Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“Nice,” I said, slipping my bracelet on. “Please thank the engineers for us.”

Art3mis put her bracelet on, too, then she turned to face me.

“OK,” she said. “Spill it, Watts. What’s this ‘Big Red Button’ that Anorak mentioned? And what does it do, exactly?”

I’d been dreading this question. But under the circumstances, I had no choice but to answer it truthfully.

“The Big Red Button is a self-destruct mechanism for the OASIS,” I said. “It’s located inside Castle Anorak, in the study—a room that only the wearer of the Robes of Anorak can enter. If you press it, it will shut down the entire OASIS and launch a tapeworm that will erase all our backup servers, destroying the simulation forever.”

Everyone’s eyes widened in surprise. For a second, Faisal looked as if he might faint.

“Holy shit, Z,” Aech said. “Why didn’t you ever tell any of us about this?”

“Halliday showed me the Big Red Button in secret, so I decided to keep it a secret.” I shook my head. “And I honestly couldn’t foresee a single reason why I would ever need to press it.”

That made Art3mis laugh out loud.

“Well, can you ‘foresee’ one now, Nostradamus?” she asked.

I gave her a sober nod.

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “Now I can think of several.”

“Why would Mr. Halliday be reckless enough to build a self-destruct mechanism into the OASIS?” Faisal asked, still shaking his head in disbelief. “He knew there would be disastrous consequences if the OASIS ever went offline and stayed that way. We conducted several studies, involving dozens of simulated scenarios.” He turned to me. “Mr. Watts, if you—or anyone else—ever presses that button, it would disrupt global communications, law enforcement, transportation, and commerce….The world would be thrown into complete chaos.”

Shoto nodded. “The entire drone protection force would go offline and remain offline,” he added. “There would be shipping delays, food and medicine shortages. Rioting. Markets would crash. States would fail.” He shook his head. “Jesus, the whole of human civilization might even collapse.”

“Then why would Halliday take such an insane risk?” Faisal asked.

“It’s better to have a self-destruct and not need it than to need one and not have it,” Art3mis said.

I nodded. “Exactly.”

“So that’s why Anorak went through all that trouble to steal the robes back?” Shoto asked. “To keep Z from pressing that button?”

“If I erased the OASIS, Anorak would be erased along with it,” I said. “Now he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.”

Everyone fell silent for a moment. Art3mis began to pace back and forth while chewing absentmindedly on one of her thumbnails. Samantha was probably doing the exact same thing in the cabin of her autojet, and her movements were being mirrored onto her avatar.

“Faisal,” she said, turning to face him. “What would happen to all of Anorak’s ONI hostages if we shut the OASIS down manually? By taking all the servers offline, one by one?”

Shoto chimed in. “Or even take the whole Internet down, just for a few seconds. What would happen? Would all the ONI hostages wake up?”

Faisal held his index finger to his right ear to indicate that he was listening to the team of OASIS engineers he had on the phone. When they finished talking, Faisal shook his head.

“No, I’m afraid not,” he said. “Normally, when an ONI user loses their connection to the Internet or to the OASIS, the headset’s firmware triggers an automatic logout. But Anorak has disabled that feature. So even if the OASIS went completely offline, it still wouldn’t wake any of the hostages up. The techs think it would probably just leave all of us in a permanent ONI-induced coma. Unless…”

“Unless what, Faisal?” Shoto asked.

“Unless he also programmed his infirmware to lobotomize anyone who tries to escape by cutting off their OASIS or Internet connections.”

“Son of a bitch,” Art3mis said. “If he did that, he would be able to kill all of his ONI hostages at once, just by pressing the Big Red Button. Right?”

“Hold on a second,” I said. “Even if Anorak did want to press the Big Red Button, I doubt he could. I bet Halliday designed the button so that it could only be pressed by a real person, and not an NPC like Anorak. Considering the other restrictions Halliday placed on him, that seems like a pretty safe bet.”

“Maybe that’s the reason Anorak broke Sorrento out of prison,” Art3mis said. “So that he could give his robes to Sorrento and order him to press the Big Red Button.”

“Yeah,” Shoto said. “But if Anorak did that, he’d be killing himself too. Wouldn’t he?”

“Unless he has a backup,” Faisal said. “A standalone simulation we don’t know about.”

“Like that one TNG episode with Professor Moriarty,” Shoto said.

“ ‘Ship in a Bottle,’ ” Aech and Art3mis said in unison.

“Can our guys analyze Anorak’s firmware?” I asked. “To find out what he changed?”

Faisal shook his head. “Our software engineers are trying to do that right now,” he said. “But Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they’ve never seen before. They don’t even know how to disassemble or decompile the code, and even if they could, they don’t think they would be able to understand it.”

“What about rolling it back to the previous build?” Shoto asked.

Faisal shook his head again. “We already have,” he said. “But to reinstall it, we would need to log out of the OASIS first. The headset can’t be active.”

“Great,” I said. “Wonderful. Just perfect!”

“OK,” Aech said. “Then we give him what he wants. Like, right fucking now. Whatever the Siren’s Soul is, it can’t be worth risking half a billion lives….”

“Og apparently thought it was,” Art3mis said. “Otherwise, he would have given it to Anorak. But he refused….” She locked eyes with me. “We’re missing something here.”

Aech shook her head.

“None of this matters right now, y’all!” she shouted. “We have to find the rest of those shards by sundown. We can figure out what the Siren’s Soul is and what it does along the way. Now, let’s fucking moooove !”

Aech made a herding motion with her arms, as if to spur all of us toward the exit. But Shoto stepped in front of the doors, blocking them.

“Hold on,” he said. “Aren’t we going to release some sort of statement to all the ONI users who are being held hostage? To inform them of their situation?”

Faisal shook his head.

“I believe that would be an extraordinarily bad idea, sir,” he said. “We don’t want to create a global panic—or admit any liability for this situation—until we have no other choice.”

The room fell silent for a moment.

“For now, we can say the problem is due to a minor glitch,” Faisal added. “Tell the users their temporary inability to log out is due to a harmless bug in our new firmware, and that they aren’t in any danger, because the system will still log them out automatically when they hit their twelve-hour ONI usage limit.” He spread his hands. “If we can pull that off, our customers will never know their lives were in danger, and that would save GSS billions in lawsuits.”

Art3mis sighed. “Forget the lawsuits,” she said. “But I agree with Faisal—the longer we can keep this quiet, the safer our users will be.”

“Great,” Aech said, clapping her hands together. “Motion carried.”

We told the ONI users the logout issue was due to a minor firmware bug, apologized profusely for the temporary inconvenience, and announced that all teleportation fares would be waived until the problem was fixed. We also offered to deposit a thousand credits in each ONI user’s OASIS account, to help them “make the most of this unfortunate situation”—in return for digitally signing an agreement stating they wouldn’t sue us over this incident. Faisal told us this was just an extra precaution, because each time our users logged on they were already clicking Agree to an end-user license that classified our headsets as experimental technology and absolved GSS of any liability for injuries.