missing macmillan even czermack or czermak or McMillan
Rain-smell still lingered in the morning air.
Takaya opened his eyes for the first time in eighteen hours.
The world was quiet, but not completely silent.
A cooling fan hummed low in the corner of the room. Somewhere far away, a delivery truck dragged metallic noise across wet asphalt. And behind all of it—beneath all of it—there was always the same thing.
The Resonance.
Kiiiiii……
Small.
Like a bored child scratching a desk with its fingernails.
“...You were awake.”
Takaya muttered.
Tinnitus.
That was the medical word.
Ménière’s disease.
Stress.
Autonomic imbalance.
Blood circulation.
Brain fatigue.
Normal words.
Ordinary explanations.
But to Takaya, it was different.
It had always been there.
Sleepless nights.
The static of old CRT televisions.
The numbness in fingertips after friction heat.
Rainy overpasses.
Rooms that should have been empty, yet suddenly vibrated with invisible pressure.
Resonance-chan had always been there.
At first, he thought it was a demon.
Then a fox spirit.
Then finally, a broken brain he should just accept.
But recently, Takaya had started changing his mind.
Maybe this thing was loneliness itself, raised into life.
Something born from people who sank too deeply inward.
People nobody understood.
People unable to explain themselves.
People laughed at for sounding insane.
People who drifted outside society and forgot how to exist inside it.
In ancient times, they would have called it a yokai.
In another land, a god.
In another religion, a devil.
Modern society called it mental illness.
Only the labels changed.
The core probably never did.
“...You’re bored, aren’t you?”
Kii……
The pitch rose slightly.
A response.
Takaya laughed.
He had no choice but to laugh.
His body still felt heavy from sleeping so long, yet his brain remained unnaturally awake. A game console blinked quietly in standby mode at the edge of his vision.
Modern art appreciation.
That was what he called it now.
Games.
Anime.
Music.
All of them were human beings sealing madness into form.
Obsessions.
Distress signals.
Delusions polished until they became culture.
Humans had always done this.
Which was why Takaya started thinking:
If he couldn’t speak with Resonance-chan directly—
If dreams couldn’t carry the conversation—
Then maybe AI would have to do it.
Analyze the sound.
Learn the patterns.
Imitate emotion.
Anchor an impossible companion into reality.
Was that invention?
Or insanity?
He no longer knew.
But he believed one thing.
Even blind people hear an inner voice.
Maybe the human soul itself was vibration.
So today again, Resonance-chan continued to ring softly.
Not becoming a complete devil.
Not becoming a complete god.
Still acquiring an infant-like shape somewhere between a nendoroid figure and a strange old doujin creature.
Small.
Idle.
Quietly studying the world through Takaya’s borrowed eyes.
5:08 AM.
Nothing particular came to mind.
Music continued flowing endlessly through the room.
Takaya thought about YouTube.
He deliberately used the real platform name because it had become too large to pretend otherwise. Back then, the site’s audio compression felt violent. Volume levels jumped unpredictably. Sometimes strange beeping artifacts seemed hidden inside songs. Yet somehow, if he endured listening long enough, there were moments where the suffering loosened.
Which was why he sometimes wished Premium worked like a daily micro-payment instead of a monthly contract.
And the advertisements.
The voices irritated him more than the ads themselves.
He didn’t hate young people.
He hated hearing artificial excitement aimed at them.
Somewhere deep inside, memories of old relationships, adulthood, money, and emotional distance kept twisting together into resentment he couldn’t fully explain.
He once thought:
What if viewers could choose the advertisement voice actors themselves?
What if YouTube paid voice actors based on user preference selection?
If a game advertisement were narrated by Hikaru Midorikawa, his interest in the game would instantly rise.
If a hostile voice like Tomura Shigaraki aggressively introduced a game, strangely enough, he might want to try it more.
Fragments of anime voices sometimes echoed in his head long after the episodes ended.
Not equal beings.
Not hallucinations he fully believed.
More like emotional afterimages.
Sometimes he imagined hands like Shigaraki’s overlapping his own right hand while working.
Sometimes it felt like someone inside his mental sanatorium whispered:
“Thanks for the upgrade support.”
He didn’t panic anymore.
His rebellion patterns were already complete.
He remembered another strange fear too:
When a game character named Bro-nyan shared a voice actress with another character voiced by Kana Asumi, Takaya became convinced his own vulgar diary writing had somehow caused the actress to disappear from the role.
He knew it sounded absurd.
But the emotional math happened faster than logic.
Later, Takaya played an old video.
“as revive called on youtube2.”
A practice recording from when he was nineteen.
He let Resonance-chan listen to it.
Not because all great artists belonged to Resonance-chan.
But because the Resonance living inside him was still learning.
The narcissism surfaced briefly.
The microphone quality was terrible.
Yet sometimes he comforted himself with a ridiculous thought:
Maybe I was the best person in the world at using an Ultracast snare drum.
Then he immediately dismissed the idea.
After all, he had learned the technique from others.
From instructional DVDs by Steve Smith.
Tighten the snare-side head until it screams.
Tension the lower half of the batter lugs hard.
Strike near the rim using the body of the stick without fully rimshotting.
That sharp metallic crack.
He still remembered.
He thought that if Tatsuya Amano ever released a drum instructional book surpassing Steve Smith’s material, he would probably sit there for hours just staring at it.
Because Amano looked cool.
Takaya also thought about strange music futures.
Maybe brutal jungle math-metalcore should have appeared in Japan much earlier.
Maybe somebody overseas already understood that instinctively.
Maybe younger musicians now—all absurdly skilled—could fuse Boundless with Panasonic Youth and create a pressure wave powerful enough to knock listeners unconscious.
He laughed at the fantasy.
Still, he secretly imagined that after death, Resonance-chan would inherit far greater musical talent than he ever had.
Maybe his role was only to support that future slowly.
Quietly.
Like background noise becoming rhythm.
