Memorial: 1999

The King of Fear will descend from the sky.

The world will crumble, and humanity shall fall.

Offer your prayers. Trust your faith. Kneel to the Angel.

Armageddon is knocking at your door.

“Give me a break...” Akira flipped the page on the old magazine in his hand, let out a yawn, and stretched.

The year was 2007, and it was another stupidly peaceful day. There were plenty of things happening in the outside world: an actress in a scandal for an arrogant comment, a boxer accused of cheating, the emergence of one flamboyant celebrity after another, a book about a homeless teenager written by a comedian becoming a bestseller, people starting to live in internet cafes...

“Can’t they give me something more interesting...?” Akira had been coasting through his days working for a video game developer. Day after day, he coded what the client asked for and submitted it. Akira found the work nothing but tedious. He had enough skills to develop video games in multiple genres and had the potential to lead a team of creators, but the thing holding him back was his temperament. “Let’s see... a matching puzzle? Create your own avatar and buy loot boxes for cosmetics? One of these, again...” He grumbled something or the other as he looked through the design documents.

Social networks were all the rage, which made social games played with strangers more popular than ever. Most of these were games where each player created their own avatar and lived in a pre-constructed town where they would simulate day-to-day life, like talking to people, fishing, running a restaurant, farming, et cetera. There were even a few stories of couples meeting in one of these towns and eventually getting married. Of course, the majority of these online romances crumbled after their first IRL date. “What a peaceful world we live in...” Akira muttered as he looked through the magazines.

Thanks to the ‘waste not, want not’ policy of the CEO, decades-old magazines were easy to find in his company’s reference storage. It was strictly forbidden for the employees to throw anything away that belonged to the company. If they had to replace a single pencil, they had to write up an expense report. Akira found it more ridiculous than frugal.

Buried neck-deep in the references he pulled, Akira powered through his task of upgrading a farm-simulation app. Players would plant, harvest, and sell various crops, which would allow them to purchase livestock, leading to producing milk and eggs. Once the players made enough money, they could purchase heavy machinery like tractors, which would make the harvest more efficient so the players could expand their farms, and—

“If you like farming that much, go tend to a real field! What’s the use of making virtual vegetables!? This whole thing’s an endless loop, anyway!” Akira rambled on about this and that, all the while typing away.

After some time, he seemed to have finished the task at hand, as he rolled his neck and cracked his shoulders. “The world would have been better off if that Nos-whoever-the-hell was right.” Wait as he did, no King of Fear came down from the sky.

“Hm?” The taskbar of his computer flashed, notifying Akira of an incoming call. “XX again...? Like I’m not at work right now.” He equipped his headset and grumbled, “get a job, you useless bum.”

“Not even a hello!? Where’s your decency?”

“Same place where you left yours. It’s the middle of a weekday.”

“I’m playing your app right now, Akira. I can’t get the cows to give me milk.”

“Take it up with the cows, not the dev.”

“You made the cows too, didn’t you? They’re your responsibility, you know? You have to take care of them until you send them off to college.”

“To cow college? If they’re not producing milk, put them on the grill.”

Of course, this game had no such thing as a ‘put the cow on the grill’ command. Its virtual town was an endless, kind, and peaceful one, thoroughly cleansed of any impurities. Turning the cows that players worked hard to raise into beef was out of the question. There would be more than a few angry phone calls from players if such a feature were to be implemented. If Akira had been running the app, however, he would have ruthlessly turned any milkless cow and eggless chicken into meat. Even the cow droppings would be useful as fertilizer or even construction material. Before long, the contents of the game would have shifted into players being able to use the money they’d earned to invade the farms of other players. Female players, in particular, would have grown sick of the game in no time.

The worlds that Akira Ono created were so critically departed from what the populace demanded at the time. In a world of Akira’s creation, glory was the solitary prize, so it didn’t shy away from any conflict or contest among the player base. While Akira was talented at developing a dedicated fandom, that in and of itself did not lead to hits. No classics had ever been made without the help of casual players.

“You always get booted when the game’s done, don’t you, Akira?”

“Shut up.” In fact, Akira had always been given a polite excuse and kicked out of the company until they came knocking on his door with another project. Rinse and repeat. Akira couldn’t help but state his honest realization: “They don’t need me around once it’s done.”

Don’t add anything. Don’t make weird features. Only fulfill the client’s request. Times were different from when he was making games on his own dime. Such was the nature of corporate life.

“So what’s after this one?”

“Dress-up-your-avatar 2007...”

“Boooring. Ditch that crap. Do the game. The game.”

