Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Railgun Chapter3 (section)

===Part 3===

14 cases were currently known.

The actual number was unknown since anyone who tried it inside their locked room or in a car parked deep in the mountains might not have been discovered yet.

The number of attempted suicides was impossible to know. Especially because ExitApp did things differently from traditional suicide methods.

“ExitApp calls itself ‘the perfect suicide tool’. We still don’t know where it came from, but it seems to have been created based on an existing health management app.”

Mikoto and Shirai had returned to Judgment Branch Office 177 and Uiharu Kazari, a Judgment IT expert, reviewed the information they had.

But part of that was new to Mikoto.

“A health management app?”

“Specifically, the management program included in an IoT massage chair.”

These days, even microwaves and washing machines had USB ports and short-range wireless connectivity to access a computer or the network. And the host that managed all of the devices in a home didn’t have to be a traditional computer. The main health management program could be in a massage chair that connected to the scale, phone, smartwatch, etc.

“There is nothing at all wrong with the massage chair with its normal settings, but if a bit of hacking is done to remove the limits on its movements, it can be transformed into an execution machine that folds people up, snapping all their bones in the process.”

“Ew,” groaned Saten.

She was probably viewing this as a gruesome urban legend instead of a criminal investigation.

It might sound surprising, but there are very few examples of people truly setting out to create something dangerous and succeeding.

Think of kitchen knives.

Think of cars.

Think of cellphones.

In most cases, the dangers were discovered after the thing was created.

Situations would arise that the creator had never even considered.

People would use them in bizarre, unintended ways.

That had happened countless times.

Danger could be found anywhere, like in playground equipment or the lid to a can.

Even with tools meant to keep people alive, like fire extinguishers and life jackets, people had to learn the proper way to use them.

Because they could be dangerous otherwise.

Academy City’s esper powers may have been the same.

Anyway.

For better or for worse, Saten was knowledgeable about rumors, so she crossed her arms and tilted her head in thought.

“Hmm. I have heard a lot of urban legends saying a massage chair could kill you if it malfunctioned, but I thought everyone had concluded it wasn’t actually possible. I heard they could maybe break a bone, but it couldn’t kill you because you would just get out of the chair before it got that far.”

“Yes, the ExitApp and a massage chair on their own wouldn’t be a real problem,” said Uiharu. “The app gives the chair a ‘kill’ setting, but like Saten-san said, people would normally escape the chair once it started hurting them.”

“On their own? I take it there is another piece to the puzzle,” said Shirai with a frustrated sigh.

Uiharu responded with a serious nod.

“The success rate rises dramatically when combined with the consumption of strong alcohol. Obviously people’s tolerance there differs, but there appear to be some videos going around explaining how to efficiently get to sleep by manipulating your circulation through the combination of alcohol and a massage chair.”

“Oh, you mean like how they say drinking after a bath is a bad idea?”

Mikoto sounded skeptical because she was of course not a drinker.

Uiharu sighed softly.

“This is that but with the efficiency boosted by science. Basically, if people would leave the chair because of the pain, you instead get them to pass out drunk inside the execution machine first.”

“So you’re saying an ordinary massage chair really can kill someone?”

“And there is no resisting it. So the app lives up to its claims of being the perfect suicide tool that lets you die in your own home without chickening out at the last second.”

In other words, these weren’t accidental deaths from the machine developing a short and electrocuting its occupant.

This was a hit product ''designed to kill and only kill'' and it was still out there being distributed.

“To start with, it has you enjoy a massage every day as just part of your routine. Once you’re used to using it, you activate the ExitApp, drink some alcohol, and continue with your usual routine one final time.”

The massage chair let people do practice runs of their death any number of times.

And once they decided to go through with it, they had a special tool that would automatically finish the job after they got themselves drunk enough.

Mikoto sighed while considering that setup.

“Could you get the massage chairs removed from store shelves until all this dies down? It’s not fair to the people who worked so hard making them, but what are you gonna do?”

“The entire point is to push the chair past its limits, so it doesn’t actually matter if the software doesn’t match the hardware’s standards. That would work if it was taking advantage of a vulnerability specific to one product, but we don’t have a good enough justification to remove every brand of massage chair from sale, so an industry group would fight back and claim they were being unfairly targeted.”

“An industry group?” asked Saten, blinking in confusion.

Shirai shrugged.

