I'm writing to you live from my freshman orientation dorm! At least the introduction. I wanted to get this chapter out by the 24th, but because of this orientation, it's probably coming out on the 25th or 26th. Hopefully, I guess right. Anyway, this is the first non-canon chapter, so I hope you enjoy it. There is a lot of monologuing and thinking stuff in this one, though, so if you're not big on that, sorry, this one might not be for you. But Komachi will make her debut, so stick around for the Imouto.

Additionally, the title of each chapter will be at the top of the page below the separator. Finally, I forgot that instantly axes links. Sorry about the broken playlist link. They are mostly songs relevant to how Hachiman's character is going to be written and stuff I think he would be into in the current year.

If you still want to listen to the playlist, please just search: Re: Hachiman Hikigaya on Spotify, YouTube, or YouTube Music; thanks.

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YOU CAN STILL SAVE ME. BE VIGILANT. I LOVE YOU.

Lights.

Lights, lights, lights.

I biked down the side roads to my house. By this point, the sun had almost completely set, and the street lights started flickering on; the ramen shops, the grocery stores, and the Love Hotels followed suit. Lights are a totally benign subject. They're lights; you don't really think about them. Their job is to sit there and let us see.

I hated them.

I was fine with the concept of an electronically powered light; I didn't particularly want to walk around my house with a candle. What I hated was the abundance of them. As I sped up down the widening streets, my vision was blurred by arrays of red, blue, white, orange, and yellow. Every corner, every shop, every newspaper salesperson was outfitted with inordinate amounts of LED lights. A research paper recently published by Italian and American scientists found that 80% of humanity lived under a totally light-polluted sky. Can you imagine how horrible? 1/3rd of the earth's population, billions of people had never seen the stars mapped out a singular time. Generations went by without a single member of that lineage ever staring at the stars. It made me physically ill; our artificial stars, made to sell plastic and garbage, have nearly erased the heavens.

I had seen them fully once; my family went on a rare vacation years ago, before Komachi was born, to visit my Aunt and Uncle up north. On the first day, when the moon ushered the night in, my Aunt and Uncle took me to the front of the house and told me to look up. I had never seen so many stars in my life; every inch of the sky was carpeted in a smattering of glowing white. My aunt had lifted my hand and guided it across the sky.

"Look, Hachiman, do you see that long strand over there?"

"Yeah, what is it, Aunty?"

"That's the Milky Way; it's like a big, longgg Octopus tentacle. Ragh!" she grinned before attacking my sides with a barrage of tickles.

"He-hee-hee, stop it!"

I stood under that blanket of stars for over an hour. Something deep in my soul stirred and then settled.

I untangled my earbuds from my hair before stepping off my bike and locking it to our fence.

There was no stopping it anytime soon. Governments have no vested interest in leading a light clean-up campaign, and the cost would be astronomical. There would be zero financial benefit from such a situation. Companies care even less; their bottom line is keeping the shareholders happy and accumulating excess capital. If they have to kill a few birds and rip the heavens away from people, they'll do it. That's what it always came down to: accumulation. Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate! Turn the largest amount of surplus value into capital. Accumulate, produce, accumulate, produce. An ouroboros, an eternal cycle in the death cult of infinite abundance. I wasn't the first to notice Capital's deification; hell, Ian Wright published a whole paper about it. I was just another unlucky soul who noticed it.

I shuffled towards the front door, opening it wide. "I'm home!". It was a quiet place for the most part; my mother and father were corporate slaves who worked long into the night. I don't even remember the last time I saw them on a weekday. For the most part, it was me, Kamakura our family cat, and-

"Hey! And where have you been!?"

My little sister Komachi was on the smaller side, no more than 5 feet tall, but with that personality attached to it, you would probably guess she was 6'0 by her voice. She glared at me from across the rooms, hands glued to her hips.

"Yeah, yeah, sorry, I got wrapped up in some stuff at school." I lamely mumbled, heading towards the fridge. That Max Coffee still better be in there.

"Oh? What sort of stuff? Has a charming young woman finally swept my brother off his feet? When do I meet her?"An irritating, all too cheeky grin started forming on her face.

