End of the World Broadcast

[Mysterious livestream suddenly appears on xxx]
[xxx official statement: “We cannot locate its source at all.” Various suspicions only intensify…]

One day, a mysterious livestream channel took up position at the top of a video site visited by billions of users daily.
The channel that appeared regardless of the algorithm that analyzes and recommends videos similar to what users usually watch had many strange aspects.
The broadcast title was blank, and the channel icon was painted completely black.
Even the channel name was blank, so the only thing visually confirmable was the number of viewers.
Up to that point, though peculiar, there wasn’t anything particularly strange.
After all, it was natural for people to establish their own unique concept to attract attention on a site where everyone was desperate to catch people’s eyes.
Those who first saw the video were merely puzzled why an unfamiliar channel’s livestream appeared for them, but they didn’t find the channel itself strange.

However, the fact that even when clicking on the channel icon, basic information including registration date, country, and subscriber count was blank.
And as shocking scenes that people living in the 21st century could hardly accept began to appear one after another, discussions about the suspicious channel began to spread rapidly.

Tall and splendid buildings that would be challenging to replicate even with modern technology, and various machines that don’t exist in reality, stretch endlessly along roads.
Initially, due to these mysterious scenes, most people thought it was a surprise SF movie jointly released by a film company and the site, or a livestream concept video created for marketing an upcoming movie.

But as the girl who appeared to be the protagonist of the video began walking on a snow-covered road, and the world and situation she belonged to started to be revealed in earnest, confusion began to set in.
The experiences and thoughts the girl nonchalantly expressed while walking.
And the numerous corpses buried under the white snow didn’t look like simple scripts or props.
Even if they were scripts and props, the overall atmosphere felt from the video was too heavy.

Reactions first began to emerge among parents with children that this was definitely not a video that should be publicly available to everyone without any filter.
And from the moment the girl picked a lock to find a place to sleep and explicitly revealed the end of someone who had taken their own life, people began to seriously raise issues with this broadcast.

Many people reported the broadcast and contacted the company, citing cruelty and violence, due to the fact that the cruel scenery, which couldn’t possibly be real and shouldn’t be real, was being shown without any censorship.
But unlike other broadcasts, this one didn’t automatically go down no matter how many reports it received.
Even the company, which should have had management authority over all videos and channels on its site, somehow couldn’t intervene in the broadcast.
As if to suggest that the future this video depicts is unavoidable.

And as the second broadcast began, and the girl gathered food from a supermarket full of corpses, people noticed something strange in the girl’s responses despite sending numerous chats.
[…This isn’t a snuff site, and showing someone who committed suicide so openly isn’t right, but that was yesterday’s story. Something seems off…?]

The girl, who had been saying only what she wanted to say despite hundreds of thousands of people sending chats for hours after the second day’s broadcast began, suddenly started responding to chats left by viewers.
The problem was that the time when viewers sent chats and the time when she received them didn’t match.
People felt a sense of discomfort as she received and responded to only a small fraction of chats, with a time gap of about a day.
In a world where broadcasts, no matter where they’re turned on globally, experience delays of at most a few seconds or tens of seconds.
Yet it takes nearly a day just for chats to be delivered.

A city where no life can be found at all and snow that never stops falling.
And her words referring to machines, including drones that couldn’t be replicated with modern technology, as things from the “old era.”

Even though everyone thought it was absurd.
Based on the calendars hanging on the walls of houses she visited, or the manufacturing dates on canned goods.
Led by observant people, speculation began to spread little by little that this suspicious broadcast might be coming from a future hundreds of years later.

08. Truth.

“…Whether it’s saying it’s okay to pick locks like that, or talking about the person I saw yesterday. You, you really were watching me, watching my video.”
…To be honest.
Even after seeing the messages displayed by the controller on my wrist, I still had some doubts about whether there were other survivors besides me.

For over a year, I walked without resting a single day to find living people.
How many expectations I had while passing through numerous cities during that time.
This city has a problem, that’s why it’s like this, surely survivors remain in other cities.
A world that has developed this much couldn’t possibly meet its end like this.
If not here, then in the next city. If not there, then further away.
Dreaming that I could meet at least one living person before I die, I didn’t stop walking even when large blisters formed on my feet and my legs swelled up.
—But.