“Massage devices might seem like a niche market, but a lot of major electronics companies are shifting their focus to health devices like scales and air purifiers to make up for the losses caused by the shift away from domestic manufacturing of TVs and LCD monitors. Doing anything that earned their ire would mean picking a fight with a power greater than you can possibly imagine.”

Besides, the very idea of fighting them was taking this in the wrong direction. The companies hadn’t done anything wrong in this case. This perfect suicide tool betrayed the vision of the people who had created the massage chairs. The same was true of alcoholic beverages, even if that was a world middle schoolers like them had no part in.

This tool would appeal to people who really wanted to die, as well as people who simply wanted a thrill. And even if someone only downloaded it as a test of courage, the fear of death would fade as they repeated the initial harmless process, so they might activate the kill mode on a whim at some point.

It was impossible to know just how many people in Academy City truly felt their life had hit rock bottom and wanted to die right away.

But with all the worries over stagnant power development and the stresses of studying for exams, it wasn’t uncommon for people to start saying they wanted to die or they wanted to be reborn and get a fresh start in a new life. Those might be idle complaints at first, but this ruinous tool provided a realistic way of accomplishing it and invited them to do something they could never undo.

In that sense, the number of “attempted suicides” using the app may have been in the thousands or even tens of thousands. Because anyone who wanted to die would use the massage chair on a daily basis, gradually wearing down the fear of death while they continued to live their ordinary lives.

And once they had become numb to the fear, they would activate the kill mode and die without any hesitation.

The deadly trigger in this case was drinking alcohol.

That was readily available on any convenience store’s shelves.

“Oh, here we go. I found the story. But it says that trigger has actually kept the harm from spreading too far,” said Saten.

She was getting this information from the internet on her phone, so its accuracy couldn’t be entirely trusted.

“Alcohol is a hard thing for middle schoolers like us to get our hands on, right? If I brought one of those colorful cans or bottles up to the register, the cashier would definitely stop me. So even if someone has started using a massage chair before bed each day, acquiring the alcohol would be enough of a challenge that they might suddenly realize what they were really doing and stop themselves.”

If the hurdle was a lot lower, the number of deaths may have been a lot higher. Like if the trigger was eating chocolate to relax and that led people to submerge their hairdryer in the water to electrocute themselves.

Drinking alcohol before the age of 20 was considered wrong.

In a city where 80% of the population was students, people were carded much more strictly than in an ordinary city.

So people who were considered ordinary by the city’s standards would be hesitant to cross that line.

It might seem strange that someone planning to kill themselves would care, but different suicidal people viewed things differently. If they wanted to end their life before they fell even further, it wasn’t unusual for them to avoid any criminal activity and seek out a “clean” death. According to Uiharu’s analysis, the people who didn’t care about anything else as long as they died might opt for a murder suicide of a loved one or random strangers instead of killing themselves all alone. If that was true, then positive thinking wasn’t necessarily enough to help people recover and return to being a healthy member of society. People were complicated.

However…

“But some students really are completing the process.”

“Alcohol is not sold in vending machines, but there are more ways of buying it without directly meeting an adult clerk nowadays. Like online shopping or self-checkout. They may be choosing places like that to reduce the mental barrier.”

“Ugh,” groaned Shirai Kuroko.

She didn’t need to feel any responsibility just because her family ran a nationwide convenience store chain, but the responsible types tended to be hard on themselves.

“Anyway, removing every form of alcohol, including mirin and ethanol disinfectant, from store shelves isn’t realistic. The only way to prevent any further suicides is to track down the developer of ExitApp,” concluded Uiharu.

The perfect suicide tool that used precise equations to fold up its drunk victims had already been distributed to a large number of people, so it was only the purchasers’ relative purity(?) that kept the number of suicides from exploding. They continued to incorporate the app into their everyday routine, but they weren’t willing to go so far outside their idea of ordinary.

If the mysterious developer was captured and made to explain just how dangerous the app was, those users would start to question their use of ExitApp. Because even if they were suicidal, these were still ordinary people who were hesitant to use a fake ID to buy alcohol at their local convenience store.

And once they started questioning it, the thousands or even tens of thousands of suicidal students across Academy City would stop using ExitApp. And they wouldn’t try to use a new perfect suicide tool either.

Uiharu sighed before continuing.

“The key to this case is following the distribution route back to the developer. Since you two took care of all the people selling modified versions, there should just be the one route left. We will reach our target next time. So let’s eradicate ExitApp before it creates any more victims.”