Roughly three days after returning from the other world, I had a lot of free time on my hands, so I was in my room watching some of the documentaries I’d recorded. Kon had been curled up in a ball beside me, but now she was slowly raising her head.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
Kon was looking over at the door to the room. There was the sound of the doorbell followed by Shingo’s voice. “Kouki, are you there?”
“Yeah, come on in.”
There was a rustling sound while Shingo did something outside. After a short while, he pushed open the door with his foot and entered the room with both of his hands full of large bags of candy that he’d bought from the post exchange.
“What’s with all the candy?” I asked. “Aren’t you spending time with Aikawa today?”
Shingo took a seat as he explained why he wasn’t with Megumi. “She’s going to the Space Development Group’s research facility with Alice. She said something about some sort of research report.”
Seeing the candy, Kon made a beeline for him. Shingo opened a bag of chocolates for her and handed it over.
Oh, I get it. Shingo came to see me because he was bored and by himself.
“So your precious Aikawa has abandoned you, and now you’ve come to see me. If you’re really that bored, you should go visit the other world.”
“Buh hee?! I-It’s not like that. And you’re no better. You’ve shut yourself up in this room just because Alice isn’t around. I don’t want to go to the other world, anyhow. If I had to live in a world with no internet, I’d die.”
Don’t go dying over something so small, Shingo... I sighed internally at the sight of my friend greedily eating candy in front of me. Still, when you think about it, there really isn’t a lot for us to do.
I could remember some of the ways people had killed time in my past life. There were things like video game consoles, anime, manga, movies, and other things that you could spend all your time on. I couldn’t remember anything about myself, but I suspected that I’d used these sorts of things to kill time with my friends.
“There’s none of that in this world,” I said to myself.
“Buh hee? Did you say something?”
“No, it’s nothing,” I said, brushing off his question. I was sure my friend would think I was crazy if I said to him, “I died one time and then got reincarnated.”
Anything that you might call “subculture,” “media culture,” or “otaku culture” wasn’t very well-known in this world. In fact, those things might not exist here at all.
I’d first realized this when I was very young. There had been barely any anime on TV that wasn’t educational. TV broadcasting had already switched over to satellite broadcasts at that point, and each household could select what programming they wanted to watch.
I’d thought that my mom didn’t want me watching anime while I was growing up, but one day I’d found the remote control left on the table and decided to find out how many different television channels we were getting. I learned that out of almost 600 broadcasts, we could watch almost every single one, with the exception of a dozen or so adult-oriented channels.
At first, I was just surprised that we could receive so many different channels, but then I discovered something even more surprising. Out of almost 600 broadcasts, barely any of them were categorized as music, movies, or TV drama. And the few that did exist would stop broadcasting from 2 AM to 7 AM each day rather than being 24-hour broadcasts.
I couldn’t help but feel there was something wrong with the world when I learned this. I tried asking my mom if she’d heard of any of the famous composers, musicians, movie directors, and manga artists that I knew of.
Mom must have been surprised by how distressed I looked when asking these questions. She looked troubled when she told me, “I’m sorry. I don’t know any of those people. Are they famous?”
A lot of these people had been written about in textbooks, yet Mom had told me that she didn’t know any of them. If someone with a memory a hundred times more powerful than the average person didn’t recognize those names, it could only mean that those people didn’t exist.
I could only come up with one explanation for how this could have happened.
There were three important considerations in forming this hypothesis.
The first was that the Second World War that had begun in 1935 in this world had reached its conclusion after half a year instead of becoming a quagmire with no real victors like in original history. I expected that this had made a big difference.
Although culture such as movies and musicals should have undergone rapid growth after the war, the people who were fortunate enough to have escaped the horrors of war after a short amount of time had felt that the future was full of hope. Rather than relying on entertainment, they had found strength within themselves.
The second consideration was the European tragedy.
The disease had killed roughly half of the world’s population. Humankind had lost many people who would have accomplished great things, along with would-be descendants of such people. I had been able to confirm that one famous person who would have gone on to become a bestselling author had lost their life before they could achieve their ambitions as a result of the European tragedy.
The third consideration was what I considered to be the biggest factor.
Science and the technology that came with it had advanced at an abnormally fast rate. Consider what this meant for camera technology. Some groundbreaking new method or device would appear, but then just a year later, or maybe even half a year later, it would be replaced by something new. It must have been difficult to justify any investment into such short-lived technology. With the exception of a few enthusiasts, people had distanced themselves from media culture while the technology was changing at an incredible pace.