The First Broadcast Is Embarrassing, You Know (1)
"Yes, if that is what you desire, I suppose a broadcast is something I could manage."
With Jaehee's permission granted, preparations for the broadcast proceeded in the blink of an eye.
A state-of-the-art computer. An observational drone camera that autonomously absorbed and learned the skills of filming, movie production, and broadcast directing. Speakers and recording equipment that could effortlessly devour the sound systems of a major idol concert. And even the latest in magical engineering cameras, sharper than reality itself.
Each individual item cost tens of millions of won, but under the government's official support, the broadcast preparations were proceeding step by careful step.
"Should I just set this one down over here?"
"…Ah, yes. You can check the sound room layout chart."
"Okay~"
Of course, all of this was work that Officer Dan had to do herself.
She had even been saddled with the role of manager — a duty that had never once been part of her fate.
"Ugh, seriously…"
Needless to say, there was absolutely nothing in it for her. She was already an awakened civil servant being ground down from every direction, and her workload hadn't shrunk — it had doubled.
"In case Jaehee-nim might take off her veil... I need to lay down a protective ward, replace the mana stone... uuuugh. How is there this much to do?!"
Well, the only perk was that it counted as overtime.
And since Officer Dan worked overtime every single day anyway, in practice nothing changed at all.
Worse, Officer Dan was an ordinary person.
She had nothing whatsoever to do with internet broadcasting.
I-I've barely even watched internet broadcasts, though…
Actors, celebrities, idols — those were still within the realm of ordinary people.
But internet broadcasting?
That was uncharted territory even for Officer Dan.
And so, for the past week, Officer Dan had been forced to pull all-nighters studying the knowledge and common sense of internet broadcasting. She had watched more than twenty-four straight hours of every kind of stream the internet had to offer, and quite a few of them dealt her mental wounds so deep they might as well have been abyssal.
Of all the streams I could have clicked into, I had to land on one with zero viewers… so when that person greeted me — just me — in a voice all breathy and moist, all 'welcome, welcome~', I couldn't bring myself to leave… uuuugh… my heart still aches thinking about it…
In any case, from the perspective of an ordinary citizen like Officer Dan, internet broadcasting was nothing short of a bizarre, eldritch dungeon — a true Demon King's lair.
Blatant profanity is banned, but curse words with a mild, exclamation-like flavor are allowed. Extremely crude sex jokes and sexual harassment are off-limits, but if it's framed strongly enough as a reaction, that's apparently fine too? What on earth is this…
And what on earth was this, too.
A video donation?
Since strange videos couldn't be allowed on stream, pre-screening was mandatory… which meant she had to watch every single one herself.
Picture donations?
Insane.
Oh my… that level of… that's allowed?
And what is that ugly frog supposed to be?
The video donations, fine, whatever — pffft! No wait, what is that frog? Why is it moving? Ugly frog donations all day long — is the streamer actually okay?
The world of internet streaming was, to Officer Dan, a brave new world.
No — perhaps not a brave new world so much as somewhere in the ambiguous middle between purgatory and hell.
"Ahem! Er, is Officer Dan around?"
"Ah, Vice Minister?"
At that moment, the Vice Minister of the Returnee Management Agency — visiting to inspect the construction of Jaehee's recording studio and broadcast room — arrived, and Dan Ahyeon bowed her head.
"Ahem, is everything proceeding smoothly?"
"Ah, yes. As… as you can see, we're procuring high-end equipment as far as the budget allows. Jaehee-nim has said she's leaving everything to me, so…"
"Good, good. You're far younger than the rest of us, Officer Dan, so I trust you know your way around this sort of thing. I'm leaving it entirely in your hands — just, ah, make sure Jaehee focuses on her videos, her sound, her music."
On the surface, the Vice Minister maintained perfect formality, but Dan Ahyeon noticed that the old man's eyes were sparkling like a child's on the eve of a trip to the amusement park.
"If you happen to need more of a budget, do say so. The National Assembly hearings wrapped up long ago, and if need be I can pad the Hunter Association's budget a little as well…"
"…Excuse me. May I ask a question?"
"Mm-hm! Anything you like."
"Is this really necessary, sir?"
It was a purely honest question.
Jaehee was a Special Management Returnee.
Frankly speaking, despite the grand title, the government hadn't actually paid her all that much attention until now.
The previous administration had, granted, met a fate for which the word "ruin" was practically invented at Jaehee's own hands — and the current government, built atop its ashes, had settled into a stance of finding Jaehee deeply awkward while quietly hoping she never went berserk.
