Online Communication - Chapter 0.1

Is this really such an unreasonable thing to do?

As a result of my little good deed, I was knocked unconscious and as soon as I woke up, I had to sigh with a terrible melancholy feeling. Even terrible is still not a lenient word to describe how I feel right now. I am sure that no matter how many words I try to use, it would be difficult to convey this feeling. I can’t even think of the right words myself.

“…”

How did this happen? I let out a sigh for the umpteenth time, and when I touch my cheek, it feels like a smooth rice cake, something I have never felt before. Was my skin really this smooth? It can’t be.

How did this happen? I sagged and buried my face in the pillow, my long, fine, shiny white hair spilling down onto the sheets like silken threads. Was my hair really this fine and beautiful? No, it can’t be. To begin with, I have had black hair since I was born, and I have never dyed it.

“…”

How did this happen? Reflected in the small mirror on top of the dresser is an unfamiliar beautiful girl in a severely oversized jersey. She stares at me in confusion, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. Who in the world is she, and where am I that I can’t see her even though I am facing the mirror head-on? The answers to these questions were not forthcoming from anywhere.

Online Communication

Contact 0.1 “The Beginning”

My name is Hinata Kizaki. For some reason, I don’t go to school, but I am a Japanese boy who is generally considered to be in the second year of high school. My name alone is said to be indistinguishable between male and female, but according to my friend, I am not so good looking as to be called beautiful, but I cannot be called ugly either.

Yes, by no mistake, I do not look like the beautiful girl in the mirror right now with a doll-like face, long snow-colored hair, emerald eyes moist and an anxious expression on her face. However, the mirror in my house reflects my face honestly with the sincerity and honesty, like a mirror from a fairy tale.

When I held out my right hand, the girl in the mirror reached out her left hand in the same motion, and when I was about to cry, the girl in the mirror also moistened her eyes with anxiety. It was unmistakably a person with the appearance of what one would call a beautiful girl. She looks so endearing that if you found her in the town, you would be easily charmed by her appearance. Although it would be a little difficult to see her as a woman since she is not older than 10 years old.

But it doesn’t matter, what I want to see now is not this adorable looking little girl, but an average Japanese boy with a dull face that I am used to seeing all the time. And yet, the mirror in my house is not a mirror of truth, but it doesn’t read the air and confronts me with the truth. Is it extravagant of me to wish that it would learn to care a little more?

I was not going to change my situation even if I took it out on the mirror. The various methods I have practiced to identify dreams have given me nothing but hopeless results. The world is not kind at all. There was no one beside me now to comfort me as I buried my face in my pillow, devastated.

?

It is now the year of 2040, and it has been several years since the gradual decline of the paper-based culture and the shift to electronic media as the main venue for publication. If you dig a little deeper into the internet, you will find that the genre of “I woke up and became a beautiful girl” has been going on for several decades and there are probably more than a few stars in the sky. But they are all supposed to be fiction, and should not exist in reality.

Operating a tablet-type mobile terminal, I opened a search engine and set various words such as “sex change” and “wake up to a beautiful girl” to search.

“…”

After checking the displayed search results, I let out a sigh and threw the mobile device to the bed. In a way, it was as I had expected, but it seemed to be a brilliantly pointless action.

I tried to find something that might help me find the cause of the situation, but all I could find was information on novels and comic books in those genres, too many to count. The amount of information accumulated in a single genre over several decades is tremendous, and gathering the information I need now from among them would be like searching for different colored grains of sand in the desert.

I finally came to the point of remembering what had happened just before I lost consciousness. For some reason, I seemed to be very confused. Well, if there is someone who is not confused in this situation, I would love to meet them and learn their secret.

Let me return to the story. I have been going to a nearby shrine for the past three months in an effort to exercise my body and get outside as much as possible. It takes me 20 minutes to walk to the shrine each way. I greet the Shinto priest, who is an acquaintance of my mother’s, help clean the shrine for about 30 minutes, then return home just in time. I am not a deeply religious person, and I am not sure how I could keep up with such a tedious task, but it was quite enjoyable.

The place is rarely visited and is located on a small hill, so you can enjoy a panoramic view of the city in a relaxed atmosphere. Moreover, a cute kitten with pure white fur and green eyes, which seemed to be a stray cat, has been living there for about a month, and it has become a perfect healing spot for me as a self-confessed animal lover. She seemed to be quite accustomed to people, and when I was cleaning, she would come close to me and let me pet her while tilting her little head. The only people who don’t think she’s adorable are those who don’t like cats or don’t like animals.

