The Algorithm

A bright, bouncy beat spilled out of the computer speakers. An idol song more than a decade old. It had originally belonged to a famous girl group; in this gender-reversed world it had become a boy group's track — but that distinctive, rhythm-driven build I'd grown up with hadn't changed at all.

When you thought about it, the gender-reversed world had its peculiarities.

Some people remained almost exactly as they had been. Others had vanished without a trace, swapped out for someone else entirely. There were stretches that mirrored my original world almost perfectly, and stretches that were completely different.

As nothing more than one human being dragged into this place, the why of it was beyond me. I didn't treat it as particularly important, either. The truth of this world, whatever — I couldn't care less. If it works, it works.

I watched a video labeled Work Songs for a while, then clicked over to another.

Na-na—nana-nana—na-na-na—

A similar screen came up. Some doll, slack-jawed and vacant, with a mushroom cloud blooming behind it.

A supermarket jingle blasted through the speakers. At a deranged speed.

What the hell was this.

The view count sat around eighteen million.

I'd heard of it before. The thing they called the NewTube algorithm.

The NewTube algorithm was the system by which NewTube's AI recommended videos it deemed a fit for the user. I couldn't know the exact criteria, but I knew this kind of thing happened from time to time — a video that had absolutely nothing to do with me, planted square in the recommended list.

Look at it now. That doll with the bizarre expression had muscled its way onto my NewTube home screen and refused to leave.

And right beside that thumbnail sat… How Many Chocolate Bars Does It Take to Stop a Pistol Round?

Oh, for crying out loud. The stream was about to start, and the great product of technological civilization had gone and tempted me. How was I supposed to skip that?

In the end I couldn't resist. I watched the ten-minute experiment video and started the stream with barely a second to spare — without ever clicking the fifty-thousand-view video sitting in the related-videos list beside the screen.

As stream titles went, that was close to perfect, wasn't it? Everyone slapped titles together in that exact flavor.

I'd burned too much time at the PC Bang today to come up with any special content, so I figured I'd just run a regular radio stream. People usually called this kind of broadcast Just Chatting — Just Chat, for short.

The foundation of a stream was never letting the audio go dead. You kept talking. Even if the viewers didn't react, you pushed on like you were holding a conversation with the wall.

On screen, a moody wallpaper sat behind a quiet, drifting melody.

That little stretch of silence after you go live, waiting for people to trickle in — I used it to reset my head, and I offered up a quiet prayer. Please let me hold seventy viewers today.

To a popular streamer averaging thousands, it would have been an adorable little wish. For a Minor Streamer like me, I figured it was already a bit much. Last stream the aggro had landed pretty well, so hoping for this much didn't seem completely insane. Even so.

And yet — what was this? The count had already broken forty.

??

Who goes live and immediately gets this? Was I actually at this level?

It might have looked trivial from the outside, but it hadn't even been five minutes, and I was not the kind of streamer who pulled huge numbers.

My follower count sat at two hundred. Last stream, as I recalled, had ended around a hundred and fifty viewers.

But hitting follow did not mean people piled in the second you went live. If thirty of your followers showed up across a few hours of streaming, you were doing well.

And even if last stream had been fun, the people who'd actually come back wouldn't, at a generous estimate, crack a quarter of that.

And yet — forty the moment I started. No, fifty now.

Coming to the gender-reversed world really had improved my luck. What had they even seen this time, to show up like this?

"How is it that this chat, without fail, every single day, only ever talks about things I don't know?"

"No, what happened? Why are you all laughing among yourselves? And what video? What video did you even watch?"

Last stream it had been community-site traffic. This time it was NewTube?

Today was only my fourth broadcast. I hadn't even gotten a foothold in live streaming yet, so I hadn't touched NewTube at all — and now viewers were pouring in from there.

I still couldn't quite get a handle on the situation… but first I needed to find out what that video even was.

"Our Neighborhood Fight Legend…"

I typed the title a viewer had given me straight into the NewTube search bar. At the very top of the results sat a video with a crude, unpolished thumbnail — the kind you get when someone uploads phone footage as-is.

