So am I.
“Then I’ll eat tomorrow.”
When the rescue team found her, she was dancing.
After the last fan left, Miso counted the meager box office take. “We can afford rent if we skip dinner for three days.” Underground Idol X Raised In R-peture -Dear Fan...
Miso lit a cigarette. “You know, most idols quit after a year of this. You’ve been at it for a decade. No label. No money. No future. Why?”
X tilted her head. The ventilation shaft groaned above them, exhaling a cold breath. “Then I’ll wait anyway. That’s what I was made for.”
Dear fan... you’re still here.
X was packing her bag. She paused, then pulled out a small notebook—dog-eared, covered in stickers fans had given her. “I’m fine,” she said. “I ate yesterday.”
Now, at twenty-two, X performed for maybe forty people on a good night. Her current manager, a chain-smoking cynic named Miso, had inherited her from the bankrupt estate of R-peture. “You’re a tax write-off,” he liked to say. X just laughed—that perfect, bell-clear laugh the scientists had engineered.
So X walked on.
Miso said nothing. He dropped his cigarette, crushed it under his heel, and for the first time in years, did not light another.
But the facility folded. Creditors fled. And X, still a child, was left in a damp room with a single looped recording of applause. For three years, that was her audience.
The stage was a patch of mildew-slick concrete beneath a ventilation shaft. The audience: seven people, three of whom were asleep. This was the underground idol unit R-peture -Dear Fan... —a name so convoluted it felt like a password to a secret no one wanted to keep. So am I
“This next song,” X said into the mic, her voice soft but impossibly clear, “is called ‘Dear Fan...’”
The setlist was old R-peture numbers—songs about eternal loyalty, about never leaving your side. Ironic, given that everyone in X’s life had left. The scientists. The other test subjects. Even Miso had tried to quit twice, but X kept showing up to his office with homemade onigiri and a printed schedule for next month’s gigs.