On Air
Our father was an extremely strict man.
In my childhood he was nothing short of a symbol of terror, and even after I had passed through my youth and become an adult, he remained one. He was not the sort to resort to outright violence. It was more that he took you apart, point by point, with nothing but words—or perhaps that he crushed people under the sheer weight of his presence. Either way, even now my whole body locks up the moment I stand in front of him.
He was not wholly without flexibility, either. Unless I had done something seriously wrong, he let it pass with a moderate scolding. Honestly, the times I truly caught it were in middle school, when I ran around and played far too much.
The first time I came home drunk, I genuinely thought I was going to die that day.
Anyway, that was the father I remembered. Strict and solemn, cold as a machine. That was our father.
"Our daughter~ isn't there anything you want to eat?"
He was not the kind of man who could toss out our daughter so affectionately, as if it were nothing!
Faced with a father who had changed far too much, I was feeling a terror of an entirely different kind. But fear is fear, and when an adult asks you something, you answer at once. That was one of the manners I had learned from him.
"I... I'm fine with anything."
I stammered a little, but he would overlook this much.
"Yeah? Then shall we order chicken? Our daughter likes chicken."
"Huh? Chicken?"
It was true that I liked chicken, but... as far as I knew, Father hated it.
"Fath— Dad, you don't like chicken, do you?"
"What are you talking about? Dad loves chicken."
"Really? Then OO Chicken, please."
Had his tastes changed that fast?
They hadn't. He had ordered it purely for me. He was peeling off every bit of the crust and picking out only the meat—and only the breast, at that. Breast is one of the cuts I hate most. It's dry, and it sticks in your throat.
Father used to hate chicken for being too greasy, and the only days our family ate it were when he took dinner out for work or was away on a business trip.
But where had Mother and my brother gone? Mother was always swamped, so that much made sense—but why wasn't my brother here?
"By the way, Dad, where's Hyung?"
"...Hyung?"
Ah. That wasn't right.
"I mean... o... oppa. I misspoke."
God. Fuck. I want to die.
I might have been wearing the body of a seventeen-year-old kid, but I still had the mind of a full-grown man. For someone like me to say oppa, dead sober... I wanted to crawl into a mousehole and hide.
"Your brother's busy with company work right now. It's the stretch where I have to run him hard."
Even back when I was a man, Father had drilled my brother without mercy so he could inherit the company. The lenience he was showing me, it seemed, was simply because I was his daughter.
Armed with the unthinkable discovery that Father was a complete daughter devotee, I drew a quiet breath and delivered the line I had prepared.
"Um... Father!"
"Hm?"
"Please... buy me a computer!"
I asked him outright, carrying a quiet hope, but he answered with a firm face and nothing else.
"No."
"I... I'm starting high school now, and... I mean, I do have a MacBook, but... I really need—"
I tried to inflate the reasons I had rehearsed as far as they would go, but one look at that solemn expression dragged up the PTSD of my school days, and the words refused to come out right.
Father watched me flounder, let out a soft little laugh, and said:
"...Huh?"
I really could not get used to this.
"...Do computers usually arrive this fast?"
Even the quickest delivery takes about three days, doesn't it? How was it here the very next morning?
"That's because the Chairman rushed them so hard. You know how terribly he dotes on you."
"Well, that's true..."
The housekeeper said it while opening the delivered box with a box cutter. I had tried to help, but apparently standing still was the helpful thing. Or something like that.
"But there are two monitors?"
"Ah, that's..."
To stream properly, I had heard, talking to chat was essential. With one monitor you have to hit alt-tab every time you check the chat. With two, you can watch it without ever touching the keys.
"Th-these days everybody uses two!"
No decent excuse came to mind, so I just blurted something out.
"Really? How about that."
Fortunately she was old enough to let it pass.
"Want me to help you set it up, too? Auntie doesn't know much about computers."
"I'll do that myself."
Even so, I felt bad taking help for this on top of everything else.
"All right. Call if you need anything~ Rest easy."
"Okay."
