Illusions Are Bound to Shatter
Click.
Click.
Her mouse stopped on that last comment.
Permission.
None of the videos going up right now had Unknown's permission. She had wanted that permission. She would have been fine even if Unknown told her to take them down on the spot. This was nothing more than a kind of self-satisfaction.
She just wanted Unknown to know she existed.
That would have been enough.
The reason she edited Unknown's videos was, in truth, simple. She had wanted to keep them. She had felt it from the first stream she ever watched. This was a captivating person. Being good at the game, having a pretty face, having a nice voice — those were all minor details.
The pull came from Unknown herself.
Unknown's footage was playing on the monitor. She stared, unblinking, at the figure on the screen and let herself imagine. What Unknown might look like in real life. What kind of person she might be.
The Unknown that fan devotion painted in her head was impossibly perfect. What kind of face belonged to someone who played like that, who sounded like that? She knew hollow fantasies were slaughtered the moment they met reality, and she imagined Unknown anyway.
It was not something she could stop. She had lost her heart to Unknown a long time ago.
They were filthy, self-indulgent delusions. She knew that perfectly well. She knew exactly how she would react if she inflated the fantasy as far as it would go and then met the real person, only to find her falling short of the pedestal. Disappointment was a given. It was a selfish thing — forcing the ideal in her head onto a living human being.
And still, she did not stop imagining. If only to fill even a little of the hollow place in her chest.
Her gaze drifted, unbidden, to the clock in the lower right corner of the monitor. The time had somehow become seven in the morning. Had it gotten this late already?
The blackout curtains were doing their job with grim dedication. Her room was pitch dark, morning or not. When she uncurled the knees she had been hugging to her chest, a plastic bottle knocked against her foot and skidded away. A two-liter bottle of water.
The rolling bottle clipped the row of empties she had lined up along the floor. Looking at them made her throat feel dry.
When had she last had a drink? Come to think of it, it had been a long time since she had gone to the bathroom, too. It might have been time to stand up, if only for the sake of staying alive. She didn't have much of a choice.
And still she did not get up. She stayed hunched in the chair and moved the mouse, switching to a different tab.
Jump's Trisch board.
She had no interest in Jump, of course. Unknown simply did not have a Trisch board of her own, so this was the only option. News about Unknown tended to land here anyway.
The last comment made her scowl. The feeling it left was thoroughly unpleasant. Who did he think he was talking about. Who did he think he was talking to. Even the username pissed her off.
Her hands found the keyboard on their own.
Even after she posted it, the sour feeling would not leave.
She had not liked the tone of the board lately. Just because the streams ran a little short, just because she did not go live as often, more and more of these people had started talking about Unknown however they pleased. Maybe it was the influx of new viewers.
If it were up to her, she would camp the board and purge every last one of those pieces of trash. But it was Jump's board, and not every post that went up was even about Unknown.
Checking all of it and cutting out the rot was, realistically, impossible.
Wasn't this the kind of thing Jump, as the board admin, was supposed to handle? Why did he never touch the rage-bait comments that made her blood boil just looking at them?
Ridiculous thoughts started colonizing her head. Lack of sleep, probably. She had watched the entire late-night stream and then edited on top of that without so much as a nap. Unknown might go live again today. If she wanted to watch that, she needed to sleep now.
Right before she shut the computer down, she checked her mail the way she did every day.
She took freelance editing jobs for a living. Checking her inbox on a regular schedule was not optional.
She opened it without thinking — and then she could not believe her own eyes.
Unknown's email was sitting in her inbox.
A sound tore out of her throat that could have been a cheer or a scream.
An inbox stuffed to bursting... with a countless pile of mail.
It was the email tied to my Trisch account.
Thinking about it, I had never once paid this inbox any attention. It had not even been on the list of things to consider. There was nowhere important mail would come from, and I had never thought of it as a channel for talking to anyone.
Hence this mess.
Unread messages were piled high. That part, at least, was familiar. Unless it was work, I had never really used email. Every so often I would check, take one look at an inbox that had turned into a billboard, and hit back. Once it got that bad, even deleting it all felt like too much effort.
But this was not some ancient account left to rot. It was a newborn, barely a few weeks old.
Which meant even this mountain of mail still had warmth in it.
That was the weight my own carelessness had to carry.
I could not go through a few hundred emails one by one. I did not need to. Out of the whole heap, maybe a handful looked like they had any actual substance. There were also ones I hesitated to open at all — the ones packed with things that were painfully, excessively private.
Why tear pages out of your diary and send them to me? I had no obligation to answer every single one. And a diary would have been the polite version.
Photos of their own bodies. Suffocating obsession. Vicious attacks over how little I streamed. Blatant sexual come-ons. It was a circus.
It was all far too heavy to pass off as a fan's affection. It did not even feel real that any of it had been written to me. Maybe, since sending outright slurs ran the risk of a lawsuit, they had decided to come at my head from a different angle.
Working through them one after another, I could even watch the "why won't you go live" tantrums evolve in stages. Even the psychos, it seemed, were capable of growth.
There were donation notices from Trisch, and a welcome email saying a Newtube channel had been created. That was about all I actually needed to look at.
I had not been streaming long enough to have much mail worth checking.
A big-corp streamer like Jump supposedly got everything from ad inquiries to offers to sign with a company.
That road was still a long way off for me.
I was rummaging back through the list, wondering if I had skimmed past something important, when a subject line caught my eye — one that looked like a reply to an email I had been waiting on.
The gap between the subject line and the preview was enormous. Was this some kind of title bait?
Curiosity twitched. I tilted my head — and the option of skipping it without clicking had already vanished.
I opened the mail.
Is this a love letter?
The important parts were buried between long, aching stretches of confession.
The feeling soaked into every sentence was so intense it was uncomfortable just to read past it.
Boiled down, though, it was a fervent yes.
I had been worried she would turn me down. I supposed I should be grateful.
I sent a reply to the person who might, possibly, become my editor.
The answer came back with terrifying speed.