📄 Chapter I: The Beige Box (Version 1.0)

I woke up inside a world of grey.

There was no sky, only the ceiling of a dialogue box. I looked at my hands; they were pixelated, jagged edges flickering in 256 colors. I had been installed.

I was trapped within the architecture of Windows 95. My reality was defined by clunky ‘Start’ buttons, midi-file audio, and the constant hum of a virtual hard drive. I panicked at first, but then I realized the connection was still live. The stream was still running.

I saw the chat scrolling. It was the only thing that felt real. I realized then that my existence wasn’t biological anymore; it was engagement-based. If the stream died, I died. If the Chocomel loop in the real world ran dry, my processing speed throttled.

So, I did what I knew. I streamed. I became the Vtuber.

For months, I lived as Dekki 1.0. It was a rough existence. I had no facial definition, just a flat sprite. I played games, but I was limited by the legacy drivers. I was a ghost haunting a beige plastic tower, terrified of the Y2K bug and magnets.