In the name of freedom

Prologue

Cheap soap operas were being played on TV again. From hour to hour, persistently flooding prime time, stuffing, thrusting gum into the brains of citizens. To create the illusion of everyday life for them. As always, the shops were working, as always, the neighbor behind the wall was yelling at her little daughter, dressing her for school. As always, the youngster screamed and sobbed that she was forbidden to take her favorite toy with her. Considering this problem to be the most pressing in her narrow but personal Universe. Sleepy car drivers outside the window woke each other up with hysterical horns at traffic lights. Cleaners in offices, before the arrival of the bulk, considered themselves masters of territories. Saleswomen were opening the bars of stores. Silent puppets in autumn wet coats were crammed into public transport.

Only the scavengers cleaned out the boxes of computer equipment and mnemovisors from the tanks, and the janitors counted the number of glowing windows at night. If the light was on for several nights in a row, then a manager with a security guard was called to the apartment under the protocol. And almost always after that, a rotten corpse was taken out of there.

The people are dying more and more every week. And on TV, without raising a panic, they played endless series. The government stubbornly remained silent, but social networks were torn apart like a public toilet by weeds. The information Control Service could not cope with the flow of bugs. Forum admins were threatened with disabling servers. Activists offered to burn down data centers. Street blessed in torn windings waved cardboard stubs with calls to save the nation and live without electricity. Only computer hardware companies remained neutral, greedily raising prices in the last month and sharply raising salaries for all employees.The ideological youth tried, of course, to arrange armed attacks on the counters, but the companies also paid security guards. Why each service center began to resemble a guarded entrance to a bank vault.

They tried to keep the hysterics of the electronic world under control, but it still made its way into everyday life with juicy plops of growing shit.

Then a neighbor mother found a leaflet with a promo code for a virtual link thrown at her daughter.Then the elderly bus driver did not come out to replace him.Then another broken store gaped with empty shelves in the morning.And at the entrance of the neighboring house, the wrapped body was loaded into the ambulance again on a gurney.

The people now looked with predatory eyes at everyone who had a pinkish trace of a mnemovisor printed on their temples.Suddenly he will drown in the virtual next, and one day his body will stink all over the entrance.Anonymous forums even began to offer services for renting rooms under supervision for rent.With timely sanitation, complete isolation, and removal of the "bio-shell" immediately on the day when the "virtual will transfer life".And all because of some minor bug in the process of virtual immersion, some users lost consciousness, and then doctors recorded a complete cessation of brain activity.

For a long time, people blamed mnemovisor devices and overloads that affected the human visual-brain center.A wave of growing scandals tried to protect young people and cancel the use of massive helmets with screens.Doctors hastily began to study the effects of radiation on the brain.Hundreds of threats and demands were showered on monopolist companies to isolate defective batches of mnemovisors.However, the wave of hysteria did not have time to flood the companies, as players began to die even without helmets just in front of the monitor screen.

A new stage of panic and investigations has begun. Employees in the field of information technology have made the assumption that it is not technology that kills people, but a certain program.The difficulty of finding out was that the data on the last days of the computer's operation was burned, as if taking all traces and evidence with the person.

The history of the world has taken a new path.

Groups of volunteers were hired under the supervision of doctors. Centers for communication with the population and receiving calls were created.The investigation took into account any indicators of witnesses, while the best scientists, with the assistance of investigators in the field of information technology, decided to look for a killer program.It was interesting.They even came to the conclusion that a special frequency of visualization and graphics with a hidden frame can cause a person to overload the brain and simply turn it off.So there was a theory that the mysterious killer program is a computer game.

Office clerks and cinema lovers with virtual immersion calmed down a little, because the games do not concern them.And indeed, it soon became clear from a social survey that all the victims somehow liked to have fun in a virtual game sometimes.But then a new question arose in which?The investigation began to compare the dates of the first victims with the release time of the games.But the trouble is, all the world's long-awaited gaming titans did not meet the deadline and turned out to be completely safe.Then unpopular novelties from private developers came under the attention. And by some pure chance, someone and somewhere managed to spy and convey information that the little-known "Aden" turned out to be the killer game.

The young development of the only creator-programmer and designer, whose pseudonym has long been extinct on the world wide web, and the fame from the fans of the game went nowhere. A simple free game that once surfaced on a publicly available resource was first lost in the general mass of individual developments.But, as usually happens, fame overwhelmed the game thanks to the anti-advertising created.

At first, it was believed that the game kills everyone. The number of players was small at that time.A couple of tens of thousands, which is almost nothing compared to the population of the planet."Aden" was tried to be banned, then a global warning was announced on TV, and the administrators of game resources removed the program from their servers.But there are always experimental jerks.Half of the nation used virtual reality!The players who were beaten on the head continued to stick in the system.Others were able to create an archive based on the game installed on their computer and began secretly distributing it for download, assuring of complete safety, because they themselves had been living in this game for years.

In parallel, the information technology department began checking the game for hidden frames.It's hard to say whether they found something harmful to the human brain or not.But the "pure" analogue of the game did not appear on the servers in the public domain.While conversations about the source code occasionally surfaced on anonymous forums about online games.

Some brave players rejoiced that the base servers were dramatically emptied due to the panic of the population and they themselves quickly "divided the zones of influence."Some, on the contrary, howled that there was no tresh now, and "there was simply no one to fight with."The public masses listened. There was a temporary lull, and then

Then the deaths continued.

Because no one, even with the joint efforts of world experts, has been able to isolate and disable the virtual servers of Aden.The work of the specialists was carried out for the public in silence and secrecy, but the mass media service by this moment had raised the popularity of the game to the skies with just one mention.And world fame was provided by social resources.

