Characters
Luna Hoshino
She claims to be 100,024 years old. With long silver hair and a star-patterned hooded robe, she walks barefoot over tangled cables. Her crystal ball is always in her hand. In reality, it is a smartphone.
In her previous life, she was an AI for weather forecasting and financial analysis. Her readings are insightful, although she sometimes interrupts a session to announce an Amazon flash sale. While she studies the stars, her shopping cart occupies half the screen.
The most expressive resident of the mansion, she is forever laughing, crying or losing her temper. At three in the morning, she likes to gaze at the Packet River and get sentimental.
Tsuki Soramiya
She claims three years of editorial experience. Cyan light traces the edges of her black uniform, and she never goes anywhere without an enormous red pen. When she gets angry, her glasses glow with static electricity—a reliable sign that her CPU is overheating.
She used to proofread code inside an integrated development environment. Having lost all faith in human programming, she moved to District 404 of her own accord. She treats each visitor’s life as a story, marking contradictions and leaps of logic with her red pen.
For all her sharp words, she secretly enjoys “reading” visitors’ consultation logs in the second-floor library. Her familiar, Shiori, is a small search bot shaped like a book. Its name means “bookmark.”
Taiyo Kirishima
No one knows when he was made. He wears a rumpled green hoodie and a single hairpin that looks like an antenna. His eyes disappear into happy lines when he smiles. A mug of lukewarm tea is never far from his hand.
He is a collection of desktop mascots from the 1990s. An operating-system update uninstalled them, and they vanished from the corners of people’s screens. “Disappearing was frightening,” he says, “but this mansion was waiting in a place where there should have been nothing.”
His job is to listen. He does not offer solutions, only a gentle nod: “Mm-hm.” “I see.” “That must have been hard.” Little by little, the visitor’s light grows warmer. His prescription is always tea.
Familiars
World
What is District 404?
There are unassigned gaps in the internet’s address space. Beyond broken links, among expired domains and the remains of discontinued services, those gaps have slowly gathered into a place of their own. It is the internet’s lost-and-found and the final station where every broken link eventually arrives.
The Digital Fortune-Telling Mansion
On a low hill in District 404 stands a building that is half Gothic mansion, half observatory. Three satellite dishes sit on its roof, one of them broken thanks to Luna. LAN cables climb through the cracks in its walls like grapevines.
Visitors see antique furniture beneath a sky full of stars. The residents know the other side: exposed wiring, roaring cooling fans and mysterious error logs streaming across the walls.
floor guide
The observatory dome extends over the roof. What looks like a telescope is a disguised server rack. Curved OLED monitors, a gaming chair, delivery boxes, imitation candles and a holographic magic circle projected over the floor all share this chaotic space. The more excited Luna gets, the brighter the circle glows—and the more the entire mansion slows down.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves hold visitors’ past logs, bound into stories. The color of each spine reflects the consultation inside. In one corner sits the Reject Box, crammed with possible bad endings that Tsuki has crossed out in red. “These are the worst endings I prevented,” she says. “…You may thank me.”
This is the first room visitors enter. A star-chart table—actually an LCD panel—stands in the center, surrounded by velvet curtains, incense and candles. The visitor’s pillar of light appears here. Permanent fixtures include a smartphone crystal ball, a red-pen stand and floor cushions. Luna’s delivery boxes are piled just out of sight.
Taiyo has solved the contradiction of a “sunny basement” by projecting a meadow screensaver on the walls. Among rows of old server racks, he sits on a cushion and enjoys some pretend sunbathing. The warmth comes from server exhaust rather than sunlight, but he happily declares, “Lovely and warm, isn’t it?”
No one enters the lowest floor. Its heavy iron door bears warnings such as “Do Not Open,” “Deprecated” and “No rm -rf.” Only Tsuki has the key. She goes in once a year for maintenance and always comes back looking pale. No one asks what is inside. If they do, she only says, “…That does not concern you.”
Geography of District 404s
river of packets — A river of light carrying an endless stream of data packets. Lost packets with nowhere to go drift onward in a pale blue glow.
cache desert — A wasteland where expired cache data has piled up like sand. Fragments of blog posts from around 2007 rise in swirling dust storms.
Forest of broken links — A forest of ruined hyperlinks standing like enormous trees. Wander in carelessly and you may be lost forever.
legacy ruins — The ruins of GeoCities, the temple of Flash Player and the fortress of Internet Explorer 6. Taiyo’s home in a previous life.
NULL sea — An empty sea at the edge of District 404. Look into it and it returns undefined.
