Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

Only time would tell.

One thing I had never shared with my therapist—or with anyone—was the comfort I took from knowing that I had access to the Big Red Button.

Not that I would ever actually press it. I’d read all of the worst-case scenarios and seen the disaster simulations created by GSS’s in-house think tanks, predicting what would happen if the OASIS went offline. The outlook was never pretty. The general consensus was this: if the OASIS stopped working for more than a few days, so would human civilization.

This had become even more of a certainty in the wake of our merger with IOI, because nearly all of the support operations that kept the global Internet backbone running were now dependent on the OASIS in some form. As were the vast majority of the security and defense systems around the world, at the national, state, local, and home level. If the OASIS went down, the Internet would probably suffer a catastrophic collapse of its infrastructure a short time later, and our already precarious human civilization would begin to rapidly collapse too. That was why GSS had so many backup server installations all over the world.

Nobody knew that the OASIS’s creator had rigged the whole simulation with a self-destruct button, and that I alone now had access to it.

Nobody knew that the fate of the whole world was literally in my hands. Except me. And I wanted to keep it that way.

Once my virtual therapy session was over, I headed downstairs and made the long trek to my office at the far end of the mansion’s east wing. This was the same enormous oak-paneled room that had served as Halliday’s office when he’d lived here. It was also the room in which Halliday had designed and programmed his elaborate Easter-egg hunt. He’d even included a re-creation of this office in the hunt’s final challenge.

To me, this room was hallowed ground. And I’d spent three years and millions of dollars re-creating the vast collection of classic videogame consoles and home computers Halliday had originally kept on display here.

The office contained over a hundred glass tables, arranged in a large egg-shaped pattern on the floor. On each table was a different vintage home computer or videogame system, along with tiered racks that held a collection of its peripherals, controllers, software, and games. Each collection was meticulously arranged and displayed, like a museum exhibit.

A conventional OASIS immersion rig sat in one corner of the room, collecting dust. I only used it for emergencies now, when I needed to access the OASIS after I’d hit my twelve-hour ONI daily usage limit. It was hard to believe that just a few years ago, I’d been completely content accessing the OASIS with my visor and haptic rig. Once you got used to an ONI headset, the old hardware made everything look and feel painfully fake—even with the best haptics money could buy.

My new prototype MoTIV—a mobile tactical immersion vault—sat on a circular elevator pad in the center of the room.

The MoTIV was a logical extension of the concept of the standard immersion vault—an armored coffin that protected your sleeping body while your mind roamed the OASIS. Except that my new device didn’t just provide passive protection. Part of GSS’s new SuperVault deluxe line of tactical OASIS immersion vaults, the MoTIV looked more like a heavily armed robotic spider than a coffin. It was an armored escape vehicle and all-terrain weapons platform, featuring eight retractable armored legs for navigating all forms of terrain, and a pair of machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on each side of its armored chassis—not to mention a bulletproof acrylic cockpit canopy for its occupant.

Our in-house ad agency had already come up with the perfect slogan: “If you’re gonna use lethal force to defend yourself, you better have a MoTIV!”

If I was awake, I could operate my MoTIV using the control panel located inside the cockpit. If I was logged in to the OASIS with an ONI headset, I could control the MoTIV from inside the simulation, via my avatar. So if my body came under attack while I was logged in, I wouldn’t need to log out before I could defend myself. And I could hurl insults at my would-be assailants through the earsplittingly loud speakers mounted on its heavily armored exoskeleton.

The MoTIV was overkill, considering the small army of security guards and defense drones guarding my house. But state-of-the-art toys like these were a perk of my position at GSS—and I had to admit, having it made me feel a lot less anxious about leaving my body unattended for twelve hours every day.

Most ONI users couldn’t afford a standard immersion vault, let alone a personal armored attack vehicle. Some settled for locking themselves in a room or closet before they entered the sleeplike state induced by the ONI headset. Others asked someone they trusted to watch over their helpless body while their mind was temporarily disconnected from it.

Of course, as Art3mis was fond of pointing out, plenty of users didn’t take any precautions at all when they put on their ONI headsets. And plenty of them paid the price for doing so. A new breed of thieves, rapists, serial killers, and organ harvesters preyed on those ONI users who failed to lock up their bodies while their minds were on vacation. But over the past few years, thousands of “BodyLocker” capsule hotels had opened up around the world, where people could rent coffin-size rooms for just a few credits a day. It was the lowest-rent housing imaginable. They couldn’t build them fast enough to meet the demand.

To increase user safety, GSS had also started selling deluxe ONI headsets featuring built-in motion-activated cameras, with video feeds that could be monitored from inside the OASIS. Immersion vaults were also equipped with interior and exterior cameras that allowed their occupants to monitor their physical body and its surroundings from inside the OASIS, along with motion detectors that would alert them if anyone came within spitting distance of their body in the Earl.

I went into the office’s private bathroom and remained there until I’d emptied my bowels and bladder as much as possible. This had become a pre-login ritual for every ONI user—especially those who wanted to remain logged in for a full twelve hours without soiling themselves. When I emerged from the bathroom, I climbed into the MoTIV and settled into the form-fitting gel-foam flotation recliner. Its padded retaining bands locked into place around my arms, legs, and waist, to keep me from falling out. Throughout my long ONI session, the recliner would periodically rotate my body and flex my limbs to increase circulation and prevent muscle atrophy. There were also special suits you could wear that would electrically stimulate your muscles while you were under, but they irritated my skin so I never wore them.

I pressed a button to close the MoTIV’s canopy. Then I pressed another button to activate the circular elevator pad it was sitting on. I grinned and braced myself for a drop, just before the pad began to rocket down the elevator shaft. Lights embedded in the shaft’s reinforced titanium wall flew by in a blur.

This elevator had been designed so that, if you looked straight up during its descent, it perfectly re-created the look of the top-secret Pepsi elevator guarded by B. B. King in Spies Like Us. It, and the bunker it led to, had both been constructed by Halliday when he’d first moved into this house, so that he would have a place to ride out World War III, which was still threatening to break out at any moment, just as it had been for the past hundred years. Now I used his bunker for my daily twelve-hour ONI dives, content in the knowledge that I was deep enough and well protected enough to survive a missile strike on my house, on the off chance that some nutjob despot with a death wish managed to get one past our global defense network, and the redundant one GSS maintained over the entire city of Columbus to prevent terrorist attacks on our OASIS servers, and the even more redundant antiballistic-missile installations that surrounded my home.