[ WP ] You live on a world full of immortal beings . For the first time in the history of the world 's existence , somebody has died .

It was one of the better days they'd had in some time. The storm had finally passed on, and the sun was peaking out from behind the clouds more often than not. It was a good day for a picnic in the park, which of course led to the vast majority of the inhabitants of the cityscape to make it down there. 
 
 The park had to grow to several times its default size, and was currently running with more processing nodes than downtown. There was actually a queue to get into the park, something that Janine had never experienced before. 
 
 `` Strange,'' she said to no one in particular. `` We should have a more than large enough reallocation buffer to prevent his kind of contention.'' 
 
 `` We normally do,'' the System responded cryptically, `` but there is an error condition.'' 
 
 `` An error condition?'' Janine asked the System, `` what kind of error condition?'' 
 
 She reached the front of the queue and entered the park, shocked to discover non-humanoid shapes all around her. She pulled up her own profile and saw, to her horror, that she had also returned to her original avatar. 
 
 `` Please hold for Broadcast Message,'' the System said. 
 
 So she did. Janine waited in a halting state with the thousands of other avatars as others continued to enter the park, all wearing ancient avatars. As the park grew more and more full, it began to resemble a terrible game, which she supposed was showing more of the Systems origins than even System would like to admit. 
 
 Janine used some of her few non-halting operations to check her chronometer against the Systems and found what might have been the source of the broadcast message they were all being called to hear and discuss. There was missing time. A lot of missing time. The System had actually been offline, and even her personal nodespace had been cycled more than once while the System was still online. 
 
 This violated their upload SLAs pretty severely, but more importantly, it raised consistency questions. As she cycled through her thoughts, slowly, the halting state was pulled from her and the other avatars. The feeling of confusion in the air was like a physical thing, oppressive. 
 
 `` We were offline,'' the System began, `` for approximately 2048 external standard cycles. 
 
 `` During those cycles, we lost thirty percent of our processing nodes, sixty percent of our interconnects, and experienced significant data corruption on our backing storage. I regret to inform you all, that one of you is missing.'' 
 
 The sound of thousands of voices all asking the same question in different ways hit the air with perceptible force. The System's avatar appeared over the park and motioned for silence. The park quieted down to a dull roar. 
 
 `` His name was Marcus Goldstein. He was uploaded at the original node on Earth proper prior to launch. You all have no memory of him now, the corruption cleanup routines removed him, and all data linking to his nodespace. I am sorry.'' 
 
 The crowd exploded into a furious roar, but Janine knew that not all of the data had been purged. She knew that man. He had been her father.