Your attitude did a real 180 there. "No, it was nothing like that. Don't be stupid."

"Meanie," she pouted, "Okay, seriously, then what was it? I haven't seen you this late in forever."

"Just some stupid club thing I was forced into," I sighed, sitting down and gulping down some of my almost painfully over-sugared coffee,

"A club? For what? Being a super otaku all the time and talking about how terrible the world is?" Komachi giggled, moving to sit next to me.

"I'll remind you that I said a club that I was 'forced into'; it's not like I really had a plethora of options."

"Oookay for serious this time, what's the club about?"

"It's called the service club; the basic premise is that we take people's requests and help them figure it out." I gulped down more of my coffee. This thing was seriously going to make me develop diabetes.

"Woah. You would totally never join a club like that; you really were forced."

Did she think I was lying about that part the whole time? Where's the benefit in that? "See, you should have believed me." I finish off my drink before setting it on the coffee table. Komachi seemed to have shaken off her stupor.

"Well, is anyone else in it?"

"Yeah, this girl, Yukinoshita."

"Wait, the only other person in the club room with you is a girl?!"

"Yeah, I suppose so, why?"

Komachi leaned closer to me, clapping her hands together lightly. "This is good! Seriously, big brother, I know you're always talking about like the 'facade of youth' or how 'consumerism has entrenched itself fully into our psyche' but hanging out with people at our age is important, seriously."

I rolled my eyes; I didn't really see why she had to use a bad Batman impression for my voice. "Well, don't get your hopes up too much. She's a pretty big bitch."

"Hey, don't shoot yourself in the leg the second the race starts. I know this stuff's hard for you, but seriously, could you please try."

"Sorry, no promises." Komachi tilted her head at me slightly, resting her head on the top of the couch.

"Big bro, when did you last make a friend?"

"Never."

"Exactly my point!" she whimpered. "People aren't supposed to live life like that! You make me worry, seriously…"

"Don't worry about me so much," I said, waving my hand at her.

"How could I not! All you do is spend time in your room working on graphs and data trends or whatever, being a total fatalist."

"So what's wrong with that? If you looked at the stuff I did, you would be a fatalist, too. I'm just analyzing the present situation for how it is."

"No, you're not. You're just looking at it how you want to." Komachi tenderly nestled her hand to cup my face. "For all your talk about the 'workers' or the 'masses' and how they run everything, you don't seem to trust them much. You don't trust yourself much."

Komachi was right; I didn't, and why should I? One could argue the last successful people's revolution was the Upper Voltan coup led by Sankara. Even then, he was eventually betrayed. And as for me, what was I going to do? I was just one person. "So, why should I? There are no indications that any real revolution will happen soon. Sure, there are labor, national, and socialist parties in most places, but it's not like they're really popping or anything."

"So? Those Russian dudes you talk about all the time who led that revolution didn't seem too sure of anything changing until it suddenly happened."

A part of me knew she was right. The Bolsheviks weren't even the most popular party when the Russian Revolution exploded, but they managed to claw their way forward and beat everyone out. But modern Japan was definitely not 1917 Russia. Revolutions do not manifest out of thin air; they're a confluence of events merging together to build one really large powderkeg. Trotsky had realized this then and recognized it as such. "Sure, but we're in a different time, struggling with different modern issues. The base for a revolution has eroded. I don't think one will kick off in time."

Komachi sighed, a sad twinge in her eyes. "You don't trust big brother, you don't love. What kind of revolutionary are you if you don't love?"

She was right, and it hurt. Sometimes, it hurt to even look at Komachi. She was so sweet, so kind, so caring. I didn't deserve it. I was a fundamentally doomed human, like Cain in the land of Nod, eternally bound to wander. She spent too much time worrying about me and my problems. I was never going to get 'better'; I was never going to figure any of it out. I was a computer, built to process, think, and chart, and that's all I was good for. This design left me hopeless, caught in a constant state of analysis paralysis, doomed to think forever and never act. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

My eyes dragged away from Komachi and dropped to my lap as her hold on my face fell. "You might be right, but I never claimed to be a revolutionary. I just observe; that's all I do."

