Falling for Someone Happens in an Instant
We can no longer lean solely on a past that grows harder to find by the day. We — the people of the present, the humanity of the twenty-second century — must create our own entertainment!
Ten years had already passed since David Lee, Speaker of the United Human Parliament, had raised his voice with those words.
Yet for all the effort and hardship poured into the cause in the years between, no clear results had emerged. It was, quite literally, like throwing eggs at a boulder — like trying to cut water with a blade. And perhaps that outcome had been inevitable all along.
The Great War that had erupted decades earlier had not merely been a vast conflict that swept the entire world. It had been something closer to a fatal mistake — one that had severed the old generation of human history from the present with brutal finality. No race, no people, could know their own roots. Tradition and culture felt hollow, as if something essential had been scooped out and left empty.
And so most people living in this era, even if they never showed it, carried a kind of emptiness with them always — a loneliness that left them feeling vaguely incomplete. Filling that void by devouring fragments of culture created in the past was never going to be enough.
Some intellectuals even went so far as to claim that the present obsession with Ooparts was a deeply unstable state of affairs. Ooparts, engineered with ruthless efficiency to elevate pleasure, functioned like a drug that jacked the dopamine of twenty-second-century humanity to extremes. And the fixation on a past that could never be returned to had the effect of suppressing the growth of humanity as a whole.
…Demand for Ooparts keeps climbing, and viewership of the public broadcasters keeps falling? Then find a solution — any solution! Activate individual streaming if you have to!
As salvagers grew more systematic in their methods, the Ooparts they hauled up from the virtual world only grew more sought-after by the day. Speaker David Lee threw every means at his disposal into reducing the public's fixation on them — and among those measures, quietly included, was the promotion of individual broadcasting through internet streaming services.
"Haa…. All right. Let me rephrase what you just said…."
Streaming Management Team Lead at Olive Corporation. At a glance, the title might not have seemed like much — but layered with that political backdrop, it was a post that came with considerable real power. The management teams charged with overseeing countless individual broadcasters and driving up their profitability had been given a full-throated push by Parliament through policy after policy and project after project, all in the name of somehow lowering demand for Ooparts. The result was that Visk, barely past thirty, becoming Management Team Lead of the 21st District Branch was regarded as a thoroughly exceptional appointment.
"This Nia person is a brand-new creator who only appeared a month ago."
But she had not landed the position by pure chance, either. Within the company, Visk was known as the hawk-eyed one. Whenever a personal broadcaster with the potential to make waves first showed their face, she never let them slip past her unnoticed. Individual streaming was a bomb that could go off at any moment, true — but even so, the fuse rarely lit without some kind of warning sign. And hitting a hundred thousand subscribers while still a regular streamer, with a relatively small viewer pool, meant that person had the kind of draw that pulled people in by the thousands. Word of mouth was all but guaranteed.
"And starting about three days ago, subscribers suddenly started climbing by ten thousand a day… so she's already on the verge of a hundred and ten thousand?"
"Yes. You've got it exactly. Oh, and for reference — her average concurrent viewers are already well past most Plus Streamers. She's what you'd call a creator of the moment."
And yet — what on earth was going on here?
Visk found herself lightly furrowing her brow, a headache rising unbidden at the words of the subordinate nodding so confidently before her.
"…Why have I never heard of her? I feel like I'm learning about this person for the first time, right now, from you."
The reason was painfully simple. Even for someone who prided herself on reacting sharply to the appearance of promising new broadcasters, this was a face she had genuinely never seen. Not a single creator had ever escaped her notice before. There had been creators who failed to grow for lack of opportunity — but never one who had slipped past her eyes and hit a hundred thousand in a blink. No — unless someone was hitting a hundred thousand overnight, there was simply no structural way for the relevant parties not to know.
Could it be a botting program? But Olive's systems are designed to prevent interference from every kind of fraudulent program before it even starts….
Visk chewed her lip in silence, turning over the unsolvable puzzle, and was just starting to lean toward that conclusion when her subordinate offered a calm explanation to the woman wearing such a grave expression.
"Ah, that…. It's probably because this person set her category to something extremely niche, and keeps her streams short."
"…What do you mean?"
"I was curious myself, so I checked. When she streams, she doesn't use any of the Big Three categories — Talk, Music, or Games. Review, Media… Traditional? Wow, I didn't even know that one existed."
Listening carefully, Visk finally understood why she had remained unaware of Nia's existence until now. The subordinate's explanation, read from a sheet of paper that looked as though it had been fetched from somewhere, boiled down to this: there had been a major error in the category settings that mattered most to ordinary streamers — those who were neither Plus nor Complete Streamers.
Who streams in categories like that?
In the twenty-second century, where the depth of culture had grown considerably shallow, the mainstream of individual broadcasting still belonged to the Big Three: Talk, Music, and Games. Talk reigned supreme among them — in part because music and games had taken such heavy damage in the Great War that Talk's relative importance had risen by default. But to return to the point: the fact that Talk, Music, and Games were the mainstream meant, conversely, that the remaining categories had almost no floating viewership at all. Plus Streamers and Complete Streamers might be a different story — but viewers who sought out the eccentric broadcasts of unproven regular streamers were vanishingly few.
