The Seventh Broadcast
Se-a headed back in the afternoon, saying she had things of her own to take care of. I'd floated the idea of living together, just casually, but she said it wouldn't work in this house — we'd do it after I moved.
"Haa..."
It was a good thing. Objectively, undeniably a good thing. Se-a and I were together now, and we'd already promised to move in with each other. And yet I couldn't shake the words she'd left me with — the ones where she all but encouraged me to be with other women.
I'd asked her what she meant by that.
"Because I'm happy."
I hadn't understood at first. But the explanation that followed finally made her meaning clear.
"Talking with a man. Holding his hand. Going further and actually being with him — it's genuine happiness."
Her eyes had been bright with that happiness, and yet they'd been looking somewhere far away. As if she were remembering someone she could no longer see.
"I just thought it would be nice if more people could taste this kind of happiness. I'm not forcing you, okay? If I actually picture you with another woman, I get jealous too."
Jealousy was a complicated emotion in this world. Men were scarce, so even if you dated one, you weren't supposed to monopolize him. And yet because men were scarce, plenty of women tried to do exactly that the moment they got the chance. That was the reality. A significant number of women who were dating or married ended up in counseling over jealousy and possessiveness.
The reason Se-a had flushed with embarrassment even as she admitted to being jealous was almost certainly her position — a Special Escort Officer who'd passed the MSVT. She was supposed to put men first, to act, ultimately, for the prosperity of the human race. And here she was, wanting to keep a Grade 1 man — the one who most perfectly served that purpose — all to herself.
"I've lost my mind."
To cut to the conclusion: I accepted it. I still wasn't sure what I'd been thinking. My willpower had already been worn down, bit by bit, by Se-a's persuasion — and it had finally snapped when she pointed out that if we went at it as hard as we had yesterday, my body simply wouldn't hold up.
Now that I'd had a moment to rest and my head had cleared, the whole thing felt insane.
Not that I wasn't tempted. No risk of pregnancy. No responsibility for raising a child. Nothing but consequence-free pleasure. What man would turn that down?
But I had a lover now. Her name was Lee Se-a. It hadn't been long, and yet I'd fallen for her so hard I could barely believe it myself. The idea of sleeping with another woman while I had someone like that — I couldn't just swallow it.
Just flip the positions and think about it. If my woman went around meeting this man and that one in the name of humanity's prosperity...
"Not a fucking chance."
The thought alone made me swear. Different world, different upbringing, different everything — fine. That didn't mean I could live it.
"Maybe I should talk to Manager noona."
She had a habit of giving me exactly the advice I needed whenever I was stuck on something. I was only going to stew on this alone, so I messaged her right away.
Right in the solar plexus.
To be fair, I never had much to talk about with her. She never said a word about herself, so I didn't even know what she liked, and I wasn't smooth enough to draw that kind of thing out of her naturally.
She took it. She always clicked her tongue and sulked, but she never failed to come through when it counted. That was exactly why I ended up feeling like garbage every time — if she actually hated it, she wouldn't do it. I knew the dislike was at least half an act, and I leaned on that knowledge more than I should have.
I laid the whole thing out. She didn't even hesitate.
There was no arguing with that.
The history of Extraction ran deep. Trace it back far enough and you hit the early 1900s — that was around when it first began, though I didn't need the full lecture. Once Extraction was institutionalized, the burden on men actually decreased. Birth rates climbed. For about a decade after that, the population surged.
Semen collected through Extraction was sorted by grade and used for artificial insemination. There were more women than you'd think who couldn't sleep with a man but still wanted a child. From childhood they'd been taught that having children was the right thing to do, and society had backed that lesson at every turn. And if you happened to give birth to a boy, your entire life flipped overnight. Nobody advertised it, but a certain number of women were aiming for exactly that.
When you're heading in the right direction...
Is the direction I've been pursuing just... incompatible with this world?
I'd never thought of it that way. More precisely, I'd never thought about it in those terms at all. I'd only ever asked: Is it okay to act like this? Is this all right? Am I betraying her?
I'd been judging everything by my own standards. By instincts I'd grown on the old Earth.
I need to recalibrate those instincts to fit this world.
Accept what should be accepted. Keep what should be kept. Another principle for the road ahead, locked in.
God, she was cute.
I checked the clock. Six-thirty. She was right — it was time to get ready.
