Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

She walked back over to the conference table and turned to address all of us. I winced, bracing myself for the worst. This was her moment to shout, I fucking TOLD YOU SO, morons! at the top of her lungs. Because she had told us. Many, many times. And now she might pay for our hubris with her own life, along with half a billion other innocent people. It was all our fault, and she would’ve had every right to say so.

But I should’ve already known…that wasn’t her style.

“We can handle this,” she said, making eye contact with each of us in turn. “Anorak isn’t some supergenius. He said so himself. He’s only as smart as James Halliday was when he was alive.” She made a show of rolling her eyes. “Halliday may have been a genius with computers, but we all know he was a total idiot when it came to understanding other people. He never understood human behavior. Which means Anorak will understand it even less—especially since Halliday erased a bunch of his memories. We can use that to our advantage.”

“But this isn’t Halliday we’re dealing with here,” Aech said. “It’s Anorak. He’s read the entire Internet! Now he knows everything about everything!”

“Yeah,” Shoto said. “Because there isn’t any false information on the Internet. At all.”

“Hey!” Art3mis said, snapping her fingers at us like an annoyed schoolteacher. “I don’t want to hear one more word of negativity, guys! You got that? We’re the High Five ! We beat Anorak once before, remember? And if we work together, we can do it again. Right?”

Aech and Shoto both nodded silently in agreement. But their faces seemed to give a different answer.

“Parzival?” Art3mis said, locking eyes with me. “Back me up, here….”

I met her gaze.

“You tried to warn us,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen.”

“Being sorry isn’t going to save anyone,” she replied. “Even I couldn’t have predicted something this fucked-up would happen. But now that it has, it’s up to us to try and fix it. Right, Z?”

I took a deep breath.

“Right,” I said. “I’m sorry I lost my cool before. I’ve got my game face on now.”

“Good,” Art3mis said. “Because we need to figure out what we’re going to do, and do it A-S-A-F-P.” She tapped an invisible watch on her wrist. “Like Raistlin said, ‘Tick-tock.’ ”

“Agreed,” I said. “But before we start discussing our game plan, we need to make sure Anorak isn’t still here in this room, eavesdropping on everything we say.” I turned to address everyone. “He has the Robes of Anorak now. If they give him all of the same abilities they gave me—when I wore them, they gave me unrestricted superuser access to the OASIS. They also made my avatar invulnerable and invincible in combat. And they allowed me to go anywhere I wanted to in the simulation. Anywhere. And they let me remain invisible and undetected to other avatars, even in null-tech and null-magic zones. I could also eavesdrop on private phone calls. And access private chatrooms too. Just like Og did, when he eavesdropped on us in Aech’s Basement.”

Art3mis, Shoto, and Aech all appeared to be processing this new information. But not Faisal.

“We may have a solution here,” he replied. “We’ve been aware of the robes’ powers for a long time now. Halliday used to use them occasionally, when he wanted to travel around the OASIS undetected. Just like you, Mr. Watts.” He gave me a knowing smile. “But we managed to isolate the unique item-identification code that Halliday assigned to the Robes of Anorak when he created them. We still can’t pinpoint their location in the OASIS, but we can detect the item’s presence within a defined volume.”

He opened a browser window in front of his avatar and spun it around to face us. It displayed a three-dimensional wireframe diagram of our conference room, with the position of each of our avatars indicated by a glowing blue outline.

“When Anorak revealed himself, our OASIS admins immediately conducted a server-side scan of this room,” Faisal explained. “This shows us everyone and everything located inside it, regardless of whether or not it’s visible to the room’s other occupants.”

He tapped a few buttons and the wireframe diagram of the room began to rewind like a video recording, showing our avatars moving and walking around the conference table in reverse. Faisal paused the recording a few seconds before Anorak disappeared. The system classified him as an NPC, so his avatar appeared with a red outline around it. Faisal hit Play on the recording, and when Anorak teleported away, the outline of his avatar vanished from the room too.

“As you can see, he really did teleport away,” Faisal said. “And he didn’t leave behind any monitoring or recording devices, or we would be able to detect those too.” He turned to me. “So there’s no way Anorak could be listening to us right now. Unless those robes give you the ability to remotely eavesdrop on other users, no matter where they are?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “The wearer has to be in the same OASIS location or logged in to the same chatroom to listen in on them.”

“Jesus,” Aech said, shaking her head. “So much for our famous user privacy policy.”

“Are you sure there’s no other way Anorak could be spying on us?” Shoto asked Faisal. “Perhaps via some other modification he made to his ‘infirmware’?”

Faisal waited to get an answer from his engineers, then he smiled and shook his head.

“The admins tell me that’s impossible,” Faisal told us. “There’s no way to tap a person’s ONI connection to the OASIS and filter out just the audio or visual data—all of the sensory input and output is streamed simultaneously. They say it can’t be done.”

“Maybe not by them,” Shoto said. “But if Anorak is a copy of Halliday, he probably understands the OASIS even better than our engineers.”

“Why am I thinking of that scene in Heat ?” Art3mis asked us. “The one where Pacino is starting to close in on De Niro and he tells his crew, ‘Assume they got our phones, assume they got our houses, assume they got us—right here, right now as we sit, everything. Assume it all.’  ”

She looked at me, Aech, and Shoto. “I think it might be wise for us to observe the same policy, from here on out. Just to be safe.”

I nodded. “If we need to say something to each other that we don’t want Anorak to hear, we should do it in this room.”

“Do we have any way of finding out where Anorak is right now?” Shoto asked.

Faisal closed his browser window and shook his head. “When Halliday created Anorak and released him inside the simulation as an autonomous NPC, he gave him the ability to move around the OASIS freely, uninhibited and undetected by our admins—just as Halliday and Morrow’s own avatars had always been able to.”

I found myself wondering if Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding would be able to help us locate Anorak. Then I remembered—that artifact only gave you the ability to locate other avatars. It didn’t work on NPCs. And the admins said the system classified Anorak as an NPC. And there were no artifacts that gave you the ability to locate an NPC, because it would break every single OASIS quest that involved tracking one down. Probably at least half of them.

“Thankfully, we have come up with a way for you to detect Anorak if he comes into your immediate vicinity,” Faisal said.

He opened his inventory and removed four plain-looking silver chains. Then he gave one to each of us.

“These are Bracelets of Detection, linked to the Robes of Anorak,” Faisal continued. “They will begin to glow bright red if the robes come within a hundred-meter radius of your current location. That should prevent Anorak from sneaking up on you.”