I finished lunch around mid-afternoon, and headed for the shrine, slightly fed up with the sun, which was now strong enough to bake me in the height of summer. I greeted the Shinto priest and swept the shrine grounds, but the kitten that usually lays down near the steps of the shrine when I start sweeping did not show up. I had always been capricious, and it wasn’t always the case, but this one time I was strangely curious, and after putting away the broom I had borrowed, I somehow began to look for her.

Then, in the woods, I found two boys in high school uniforms from a high school in the next town over playing with the kitten as a target for an air gun. I get angry and blood rushes to my head when I see such actions due to various reasons in the past, and this time, as usual, I took off without a plan. I was a little impatient with my own carelessness, but I managed to escape with the kitten in my arms. I didn’t. In any case, one of them was a reclusive brat, while the other one seemed to be playing some kind of sport, judging from the complaints I heard.

And he comes with luggage, albeit small, I was not sure if I could even win given my physical strength to begin with. I was cornered on the steps at the entrance to the shrine and pushed down by these angry men.

“….aw”

I even remember the pain and the hold on both of my arms. I had rolled my body to protect the kitten as quickly as possible, causing me to slam my back, arms, and legs into the staircase. By the time I was too sore to feel anything, I had already rolled down to the bottom, and when I was sure the crying cat in my arms was safe, I lost consciousness just like that.

Yeah, it’s funny. From the way I remember the feeling, I think my head and spine were gone too. No matter how lightly I estimate it, both my hands and legs should be in casts. So why am I here now, safe and sound?

In a sense, I can’t say that I’m safe by mistake, but at the very least, if I had been rescued normally, the place I would wake up would be in a hospital. In reality, however, I woke up in my own room, with a familiar ceiling, in a familiar house. I thought about the possibility of swapping places, like in the classic “The Last Time I Saw a Girl,” but I don’t remember there being a girl nearby, and the question remains as to who brought me to this room in the first place, when I was unconscious.

I was about to think something like maybe I came back on my own like I was sleepwalking, but then I laughed my head off and thought that was absurd. At any rate, there seems to be too little information available, and this appearance is a bit too much for me to go check out. Think about it, a foreign girl, no more than 10 years old, wearing a man’s jersey, wandering around in the daytime in this peaceful country of Japan, no matter how long it has been since internationalization has been called for.

No matter how you think about it, you will be immediately protected by the state authorities, and I can only smell a case when I say so myself. If you tell the truth and they suspect you are telling the truth, you will be placed in a mental institution, and if they believe you, you will be placed under observation. I know it will not end well for me. Above all, I have a big “disadvantage” when I go out. It is too risky to go out with my appearance and outfit, which will surely make people worry.

After all, it’s an all sided problem. I don’t want to consult my family and friends as much as possible. I am still causing a lot of trouble because of my so-called “shut-in” status. Especially, I don’t want to cause my mother and sister, who are very supportive of me, any more trouble than they already have because of the unintelligible situation that their son and brother have turned into their daughter and sister.

Well, I understand. In the end, I’m afraid of not being believed or accepted. I’m afraid of being rejected by my friends, who have never given up on me because I hated people and started shutting myself up at home. To be rejected by my family, who no matter how busy they are, they still care about me as a family member and look out for me in the long run.

I will lose my place, and there is nothing more horrible than that. I have to get back to normal before my friends find out. Until I do, I have to keep it a secret. I have an uneasy feeling that this is a difficult goal, and to be honest, just thinking about it makes my hands shake with fear and tears well up in my eyes. Before I lose the ability to act, I forcefully switch my consciousness and go to my computer.

After a few dozen seconds, the startup is complete. I operated the mouse to launch the browser, opened a search engine, and blurted out every word I could think of. I didn’t care if I was searching for different colored grains of sand in the desert, right now I just wanted to do something to turn away from this irrational reality.

?

How long has it been? There was no way I could get any clues by the straightforward method, so I read through all the creative works as if I was grasping at straws in the water, but in the end, I could not get any useful information. The scenery outside, seen through the cracks in the curtains, was tinged red with the setting sun. Looking at my watch, the hands were showing at 6:30 in the evening. It was now almost the latter half of July, and it was still a little too early for it to be completely dark.

“…!”

I was taking it easy, but then I looked at the clock and remembered one more important thing. There were only 30 minutes left until my mother’s usual time of getting home, and even though I was in charge of meals today, I hadn’t done anything about it at all. Although it is unavoidable because of the situations, it would be very poor if things were left as they are. I hurriedly picked up my cell phone, which I had left on the bed, and sent a message to my mother. My father, by the way, is on a short-term assignment in a northern country.

Mom, I’m sorry, I’m a little sick and couldn’t make dinner. Can you buy dinner on your way home?