The unedited thumbnail showed a blond man, two women, and a crowd ringing them in.

"……What is this."

The two women in the thumbnail. There was no way I could forget that aggressive fashion.

Compression shirts glued to their skin, showing off every line of their bodies. Lime-green neon shorts I still could not, for the life of me, understand. And a tiny luxury pouch.

The heavier woman behind them was wearing a designer cardigan known for being expensive.

Opposite the two of them stood a man with dark skin and dull blond hair, a face the thumbnail's muddy resolution couldn't hide — plus a leather jacket that made no sense in the warming weather.

"Ehh…… wait. Is this… watashi?"

The two delinquents I'd run into last time, when I'd gone out to buy a mic and a webcam. I'd known there ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠were a lot of people around when we threw hands, but I never imagined someone had filmed it.

And judging by the crowd in my stream, the fact that the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠guy in the video was me had already made the rounds. Someone in the comments had probably spelled it out.

So this was…… the algorithm?

NewTube as a platform was exploding day after day; fifty thousand views could feel small in that light.

No. That wasn't right. Fifty thousand was still a big number. Plenty big.

Even people who pulled around a thousand live viewers struggled to crack ten thousand on NewTube. That was the reality.

That video would definitely bump my live numbers to some degree. I thought so, anyway. Probably.

But why did it have to be a fight video, of all things?

In the gender-reversed world, a man beating two women two-on-one would mostly just get a "damn, that's impressive" — but I really did not want the delinquent concept getting any stronger.

"Uh… that's not me. He looks completely different. Dude looks like a delinquent. Ugh."

I tried a little denial. The viewers, who had somehow swollen to seventy, did not believe a word of it.

I clicked the video. The resemblance got even more blatant.

"It could just be someone who looks like—"

The man in the video's voice overlapped with mine.

No — I did not want a brawler image stuck to me.

"Ah, fuck."

On screen, the me in the video drove a hard punch into the delinquent woman's chest.

Thwack—

"Ow."

"So two women picking a fight with one guy isn't too much?"

The chat whipped around on a single sentence. I chewed on a starch snack stick I'd grabbed from the supermarket sample counter the other day and scrubbed back through the video. The viewers' reactions were, on the whole, positive.

The occasional chat like that still popped up, but it didn't land any real psychological damage. I banned them with a blank face.

I knew better than anyone that I wasn't a delinquent, and I was at peace with myself, so what did a comment like that matter?

……Okay, I had maybe become a little bit of a delinquent. Anyway!

I scrolled down into the NewTube comments. All kinds of reactions jumped out.

So this was the gender-reversed world. Barely any hate at all. I'd expected as much, but expecting it and finding it weird were two different things.

The people who seemed to be men were even deploying that mysterious vocabulary: mancrush.

"Wow. This isn't even going to hell."

Pleasure with no consequences. A blow-up with no crash. The stream was growing a lot faster than I'd expected.

This was a precious opportunity. I had to pour everything I had into a legendary suck-up performance and lock these viewers down!

"Aigoo! A proper lesson. Mancrush. Geum Taeyang here! Welcome, welcome!"

Time to show the new arrivals some charm! Grinning at the unexpected surge, I even broke out honorifics I never used and fired off a greeting.

"Ah, right. That video is export-prohibited. Please don't send it to other streams!"

A mechanical voice read out the message a viewer had sent along with the donation.

"You. Fuck."

My whole body went cold in an instant.

"Please. Why are you sorry again? I am begging you — if you're going to be sorry, maybe don't do the thing you have to be sorry for…!"

A ten-dollar video donation. In the clip, a woman was watching my fight video.

Dark blue-black hair. Her eyes were ice-cold.

"I believe I told you last time not to send me videos of people I don't know."

Why did it have to be Lethe, of all people.

The chat from a viewer who had already sunk fifty dollars into me over the last two days felt, today, unreasonably cruel.