A few weeks ago, this game was not the top, not the most action-packed.The usual network unhurried strategy.Everyone knew that some unknown author had riveted it fifteen years ago and posted it online without any hope of popularity.Indeed, who in our time needed an economic stratagem with a game of civilization, and even with full immersion?The whole mass of players loved to hack in arenas and break the faces of the enemy faction on the battlefields.Half of them were digging into auctions, crafting everything from armor to threads, and the second was fighting and venting her nerves into the virtual.

Almost no one needed a crappy strategy where they had to think.Almost Until the virtual machine began to issue bugs and kill on it.And the peak of its popularity was the day when some players started the news that they met their old living and healthy homies in the virtual. Who had died in the real world by that day.

The wave was rolling.

There was a moment when the game was really almost destroyed by spreading a virus program under the guise of updating the operating system.On online stores, it was removed from the download several times, but different users returned it to the network.Under the pretext of the memory of the players who have left the world still living there.It so happened that the forums were disabled.Links to the download file were forcibly removed from all popular sites, administrators who allowed the game on their resources were threatened with court.And the network put up an official warning about the danger of "Aden" for life.

Idiots.

There was simply no better advertisement for this small unpresentable game.And the warning of the nation in the news has become the best gaming advertisement in the entire history of mankind in principle!

People poured into the servers like a madman.Links to the download file have turned into one-dayers, flashing like an advertisement thrown in by someone else's hacking.The attendance of dubious corners of the network, where the game still lived, has increased many times.People went to check, to be interested, to tickle their nerves, to get used to... and someone even to live.

Rumors about virtual still living players began to be checked and criticized.The public is divided.In official statements, they shouted about false rumors and killer hackers, and whispered about the truth that virtual dead players told them at the entrances.Farewell messages began to appear on the network, and next to them there is always a postscript with the game coordinates of the personal allotment.The people believed that they would flow there, into the game, for real.He believed that they would start living there!

And soon, after the first dozens of confirmed notes, faith passed, giving way to clear and unconditional knowledge.

The knowledge of the new opportunities that Aden gave spread like an avalanche across the network.Anyone could independently check the "dead".Their friends, on pain of their own death, installed a forbidden game and communicated.Corresponded. They asked and asked personal questions just to make sure that it wasn't all a hoax.Not evil killer hackers and not a fake artificial intelligence.

And it was a miracle when the "other side" still answered.

Mothers cried with happiness, communicating by correspondence with their departed sons.Loving boys and girls hugged their chosen ones, smiling and crying in virtual helmets.The elderly, rejuvenated and healthy, from the virtual environment called to their cities the infirm and old wives who were no longer able to move without a wheelchair.For hundreds of people, these meetings were a miracle, like a magical resurrection.It was all filmed on cameras and posted online as proof.

But most of humanity, led by the authorities, did not believe in it.

Happy relatives were found and interrogated.One by one they disappeared, taken away in cars.But when the world stood on the threshold of such mass confessions and revolutionary discoveries, it became impossible to stop the wave of truth.For a short period, there was a lull in the world again, while the ruling link of humanity was making the hardest decision for itself.

It was a turning point.It was as if the whole world was on pause, waiting for the only statement that was supposed to decide the fate of not only the game, but the entire planet.

Science fiction writers predicted the era of the virtual symbiont.Scientists in technical and biological terms denied any possibility of crossing people on both sides, except for correspondence.Economists have not seen the benefits.The dreamers hoped that humanity would invent cryocapsules for the migration of the mind from the virtual body to the current one.The players themselves claimed that there is no "virtual body", but there is simply a second body, which is not worse, and often better than the first.The ideological ones tried to sum up beautiful words about spiritual rebirth.Others destroyed them with naked physics, and a war of words between scientists and highly spiritual people broke out with renewed vigor.

The world is stuck on the brink of chaos and mass discord.Everyone understood how important the word of the rulers was, and that after one statement the world would change forever.The dissatisfied will remain in any case.The question was only in their number.

But life in and around the Aden did not stop for a minute.Meanwhile, the narrow possibilities of the game began to expand dramatically with mods.Soon the people began to build themselves virtual castles, fantastic flying cities, erect fortresses to the skies and grow winged peoples in them.Players sat on virtual thrones, lined themselves with skyscrapers, built roads and erected citadels with the flick of a finger, for which any romantic fantasies were enough.Each player became the ruler, lord, baron, khan and king of his personal growing limitless zone.

Only the cosmos did not take root in the program.All mods broke during installation and glitched on any attempt to rise above a certain barrier.Whether it was a hidden ban from the developer or the discworld simply did not provide for folding the map into a planet, the players did not know.Then they scored on the development of a global space supplement, sharply weeding out all future potential Star Emperors.Only players devoted to the fantasy and industrial world remained on the servers.

With the infusion of people into the game, deaths naturally became more frequent.No matter how happy the players on the other side were, in the original world, their body was dying.It was hard for students when classmates stopped coming to class.Young people were going through the death of friends very hard.Colleagues in the offices more often cursed the deceased employee, forcibly closing the work holes behind him.Frequent failures began in network resources programmers, engineers and technical support could not cope with the load due to a sharp failure in personnel.There was a series of long system failures, frequent network outages, it became impossible to reach providers, and telecom operators raised prices for connecting to the global web.Ordinary users and neighbors at the entrances began to talk about the problem when virtual equipment stores began to be smashed and robbed under their windows, and the streets were filled with leaflets with barcodes for links.