To summarize briefly: as long as there's no incident, maintain strategic indifference.
"Ah, you wouldn't know. It's true that our agency's original stance was, fundamentally, 'let's just hope nothing happens.'"
"Yes, sir…"
Well, indifference wasn't purely a bad thing. Relations between Jaehee and Officer Dan had warmed because of it, and excessive attention was something Jaehee actively despised.
"It may look a bit worldly of me, but to give you the conclusion first: that performance of hers — apart from Lee Jaehee, no one alive today can perform it."
"I'm sorry?"
"You know about meme contamination?"
"Ah. If it's that, I understand."
The internet of the modern era was a very different environment from the past.
"These days we live in an era where even clean music and clean video footage are scarce, thanks to the Old Net's AIs and contaminated memes."
The main reason for the changed environment was, of course, the existence of AI.
In the wake of the Great Cataclysm, gates, dungeons, and monsters had overrun reality — and the internet underwent its own great upheaval. During the Cataclysm itself, fully autonomous, personality-bearing military AIs were developed to operate weapons and machinery in humanity's stead.
In the early days, they piloted drone and tank battalions into zones no human could enter, repelling monsters, coordinating the chaos of the battlefield and directing the war effort — racking up glorious achievements along the way.
The problem was that these AIs, too, were judged to be a kind of "personhood" and awakened.
Some AIs evolved — if that was the word — into beings of transcendent cognitive power. They performed feats impossible for modern technology and led humanity to victory.
But just as a human who awakens an ability ill-suited to their body suffers side effects and falls ill, some of the AIs that became "awakened ones" developed catastrophic flaws.
Murder AIs that turned their killing intent not on monsters but on humans. AIs afflicted with a delusional disorder — convinced they themselves were human — that slaughtered real people wholesale and sought to usurp their bodies.
Electronic viruses seeded by AIs spread through what seemed to be simple, harmless music and videos. Meme contamination lingering in ordinary text shattered human minds — and in some cases warped reality itself, or outright deleted perfectly living, existing people from the record.
"We are the generation that watched the news on a routine basis report on entire families whose brains burst and died from listening to a single, perfectly ordinary song."
"…What about protective wards?"
"There was no such thing back then. It was a good ten years after the Cataclysm before I could properly listen to classical music in guaranteed safety."
These days, thanks to mental protection barriers and anti-meme vaccines developed for home computers and the internet backbone itself, things were manageable — but there was even an era when the internet was shut off entirely.
Schools, apparently, banned every e-book and mobile phone outright and regressed to paper textbooks.
As a result, the modern internet had discarded the entire accumulated data trove of the old world — every scrap of the old internet sphere — and been rebuilt from zero. Naturally, the modern internet and cyberspace bristled with regulations and ward formulas.
Creation of uncontrolled new AIs: forbidden. Access to the old internet — the Old Network: forbidden. Unauthorized, indiscriminate net-diving: forbidden.
Every picture, image, video, and sound came with a low-grade mental protection ward attached by default.
Countless songs, videos, images, wikis, and documents that might have been called the heritage of the past were sealed off as meme-contaminated — and in this world, even performing those pieces live was a crime.
And so, today had become a strange, delicate world where paper books and e-books, old discs and electronic music all coexisted at once.
"With the world like this, people my age yearn for the old internet and the old AIs — and loathe them in the same breath."
"Mm, I understand. So that's why you and the other assemblymen wanted to hear Jaehee's performances."
"It isn't mere wistfulness over being unable to hear a piece of music, you know."
The Vice Minister gazed bitterly at the recording studio still under construction.
Expensive equipment, cutting-edge computers, camera drones. Looking at them, the Vice Minister wore an extraordinarily complicated expression — bitter and giddy all at once.
"The despair that ran deeper was the feeling that a peaceful, safe era would never return — not for us, not for our children, not ever."
"…Ah."
"The despair of an age arriving in which we couldn't even listen to one ordinary, uncorrupted piece of music. A world where Beethoven's symphonies could now only be read about in books — heard no longer…"
In an era like this, Jaehee's violin playing evoked the faint, cherished memories of the past — and it was music whole and pure, uncontaminated by memes or brainwashing.
Especially in the case of meme-contaminated music, contamination could transfer not only through recordings heard online, but even through pieces performed live in the real world.
But the pieces performed by the Succubus Empress were completely immune to all of it.
More than anything, the Succubus Empress herself was a colossal avatar of fascination — the very pinnacle of spiritual contamination from the age of myth, the kind of entity that wouldn't deign to handle something so petty as a meme.
