Teddy Bears and Rubber Ducks Are Equally Cute
Roughly thirty minutes had passed since the moment I witnessed the uncanny phenomenon of letters rising across my monitor screen.
I had spent every second of that half-hour in a full-blown panic.
Can you really blame me? Imagine running headfirst into something straight out of a horror game or a scary movie — in real life. At least eighty people out of a hundred would fall over backward in shock. And me? I was the kind of person who flinched so hard a pigeon walking past would tangle my feet. Not exactly something to brag about, but still.
"Uuugh…."
But there was nowhere to run in this cramped little studio. Hiding in the bathroom was about the best I could manage — and no matter how I looked at it, a narrow, pitch-dark bathroom was even scarier. So the best option left to me was to duck behind my chair so I wouldn't have to see the monitor at all.
"…What is this?"
Even the scariest movie, though, loses its edge if the same scene just keeps looping for thirty straight minutes. Especially the kind that builds dread through atmosphere rather than a clear-cut killer or monster.
"Nothing's happening."
So after half an hour of absolute stillness, I muttered that to myself and carefully peeked over the top of the chair back.
What met my eyes was still the same monitor screen, packed solid with pure white noise. The speakers kept spitting out a continuous crackle of static, as if something had gone terribly wrong — but nothing else had changed. Well, one thing had: the letters that had definitely been floating dead-center on the screen earlier were gone.
Maybe this isn't something I need to be scared of?
The thought drifted up from a corner of my mind, and with it a strange little surge of confidence. Clutching that feeling close, I used the chair back as a shield and carefully rolled myself toward the computer. Thank goodness the chair had wheels — I could control how fast I approached.
Just a little more… a little closer…
And the instant I got close enough that I could almost reach the mouse—
Letters suddenly burst out from the middle of all that white noise.
"Hyaaaak! Uh… h-hello…?"
I was so startled that a genuine scream tore out of my mouth before I could stop it.
Wait… had whatever was putting letters up through that noise just recognized I was here? Or was it pure coincidence?
Coincidence… no way. The timing was way too perfect for that.
They had to be watching me somehow — hacking the camera on top of the monitor, or planting a hidden camera somewhere in the room. And that guess of mine turned out to be more or less right. When I carefully offered a greeting while staring at the screen, the white noise warped irregularly and reshaped the rest of the message.
Help me.
No translation needed. It just meant help me.
Wait — help me? Was someone on the other side of this noise sending me a rescue request right now?
From behind the chair back, I put on a carefully cautious expression and directed a careful question at the monitor.
"Help me… y-you want me to help you?"
"W-wait a second!"
This was bad. I quickly asked the presence beyond the noise for a moment, spun around, pressed my back firmly against the chair, and put on a deadly serious face.
Showing up out of nowhere and asking for help… what was I supposed to do?
Thinking it through carefully, there were really only two choices available to me right now: ignore it, or keep talking and see where this went. Of course the option I actually wanted was to pretend I hadn't heard anything and just hide — but for some reason my gut was telling me I had to pick the second one.
Ugh… I can never turn people down once they start asking…
And that brought up a problem all on its own. I was the kind of person who almost never managed to say "I'm done" once I'd gotten involved. What if I stuck my hand in too casually and crossed a river I could never come back from? I'd regret this moment for the rest of my life — probably right up until the day I died.
More importantly… how did they even hack my computer?
Trust was another issue entirely. Blindly believing some suspicious stranger who had just appeared by flooding my screen with noise was not the kind of thing a smart person did.
But what if they really had no other choice? What if this was the only option left?
God, damn this decision paralysis. A timid mind, a cowardly personality, and a tendency to put off every choice — put them all together and you got the absolute worst kind of human being. If the leader of any group I belonged to had been like this, I would have grabbed a spear and yelled at them to get out. Silently, of course. In my head.
We can communicate, at least. Let's gather a little more information first. I can decide after that.
