Forced Shutdown
"AlphaFemale! Thank you for the fifty dollars!"
"Oh, is that so?"
This AlphaFemale person seemed to be famous. And even after I'd revealed my unique ID, people were still suspicious. The doubts would fade with time, I knew that — but it didn't sit well with me.
Not that I can just show my face, either.
I would, someday. I knew that someday wasn't even that far off. But ripping the bandage off right now was another matter. The assault still had me by the ankle. Everyday life was fine. Overcoming what had happened that day was not.
"I'll show my face later. Until then, if you can't believe me, you're free not to watch."
Fortunately, the people watching right now were taking it in good faith. I let out a breath of relief and was about to start talking again when another donation landed.
A thousand dollars. A small fortune, just like that.
My brain refused to turn over. Why had she suddenly dropped a thousand dollars? Was a thousand dollars on Twitch, like, a hundred dollars in real life?
No. Of course not. Then why?
Spending money just because I was a man — that, I could understand. In a world where men were hard to come by, even a voice through a screen was something. Fan feelings. The wish to be noticed. People spent money for reasons like that.
But that came after you actually knew the person. A thousand dollars was not an amount you threw at a man who'd started streaming today, whose face you hadn't even seen.
"Uh, Alpha? Why did you... donate a thousand dollars?"
"That's not what I meant!"
I'd said it completely seriously, and everyone was looking at me like, and?
I had no idea how much that earlier barrage of hundred-dollar donations had added up to, but I was pretty sure I'd already earned what most people made in several months. Was this really something I could just say thank you for and move on? I hadn't even done a proper reaction.
Donations were usually sent because people wanted to see a streamer's reaction. I hadn't given them anything. That was what worried me.
"What did I even do to deserve a thousand dollars? Why!?"
"Can someone just tell me who AlphaFemale actually is? And stop going off on tangents."
That was what I wanted to know. She seemed famous on Twitch, and the chat kept veering off into something else.
"That's it? She's rich? Then why did Alpha donate a thousand dollars to me?"
I'd figured that if they all knew her so well, they'd know the reason too. Apparently this was a first even for them.
Well. I'd taken a thousand dollars. I should probably do a reaction.
Except I didn't prepare anything.
Honestly, I hadn't expected donations on my first stream. I hadn't expected a controversy over whether I was actually a man. I hadn't expected hundreds of people to show up. And I definitely hadn't expected to be put on the spot for a reaction.
If donations came in at all, I'd figured they'd be a few dozen dollars. At that scale, I could have faked my way through a reaction with my voice alone.
When you don't know, asking is always best.
Better than sitting there burning time on a question I couldn't answer by myself.
"Um, AlphaFemale? Could you tell me why you gave me a thousand dollars, what you mean by temporary home stream, and what kind of reaction you'd like?"
"Why's everyone making a fuss? Of course I can do a reaction. It'd be weirder to take the money and shut my mouth."
Wait. Was that what the other male streamers did? The thought hit me the moment the words left my mouth.
Come on. They can't be that trashy.
Nothing but awkward laughter scrolled up the chat.
Okay. So they are.
The Reversed World wasn't easy either. I swallowed the complaint and sat on it — and another donation arrived.
"O-one thousand dollars..."
She'd spent a thousand just to type those sentences. That put me at two thousand and fifty dollars already.
What did this person even do? At this point it was starting to feel like a burden. And what was with the IAN she'd stuck in front of her name?
"You all look like you're having fun. Meanwhile my hands are shaking."
I downed the already-cold cocoa in one go and spoke.
"So what does putting IAN in front of her name mean?"
"I'm starting to get the picture. Haa... two thousand dollars? This is way too much pressure. Are you sure you're okay? Spending this kind of money like it's nothing."
That was the part that worried me. I remembered a news story from the old world — someone who'd gone into debt donating to a streamer they loved. AlphaFemale had clearly been spending like this for a long time, but the amount was still the amount. I couldn't not worry.
No, she could have typed that in chat. Why did she keep doing it through donations? And it wasn't like the amounts were small.
"Ah— ahaha! AlphaFemale, thank you for the thousand dollars. I'll put it to good use, okay? Super efficiently, I'll... I'll..."
I wasn't crying. I hadn't cried. I was just so stunned, so utterly at a loss, that reality had crashed down on me. That was all.