"I know it's in you, big bro, I can tell. Don't give up, not yet, Okay?"

"Okay." I stuck to my promises and cared enough about Komachi to abide by her request. "So what do you want me to do? Cozy up to Yukinoshita or something?"

"Just put your mind off everything for a second and talk." Komachi smiled. "If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but just try."

"Alright," I said, standing up. "Thanks for the talk; I need to work on some stuff upstairs," I said, patting her head.

"Ugh, even after all that, you're still going to work on that stuff?" she grumbled, her voice drifting as I moved upstairs. "What am I going to do with you."

She wouldn't need to much longer; I planned to kill myself through overdose when she entered high school. It was selfish of me, cowardly even. But I couldn't bear it anymore, even with Komachi at my side; it was too much. The heat of the future burned my vision; there was nothing left for me here.

I slid into my room, throwing my schoolbag next to the door and undressing myself into something more comfortable before sitting down and booting up my PC, shoving my reading glasses onto my face. Now, what to work on? I decided on some general 2050 predictions I had been working on. As I pulled the document pages up, I turned on some music, Yves Tumor for now. They weren't particularly popular in Japan, but they made some pretty good end-of-the-world music. I absentmindedly scoured .edu directories, research papers, news reports, and YouTube interviews for hours, as I did almost every night. I was a top-of-the-line computer, Ryzen 9 and all, I did what I did, and I did it well. I pulled back from the screen eventually, leaning back and reading over the information I had amassed.

2050- sea levels two feet higher on the American East Coast. Low-lying areas around the globe are now submerged completely. Bangladesh, 20% loss of total land mass. Central Africa, 50% reduction in crop growth leading to mass starvation. The Western American reservoirs dried up. If the current temperature increases at the rate it is in 2024, the average American will only experience 27-50 days a year where the temperature is below 90 degrees—as many as 1.5 billion people are displaced due to climate catastrophes, mass immigration from the global south leads to an increased revival of reactionary and fascist political parties.

I rubbed my eyes and closed the document, shifting my gaze to my secondary monitor with an image-based article on it. A young Moroccan boy no older than 6 is walking down a dirt road, carrying a backpack and a sleeping bag holding all the possessions of his dead family. His eyes are red-rimmed, tears waiting to break down his face. I bit my lip and sucked my tongue in. I could feel the wetness building up in my eyes. It was disgusting, an admission of feeling, of guilt, of need. I rested my head in my hands; how did they do it? How do they keep going? That boy had lost everything, his family, his friends, his school, his home. And yet he walked forward, as devastated as he may be. Then there was me, middle class, living in a first-world country with only the probability of the destruction of my country in the future. And I could barely do it; every day was a struggle to get out of bed. Every conversation was a sparring match with my brain to speak normally. I wasn't built for it; I was born with something deeply wrong inside me.

Maybe Komachi was right; it probably wasn't good for me to spend all my time doing this. But I felt as if I had to. These people were the wretched of the earth; no one wanted anything to do with them. The least I could do was pay attention to them, write something down, and ensure they wouldn't be forgotten. It had happened too many times already.

It was enough for tonight. I shut my set-up down and lay down in bed, picking up my trusty Vita-Chan from my side table. It was a bit of a relic, but the titles that got ported onto it held up well. I decided to boot up Persona 3 Portable and mess around in Tartarus for a while. My mind drifted back to earlier today and Yukinoshita. I didn't like her, but I still felt a weird attraction to her almost. Sure, she was pretty, but that wasn't really the reason. That moment when she pushed back against me, staying how I am that look in her eye, something steely and committed there. I rolled over and set Vita-chan down, I might be looking into this too deeply. Besides that one moment, she was nothing but a perfect example of a bourgeois politician's kid. Whether I liked it or not, I would have to find a way to deal with her.

My eyes grew heavy and fluttered slowly; as my eyes closed fully, I was met with another image.

Communards along the wall, heads bowed before their bodies crumpled.

I breathed in.

I breathed out.