Too Awkward
I understood the gist of what Bora was telling me.
I still had no official status, and I had been classified as a dangerous monster—not the least bit dangerous, but classified as one all the same—so the goal was to win the public's affection through broadcasts and exhibitions. Getting certified as harmless, she said, mattered more than anything.
Even so, what we were doing right now felt like far too much.
"All right. You've got to look at the camera when you talk."
"Um... Hello, everyone. My name is Hana."
I had to deliver my introduction straight into the lens, the sort of self-introduction I felt sure I'd seen somewhere famous. I gathered my hands at my navel and bowed with perfect manners, and Bora's reaction exploded with delight. After that, she spent the day filming every ordinary minute of my life.
"This is it!"
She looked as if she had reached that rare pinnacle where hobby and profession become one and the same, but I didn't have much to say about it. She simply kept shoving the camera in my face and filming. A child's everyday life, she insisted, was in overflowing demand all by itself.
Once, when real life hadn't been quite so hard, a person could sit through bad endings and plots that dragged like a mouthful of dry sweet potato and feel nothing at all. These days, perhaps because life itself was exhausting, not everyone, but most people, wanted happy endings or twists of pure, sparkling catharsis. Put a bad ending or a truly frustrating story in front of them, and they would come charging, foaming at the mouth.
People healed themselves, too, watching videos of animals or cute clips of little children. Even with no purpose and no theme at all, cuteness alone was enough to catch the eye.
And so I was being filmed eating, or watching television—footage of the most ordinary kind imaginable. Wasn't a broadcast supposed to have a script, or at least some actual content? Shooting with neither, I had the distinct feeling this was going to crash and burn.
From where Bora stood, it didn't look that way at all. She followed me around all day with the camera, and I wondered whether filming like that without a rest wasn't exhausting, but she endured on sheer grit.
We did pause here and there in the middle of the shoot, and yet it still felt as if we had filmed nearly full-time right up to evening. When the last shot was finally done, I let out a long sigh and collapsed onto the bed.
"I'm exhausted, Bora."
"You did great, Hana. It was your first time on camera, and you still did well."
"Hehe..."
At her praise, I tugged the corners of my mouth up and answered, thoroughly pleased with myself. It had felt like a disaster to me, but through Bora's eyes it didn't seem like such a failure after all. Nothing much appeared to have happened today, and yet my body was heavy with fatigue, as if I had accomplished something tremendous.
The Starlight Research Institute had a YouTube channel of its own. For the channel name, they had dropped in the institute's full name, the Starlight Lifeform Research Institute, exactly as it was. Not many people went looking for it, but the mere fact that it uploaded footage of rare monsters had been enough to secure a certain number of subscribers.
Even so, that number was only about thirty thousand. For a channel that simply filmed people gawking at monsters, with no subtitles and no editing whatsoever, it still pulled in a respectable number of views. The flashier monster videos cleared several hundred thousand.
For a while, though, no monsters from inside the gates had been captured, and the channel had lain nearly dormant for close to half a year—until a new video went up.
The thumbnail was a cute little child with green hair and green eyes. To a Korean used to black hair and black eyes, it was a look more than capable of pulling clicks. You could fake the colors with dye or colored contacts, but achieving them this naturally was another matter entirely.
Since this was only the beginning, Bora uploaded the first video with a little editing and a few subtitles, hardly thinking about it, and then clocked out for the day. A few hours later, though, the video caught the algorithm, and its view count began to climb at a furious pace. In the middle of the night, no less.
Starlight Green Tea was on the market, but the amount available was drastically smaller than the number of people trying to buy it, and the online marketplaces descended into chaos. At the marts it was one box per person anyway, and by the time you made it to a second store, the tea was already gone.
Selling above the retail price was against the law, of course, but there were so many people doing it that hardly anyone cared. The situation grew strange enough that buyers far outnumbered sellers.
With consumer demand exploding, distributors who were not Starlight Food itself were living the high life.
"Skim a little off the top and nobody would even notice, right?"
"We're taking in a thousand boxes. If we set aside just a hundred, it'd be fine, wouldn't it?"
It was the same as when those honey-butter chips—the snack famous for being glazed in honey—had flown off the shelves and the whole country lost its mind. Demand so far outstripped what the sellers could supply that distributors kept diverting stock and selling it themselves before it ever reached the marts and convenience stores.
"Hey! There's no Starlight Green Tea out on the market!"
"We were supposed to receive a hundred boxes, but the distributor suddenly changed their story, and we only got seventy."
The people taking deliveries at the marts and convenience stores were miserable. Consumers were already hunting for Starlight Green Tea as if their lives depended on it, and on top of that the distributors were skimming it along the way, so the stores received far less than the quantity written on the invoice.
And yet they were the ones taking the abuse. Protesting to the distributors did precious little good.
Starlight Food felt the severity of it too. Far too many consumers were flooding the company website with complaints. From the company's side, they had clearly stated that quantities were limited and that they simply could not release more, but consumers with their eyes rolled back in their heads paid no attention to that.
"Chief, when it comes to distribution, there are far too many distributors playing games with the price."
"Keep releasing volume for now, and trace the distribution chain. The hoarders need to be rounded up all at once."
The moment Starlight Food released green tea onto the market, the distributors swooped in like baby birds taking food from their mother. Starlight Green Tea moved product all day long, day and night, and the instant it was put out they swept every last bit of it into their warehouses. Then they went on selling it while holding the price far above what Starlight Food had officially set.
The margin was so obscene that people said the daily spread alone was enough to buy a house out in the provinces. That golden stretch of time, however, did not last.
After the gates appeared, monsters had smashed humanity's foundations and thrown its progress backward, but once the hunters emerged and the gates were suppressed, technological development actually accelerated at a dazzling pace. Byproducts from the monsters revealed effects no one had ever seen before, and those discoveries drove a leap forward in IT.
And so the AI that Starlight Food had built around Starlight Green Tea accumulated big data continuously, until it had a sample large enough to tell the distributors who had cheated from the ones who had not. It was no fully autonomous AI, the kind from that movie about the man in the suit, but even this much was plenty innovative.
Starlight Food stopped supplying green tea to the distributors who had played games with the price, and to the honest distributors who had stayed out of the hoarding, it supplied a far greater volume than before.
Only the legitimate distributors—the ones who had never toyed with the price—survived, without even realizing it themselves, while the ones who had been selling illegally found they had slit open the belly of the goose that laid the golden eggs.
A few shameless distributors protested to Starlight Food, insisting that the hoarding they had done was actually legitimate conduct, but a threat delivered in the form of a courteous letter succeeded in shutting their mouths.
Once the limit of one box per person was in place and the irrationalities in the distribution process under Starlight Food's control had been cleared away, the market began to find a measure of stability. Even so, the simple fact remained that there still wasn't nearly enough to go around, and the company's homepage was buried under posts begging them to please just make more.
But unless Hana became two people, Starlight Food had no real answer.