Nothing Irritates Quite Like Slow Internet
Nothing gets under a person's skin quite like a lagging internet connection.
I've always been the type to let my mind wander, and my memory has never been anything to brag about. Without something memorable to hang onto, I'd forget what I'd done just yesterday more often than not. Hell, if I got deep enough into my own thoughts, I'd even forget whether I'd brushed my teeth thirty seconds ago. In short, I had the memory of a goldfish. Depressing, really.
But even a trait that seemed to offer nothing but drawbacks had one silver lining: bad memories and ugly feelings slipped away just as easily. People say fools don't catch colds — turns out they don't catch depression either. Maybe being an idiot wasn't so bad after all.
"Haa… that was terrifying. What the hell is wrong with this place? Is it stuck to the ceiling or something? Weird. Really weird."
It was the kind of vast, bottomless dread you'd feel staring into an endless deep-sea trench, or drifting through open space in a spacesuit. That was probably why the view beyond the door had scared me so badly — that feeling had sunk its claws deep into my chest.
But the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. If the outside was truly that terrifying… then why was this room perfectly fine?
"Hmm… uuuuhhh… I have no idea."
It was genuinely frustrating. Questions kept piling up with no sign of answers. Like autumn leaves accumulating on a path with no janitor in sight to sweep them away.
Wait. No — I wasn't completely alone. I had my closest friend right here.
"Yeah. This is the only way."
I threw off the blanket I'd wrapped around my trembling body and walked over to the computer as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Before I died, I'd spent a good twelve hours a day sitting in front of one. Just settling into the chair was enough to make me feel like I was back in my rightful place — solid, reassuring.
Okay. Not a cheap monitor, keyboard, or mouse — that's a pass. The tower… well, you can't tell the specs from the case alone, so I'll set that aside for now.
Desk: pass. Monitor: pass. Keyboard, mouse, and speakers: all pass. The tower's case design was a pass too, but without checking the actual performance, I couldn't rule out the possibility that it was just a pretty piece of junk. Ugh. A computer with a gorgeous case and garbage guts. My least favorite type. What a waste of a nice shell.
With those thoughts swirling, I hit the power button. You can't judge a computer you haven't even turned on. And even if it turned out to be slow, there wasn't much else I could do right now. All I could manage was to pray it wouldn't crawl along like a turtle.
"Huh? The OS isn't Windows. Doesn't look like Mac either… Wait. What… is this?"
Confusion hit immediately. The operating system wasn't the familiar windowed one, and it wasn't the bitten-apple camp either. A custom-built OS, maybe? I didn't know enough about that stuff to say for sure. For all I knew, I might not even be able to use the thing.
"Okay, moving the cursor with the mouse seems right… but how do I get online?"
Click-click. Tap-tap-tap.
No matter where I clicked or what keys I mashed, nothing on the screen changed. Just an empty desktop with no icons at all, and my lonely cursor drifting around, waiting for orders that never came.
"…Is this computer a brick? Am I screwed?"
The world spun for a second. I could almost hear someone next to me snickering, You actually believed that?
No. No way. I was going to prove this machine could do something.
Muttering that vow to myself, I methodically tried every key combination I could think of. Dozens of minutes later, I was forced to accept the brutal truth: this computer couldn't do a damn thing.
"Aaaargh! What is your problem?! Just work already!"
My chest felt tight with frustration. The screen was on, the mouse cursor moved fine — so it was somehow functional — and yet nothing actually worked!
I slammed my fist against the desk to vent the boiling feeling in my gut. Thump-thump-thump. But my newly dainty fist was far too soft for a fight with furniture. The desk answered with a pathetic little sound and left my hand stinging red.
"Ow! That was stupid… damn it…"
Nothing was going right. Feeling unfairly wronged, I glared half-accusingly at the monitor.
Ding.
"H-huh? Something appeared."
Was it answering me? Or pure coincidence? A strange sound effect chirped from the speakers, and an icon materialized in the center of the desktop — one that definitely hadn't been there before. No title, just an image that looked like a swirling vortex. It practically begged me to click it.
As if possessed, I grabbed the mouse and double-clicked. Something popped open on the screen.
"…It worked."
What appeared was some kind of program. It didn't feel familiar like Google or Naver, but it was clearly a search engine — the kind that would spit back answers if you typed something in. This was exactly what I'd been looking for.
"I-it works? Don't tell me hitting the desk made it show up… No. No computer has a system that weird."
There was no way it had some proactive voice-recognition feature. If it wasn't coincidence, then someone was watching me and had timed the icon's appearance perfectly… but there were no cameras anywhere I looked, so that was basically a delusion. If it turned out to be real, though, it'd be a little scary.
"Mm… whatever. Let's just be glad we made progress."
Anything was better than staring at a blank, unchanging desktop. Right. Time to search. Type something into this bar and something would come up. Better to think positive than sit around being anxious and scared.
I whispered that to myself and reached for the keyboard with a forced bright expression — then my hands froze.
"…What do I even search for?"
Now that the chance was here, I had no idea what to type. I'd woken up as a girl who looked exactly like Nia, dropped into a windowless studio apartment. Opened the door and found nothing but pitch-black darkness. Haha. What even was any of that.
Then a saying floated up from somewhere: a wish that lets you ask anything is only useful to people who already know exactly what they don't know. For someone who doesn't even know what they don't know… an all-knowing wish doesn't help much.
"Alright then. I'll just type 'Nia.'"
My approach was almost painfully simple. Drop the complicated thinking and go back to square one. I typed the word Nia into the search bar. The girl at the center of everything that had happened to me. Maybe learning about her would give me a thread to pull on.
I'm a little nervous… What happened to Nia's streams after I died? Oh — did the concert go okay? Ugh, thinking about it again just makes me sad. I really wanted to see it…
Worry and anticipation tangled together, and tension rose unbidden in my chest. What results would searching for Nia even bring up here? The uncertainty left my mouth dry.
As if taking pity on me, a loading icon appeared in the center of the screen — a polite request to wait. And then… a long time passed. Long enough that any reasonable person would say they'd waited plenty. And still the spinning icon showed no intention of disappearing.
"…Why is this so slow?"
Even the best movie or novel gets boring if it drags out the ending. All the worry and excitement that had filled me right after hitting Enter evaporated into nothing. Was the computer just rottenly slow? No — the boot itself had been fine. Internet problems, then? That actually made sense. Even a great machine could choke like this on a bad connection.
"Argh! Nothing pisses me off like slow internet! There's no books or phone in here either!"
Maybe it was because I'd come from a country where hundreds of megabits per second was nothing special. A computer that just sat there staring back at me like a blank wall was completely at odds with my temperament. Just as the ominous thought crossed my mind that the search might crash before it ever finished—
The loading icon vanished, and the program's contents began to change in a rush. Search results started appearing one after another, top to bottom.
"Ah, finally! Let's see, let's see. Nia… there! Found her! Wait, but…"
And nestled among all that unfamiliar information was exactly what I'd been hunting for so desperately — sitting there like it owned the place. Bearing a title that stirred a faint unease.