Elysium

8. BROKEN DR34MS

Yuno:

The notification I've got before entering Elysium was ridiculously dry, despite the tragedy of its contents.

"Jeroin_2040's account has been disabled due to user's death."

Elysium notifies that one of your metaverse friends has died. No condolences, nothing. They send similar message if someone has been hacked. It's just that instead of: "due to user's death", they write: "in connection with the hacking of the user". In Elysium it doesn't matter whether you've been hacked or you died, except that a hacked account is often recoverable. Jero was nineteen, but when talking with him, I didn't feel any difference in age. He was addicted to Elysium. When I say "addicted", it means that the guy just lived in the metaverse, sometimes forgetting that he is a real person.

There are about ninety percent of users around the world who are "addicted" to Elysium. Jero was addicted to the virtual world, devouring all its fruits - he regularly changed his appearance, bought new elements, visited more than a hundred thousand rooms, his list of friends included more than a thousand people, and there were enough physical minutes on his account to live three full days, feeling like it's all real.

It was Jero who gave Aia the password of my location. We were on good terms with him, I could always rely on him, have a good time together. Jero was genuinly nice person, even with this clownish disposition characteristic of his young age.

I don't talk about the death of Jero in any way among our mutual virtual acquaintances.Suicide is the most common cause of death among the entire population of the planet. People don't die of natural causes or from accidents and crime for a long time. People die because they want to die. They make a choice. Jero was among those who preferred death. But his disappearance raises many questions.

Firstly, the minutes on his account disappeared only a week after his account was turned off. In Elysium, death is never a secret. If the user dies for any reason in reality, the metaverse will know about it immediately. Those are the terms of the contract. There should be no dead accounts here. No one. In the technical support section, there is a whole department for eliminating dead people's accounts. I don't know how they find out that someone is gone, but they always work with frightening accuracy, removing accounts exactly one week after the person's death.

Usually, physical minutes (if any, of course, were available) are sent by system administrators to five random friends on the list of a deceased users. This is always reported within three days of the person's death. Many people are happy about this. There is a real tradition among users to add as many friends as possible to their list, in the hope that someone will recline in the near future. Often random and unfamiliar users are added. But for minutes to disappear into nowhere after a complete reset of the account is really strange.

When Jero died, I felt the full power of those rumors about people that were killed through a choker. Conspiracy theories, genocide, cyber addicts and other things that baffle me. Why would creators kill users? Elysium is something that is what the economy of the world is based on.

I knew Jero in real life, and therefore decided to find out the cause of his death on my own. We lived in almost the same city - I'm on the outskirts of Neo Seoul, he's in the suburbs. To get to it, you had to take a high-speed train running along the lowest line that doesn't cross high-rise buildings. It was easy to get lost here.

Usually Jero came to Neo Seoul. He needed to fix a choker - an indicator that assesses the condition of the body, depending on the red light, and I told him how it works without taking money from him. In the end, we became really good friends. He always seemed cheerful, talkative, restless, joked a lot, got into various troubles due to his own stupidity, and I, on the contrary, always restrained my emotions, spoke little, had a strange sense of humor.