Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“It’s OK,” she said, playfully punching Wukong in the shoulder. “I know you’re just jealous. I would be, too, if I were you. Caesar.”

Wukong pointed a finger at her. “I warned you about the Planet of the Apes jokes, Goldilocks.”

“I know,” she said, smiling. “And it was a scary warning too. Made a big impression.”

“Hold on,” Lilith said. “What’s to stop Parzival from taking it and teleporting away, without paying you a dime?”

“Parzival would never do that,” L0hengrin said. “He’s a righteous dude.”

“He’s a rich nutjob who acts like a total douchebag on social media,” Lilith said. “He also likes to hunt and kill his detractors for sport, remember? You shouldn’t trust him.”

“You guys are all so cynical,” L0hengrin said, shaking her head. “Have a little faith!”

“We just don’t want to see you get ripped off is all,” Rizzo said.

“If it makes you guys feel any better, I plan to record my entire conversation with Parzival, just in case I need to prove it took place.”

They all studied her for a moment.

“You’re not kidding about this,” Wukong said. “You really found something?”

L0hengrin nodded excitedly.

“One billion simoleons,” Rizzo said, shaking her head and smiling. “Have you already figured out what you’re gonna do with it?”

L0hengrin grinned at her, then glanced around at each of the others.

“I thought you’d never ask!” she replied. “First, I’m gonna buy a big house in Columbus for all of us to live in together. It’s gonna have a big kitchen that’s always full of food. We’ll each have our own room—and in the basement, we’ll have our own private classic videogame arcade where we can all hang out!” She paused to take in a large breath of air. “I’ll also make sure our new crib has the fastest OASIS connection money can buy,” she went on. “Then, once it’s ready, I’ll fly you all up to it! We’re all going to grow old there together. And we’ll never have to depend on anyone else, ever again.”

They all stared back at her.

“Seriously?” Kastagir asked, in a voice that was almost a whisper. “You’d do that?”

L0hengrin nodded and then crossed her heart. “Guys,” she said. “You’re my four best friends in the world. My only friends, if we’re being honest. And ever since my mom died, you’ve been my only family too. Of course this is what I want to do.” She looked like she was about to sob, but then she forced out a laugh instead. “Besides, we’re the L0w Five. We promised to stick together forever. Right?”

Lilith reached out and squeezed one of L0hengrin’s hands. Kastagir’s lower lip began to tremble and he turned away in an attempt to conceal it. Rizzo had tears in her eyes, but she was smiling.

I was smiling and tearing up, too, I realized. It was heartbreakingly fitting that these kids had nicknamed themselves the L0w Five, because the bond that L0hengrin shared with her friends reminded me of the one I’d shared with the other members of the High Five during the contest. But it also reminded me just how much it had faded over the years.

“Goddammit!” Wukong roared. He reached up to wipe his eyes on the back of his furry simian forearm. “Cut it out, before you fools make me start bawling too!”

The others all laughed at that, and it made Wukong crack up also.

I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming desire to find out who these people were in real life, and how they all knew one another. For a normal OASIS user, learning the identity of Lo and her friends would’ve been impossible. But for me, it was as simple as selecting all of their avatars on my HUD. Then I instructed the system to scan each of their OASIS accounts and display any obvious similarities or connections between them. It informed me that L0hengrin, Wukong, Rizzo, Lilith, and Kastagir were all either nineteen or twenty years old in age, and that all five of them had graduated from the same OASIS public school on Ludus II a few years ago—OPS #1126.

These gunters were old high school friends, just like me and Aech. And all five of them had enrolled in GSS’s Disadvantaged Youth Empowerment Program, which provided free ONI headsets and OASIS consoles to orphaned and/or destitute kids around the world.

I suddenly felt like a jerk for eavesdropping on their conversation. So I logged out of the chatroom and resumed control of my avatar back inside Og’s basement on Middletown. But I was still invisible, so L0hengrin couldn’t see me.

I stood there for a few seconds, staring down at her avatar, pretending to wrestle with my conscience. Then I went ahead and pulled up L0hengrin’s private account profile to find out her real-world identity. I justified violating her right to privacy as an OASIS user the way I always did—by telling myself it was necessary. Before I accepted L0hengrin’s help in return for a billion dollars, I had to find out as much as I could about her, to get a sense of who I would be dealing with. But that was a bullshit excuse and I knew it. What it really boiled down to was plain old curiosity. I was curious about who L0hengrin was in the real world. And I had the ability to find out. So I did.

L0hengrin’s real name was Skylar Castillo Adkins. According to her private user profile she was an unmarried nineteen-year-old Caucasian female, and she lived in the Duncanville, Texas, stacks, a sprawling vertical slum near the apocalyptic epicenter of the DFW metroplex. It was an even rougher neighborhood than the one I’d grown up in.

Since I’d already violated her privacy, I decided to go full-on Big Brother and have a look at her headset feeds. There were ten wide-angle surveillance cameras mounted on the exterior of each ONI headset, which allowed the wearer to keep an eye on their body and its surroundings from inside the OASIS. The Robes of Anorak gave me access to a secret submenu on every ONI user’s account, where I could monitor the video feeds coming from those cameras. Meaning I had the ability to spy on people in their homes. This was one of GSS’s uglier secrets, and there would be riots and class-action suits galore if our customers ever found out about it. But these were exceptional circumstances, I assured myself.

When I pulled up Skylar’s headset feeds, I was not prepared for what I saw. The darkened interior of an ancient Airstream trailer, lit up bright green by the night-vision filters. I could see a helper bot silently washing dishes at the miniature kitchen sink. It was a battered Okagami Swap-Bot, so named because it could be used as both a telebot and an autonomous domestic helper robot. It had a sawed-off pistol-grip pump-shotgun in a makeshift holster strapped to its back, so she apparently used it to do more than just the dishes.

In the foreground of several of Skylar’s headset camera feeds, I could also see her—her thin, frail-looking body was stretched out on a worn mattress in the back of the trailer. Like a lot of people who lived in the stacks, she appeared to be suffering from borderline malnutrition. Her gaunt features seemed to conflict with the pleasant, dreamlike expression on her face. Someone had laid an old Snoopy blanket over her to keep her warm—or, no. She must’ve done this herself, using her telebot. Because she was all alone, with no one to rely on but herself.

My chest felt hollow. I closed all of the vidfeed windows and scanned Skylar’s user profile for more information about her. Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise. She’d been DMAB—designated male at birth.

Discovering this minor detail didn’t send me spiraling into a sexual-identity crisis, the way it probably would have back when I was younger. Thanks to years of surfing the ONI-net, I now knew what it felt like to be all kinds of different people, having all different kinds of sex. I’d experienced sex with women while being another woman, and sex with men as both a woman and a man. I’d done playback of several different flavors of straight and gay and nonbinary sex, just out of pure curiosity, and I’d come away with the same realization that most ONI users came away with: Passion was passion and love was love, regardless of who the participants involved were, or what sort of body they were assigned at birth.