In a world where the very words ‘belief’ and ‘hope’ have become illusions of those who wish and expect, the world endlessly betrayed me and brought only despair.
Despair, which came more intensely the more I expected and hoped, made me unable to believe in anything uncertain.
But if I let go of hope altogether, I felt like I wouldn’t be able to take even one step.
So, while verbally expressing hopeful words, but actually unable to smile, I—in such a broken state—
Also considered the possibility that even this drone and controller were not actually messages sent by real people, but merely very old messages stored in this machine reappearing.
Just in case this was really just a trace from the past, to avoid falling into deep despair.
Great hope would bring equally deep despair.
If I were to fall into such despair, I felt like I might not be able to escape it this time.

[What, wasn’t this a special project? It’s broadcasting today too?]
[We’re talking about you! Can you not see the chat?]
[Wow. The snow is no joke today too. What country is this anyway?]

But unable to shake off all expectations after all, I glanced at the drone every few minutes while searching for food.
As such, when the controller spoke again, I almost screamed in surprise.

“…Ah, wait, I think I’m going to cry.”
Unlike the messages from early this morning, which I couldn’t properly confirm were directed at me.

[I admit canned beans don’t taste good… But those aren’t real corpses, right? Like CG or something?]
Words that couldn’t come out without sharing what I saw and said.
Though it seems real-time communication is impossible because it takes quite a long time for responses to come back to my words and actions, perhaps because the distance is farther than imaginable, or because the connection is unstable–
—But what does that matter?

“This time, it’s really not my dream. It’s not a hallucination, and it’s not a wild guess.”

I couldn’t immediately know who or where these videos were being watched from, but there exist people in this world with whom conversation is possible. They are living in the same time as me, though I thought I was walking into the future alone. We can have proper communication, even if it’s slow.
The languages of the incoming messages varied, but thanks to the translator built into the drone, I could understand them sufficiently.
I can share situations and talk with people far away. So even if it takes a bit longer, there’s no reason we couldn’t meet.

“Someday, we can meet.”
The word “someday” with a different meaning than before.
With just that, I was able to regain my hope, which I thought had been buried in this white snow.
Not a false hope riddled with lies, but a true hope.

“So– Hello, nice to meet you. There really, truly were living people. Actually, until just now, I was in a bit of a depressed state, thinking that it might just be my delusion that someone was watching this video, and I might be getting excited over messages saved in the machine a long time ago.”

For the first time in a long time, with this body for the first time, I couldn’t control my emotions due to happiness.
My words speed up, and even to my own perception, pure exclamations and words that aren’t organized boil up from within and spill out of my mouth.
I repeatedly say, rambling, that I’m happy and glad just because you exist in the same time as me.
Even people who don’t understand my language or words could tell I’m extremely happy just by looking at my intonation or expression.

[Does anyone know where this is?]
[Why are the buildings so tall?]
[That thing buried in the snow… it’s not what I’m thinking, right?]

Messages were coming up sporadically, two or three at a time, at intervals of about twenty minutes by my perception, and they contained mostly meaningless content, but that was enough.

For me, who had walked over countless snow and death just to find living people and their traces, even if just one message came in an hour, no, half a day, no, no? Even if just one sentence a day came, it would have felt more valuable than any item I had discovered so far.

“Unfortunately, whether it’s that you’re seeing my video late, or I’m receiving messages slowly, or both. Our conversation seems to have a bit of a time difference, but that’s okay. I’ll try hard to remember for you.”
I looked alternately at the controller and the drone’s lens with a bright, pure smile that I hadn’t been able to wear since waking up in this world.

“Whew, as much as I’d like to chat more… seeing that it’s getting dark outside, I think I should find a place to sleep first.”
With those final words, I left the supermarket.
I didn’t even get to look around the electronics section I had aimed for, but that’s fine—I can come back tomorrow to find it.
Right now, I just wanted to fully enjoy the joy of meeting people as it is, in a warm and safe place.