End of the World Broadcast

“Hmm… but I wonder what I should tell and what I shouldn’t. Human relationships aren’t normally formed by unilaterally and directly dumping information like this.”
Humans themselves belong to space and time, but their essence is ultimately formed by others.
People experience various behaviors and words that appear in various situations while being together.
Through that experience, humans exist by defining themselves through the process of comparing and being conscious of each other’s existence.
But now I’m in a situation where I have to define everything myself, starting with my name, including my personality and past.
It was awkward, and it couldn’t help but be awkward.
Just as no one can properly explain when asked to describe an elephant after touching it blindfolded, how can a human, who struggles to explain even intuition formed through experience, easily explain themselves to others, made up of countless causal relationships?
This required a lot of contemplation.
Beyond the objective aspects that are visually apparent, like names or appearance, I had to question my existence itself.
The fortunate thing was that I had often contemplated these things while wandering alone.

“Alright. From now on, I’ll tell you what kind of world I lived in and how I ended up in this world. Like reading a history book.”
After much deliberation, I decided that, just as there’s no more perfect commentary on the problem of life than history.
To convey to people who are curious about me as a person, I decided to simply share what I’ve experienced.

“Honestly, it might be boring. Like many people, I didn’t particularly live a glamorous or unusual life. …Of course, now I’m living a more special life than anyone else.”
From what I can tell, just a year ago I was living an utterly ordinary life, and I laugh self-deprecatingly, lamenting how I ended up in this situation.

“Even what did happen… was as common and predictable as a story in a children’s fairy tale. But wait, let me move this ladder and continue.”
Right now, I was revisiting the supermarket I had stopped by yesterday and examining various shelves.
Items that are neither highly scarce nor essential necessities, like food, clothes, or cosmetics, remain quite plentiful in the supermarket.
For a place in such disarray, many items remained.
But as if it wasn’t for nothing that people didn’t take them, most of the items were things I couldn’t use.
So I was in the process of repeatedly moving the ladder to climb to high places, only to come down with disappointment instead of useful items.

“Phew, it seems well-secured. Okay, while looking around here, let me continue… I don’t know what you might think, but before my body became like this, that is, before I became ‘Mori,’ I was an utterly ordinary young man. I liked IVRG (Interactive virtual reality games) and waited for news from the exploration vessel sent beyond that galaxy… I was ordinary by the standards of that time.”
I liked thinking about my existence, whether I was really alive on this Earth.
Those thoughts were limited to the scope of the world I currently belonged to and this body that directly speaks and moves.
In contrast, I didn’t much like recalling my memories and past like this.
In time, which can only flow in one direction, all memories and happiness were left in the past, so when I think about old times, only sad emotions arise.

“But… unfortunately, my bronchial tubes weren’t very healthy from birth, and I was told by doctors that I wouldn’t live very long. Now there’s only clean snow falling heavily, but back then, there was so much dust that on particularly dusty days, people like me had to wear masks and goggles, making it difficult to live.”
The vague memory of yellow skies and the sensation of a stinging chest and phlegm bubbling just from breathing makes me clear my throat with a “hmm.”

“So I persuaded my parents… to transfer ‘me’ to another body instead of my current one. Well, it wasn’t that special, so maybe you predicted it as soon as you heard the first part?”
A world where not only parts of the body but even consciousness could be transferred if conditions were met.
Some people even had children to sell healthy bodies for large sums of money.
Muttering that greed is terrifying in any era, I put a well-sealed chicken rib-flavored pet gum I happened to find into my pocket.
I wonder if it could be cooked in a way that humans could eat it deliciously…?

“Hmm, but my condition was a bit tricky, and time passed without finding a body that could completely transfer my consciousness. The problem was that my health kept deteriorating during that time.”
Coughing up blood, even breathing felt painful. The chest-ripping pain continued.
The pain then can only be described as terrible.
To the extent that if someone came to me right now and said they would send me back to the time I used to live in, but I would have to live in that body forever, I wouldn’t be able to agree immediately.

“Eventually, I decided to sleep until I found a body that met the conditions. …Though I didn’t know I would sleep this long.”
When I would wake up in a healthy body, I had promised to go on a picnic with my family.
But when I opened my eyes, I was alone in a dark, abandoned laboratory with no family or anyone else, and I can’t express how shocked I was.

“I hoped it was a surprise event, and I believed it was a surprise event. But when I realized that the person collapsed on the floor was really dead, I cried like a child.”
Time flowed steadily, and the people who lived in this city met their end sequentially.
But for me, who had been asleep all the while, it felt like the world had perished in just one day.
Naturally, I couldn’t accept that fact.
Neither that I, who thought I would wake up after a short sleep, had come to a distant future.
Nor that the city where many people had lived happily had perished like this.
I denied reality, claiming it was all just a mean prank for the newly born me.
But there was no falsity in the world I saw with my eyes.

“…It took a really long time to get up again from that state.”
This is all just a nightmare.
If I sleep and wake up, I’ll be able to return to my happy daily life.
Believing that, I couldn’t advance into the city full of corpses and only sought sleep, hiding in the corner of the building.
For days, I did nothing except wear several layers of gowns to avoid freezing to death.
What finally made me move was none other than the rumbling sound from my stomach.

“Even in this situation, the sensation of hunger and thirst cruelly told me that my current situation was not a dream.”
Eventually, I had no choice but to accept reality and move my feet.
Although it was a changed body, I couldn’t give up the precious life my parents gave me in a place like this.
So, properly dressed and with a large bag from the lab on my back, as I was about to head into the city.
I saw the word ‘MORI’ written large on the half-collapsed wall outside the laboratory.

“I don’t know what values you hold now… but in the world I lived in, transferring consciousness to another person’s body was viewed as ‘an eternal farewell to two people.'”
Due to one person’s choice, both the consciousness that would have existed in my original body and in this body’s owner disappeared, leading to the birth of a new being.

“There was a perception that it was an extremely irreverent act for a human who defied the natural order to speak the names of those two, as it would be desecrating both death and birth.”
Therefore, instead of the precious name my parents gave to my original body, I decided to adopt the word ‘Mori’ as my name.

“…That’s the end, really nothing special and an uninteresting story, right? It just leaves a bitter aftertaste. Actually, this is why I didn’t want to talk about my past, but I guess even such trivial stories might narrow the distance between us a little.”
Now that I’ve said it, it doesn’t seem like it will help much in getting to know each other, but there’s a big difference between 0 and 1, and between 1 and 2.
Even if the people watching my video understand my situation just a little bit, someone who feels sorry for me might come to rescue me, so I don’t think it was meaningless.

“By the way… there were many capsules besides mine in that place, where did those people go?”
When I woke up in the laboratory, I was alone.
But around me were many capsules with their lids already open, and there was no one inside them.
Why did only I wake up so late?
If things had gone as planned, I would have been asleep for at most a few months.
What is the reason I woke up alone after at least tens or hundreds of years had passed?
And what on earth happened to this city while I was sleeping?
Although I know it only gives me a headache to worry about things with no one to tell me and no way to find out, I still occasionally get curious.

“Anyway, that’s the answer to who I am. In the end, the fact that I am now Mori remains unchanged, so please call me Mori when referring to me from now on.”
Honestly, I never imagined there would be someone to call me by this name… if someone calls me by name, even in text, I might cry from extreme happiness.