Once the housekeeper left the room, I got down to the real setup. A 240Hz monitor, the same kind I had used in the practice room back in my pro days, and a vertical monitor I had bought for keeping an eye on chat. I used to make a living on a rig like this. This much ought to be easy.
"Uh... so... this connects like this, right...?"
"Why won't it turn on..."
"Oh, for— seriously! What the hell is wrong now!"
In the end, after four hours of wrestling with it, I got every piece of equipment installed.
"...I should've just asked the housekeeper."
Still, seeing the broadcast gear perfectly set made me feel a little proud. The keyboard and wireless mouse from my active years, and a headset and a microphone besides. I had never actually used a mic, but I had bought one because I had heard you needed one if you were going to stream.
"I didn't buy a camera... I probably don't need one."
I had no intention of showing my face. In a few months I would be starting high school, and it seemed like it would turn into a real headache.
Strike while the iron is hot, they say. Since the gear was all set, I decided to go live for the first time that very day. I did have some experience streaming. This much was simple.
I adjusted the output, confirmed the picture was coming through, and hit the button to start the broadcast.
I had gone back and forth on a streamer name. I considered using Galaxy, the one from my pro days, but in the end I decided to go with my own name, Eunha. The reason was simple. Streamer Eunha just looked cleaner than Streamer Galaxy.
I turned the broadcast on and waited about five minutes.
"Why isn't anyone coming?"
Back then, wait five minutes after going live and about five hundred people would roll in...
I waited the way I remembered from streaming in the old practice room, and not a single person came. Thinking I might have botched the settings, I looked it up on my phone, but the settings were not wrong.
So people simply were not coming in. Why?
"Ah."
I understood at once.
Before, I had been one of the best Project A pros in Korea. The me of now was a nobody—an ordinary person with nothing to show for herself.
Streaming, it seemed, was a harder job than I had thought.
No matter how long I waited, nobody came, so I decided to just start the game. But the ID I had made for the first time yesterday was level 1. The account could not even queue competitive, let alone a high-rank lobby, so I was stuck playing unrated.
Even so, a former pro playing unrated was basically smurfing...
Still, I figured it was better to hit level 20 fast, jump into competitive, and climb. So I just did it.
And so a game was found.
The map was Haven. Haven is one of the more complicated maps: the attackers have three sites where they can plant the bomb—A, B, and C.
I was still deciding who to play when my four teammates seemed to have already locked in.
"Nobody's on smokes?"
In Project A, smokes—the Controller—are one of the roles a team cannot do without. On attack they cut down a good number of the defenders' angles and open a way to entry. On defense they choke the attackers' push. A team really needs about one, so I took it.
A psychic who works in shadow. He can swap his position with a teleport, and he carries a powerful crowd-control tool called Paranoia, which shuts off an enemy's hearing and sight.
It had not been my role when I was active, but a pro at my level has a working proficiency on every agent anyway. It would be fine.
"It's been a really long time since I played against actual people."
Aside from warming up in the range yesterday, my last game of Project A had been game five against Lord in the PCT LOCK//IN semifinals. Even so, I was on the mouse, keyboard, and mousepad from my playing days, so it did not feel all that strange.
We were starting on defense: three on A, one on B, and one on C.
"Nobody's watching Garage?"
My teammates had pushed me onto C, and a hole had opened in the defense. Leave a whole zone uncovered like that, and the odds of the attackers shooting you in the back of the head get very high.
Just like now.
The Jett holding B had his back blown out by the enemy Raze rotating through Garage.
Once that happens, the attackers cut the ground the defense has claimed straight through the middle, and I on C and the three allies on A can no longer support each other. From the defense's side, the round had just gotten a great deal harder.
This is why, on defense, you watch every zone without a gap.
I was about to check whether the enemy was filing into B—left empty by Jett's death—when a human voice came through my headset.
"Hey, is nobody watching Garage?"
A voice that sounded about elementary-school age—the sort people usually call a little kid.
"Chamber, what are you doing not putting your trip down?"