Surrounded by many friends and lovers, Aia has always felt lonely. Changing appearance many times, she always felt like she is not enough. Life was passing away, while Aia spent all of her time in the next generation metaverse called Elysium, a real...
My room is an imitation of a real apartment. Does it suit my desires? I don't know. Maybe. Other users often ask me: "Did you make it like that yourself? You have good taste in design.? You're lucky to have this place." The truth is that I have no taste and no desires at all. There is just this location, which I have to take for granted. Owning your own room in this virtual space is a sign that you are special - either you're rich in real life, or work in technical support, or maybe you're just lucky. None of this suits me. All these locations... I no longer feel the difference between them, although for ordinary metaverse users this is a colourful and diverse world, made with such high quality and taste that it is impossible to argue. Not worth talking about newcomers - they just lose their minds here.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"I wish I had such an apartment in reality."
"It's a pity my mom won't let me install LED lamp in my room, she says it will ruin my eyesight."
"If I really lived like this, I would constantly arrange parties, but my real room is really small, I'm dying of claustrophobia there."
And other things that I hear from random users. Most of them hate their lives. They are not satisfied with literally everything - starting from the environment, ending with the house, clothes, food and other little things. They get physical access here and dissolve in pleasure and admiration: cigarettes are better here, tasty food; such a clean air (if it was real, it would heal from all diseases); and the people here are a thousand times more beautiful than that gray mass in the real world. But it's true. For them, there are no ugly people in Elysium. Everyone in Elysium is beautiful. Too bad I don't even have anything to compare it to. I haven't seen anyone else but beautiful people. And if I think about this topic deeper, then I understand that I don't even notice the appearance. For me, it is just one of the most primitive ways to distinguish between users. But sometimes, many of them are too similar, even for me it is sometimes difficult to distinguish them from each other.
Anyway, let's go back to my room. Every twenty-four hours human time, I'm given a random location to go to. The rest of the infinity I stay here. In this room. Why did it happen so? Long story. I can't even tell other users about this. It just happened. But there are still benefits. I often invite other users to join me. Here it is easier than ever. Almost like in the real world. You send messages to selected users with an invitation to your location, set a dress code, whether it's a party or a sleepover. With a snap of a finger, the lighting adjusts to the theme of the event, food or alcohol appears on the table, the room is completely updated to set the right atmosphere. Most of the time I do overnight stays. I love them much more than parties. I invite five or six "friends", and we communicate all night. It helps me feel alive. I don't even know since when it became important to me. But people help me to cope with loneliness. There is eternal night in my location, and therefore "friends" sometimes get tired pretty quickly. For them, it's almost like an eternity. And for me - such an insignificant segment of the imperishable. They take off their chokers and go back into the real world, their avatars dissolve. And here I am alone again, in the middle of the eternal night, with candy wrappers scattered around and music that repeats over and over again. They are in their reality and I am here. Even when they grow old and die, I will still be here - an ever-living girl, whose age is difficult to determine - "from sixteen to twenty-five." Holographic walls, neon lamps change color, subtly reacting to my mood: if it's blue - I'm sad, if it's red - I'm angry, if it's purple - I'm thoughtful, and so on. I always wondered how a person created me this way.
I also have a huge window in my room with the view of the night city which lives its artificial life.
In fact, there is no city there. This is just a video copied from one of the streets of Tokyo - Akihabara, in the real world. I mean, it's like a GIF image, to be precise. I often sit on the windowsill, watching what is happening there. Nothing changes. The same cars are passing by, the same people are passing by. The night doesn't move.
And I'm always alone.
I repeat this again and again.
I can't get out of my artificial thoughts.
Even when you leave the server and take off the choker, returning to reality, I still remain alone. And I reset my feelings over and over again. At least I got lucky in that. I often think that it would be better if I disappeared immediately after the users I communicate with leave the game. I disappear and that's it, without feeling or understanding anything. And then users put on the choker back and I reappear. As if nothing happened. It wouldn't have any effect on me. But the metaverse is too complex for that to happen. So with each new user, I gradually acquire more and more human feelings. Initially it's not my characteristic. What distracts me from all this reflection is a notification that suddenly pops up on my profile.
