Asamiya turned off the TV. Any noise was better than silence, in theory—that was why he’d turned it on in the first place. But the sound had grated on his ears.
He wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. He wanted someone to listen to him. But he didn’t have anyone who could. He had friends, sure. The friends list on his game console was full of names. Friends like them only ever wanted to talk about what games they were into or what videos they’d been watching, though. If you tried to bring up anything else, nine times out of ten they’d get on your case about it. Asamiya hadn’t played many video games lately. Even when he did, he ended up quitting right away. He’d lost his passion for them.
Just then, Asamiya heard his phone make a sound. He couldn’t remember where he’d set it down, but after a moment of searching, he found it on the edge of the table and picked it up. There was a message displayed on the screen.
“Your summons to HEA has arrived! Join us in a brand-new social network experience!”
“…HEA?”
Asamiya unlocked his phone. He found an icon he didn’t recognize among his apps, titled HEA. Had he installed an app by that name? If so, he certainly didn’t remember it.
“This seems pretty sketchy,” he muttered, giving the icon a tap.
As it turned out, HEA was an abbreviation of Happy Ever After. An animated introduction began to play, explaining that HEA was a social media platform used by tons of artists, celebrities, and streamers, who all participated anonymously. Pictures of people who looked like they were probably famous flashed by one after another. Asamiya recognized some of them—a musician, a comedian, and a streamer who was often on the front page of online news sites, to name a few.
The video claimed that users were allowed to post whatever they wanted and that there was only one rule: You had to log in at least once every twenty-four hours. If you didn’t log in for a full day, your account and all your posts would be permanently deleted. In other words, if you ever felt like quitting the app, all you had to do was stop logging in and the rest would handle itself.
“…Well, that’s even sketchier than I thought,” Asamiya said, a wry smile creeping across his face.
The app told Asamiya to choose his symbols. Apparently, usernames on the app were made up of a series of symbols rather than letters. Asamiya picked out four of the available symbols at random and hit NEXT. A new set of choices popped up, asking him to choose his interests, likes, and dislikes. Asamiya knew how to handle this sort of thing. He plugged in answers at random, not giving them any thought. The next question, however, gave him pause.
What’s been weighing on your mind lately?
• My relationships, of course.
• My future.
• My finances.
• Love and/or romance.
• My lack of hopes and dreams.
Choose as many answers as you’d like!
“‘My lack of hopes and dreams’? Really? Talk about on the nose…”
Unable to stop himself, he selected My lack of hopes and dreams and hit NEXT. The app took him straight to a timeline screen, where messages along the lines of “Welcome!” and “Nice to meet you!” began appearing one after another.
“Oh, hey! A new user! Welcome!”
“Heyo~”
“Welcome aboard, fellow no-hopes-and-dreams-er!”
“Team despair lmao”
“…Are these people all talking to me?” said Asamiya. “This is one hell of a welcome. ‘Fellow no-hopes-and-dreams-er,’ huh? I mean, I guess…”
The stream of messages directed toward Asamiya gradually slowed, but his timeline continued to update with new posts. Most of them were generic posts about people’s daily lives, saying they’d just gotten up, or were going to bed, or describing what they’d had to eat. Some were complaints—things that had irritated the poster, or a tough situation they were going through, or something that made them want to cry. Whenever someone posted about an awful thing that happened to them, another person would always jump in to say that they’d been through the same thing or to offer words of encouragement.
The strangest part was that Asamiya couldn’t find a single post telling someone to take their whining elsewhere. Did people just ignore posts they didn’t like? Or did HEA’s users not find that sort of griping annoying? Was this a social network service exclusively for magnanimous users?
As Asamiya kept reading the messages, however—“The spaghetti napolitan at XXX is the best!” “I change the channel the second XXX comes on-screen,” “I’m going to XXX tomorrow!”—he began to notice something. The program seemed to be automatically censoring certain words—proper nouns, most likely. The names of people, places, and stores were all redacted.
“I guess it’s probably a privacy thing,” Asamiya speculated to himself. “I mean, it’s pretty easy to figure out where someone lives if they keep dropping names of nearby stores. Looks like you can’t post images, either…”
Maybe that explained the lack of negativity: It was all automatically filtered away. If so, then someone could be constantly flaming you, and you’d never see a thing. The whole community could be trying to cancel you without you even knowing it.
“…This is stupid. Talk about empty comfort,” Asamiya said. But at the same time, he couldn’t look away. His finger scrolled through his timeline as if it had a mind of its own.
This was a place where you could spit out anything—anything at all. And if it turned out to be pointless…well, he could quit whenever he wanted to.