That bastard! I trembled with rage. For one thing, when had I even agreed to make a Lolita-style erotic game? Oh, come on, don’t push your tastes onto me.
Hm. It occurred to me when I considered it more carefully—maybe he was trying to convert me!?
It might have been different back in the time of Genji Hikari; in the modern age, however, society considers lolicons deviants to be destroyed. Thus, it must be extremely difficult to find others to share your interests. That must be why Yamazaki planned to make me his partner in creating an erotic game, into one of his lolicon pals.
No, these suspicions of mine were, plainly put, nothing more than simple guesses, and he simply might be trying to make a high-quality erotic game. After all, in the current erotic game scene, games with little girl heroines were fairly common. In fact, it could even be said that Lolita-type characters directly symbolized this diseased media genre.
Now that I thought about it, another description for an erotic game was to call it a bishoujo game. Not a “beautiful woman” game but a “beautiful girl” game. I thought that some deep nexus of the problem was hidden around this point.
What will happen to Japan, where these bishoujo games are establishing a huge market? Pretending to consider this lofty social problem, forced myself to stop worrying. Then, timidly, I loaded the Rika Nishimura photo collection onto my computer screen.
A few seconds passed.
I shuddered … Rika Nishimura was actually pretty cute.
“N-no, no! I’m just temporarily confused!” In my dim, six-mat, one-room apartment, my cry echoed emptily. And Rika smiled at me with that innocent smile, displaying her protruding ribs, her endlessly pliant body.
I gulped and clicked the mouse with trembling fingers. The next image was displayed on the monitor. Oh, Rika…
This is wrong! I raised my head and, with the entire force of my body, slammed it into the wall. It made a thumping sound. Tears fell from my eyes. It hurt. Yet Rika was still smiling … Oh, Rika.
No, no!
I hurriedly opened Internet Explorer. Right! The problem was simply that Rika herself was too cute; that didn’t mean I was a lolicon or anything. I just happen to be affected by her beauty, but I’m still normal. To prove it, I needed to find other Lolita images on the Internet. It was obvious that any Lolita images other than Rika’s wouldn’t excite me in the least.
However, thanks to the new child pornography laws, it was much more difficult to find Lolita images on the Internet than expected. I tried skimming the surface, but all I found were fraudulent sites using overseas telephone numbers.
But Id be damned if anyone could doubt my net-surfing skills. I was a veteran, with four years of intensive connection to the Internet. To find valuable data, the best thing was to make the rounds on the message boards. These were the laws of the wired world. I decided to start with a bot-style search engine to scan the porno-image info message boards.
What was this? Several thousands of pages of results … Even after refining my search conditions, I still got several hundred hits. There were just too many.
For the moment, I tried opening the very first page. Instantly, with frightening energy, a seemingly endless number of browser windows opened on their own.
“Dammit! A trap!” I swore. It was one of those multiple-browser-opening attacks, using JavaScript, often found on pay pages. Even so, I didn’t flinch. Got it! It’s too big a task for Internet Explorer.
For a case like this, I needed to switch to a tab browser. Tab browsers: These excellent browsers allowed one to view multiple pages at once, in a single window. I downloaded Donut, the browser widely reputed to be most stable among the tab browsers, and opened it immediately. Oh! This makes browsing so easy! At this rate, I would find the page I was looking for soon.
I opened as many simultaneous pages as my computer’s resources would allow and searched them all. Lolita images, Lolita images … In new tabs, I opened all the pages linked to the message boards, then clicking on further links from the initial pages, and checking them all, top to bottom. I was looking for an underground-type porno message board.
Don’t be tricked by pay pages! Beware of files with .exe extensions! Suppress the annoying ads with pop-up blocker software!
The hands on my clock advanced; outside my window, it was already night. The blue-white glow of my monitor was the only light in my six-mat, one-room apartment. Even the time it would have taken to turn on the fluorescent lights would have been a waste. My wondrous, Godlike typing speed blows through the wide-open Internet with wild intuition! Fear my light-speed mouse skills!
I’m an untamed beast!
I’m a wolf!
Part Three
When I returned to reality, a week had passed. I liberated myself from the mouse and keyboard for the first time in several dozen hours and entered the bathroom. Reflected in the mirror was an unbelievably dangerous person—in short, me. The stubble from not shaving, my greasy hair, empty eyes, slack jaw… a dropout, unemployed hikikomori who anyone would avoid, who no one would want to go near… a dirty, disheveled, stinking, nightmarish…
A lolicon stood there.
“Ugh.” I weakly slid onto the bathroom floor.
How could things have come to this?
What had been done could never be undone. I had … I had collected Lolita images from all over the world. And I hadn’t been satisfied with images alone. I had even gotten involved with video data, in formats like MPEG and RealMovie. My 30GB hard drive was full of the indecent bodies of little girls who, in truth, I pitied.
I can’t go on. I just can’t go on. A lolicon hikikomori is pretty much the worst thing ever. I’m less than human. I’m a monster. I can’t keep living. I can never walk in the light of day again.
True, I certainly was a hikikomori. I was fairly certain that I wasn’t a lolicon, though. My tastes were pretty conventional, and I had, in fact, even liked older women. Even so, now…
“Ahhh … hunh hunh!” Unbearable sobs poured forth, and my tears gushed onto the floor. They were tears of atonement. Yes, I acknowledged my mistakes, and I wanted to reform myself now. I wanted to change. But it was already too late.
As soon as I had started whispering things to myself like, “Nozomi is beautiful,” I knew I was going to hell. As soon as I had begun to mutter thoughts like, “Kiyomi is amazing. Even for a first-year middle school student, she’s amazing,” to myself, I was ready to fall into hell. As soon as I had begun to opine, “Wow, Russians are hardcore, and Americans do terrible things, also”, grinning to myself, I knew that there was a one hundred percent chance that I was going to hell.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I apologize, I didn’t really want to do it. I didn’t mean any harm. It was just a joke at the start. But now…
“Argh!” It hurt. I was in pain. My chest hurt. My heart was breaking with guilt. I didn’t want to be a lolicon or anything of the sort. But now, nonetheless, I was a first-rate lolicon hikikomori, the most worthless piece of human garbage who ever lived.