Felix looked at Aron with a face full of disbelief. "Man... I know you're the emperor and above us mere plebeians, but... really?" he asked in surprise as he swiped his hand across in front of him, closing the file he had been reading.
"What's the problem this time?" Aron shot back, rolling his eyes.
"You have less than ten friends. Ten! Doesn't that make you the least social royal in the history of the world? And! AND! Half of those are the people you dragged in to be the CEOs of your companies using magical contracts!" Felix scoffed.
He jokingly continued, "Can you even consider that friendship? And besides me and Sarah, don't you have any friends from your time in school?"
"You seem to have forgotten how everything started. You and Sarah are the only two people that stuck with me when Rottem Morgan threw his little hissy fit and had me expelled under false pretenses after I proved him wrong in public. So however many I have now, it's still more than two!" Aron playfully punched Felix's arm, causing him to wince and rub it. "That means it's a net gain, regardless. Shouldn't you be congratulating me on my awe-inspiring social skills?" He struck an arrogant pose and looked down on his friend.
"Oh, really? Have you ever spent time with any of them without them being required to be there? Hmm?"
Aron went quiet, thinking back over the past few years and trying to recall if he had ever spent any downtime with his other "friends" outside of board meetings or formal events. Not finding any instances that he could recall, he realized that he had only ever spent time with them when they were required to be with him and his shoulders slumped a bit.
Sarah slapped Felix in the back of his head and he turned and pouted at her. "Knock it off, you two. Play nice," she said.
The three friends went quiet for a while, then Aron said, "But I have more than five hundred people I can invite to my wedding." He looked at Felix and Sarah with a smile that positively dripped with faked arrogance and true pride. "What about you two? Do YOU have five hundred people you can invite to your wedding?"
Sarah blushed all the way down to her chest. She was wearing a spaghetti-strap tank top and had fair, Irish skin, so the blush was very obvious. "Wh-wh-what wedding!?" she spluttered.
Felix, too, stammered something but couldn't quite spit it out.
Aron looked at his friends and laughed, having scored another point in the trio's long-running game where they tried to provoke each other into speechlessness. He tossed another file to Felix and displayed it on a holoscreen in front of him.
“What’s this?” Felix asked. The file Aron had thrown him was named guest_list.qd and it indeed had more than five hundred names neatly arranged in categories by how close Aron was to them.
He scanned the list and a subtle frown crossed his brow. “Why invite ARES troops to your wedding?” he asked. “Are you expecting an attack? I mean, I can understand inviting John, since he’s a minister, and of course you’ll be inviting government officials of sufficient rank.... But what about the rest of them? If someone’s going to cause trouble at your wedding, maybe you should hold it in the simulation instead of reality.”
“No, I’m not expecting any trouble at the wedding, and no, I can’t hold it in the simulation. It has to be held in reality. We can’t do all of our government functions, social or not, strictly in the simulation. Those troopers are just the first members of ARES, the ones that I personally recruited and interacted with face to face,” Aron answered.
“So what about the scientists? You haven’t interacted with any of them face to face.”
“I may not know them personally, perhaps, but I’ve been working with them in Lab City for centuries since stealing their brain data. So they deserve at least that much as the beginning of their compensation,” Aron replied. Lab City was no secret from his inner circle; the only thing that was kept from them was the existence of the system. After all, as the saying goes, “use the ones you trust, and don’t use the ones you don’t trust”. And Aron definitely trusted his oldest friends.
“I suppose that makes sense. But aren’t you worried about them possibly discovering something fishy about the situation?” Felix followed up.
“Well, yes and no. It isn’t like I absolutely have to tell them it’s compensation, you know. After all, they’re all incredible researchers that push the boundaries of science on a daily basis and my empire is going to be a science-focused one. We need to push our tech level as far as we can as fast as we can,” Aron answered, slightly bringing down the mood as everyone there was reminded that they were on something of a doomsday clock.
“But that’s beside the point,” he continued. “We’re here for a happy occasion, we have a wedding to plan!”
Everyone at the table took a moment to readjust their mindset and Felix lightened the mood by clowning around as they picked up where they left off in their planning.
The guest list was the first thing to be worked on and, between Aron and Rina, the guest list rapidly climbed to the thousands. It included close family members, close friends, work acquaintances, government officials, scientists, teachers, influential people, and Sarah even managed to get a lottery-style lucky draw contingent added to the list. After all, it wouldn’t be very politically proper to introduce class divisions when Aron had been working so hard to eliminate all divisions that had historically plagued humanity.
Then they moved on to the venue, where it was decided that the wedding would be held in reality at a government tower that they would rush to complete. It would be hard to find a venue that could fit all of the guests they had invited while still having some form of meaning and pomp and circumstance to it.
Sure, they could hold it at a sporting arena if they wanted to, but it wouldn’t have the same sense of gravitas that a newly completed government tower would. And although they would be holding the wedding in reality, it would also be open to everyone in the public simulation via livestream and those watching from home on other assorted devices, that way everyone could either say they were there or watched it live.