She'd told me to spend it however I wanted, but now that it came to it, I felt a little too guilty. If I'd actually done something to earn it, maybe. Instead I'd just sat there and received three thousand dollars for nothing.
It was a stretch for today, but I figured I should at least come up with a reaction by the next stream.
"I'm grateful, but please stop donating for today. I don't have any reactions prepared, so I honestly don't know what to do."
"Buried? I don't know what that means, but I'll take the thought for the donation. I'm already at saturation today."
This was enough. If anything else happened now, I wouldn't be able to take it — I'd burst. Mostly my brain.
Chat, meanwhile, had been scrolling at a ridiculous speed for a while. It was hard enough just to read, so I was only catching what jumped out, and with everyone talking about different things I couldn't even speed-read my way to a coherent picture.
"Chat's moving insanely fast. If it's this fast with around a hundred people, then streams with tens of thousands must be... wait?"
The viewer count at the bottom of the Twitch window wasn't 100. It was 1,000. It had definitely been a hundred at first. When had it swollen like this?
"Why is it a thousand? Where is everyone coming from?"
And it was still climbing. At this rate it would break two thousand before long, and that was starting to scare me a little.
The new arrivals were hammering chat. Most of it flew by too fast to catch, but the word forums kept surfacing in the middle of the flood.
Forums — short for community boards, right? Sites like message boards.
I'd never used one, but I remembered reading that any place people gathered to talk about a shared interest got called a community. Twitch had one too — Together.
"Ah, someone posted about me on the community boards again? I don't know who, but thank you."
Viewers who advertised for me without costing a dime in labor or effort. Pretty nice, wasn't it?
This time, though, they might have advertised a little too well.
"The screen's starting to stutter. This is fine, right?"
The laptop had given up. At first the lag had been so faint I'd only tilted my head at it. Now it was cutting out for real. The people watching were probably hearing my voice break up too.
"If it force-closes, what hap— ah!"
The stream died with a single strangled cry.
Ian has ended the stream.
"...I didn't end it, though?"
I stared at the blackened screen and tried, weakly, to protest my innocence.
The room was dim. RGB strips traced the ceiling molding, washing the walls in a slow pulse of violet, then blue, then violet again.
The room itself was barely thirty square meters, and the only furniture in it was a desk and a chair. Against that much empty floor the setup might have looked sparse — until you saw the computer and the monitors sitting on the desk. After that, sparse was the last word that came to mind.
"That's definitely the man from back then."
Three monitors hung in the air on a monitor arm. A forty-nine-inch ultrawide curve held the center; a vertical display flanked it on either side. In front of them, a woman sat replaying a man's voice from a community post, over and over, a smile on her lips.
Her eyes looked bored with the entire world. Set in them, irises red as rubies. A sharp nose. Full lips. Every feature came together on skin as white as fresh snow. Black hair fanned out in every direction — the kind of mess that could have looked slovenly, except the glossy sway of it, paired with her face, turned the whole effect decadent instead.
"He had a nice face. Good proportions, too..."
A faint flush colored her cheeks. She let out a heated sigh and let the man from a few days ago rise behind her eyes.
Unlike the other men, soft and overfed, he had been lean, with a solid sense of style. What had stood out most was the voice — and the temperament underneath it — gentle past any reasonable point. And on top of all that, a face so cute you could hardly believe he was a man at all.
"And Grade 1, no less."
There were about four million men in Korea. Against a total population of forty million, that was vanishingly few. Of those, the men still in their fertile years — the ones capable of getting a woman pregnant — numbered around 1.25 million.
Those men were ranked against a fixed set of criteria. Grade 1: four people. 0.0003 percent. In practice, it was a special rank created for a handful of human beings so small they barely counted as a category.
As a rule, the higher a man's grade — the more valuable he was judged to be — the more arrogant he tended to act. He could afford to. Nobody could stop him, and he knew it.
And Ian? Grade 1, and kinder than anyone. There was a chance the whole thing was an act, but...
"It's real. He's genuinely a good person."
She could tell. What kind of person he was. Whether he was lying, or not.
She had been born with it — an innate gift even rarer than a Hunter's awakened ability.
I've never seen a man like this. I was going to stop. But maybe... just once more?
She cracked her fingers one by one, a string of sharp little pops, and opened the video editor sitting on her desktop.
Hot excitement lived in that smile, and with it, a bright, hungry look toward whatever came next.