After weighing every possibility and every problem against each other, that was the conclusion I landed on: keep talking a little longer and figure out what this person actually wanted. If they were just trying to make a sucker out of me and pull some weird stunt… I'd find a way to kick them out.
"Ahem. So… how exactly am I supposed to help you?"
"Uh… what's the problem, then?"
…We weren't getting anywhere.
No matter what I said, the only answers that came back were variations on "I don't know." It felt exactly like trying to soothe a little kid who was bawling that they hurt somewhere but had no idea where. The more nonsense my conversation partner spat out, the more frustrated I got — until finally I spun the chair halfway around and rolled right up to the computer. Sitting backward and talking over the chair had been more uncomfortable than I'd expected.
Apparently that was good news for the other side. The crackling white noise on the monitor suddenly spat out a single image.
A single bright, beaming emoji. Was turning the chair around really that delightful?
Whoever — or whatever — was on the other side of this noise seemed, for all the terrifying first impression, to have a remarkably pure personality.
…Wait a second. Is this even a person?
A possibility suddenly flashed through my mind. To test it, I reached toward the monitor without thinking — and the moment my fingertip touched the screen, a fierce blue spark erupted from my finger, raced up the back of my hand, and shot all the way to my shoulder!
"Ghk!"
"…I'm fine."
From my middle finger to the back of my hand, from the back of my hand to my wrist, from my wrist all the way to my shoulder — ugly blue marks scored my pale skin like scars. But through that very phenomenon, I realized something astonishing.
"You're not a person, are you?"
This white noise wasn't the result of some outsider hacking my computer at all.
The noise itself was a Virtual Lifeform — something essentially very similar to me!
More precisely, "lifeform" isn't quite right. An electrically realized virtual consciousness would be more accurate.
With no solid body to speak of, it was closer to a ghost than a living creature. Calling it a Virtual Mind rather than a Virtual Lifeform would be more precise. In the same way, the pure white noise filling the monitor was simply showing me this being's true nature.
They never meant any harm. It was the opposite — they just genuinely wanted help.
And thanks to that incomplete contact just now, which had briefly linked us, I could also tell that this being hadn't been trying to hurt me. They had simply been drifting through the area by chance and ended up inside my computer.
"Haha… so that's all it was…?"
A small sigh washed the tension clean out of me. Once I was sure they had no intention of harming me, I could finally let my guard down. I'd been worrying over nothing. I'd genuinely thought some bad actor had hacked my machine.
That aside… thinking about it again, this is pretty amazing. This is the first time I've met someone who isn't just on the internet.
Strictly speaking, this noise was closer to an AI than a person, so you couldn't really call them human. But as another conscious being, they weren't all that different from a person to me. I didn't particularly feel like getting philosophical about it, either. If you can think and talk, you're a person. Close enough.
So I turned toward the monitor with a much brighter expression than before.
"Nice to meet you. I'm Nia. What's your name?"
"Ah — you don't know your name either. Do you still have no idea what you need help with?"
Maybe a lot of their data had degraded while they were drifting around this area. This Virtual Mind seemed to have lost a great deal of what they once knew.
That was a problem. I wanted to help, but I couldn't if I didn't know what was wrong. You need a diagnosis before you can build a solution.
"Uh, um… is something uncomfortable? Or is there something you absolutely have to do?"
I waved my arms around this way and that, trying somehow to draw the problem out of them — and then their words suddenly stopped. The monitor was still pure white, so they hadn't gone anywhere… maybe they just had a lot to think about.
I rolled my eyes around, waiting for an answer, until at last the following letters rose into the center of the screen.
Unpacked: I am disappearing.
…Ah. So that was the problem. I see.
In that case, I was genuinely relieved. If fading away really was the issue, then I could think of at least one way to fix it.
"…Do you like teddy bears or rubber ducks better?"
I spent CP and created a bath duck in my right hand and a teddy bear in my left, then looked at the monitor.
Looks like from today onward… the family was about to grow by one.