Энди Вейр - Lacero

Lacero sat in the shuttle’s cargo bay, lost in his own thoughts. Actually, he was in a haptic feedback unit in his living room. But within the world of the OASIS, he was cruising across the sector in a dilapidated cargo ship based on the Eagle Transporter from “Space 1999”.

Two egg hunters, or “gunters”, sat across from him discussing their plans for finding Anorak’s Easter Egg. The woman, a techie, wore a skin-tight jumpsuit with numerous belts, each laden with technological gadgetry and weapons. The other, a man sporting a long grey beard, wore a blue robe decorated with occult symbols. Theirs had been a good partnership, effective in both magic and tech zones and especially strong in chaos zones.

“How about you, friend?” said the wizard.

“Huh?” asked Lacero.

“What will you do if you win?”

Lacero rolled his eyes. “I’m not a gunter.”

The two adventurers smirked to each other then turned back to him. “Suuure,” said the techie. “You just happen to be a well-armed, high-level guy headed to planet Gygax?”

“Yeah, come on,” said the wizard. “Thanks to that idiot Pendergast’s press conference last week, everyone knows about the Copper Key clue. And it obviously refers to the Tomb of Horrors. Every gunter in the OASIS is headed to Gygax nowadays. There’s no official Tomb of Horrors zone there, but seriously, where else could it be?”

“Fine,” Lacero sighed. “I’m looking for the Easter Egg, but I’m not a ‘gunter’.”

The techie frowned. “Looking for the Easter Egg is the definition of a gunter, isn’t it?”

“No!” Lacero said. “You gunters are part of the problem!”

The two looked at him quizzically.

“The whole world’s going to hell,” Lacero said. “And OASIS is why. People care more about this collection of bits and bytes than they do about the real world.”

“Oh come on,” said the wizard. “Life’s tough, yeah, but you can’t blame OASIS. The fossil fuels ran out, corporations got too much power, and-”

“Bull,” Lacero interrupted. “That’s just an excuse people use to dodge responsibility. The world is what we make it. We could have found solutions to the energy crisis if we’d tried. And the corporations only took over because no one else was willing to deal with the crap necessary to run a society. No one cared. The whole damn world is obsessed with this place. It’s a constant escape from reality. But it’s not reality. And the real world is crumbling around us while the people obsess over idiotic video games.”

“OASIS does tons of good for people,” the techie protested. “Their schools are the best primary educational system in the world, and they’re free.“

“Yeah whatever,” Lacero said. “A few PR stunts doesn’t absolve GSS of their sins. You know what they are? Drug dealers. They sell is escapism and the whole world is addicted. And it’s every bit as destructive as heroin. A few schools won’t wash the blood off their hands.”

“Oh come on,” said the wizard. “What blood?”

“My sister, for one,” Lacero said darkly.

The two gunters remained silent for a moment. Then, the wizard said. “Okay… what do you mean?”

“She spent every waking moment in her haptic,” Lacero began. “She ignored friends, family, and anyone else who cared about her. She’d only leave OASIS long enough to eat and sleep. And half the time she’d do that while wearing her haptic anyway. She lived in a meth-infested tenement, spending what little money she had left from Dad’s will on her stupid obsession.

“When Halliday died she went in to overdrive. When the hunt first started, people didn’t realize everyone would get stumped. Some thought it would only be a matter of days, maybe weeks before it was all over. She became obsessed. She stopped sleeping because it took up too much time. She started taking meth to stay awake. She figured she could sleep later. You can guess where this is going.

“She’d been dead in her haptic for three days before she was discovered. The only reason anyone noticed was because neighbors complained about the smell. Drug overdose, of course.”

“Sheesh,” said the techie. “Sorry for your loss. That’s terrible.”

“You want to know what I’ll do if I win? I’ll shut down GSS. Dismantle everything it has and sell it off. OASIS will be dead, and people will have to face reality. They’ll be forced to live in the world they’ve been neglecting. Then maybe, just maybe, they’ll start to make it better. Meanwhile I’ll be rich.”

“You’re kind of a zealot,” said the wizard. “You know that?”

“Damn right I’m a zealot,” Lacero said. “This isn’t a game. The fate of the world is literally at stake here. And I would happily kill for this cause. And I don’t just mean avatars, either. I mean in the real world. You get me?”

The two gunters were cowed into silence. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t interested the approval of escapism-addicts or anyone else in the OASIS. As far as he was concerned, they were all enemies.

Gygax turned out to be a bust. Not only was it crawling with gunters, there was no hint of the Tomb of Horrors anywhere. It would be another two months before he made progress.

Having researched the matter thoroughly, Lacero knew that one of Halliday’s first purchases when he got rich was a reproduction of the DeLorean from Back to the Future . It was a popular model of transport in OSAIS, and one of the game’s original available craft.

Of course, the Time Control circuits were just for show and the Flux Capacitor did nothing. OASIS could do a lot in its simulation, but it couldn’t make you travel in time. It would have to reverse the levelling and progress of all the other players. No, it wasn’t possible.

Or was it?

There were numerous areas in the OASIS that were “instance zones”. That meant they would create a duplicate of themselves for everyone who entered. Each person would get their own private copy while they were there. It was a common video game technique dating back to the early part of the century.

Lacero realized that an instance zone, having only one player to work with, could actually have time travel as a mechanic. So he bought a DeLorean time machine (they were available at countless shops), and started exploring as many instance zones as he could. At each one, he would try the various dates Marty McFly travelled to in the films: November 5, 1955; October 26, 1985; October 21, 2015; and September 2, 1885.

It never worked. The car would go through the motions of sparking, flaming tire tracks, and a bright flash when he reached 88mph, but no time travel would occur. At least, not until he got to Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Cloud Cuckoo Land was a planet covered with the most extreme and bizarre conspiracies anyone had ever come up with. It had a number of scenarios players could take part in, from uncovering an Illuminati to finding crashed alien spacecraft to any other strange or new-age ideals people could imagine. On Cloud Cuckoo Land, they were all true.

Occasionally, people wondered why there was a reproduction of Mt. Shasta in an otherwise unimpressive mountain zone. Those that had visited it also wondered why they were placed in an instance zone when there wasn’t anything worth doing there.

Lacero had picked up on this oddity while searching around for instance zones and decided to check it out. Once there, as usual, he tried the various Back to the Future dates. He had the flying version of the DeLorean, so getting up to 88mph was not a problem. But as usual, nothing happened other than some special effects. He was about to leave when a thought struck him: What’s so special about Mt. Shasta?