Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“Wade?” I heard Art3mis whisper. “Please stop.”

The tenderness in her tone, which had once been so familiar to me, now felt completely foreign. Hearing it again was like a knife in my heart.

I turned to see Art3mis standing there, restraining my arms in her viselike grip.

“Calm down, OK?” she said. “It’s gonna be all right.”

She let go of my wrists and took hold of my hands instead, forcing open my clenched fists so that she could interlace her fingers with mine.

“I need you to breathe, Wade,” she said. She gave me a comforting smile and squeezed both of my hands. “I’m here with you. Be here with me.”

That finally snapped my brain out of its toxic thought loop. I relaxed my hands and she let go of them. Then she rested her own hands on my shoulders and gave them a brief squeeze.

“There he is,” she said. “All good in the neighborhood, Z?”

“Yeah, thank you,” I said, turning away sharply in embarrassment. “It was just—I think I may have had a panic attack. But I’m better now.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I need you to get your head in the game. Everyone does. OK?”

I nodded and took a deep breath. Then I took a few more. Once I had calmed myself down a bit, I pulled up my HUD to check my vital signs. They all looked normal. Then I decided to check the operational status of my OASIS immersion vault, and discovered that my situation was even more fucked than I thought….

I no longer had the ability to unlock or open my MoTIV’s armored canopy. Both of those functions had been disabled. But I could still see myself and my surroundings, via the MoTIV’s interior and external camera feeds. And, thankfully, the MoTIV’s mobility, defense, and weapons systems were still functioning normally, and still under my control. So I could still defend myself if I needed to. The only thing I couldn’t do was get out.

Each MoTIV unit had an Emergency Release Protocol, but you had to power down your ONI headset before it could be activated. And to power down your headset, you first needed to log out of the OASIS. And thanks to Anorak’s “infirmware,” I couldn’t do that.

In the calmest voice I could muster, I told the others about my discovery. Aech, Shoto, and Faisal immediately checked their own OIV control menus and discovered they had the exact same problem I did. We each owned different immersion-vault models, but they all had the same fail-safes built in to them.

“Guys,” Shoto said. “What the hell are we going to do?”

Faisal was listening intently to several different phone calls. He shouted, “One at a time!” to whoever it was he had on the line. Then he regained his composure.

“I’ve got one of our chief engineers on the phone right now,” he announced. “And he can’t figure out a way to unlock his vault either. According to him, the firmware on our OIVs has not been altered in any way—it just isn’t functioning properly now, due to the changes in Anorak’s infirmware.” Faisal threw up his hands in a helpless gesture. “We won’t be able to attempt a lobo logout. Even as a last resort.”

A “lobo logout” was the slang term for what happened when someone’s ONI headset malfunctioned or lost power before their OASIS logout sequence could be completed and their brain was properly awakened from its dreamlike state. Nine times out of ten, a lobo logout left the wearer in a permanent coma. But a few hardy souls managed to wake up and recover their faculties, the way some people were able to bounce back after a major stroke. Several of these survivors described being trapped in an endless loop of the final second of the simulation they were experiencing before they lost their connection. A loop that seemed to stretch on for months or years. (GSS never allowed the public to find out about that last bit, though.)

Lobo logouts were an extremely rare occurrence, because each ONI headset had three redundant onboard computer systems and three fail-safe batteries. These batteries were small, but with a full charge, each one could keep the headset in operation long enough for it to complete its wearer’s logout and wakeup sequence, which was triggered automatically when the headset switched to battery power.

When the redundancies failed, it was almost always a result of sabotage, either by a user who was looking to end it all, or a user’s family member who was looking to get rid of them and/or cash in on their life-insurance policy. As a result, GSS wasn’t held legally accountable for any of these incidents—although thanks to the licensing agreement our users clicked past before each login, if our ONI headsets suddenly started making people’s heads explode like watermelons at a Gallagher concert when they put them on, we probably wouldn’t be liable for that either. It was real comforting.

Up until now, I think Aech, Shoto, and I had all been thinking the same thing. If Anorak failed to release us before we hit our ONI usage limits, a lobo logout with a 10 percent chance of survival was better than no chance at all. But Anorak had robbed us of that option too. Even cutting off the power wouldn’t help; with the logout disabled, the redundancies designed to save users would instead power the headsets long enough to push each of us past our daily ONI usage limits. Each of those backup batteries held more than enough juice to cook our frontal lobes.

The armored shell of my tactical immersion vault was designed to be indestructible and impregnable. Even if I disabled all of its defenses and ordered a security team with plasma torches to come down into my bunker and start cutting open my vault right now, they wouldn’t be able to get my body out of it for at least a day or two. I would be long dead from Synaptic Overload Syndrome by then. And Aech, Shoto, and Faisal were all in the same boat. And so was every other ONI user with an OASIS immersion vault.

Anorak had thought of everything. Every precaution we’d taken to protect our bodies and our brains was now being used against us.

People often jokingly referred to OIVs as “coffins.” Now that felt terrifyingly prophetic.

“Z?” Aech said. “I see those wheels of yours turning over there. What’s your assessment of our situation?”

“That we’re totally screwed, pal,” I said. “At least for the time being…”

Aech let out a roar and punched the wall in frustration.

“This shit is unbelievable!” she said. “Faisal, how the hell did our admins let this happen? We’re always saying we have the smartest people on the planet working for us, right? And the ‘best cybersecurity infrastructure ever to exist in human history’? Some shit like that?”

“We do,” Faisal said. “But we never anticipated an attack by an AI copy of our deceased CEO! How the hell were we supposed to prevent that ? It’s impossible.” He grabbed a fistful of his own hair in each hand, as if preparing to yank all of it out. “He had unrestricted admin access to our entire internal network. All of our safeguards were to prevent someone on the outside from hacking in to our network. Anorak already had the key to the front door!”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “Just tell the engineers to keep working on a solution, OK?”

“They are, sir,” he said, giving me a grim smile. “Like their own lives depend on it.”

“Good,” I replied. “In the meantime, we’ll try to give the Dixie Flatline what he wants, and hope he makes good on his promise to release us.”

I glanced back over at Aech and Shoto. They both nodded mutely in agreement. We all looked at Art3mis, but she appeared to be lost in thought. She also appeared to be the only one who had fully regained her composure—maybe because she was the only person present whose brain wasn’t currently being held hostage.