"She's been streaming for thirty-four days as of today. Streams roughly once every two days, under two hours each. Sixteen streams total so far. Categories: Talk for the first stream only. After that — Review, Media, Review, Review, Traditional. …How did this person hit a hundred thousand subscribers with categories like these?"
"Well…. I think it'd be faster if you just watched for yourself."
Visk shot a sidelong glance at the subordinate who had just said something that made her eyebrows want to stretch themselves, but she soon realized the woman was right and had no choice but to nod slowly. Fair enough. There was no need for empty talk. All she had to do was watch with her own two eyes how the streams actually went, and make her judgment from there.
She adjusted her posture, took hold of the mouse, and with practiced movements logged into Olive. She typed Nia into the search bar. Immediately, a channel appeared — a cute young woman's face set as its thumbnail.
"…More edited videos than live streams? There are over thirty of them."
"She does one edited cut per stream as a rule. Sometimes two cuts come out of a single stream's footage."
"And the views across the board are high. Hard to believe for a brand-new creator who just hit a hundred thousand."
"Well, this is an editing goldmine! Sometimes parts that never appeared in the live stream show up in the cuts, and she makes the live streams genuinely delicious to watch…! Ahem. Nothing. Never mind."
Visk, who had been listening quietly, narrowed her eyes and looked at her. The subordinate, catching that gaze a beat too late, gave a small cough and looked away. So this one was a fan of this Nia creator, was she? Visk sent her a look that said go on, tell me more — given how freely the woman had started dumping information she knew — but the subordinate only played dumb, claiming she didn't really know anything.
Still, her eye isn't that bad. Which means this isn't just a high-subscriber, low-substance type.
Thinking as much, Visk quietly raised her assessment of Nia a notch, then clicked without hesitation on the most recently uploaded video. What she needed right now was a kind of certainty. Clearly this Nia person was a promising creator — promising enough that a subordinate with a good eye had, without meaning to, tipped her hand as a fan. So go on, then. Show me that talent. And if you do, I'll prepare a stage where you can run wild to your heart's content. As someone tasked with raising the quality of the people creating entertainment on Olive, Visk could only hope that Nia would live up to her expectations.
"Hello! Heaven above, earth below — I alone am supreme! I am Nia, the strongest virtual idol on the planet! Today is the second installment following our previous healthy gymnastics session — Healthy Gymnastics, Part 2!"
"Today, together with Noise — who I introduced during our last outdoor stream — we're going to continue with the second half of a healthy gymnastics routine that improves full-body blood circulation, reduces fatigue, and might even make you taller!"
"Then — Let's gymnastics!"
"Gymnastics…."
"One, two. One, two…. If you move while imagining your arms and legs stretching out straight without bending, the effect is even better!"
"One… two… one… two…."
The video Visk had played showed a silver-haired, purple-eyed beauty who looked just barely old enough to be a high schooler, standing side by side with a little beauty of elementary-school age, both performing gymnastics in a clean, pure-white studio apartment. The channel's star, Nia, appeared to be the silver-haired girl in a thin tracksuit, energetically working through the routine. Whether she was the type who kept her body moving even off-stream, she was stretching her arms and legs with a vigor that stood in stark contrast to Noise — a frail-looking little girl whose stamina seemed paper-thin.
Then, as Noise began to flag, huffing and bending forward, Nia stepped over beside her, took her hands, and bounced along with her. The way Nia helped move her back and corrected her posture seemed to make a real difference — life gradually returned to Noise's movements, and the sight of it was the kind of delightful scene that brought a smile to any viewer's face without them even realizing it.
"Cute."
"Pardon?"
"Huh? Did I just… say that out loud…."
She had been staring blankly at the screen — and the word had slipped out before she could stop it. Briefly flustered, Visk looked back at the Nia on screen, still performing her gymnastics with vivid energy… then gently closed her eyes and murmured to her junior as if thinking aloud.
"…You're a fan of this creator, aren't you?"
"Huh? Ahaha, you're the one who always says management has to be equal for everyone, senpai. Of course I…."
"No, never mind that for now. It's just you and me here anyway, right?"
Visk cut off the junior who was still trying to play innocent, already knowing full well, and opened her mouth again in a tone that carried the weight of a serious request.
"Which of this person's videos is the most fun?"
"Ah, well, about that…!"
It was a situation where they didn't have to start work immediately. And if that was the case — even at the office, a little deviation like this should be fine.
A career woman who had fallen at first sight for a fatally beautiful silver-haired, purple-eyed girl — Visk decided that, for today at least, she would start work just a little late.
I should send an email. Something about wanting to discuss a Plus Streamer arrangement.
She murmured the thought to herself as she watched.