My conscience begins to throb at the thought of lying to my parents, but I tell myself it can’t be helped. Soon after, an electronic beep sounds to alert me to an incoming call. My mother is on her way home, as she is supposed to answer later at work unless it is an emergency.

Don’t overdo it if you can’t, do you want me to make a doctor’s appointment? What do you want for dinner?

The pain in my conscience grows as my mother replies with an air of concern. I honestly can’t think of anything and I have no appetite, so I just replied that I would like a light one with a small quantity. I refused to go to the hospital, saying I was just a little tired and would be fine. After I said this I realized that I had a family doctor and this excuse was not going to hold me for long. I set my mobile device on the charger and lay down on my bed, hoping to find some other excuse.

Apparently, the immediate thing to think about was how to spend the day without seeing my family. 

After 30 minutes of frantically racking my brain, I finally came up with nothing until my mother came home. I locked my door at the sound of the front door opening and wrapped myself in the covers on my bed, just in case.

“I’m home. Hinata? Are you okay?”

Coming up the stairs, the creaking sound of the hallway approached me and the door to my room banged. But I can’t answer the door, so I send a message on my cell phone. Fortunately, I am not encouraged, but not blamed, for my “handicap” in communicating by text rather than words. I was seriously troubled and distressed when I first started, but in this situation, it is an advantage, so you never really know how life will turn out.

Welcome back, Mom. Sorry I don’t want to leave my room right now, I’ll eat later. You can leave my dinner in the kitchen. Thanks for getting it for me.

“…Okay, I understand. If it gets worse, just tell me right away, okay?”

She must have checked my message on her cell phone because after a short pause, she responded in a worried tone. I realized after trying it that the temporary illness setting was too much of a pain in the conscience for me to be able to do it for a long period of time, and above all, if I stayed in my room for several days without showing my face, I would surely be sent to the hospital or at worst an ambulance would be called. If that happens, of course I have to come out.

I frantically ran my head around as I listened to the sound of footsteps moving away. Is there anything that can help…?

A ray of light appeared in my wandering vision as if to express the turmoil in my heart.

“…!!!”

On top of the desk, which caught all my attention, there was a full-face headgear and a cassette. It was the equipment I needed to play the newest and most talked-about online game that my friends had invited me to play so that we could at least play together even when we were inside the house. The answer to why such a thing was necessary to play the game was simple. It is because it is the world’s first fully experiential online game also known as VRMMO, which takes place in a virtual reality space. My best friend was very enthusiastic about this dream game that many people have been craving for decades.

The foundation of the technology to build virtual reality was developed about 20 years before I was born. At the time of its announcement, it was apparently a big deal up and down the line. It was only about 12 years ago that the technology was studied for use in a variety of fields, and then moved down to the private sector. In modern Japan, where it is said that there is not an ordinary household without Internet access, online games are becoming mainstream and the competition is fierce. All the companies started to develop VRMMO virtual reality online games, but 80% of them failed due to the difficulty, and the remaining 20% of them were just virtual reality experiences, and the users who had high expectations for these games gave up on them.

In the midst of all this, a group of volunteers, unable to give up, came forward and began to cooperate with each other to develop the game. With the immunity of a hobby in hand, they began to pour their time, effort, and manpower into one place. The trend grew and grew, gradually involving even major suppliers, and finally, this year, the game was completed and announced. The first closed beta at the beginning of the year was such a high quality that the buzz was so great that the second round of applications in the spring had a strange turnout, with 140,000 applicants for a maximum of 5,000.

After spending the night chatting with one of my best friends about it, I was slightly taken back but strongly agreed. My sister, who had been a gamer for some time, responded by giving me a set of equipment for a price that would allow me to build a platoon of my own, as a birthday and Christmas present, and to help me rehabilitate my social skills for a change.

Two of my best friends also started working part-time last summer in addition to the allowance they had accumulated over the years, in order to be ready for the official service in the summer, and they successfully purchased the game before the service started. It’s a scary fact that the pre-orders are already sold out in spite of the outrageous price tag.

Now, by the time I have continued to talk about the game, I think you have understood my intention. In short, I’m going to take the ultimate no-good strategy of not showing up because I’m concentrating on my game. To be honest, I’m not sure if I’m just being a bit of a jerk myself, or if I’m just smelling all kinds of bad, but I can’t think of anything else to do.

Once summer vacation starts, if I groom myself to some extent, I won’t have to worry about being arrested if I go outside a little. For a while, I will look for the shrine that seems to hold the key while being shut-in due to my poor health, and if I pull myself to the limit and still cannot get back to normal, then I will use this excuse to somehow push my way through.

Having completed the preparation, I held down my stomach, which was chirping with anxiousness and hunger.

“…”

I’ll hold out until—Mom goes to bed for the night.