I'll Even Sing for Donations
By the time I made it back to camp, the last of the red light still clinging to the sea had all but gone.
I shoved a little more wood into the fire and laid the shark meat and the crabs I'd caught on the beach out close to the flames. There wasn't anything resembling real cookware, so I skewered the shark on a decent stick and let it roast slowly beside the fire, and set the crabs, shells and all, along the edge of the coals.
"Not bad for a first night's dinner, right?"
"I want beer too. If delivery reaches out here, go ahead and order some."
Donations kept rolling in even while the shark was still cooking. I'd been streaming long enough that the domestic audience was huge, but ever since I'd crossed three million subscribers the overseas share had gotten pretty substantial too. In the old days the chat would have been a riot of English, Spanish, and Japanese all at once; these days Nutube handled the translating on its own and dumped everything onto my goggles in Korean. Whatever I said went out to foreign viewers as captions in their own languages. Every so often the translation was so garbage that people started fighting over things I'd never even said, but that much I could live with.
"So the folks overseas can just type however they want. I see pretty much all of it in Korean anyway. That's progress for you. Long live Nutube."
"Except cases like that."
"Haven't tried it yet. Needs to cook a little longer."
I took my eyes off the roasting shark and stared at the sentence floating in the air.
"A song?"
"I'm not even good at singing."
I'd gotten requests like this before, now and then. Most of the time they just wanted to watch me belt something out covered in mud in the middle of the jungle because it would be funny, and if they'd already paid, I generally went along with a reasonable ask.
I cleared my throat.
"Alright. One song, for the comeback."
I even sat up a little straighter. Then I launched, dead serious, into a military marching song I'd heard a thousand times in the service: Going to the Frontline.
I hadn't even gotten far past the first verse before chat detonated.
I sang through one more stretch of it anyway, then stopped.
"You asked me to sing."
"So many demands."
The reaction was not great. I thought it over for a second, then picked a ballad I actually remembered. I hadn't ever been a terrible singer, but I'd barely sung for real in this body. Since the voice itself had changed completely I'd hummed to myself now and then, but this was the first time I'd committed to it on stream.
It felt a little awkward at first. A few lines in, though, the voice carried better than I'd expected. It was much higher and clearer than when I'd been a man, a slender tone I didn't usually notice, unspooling quietly into the dark. With the crackle of the fire and the wash of the waves underneath, the whole thing even had an atmosphere it had no business having.
I finished and looked at chat.
"……Why is it so quiet."
A moment later the messages started pouring in like they'd lost their minds.
"Why are you clipping that."
"Don't."
The vibe had gone weird. After a lifetime of rolling around in the mud and getting called a lunatic by my viewers, being praised this purely for my face and my voice still sat on me like clothes that didn't fit. So I decided to kill the mood.
"Alright. One more, then."
"Something upbeat this time."
I picked an idol track the kids were supposedly all listening to these days. I'd heard it a few times as a joke on stream, so I at least knew the chorus. I sang it as half-heartedly as I could, pulling deliberately ridiculous faces through a bright, bouncy idol number, and in the middle I even roughly mimed whatever choreography I could remember with my hands.
That, I figured, would smash the atmosphere to pieces.
It did the opposite.
I shut my mouth. I just stared at the chat. It was moving at least twice as fast as a minute ago.
"No."
"No. Wait."
"Don't wanna."
"Do not attempt to purchase a human being with money."
I snatched up a cooked crab in a hurry.
"Let's just eat."
"I am not embarrassed."
I cracked the crab shell a little harder than I needed to. The shark meat was more edible than I'd expected, and the crab didn't have much meat on it, but cooked over the fire it actually tasted pretty good.
I sat there through a late dinner, shooting the breeze with chat for a while, and then the fatigue of the whole day hit me all at once. I'd fought a shark, rowed for a long time, and built a camp. Considering it was the first real stretch of outdoor work I'd done in this new body, I'd moved plenty.
I yawned, wide.
"Let's call it here for today."
"I'm not turning the stream off. If something happens, it's better to have a record, so the camera stays on. I just mean I'm done talking."
I took off the goggle-cam and fixed it near the mouth of the shelter. Once I tweaked the angle, both the fire and the sleeping spot sat reasonably in frame. After checking the shot, I planted my nose awkwardly against the lenses again and started reading chat.
"If anything happens while I'm asleep, you guys fight for me."
"Cheer, at least."
"If a shark comes all the way onto land, then for fuck's sake please wake me. I'll even interview it."
Of course, no matter how much chat yelled once I was out, there was no way I'd notice. I crawled into the shelter and lay down on the dry leaves I'd spread on the ground. The body still wasn't fully familiar, but after rolling it around all day I didn't have the energy left to think about that.
"Tomorrow I'll start by finding water. Yeah, well. Watch as much as you want and get some sleep."
I tucked one arm under my head for a pillow. Not long after I shut my eyes, the sound of the waves and the crackle of the fire receded.
In the old days, this would have been as good as the stream ending. Kim Seowoo's survival broadcasts often left the night feed running, but the moment she started sleeping the viewer count dropped fast. There wasn't much reason to sit for hours watching a muscular man snore after a day of cliff-climbing and dodging wildlife.
This time was a little different.
The camera held a small campfire and the makeshift shelter together in frame. Kim Seowoo was curled a little to one side, deeply asleep. The clothes that had been wet during the day had mostly dried by the fire, and whenever she shifted, the firm lines of her arms and legs showed the muscle she'd spent the last three months putting back on.
And in the chat, a slightly different breed of human started to show up.
In among them, overseas messages mixed in, auto-translated.
Of course, the person in question knew none of it. Kim Seowoo was sleeping far more peacefully than she had while wrestling a shark in the afternoon, only occasionally shifting or curling a little closer to the fire.
Time passed, and the viewer count barely fell. It used to be that the graph pointed down the instant Kim Seowoo fell asleep. Today it was the opposite. People coming in off clips and overseas viewers kept attaching themselves, and the numbers were even climbing a little past where they'd been before she went to sleep.
What kind of face she would have made if she'd known was anyone's guess. Lucky or unlucky, she knew nothing at all, and she was sleeping very, very well.