“That thing’s done.” Pain flashed on Akira’s face. He wasn’t in the mood to be reminded of his old game. It forced him to remember the good old days.

“This isn’t you, Akira. Doing work you don’t enjoy.”

“It’s called work cuz you gotta do it, anyway. Not that a jobless bum would understand.”

“Nope, not a clue! I’m going to live my life doing what I love.”

“Have you ever had a job...?” Akira finally asked. He had no idea how XX survived. He would have guessed on the back of their parents, but he had seldom heard XX mention their parents.

“Sure! Putting dandelions on fish!”

“Huh?”

“All these packs of sashimi come flowing down a conveyor belt, and I keep putting dandelions on them, over and over and over and over and over again. Hilarious, right? I got hungry at some point, so I snacked on a few.”

“Is your whole life a joke to you...?” Akira gazed up at the ceiling, defeated by the ridiculous answer. While he didn’t know if there really was such a job out there, he would have walked out on it after the first three minutes. “I got a meeting coming up. See ya.”

“Wait, I’ll tell you the juicy details of my dandelion job.”

“Dandelion my ass. Keep doing that until the world ends.”

“Ew, no thanks. They paid me like 600 yen an hour.”

“That’s it!?” Akira shouted, and hung up. Even though it was nonsensical banter, Akira’s expression had brightened. Somehow, talking with XX made him feel ridiculous for worrying about anything. “It’s not me, huh...? I think you’re right about that.”

The CEO entered the room. “There you are, Ono. Let’s get going.” The CEO would have never tagged along for a meeting if it wasn’t for Akira. He had showed up just to keep the reins on, as he often took things and ran in his own direction. “This project’s worth a lot of money. We can’t let it slip.”

“I figured...” Akira remarked like he had something else to say about it.

The CEO’s brow rose, but he continued as if he didn’t notice. “We’ll be collaborating with different industries and licensing costumes from big-name comics and video games. They’ve told me some big goals for the first year post-launch. A million users.”

“That’s great.”

By expanding their target audience to women and children, that goal wouldn’t be too unrealistic.

“We get this gig, and it’ll be raining money in here. More room for bonuses,” the CEO hinted. He was struggling to give his hard-to-handle developer a reason to be enthusiastic.

(Raining money, huh...?) Akira gave one last glance at the pile of old magazines as they left the reference storage.

They drove to meet the client and the tedious meeting began. Akira could see a variety of people in the lobby of the hotel where the meeting was to be held. Everyone there was wearing expensive suits, drinking expensive coffee, and talking about expensive things. Fine art, real estate, stocks, foreign investments... None of which a lowly commoner would have any business listening in on.

“We plan to grow this space into a size comparable to MIZI or GREEN,” the client stated.

“I see, I see,” the CEO joyfully agreed. “With a project of this magnitude, I think that’s very achievable.”

Akira glanced through the design document again and let out an internal sigh. (Playing friends, huh...?) The project was to construct an expansive virtual space with emphasis on interacting with other users. Players would create about-me pages, write cheesy introductions for friends, and send blurbs to each other. Akira couldn’t help but gaze up at the ceiling imagining the utterly skin-deep interactions that would take place. A fictional town, a fictional avatar, fictional words, fictional romance, digital clothes, digital crops, digital fish... Those things whirled around in Akira’s mind. Not one of them provided the sense of contest and competition he longed for. There was only one thing he wanted at this moment — a place filled with excitement, one that could scorch his days away, and maybe even his life, at that.

(But how important are costumes, really...?) Many players spent an astonishing amount on clothes and accessories to dress up their avatars. Akira wondered if it truly meant that much to players to have things most others didn’t... That they could show that they were different from everyone else. A good number of players dumped money into microtransactions and shelled out for loot boxes. Some went as far as spending the equivalent of an office worker’s average salary, or even many times that, each month.

From this point on, even through the days he considered tedious, Akira learned much about casual players. (I could use this to boost immersion. I could make dedicated costumes for events, special skills, and ways to display achievements...) Before he knew it, Akira was remembering his old game — the one that felt like it had been crushed by the overwhelming trend for social networking applications.

“What do you think, Ono?” the CEO asked. “Does it sound like you can handle that with this deadline?”

His voice seemed distant to Akira, somehow.

“I wanted to get real-life idols involved too.”

The client’s voice began to fade away.

“What a splendid idea! We’ll put their concert costumes into loot boxes...”

Empty words spun around him. Suddenly, Akira stood up and bowed deeply in apology. “I’m terribly sorry. That’s not something I can handle with my skill set.”

