Enter Your Username, Email And Password To Register: Hotaru [better] -

Her reflection stared back from the dark glass of the monitor. Just a tired woman in a grey hoodie. No username. No email. No password.

The screen paused. The little loading icon spun—a lazy circle of grey dots. For a moment, the whole city seemed to hold its breath. The distant wail of a siren. The hum of the vending machine outside. The thrum of her own blood.

* [REGISTER] – click to complete.

Her stomach dropped. A ridiculous, irrational pang of loss. Of course it was taken. There were thirty-seven million people in this metropolis. Someone else’s grandmother had called them a firefly. Someone else was clutching at the same frayed thread.

And her name was not a record in a database. enter your username, email and password to register: hotaru

She stared at the list. Each suggestion was a smaller, shabbier version of herself. Hotaru with a serial number. Hotaru pinned to a district. Hotaru translated into English, stripped of its soft, Japanese vowels. A princess made of pixels.

The button pulsed faintly, expectant.

Why was she hesitating? It was just another account for another faceless service. A cloud storage site. Cheap, infinite, anonymous. A place to dump the photos she couldn’t delete but couldn’t bear to look at. Photos of Obāchan. Photos of the old house. Photos of a sky full of real stars, not the electric smear of Shinjuku.