success wouldn't necessarily yield big impact.
If not for his decades of academic reputation and influence, Stanford likely would've cut off funding long ago.
But eventually, even Stanford's budget office ran out of patience. They began to suspect that Benedict was using research as an excuse to indulge his gaming passion. After all, everyone knew that's what pulled him into this field in the first place.
"Benedict, sounds like things haven't been going well for you. Hit a bottleneck in your research?" Ayano asked gently from the other end of the line.
"No, not a bottleneck... just, other issues. Never mind that. What made you suddenly call, senpai? Looking to borrow so students for another ga project?"
In the past, Ayano had occasionally asked to borrow talented Stanford students to help develop ga-related systems—always paying generously.
Benedict briefly thought, if she needed help again, even he might offer himself—if it ant earning a little for his struggling research.
"Actually, no. I'm not calling to borrow anyone this ti. I wanted to ask about your progress in AI. How's it going?"
"Huh? Not borrowing people? You're asking about AI?"
Benedict was surprised.
"I rember you once told that your StarCraft AI, the one ant to beat pro players, was almost finished. I'd like to see what you've accomplished."
"Oh... that. The results are mostly there, but there's still... one small gap."
"A gap? What kind?"
"It's... funding."
Benedict hesitated.
Ayano understood. "You're short on money? Didn't Stanford keep supporting you?"
"They think our progress is too slow. They're getting impatient and have paused funding for now. But this is the exact stage where we need more computing power and better equipnt..."
"I'll sponsor you."
"Eh?"
"Oh, sorry—let clarify. Gastar Electronic Entertainnt will sponsor your research. But before that, our president Takayuki has one request. Specifically, he wants your team to first..."
But Benedict couldn't hear the rest.
His mind was already stuck on a single phrase:
"Gastar Electronic Entertainnt will sponsor your research."
Just like that, all the gloom that had clouded his heart... was gone.
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