"So he made himself a girlfriend..."
A woman sat at a desk in a wide room, a bed behind her and five monitors arrayed in front. She was around five-one. Her black hair was done up in twin tails that spilled all the way down to her thighs, but the strands caught the light like silk microfiber, and the effect was less uncanny than impossibly beautiful.
"The Escort Officer, most likely. Why are there so many bitches in heat these days..."
The voice that spat the words was lovely, like a little bell ringing. It matched her looks perfectly — young, bright, and it did not stop.
"It's fine. Dan-woo doesn't have any resistance to being with women in the first place."
A red tongue swept across her lips, leaving them glistening. If Dan-woo had seen her like this, he would have recognized it instantly as the ultimate form of the sexy-streamer image Cho Yo-yo had been chasing.
"If I can become his lover — and eventually his wife — that's fine. Time to change course. Not hostility. Cooperation."
Her fingers flew across the keys. Letters bloomed across the document open on one of the five screens. The title was not subtle.
"Hey, Yandere. Feels like it's been forever!"
I'd gone live at five minutes to seven. Within a minute the count blew past two thousand. By the three-minute mark we were closing in on five thousand. Viewership had been climbing lately — average concurrent sat somewhere in the six-to-seven-thousand range.
"A whole week's gone by already, huh? Time moves way too fast."
Seven days since the first broadcast. It felt blisteringly quick and, because so much had happened, impossibly long at the same time. What I knew for certain was that I'd never lived days this full.
"No guest today. Se-a had a rough time yesterday, so I'd feel bad calling her in. And besides her, there's nobody I could call."
My contacts still had no one registered except Se-a. Hae-myo and Manager noona were on DearCode, but if you asked whether we were friends, or whether there were any special feelings involved, the answer got messy. Manager noona especially. I was grateful to her, and I wanted to get closer — but I always got the sense she was drawing a line.
I'd really like to meet her in person, if I can.
I was curious what kind of person she actually was.
"Hae-myo, aren't you supposed to be streaming? What are you doing in my room?"
What was she even doing here?
...What?
Squid Squad — that's her fandom, right?
Matching the sea-cat theme, her fans had taken a sea creature for a name: squid. And she'd been kicked out by her own fans? From where?
"Hae-myo, you really... have it rough, don't you."
I hadn't expected her to get thrown out over something like that. You could read it as her being that close with her fans — or as her fans walking all over her. Either way, I didn't feel particularly sorry for her. Being able to talk to your audience with zero distance like that was, in a way, one of the endgames of streaming.
"So how do you get back into your own room, then?"
A game? Hold on. A sudden chill ran down my spine.
"W-wait a second! A game? You know I can't—"
Too late. The donation landed before I could even finish the sentence. Secret of Hell? What kind of game was that?
"..."
I had nothing. Meanwhile Yandere had appointed themselves judge and jury and were holding court without me. It was a horror game. Obviously. Everyone was agreeing as if that were a given, and they were equally certain that I was bad at horror games.
More precisely: that I was bad at scary things, period.
Oh, come on. You've got to be kidding me.
How did they even know that?
I hated scary things. I didn't believe in ghosts, but they still terrified me. I hated the dark. I hated anything creepy, and bugs most of all.
"Hae-myo. Have you considered just... not going back to your room? That's also an option, right?"
"Do not take notes."
Someone needed to ban bits like that.
"..."
I didn't react to the second donation at all. If I just refused to engage, she'd back off on her own. A normal person wouldn't keep clinging after being ignored.
Hae-myo was not a normal person.
She was a streamer who ran on entertainment first, and she collected nicknames like "man-chaser" and "Twitch's resident unhinged gremlin" the way other people collected stickers. What I was trying to say was—
She was chopping a single sentence into individual words and firing them one donation at a time. Living up to every nickname that had the word "unhinged" in it, I supposed.
"This is scarier than the horror game..."
Someone in Yandere dropped a clip. There she was, wearing the most wicked little smile, donating without end. At this point it wasn't even the Squid Squad — she just wanted to watch, didn't she?
"Haa... fine, Hae-myo. I'll do it. That Secret-whatever thing."
Refunding everything and pretending I hadn't seen it until the end of time didn't sound very fun either, so I folded. And that was how I ended up streaming a horror game I had never once planned on touching.