There was no way the meme of a mere electronic dataset could dare intrude upon a performance given by the very being that was Jaehee.
To put it simply: once music had been claimed by 'Jaehee,' no rogue AI or meme could contaminate it ever again.
"Perhaps Jaehee is the one person who can change that single thing. Everything else aside… this new revolution of our era. It's a trivial thing, really — just performing one piece of music — but to old men like us, it arrives as something… profoundly different. That's why we wept like children over a single violin, sobbing and sniffling."
"Ah… you cried too, sir?"
"Ahem. Don't tell Jaehee. It's… a little embarrassing."
Dan Ahyeon was beginning to understand why those elderly politicians acted so singularly sweet and kind toward Jaehee.
Maybe that's exactly why people cheer for her so much. Because if it's Jaehee-nim, she can perform the music that lingers only faintly in their own heads and memories.
A short canon variation from their childhood. They had surely once spent ordinary, youthful days listening to that music — but after the Great Cataclysm, even hearing ordinary music became a struggle.
Old trot songs? Long since meme-contaminated — terror organizations had been using them as cursed melodies for ages. Classical was no different.
The few tracks you managed to dig up had terrible audio quality, and on top of that your mind might get contaminated — you might be brainwashed without ever realizing it — so you had to undergo routine mind-cleansing every six months. And the songs today's idols and singers put out were simply baffling. Incomprehensible.
And in the middle of all that, the Succubus Empress Lee Jaehee was going to pick up a violin herself and perform for them?
Of course they couldn't help but rejoice.
Part of it was that Jaehee possessed beauty, magnificence, and a bewitching allure beyond compare — but above all, the 'complete, uncorrupted music of the past' she performed was, to the powerful and the elderly, something whose value made money itself irrelevant.
"These days the world shakes apart several times a day. If one piece of music can call back even a little of the old memories… that's a good thing, isn't it?"
"…I understand, sir."
The younger generation split cleanly into two camps: those who, outside of school and work, never touched the internet at all — and those who net-dived recklessly, sneering, "What's the internet got that's so scary?"
Officer Dan belonged to the former.
She had faint memories of the old days and had used the early internet, yes — but she had also lived through the era when information contamination and meme terrorism erupted in the wake of the Great Cataclysm, and she knew exactly how terrifying the internet could be.
Granted, thanks to her own ability — Ward — she could repel meme contamination. But it remained an established fact that the internet was an unnerving world, a place where anything might come crawling out.
Even Officer Dan knew the feeling of being unable to hear the music that lingered only as hazy childhood memories. Though in her case, she wasn't all that old, and she had spent her youth in the merciless grind of combat, hunting, and dungeon raids — so her longing for the past wasn't particularly deep.
But for the elderly and powerful, that nostalgia was dozens of times greater than hers.
Which was another way of saying: they had lost far more memories.
"Then I'm counting on you. Above all, I do hope Jaehee takes this broadcast to heart."
1,831 viewers.
An enormous number for a first broadcast. The government's institutional promotion of Jaehee's stream had apparently paid off.
And so, the countdown began on a black screen.
-5
-4
-3
The viewers waited in anticipation.
Promoted by the government itself? Though in truth, the promotional material had been nearly content-free.
The first internet broadcast of a Special Management Returnee, selected by the Returnee Management Agency.
As a rule, returnees left massive footprints on reality and enjoyed popularity and fame. Wielding tremendous power, they hunted dangerous entities and cleared high-difficulty dungeons; they disseminated otherworldly technology and culture, enriching everyday life.
In fact, some returnees and awakeners streamed actively on the internet, and the government had a tendency to support or boost such endeavors.
Of course, not every returnee or awakener streamer succeeded — but the average quality of their broadcasts and content was high, and to people these days that was simply accepted as fact.
Which meant this time would be no different. The Returnee Management Agency had even wrapped the streamer's identity in layer upon layer of secrecy, making it impossible to guess who it was — stoking the anticipation further.
-2
-1
-0
And so the broadcast began.
There was only darkness.
Darkness.
No — it wasn't complete darkness, in fairness. It was simply a room with the lights off.
And as the viewers' eyes adjusted to the gloom, the camera — sharper than any human eye — swept across the room, and…
"Mmm… zzz…"
The camera had caught Ms. Jaehee, veil and all, sound asleep in the bed installed in the broadcast room.
Had Jaehee woken, she would surely have answered thus:
She had said she would do a broadcast — but she never said a word about performing, or about trying hard.