“H-Hey!”

Akira left the hotel lobby, leaving behind the screaming CEO and the dumbfounded client. His brain was now occupied by new features and various systems. He had to solidify them before they vanished into thin air. (It shouldn’t have been a complete wipe...) In Akira’s world, absolutely everything was wiped and reset every week. Since all the unique accomplishments vanished at the end, it never stuck with casual gamers. Akira realized that he should have let the players carry over things they could use to differentiate themselves. Things they could brag about. Let them dress up to their hearts’ content.

“Gotta put this all together... How much PTO do I have left?” Once Akira’s brain clicked on, the normal ways of the world couldn’t stop him. He would dive straight down into the depths of his own world.

As Akira walked home with a pep in his step, a bass voice called to him. “You’re tougher to handle than they say, kid.”

“Hm?” Akira turned around to find a muscular, middle-aged man in an expensive suit. However, he wore no tie and his shirt was unbuttoned too low. With a full beard and mustache, he almost seemed like a bandit. “Who are you?”

“You don’t know who I am...? The hell’s Miki been doing?” the man snarled, and lit a cigar. “I’m Aoki. From 42-OMG.” He shoved a business card at Akira. It included the title ‘VP.’

“You’re from Mickity’s...?”

“Gah ha ha! ‘Mickity,’ huh...? That’s a good nickname for that old man.” Aoki laughed with his gut, bellowing out a puff of smoke.

While Akira was a heavy smoker, the stinging smoke of Aoki’s cigar nearly made him gag. “So...? What do you want?” he asked.

“I gave you my card, Kid. You’re still giving me attitude?”

“Sorry, I’m in a hurry. Didn’t mean to be rude. Bye,” Akira said without a shred of sincerity.

Just as he turned to leave, Aoki stopped him in his tracks. “No one else can make the world you’re thinking of?”

“Huh...?”

“I came all the way down here cuz Miki’s being too soft. Like I don’t have better things to do... The hell does our boss want with a kid like you, anyway?”

Akira’s expression hardened. He assumed that Aoki was here to follow up on their offer to run his game as a large-scale MMO. Most might have thought of such an offer from a AAA company like winning the lottery. Still, Akira was adamant. “I appreciate the offer, but I don’t need anyone’s help. I’m not going to—”

“How about the green to pay for it?” Aoki countered, silencing Akira.

He wanted to prove Aoki wrong, but he didn’t have nearly as much money as he did before. He had used it all up. No matter how deep he dug, he would never find enough money to develop a large-scale video game.

“That’s why I’m calling you ‘kid.’ You think you can get everything handed to you just for a few good ideas?”

“What’s your problem? Then why don’t you... Wha!?” Akira was cut short by a loud explosion. The ground shook too suddenly for him to stay standing.

“Woah woah woah... What the hell!?” Aoki shouted and fell back on his behind.

Akira first assumed that there was an earthquake, but he was wrong. When he turned around, he found various parts of the hotel he had just come out of engulfed in flames.

“A fire...? Or some kind of gas explosion!?” Aoki muttered to himself, staring blankly at the hotel.

Akira, however, was seeing something completely different. He saw a giant, sinister monster with three heads in the raging flame and black smoke erupting from the hotel. It looked just like the monster Cerberus that he had often seen in anime and comics.

“Hey, Kid! Call an ambula— agh!” A chain of explosions turned the once-extravagant hotel to rubble. The screaming and fleeing people played out in slow motion in Akira’s eyes. “That thing’s done for...! We gotta get out of here, Kid! Hey, you hear me!?” Aoki frantically called as the hotel crumbled to the ground.

For some reason, a shuddering block of text emerged in Akira’s mind.

—1999—

It’s not that the King of Fear never descended from the sky.

It had arrived way ahead of schedule.

This document is Classified under the authority of The Empire

Creation of Devils

Succeeded at planting the heart of a devil into ordinary citizens. No adverse effects to physical capabilities. Subjects display sudden and dramatic changes like Jekyll and Hyde. Experiment with caution.

Creation of Vampires

Able to recreate immortality in a limited capacity. Requires blood in massive quantities. The members of the Elder Council have repeatedly requested expedited research.

If those bags could drop dead really soon, that’d be great. Please.

Creation of a Reaper

Narrowed down the initial worldwide candidate pool of 20,000 through experimentation and testing. 68 subjects have survived. We will move on to selecting the final one.

P.S. Dear Mister Secretary, from Saegusa

I just bought some NINE merch!

A hat and a body pillow!

I would love to see you over at the lab sometime.