Concurrent

At 4 AM, the internet is just a glowing monitor and the people desperate enough to be looking at it. For Tsumugi, an indie VTuber streaming from a cramped one-room apartment in Osaka, that screen is her only connection to the world. Her audience is small, predictable, and safely separated by a digital barrier.

Then she spots the red streak in her own video archive.

It looks like a visual glitch, except for the eyes that track her at sixty frames per second. It moves within the paused video. Worse, when she checks her older VODs, she finds the exact same anomaly hiding in the background of her very first stream from two years ago. It didn't just arrive. It's been waiting.

And now it's leaking out of the broadcast.