Tatsuhiko Takimoto - Welcome to the NHK!

I mulled over his words… I don’t understand at all! I tried to scream, but by that time, Yamazaki already had disappeared from my room.

On top of my kotatsu, he'd left a present: a single CD.

I thought carefully about it the next morning. It sounded like Yamazaki had been dumped by a girl previously. In response, he’d gotten drunk in despair and had decided, “Screw real women—I have erotic games!” At least, that might explain what had happened.

However, if that were the whole story, he wouldn’t have had to go out of his way to share his embarrassment with me. He hadn’t needed to declare that he was this huge lolicon. He had hedged the confession with a rather incomprehensible theory; ultimately, though, he was still a lolicon who liked erotic games. He was dangerous. Or, at the very least, Yamazaki was more dangerous than I had ever imagined.

When I put the CD he had left the night before into my computer, I was horrified by the contents. This was no good; it was too dangerous. The 700MB CD-R had been stuffed with JPEG images. They were photographs—portraits of a girl who appeared to be in the latter years of elementary school. Worse, she was completely naked. In short, they were nude photos.

Deliberately, I closed the curtains of my room. The recent child pornography laws made this CD way too dangerous. Although innocent, I could be thrown in jail, all because of Yamazaki. What the hell was he thinking? Just constrain yourself to some CG, dammit! I wanted to berate him, but he was at the Yoyogi Animation Institute.

On my fifteen inch computer display the naked girl smiled perkily.

My chest hurt, and I couldn’t breathe. Holding my head, I decided to explore the entirety of the CD, for the time being. As I did, I found a text file, which I opened in a text editor. It was a message from Yamazaki.

“Well, what do you think, Satou? You’re pretty scared, aren’t you? Remember, in order to make a high-quality erotic game, you need real-world references. Please, let these real-life images fill your imagination. This is Rika Nishimura's photo book. She’s known as the greatest treasure of the lolicon world. Because they’re all soft-core images, you can relax. Okay then, let’s make a great erotic game using Rika's smile!”

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!

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…