Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

The whole world knew my address, so I didn’t feel like I was being paranoid. I was just taking sensible precautions.

When the elevator’s blast doors slid open, I used the MoTIV’s cockpit controls to spider-walk it forward, into the bunker’s receiving bay, which was just a big empty concrete room with lights embedded in its ceiling. The elevator stood at one end and a pair of large armored doors stood at the other, leading to the high-tech, fully stocked bomb shelter beyond.

I secretly loved coming down here. Three kilometers beneath the earth, in this armored concrete bunker, I felt like I was in my own private Batcave. (Although it was obvious to me now that Bruce Wayne never would’ve been able to construct his crime-fighting crib all by himself, in total secrecy, with no one to help him lay the plumbing and pour the concrete but his geriatric butler. No way.)

I lowered my MoTIV to the concrete floor, retracted its legs, and placed it into standard defense mode. Then I removed my ONI headset from its cradle above my head and put it on. When I powered it on, its titanium sensor bands automatically retracted to fit the contours of my skull before locking themselves tightly in place so that the headset couldn’t be moved or jostled by even a micrometer. If that were to happen in the middle of my ONI session…it would be bad.

I pressed a button to close the MoTIV’s armored canopy and it slid shut with a pneumatic hiss, sealing me safely inside its roomy cockpit. Then I cleared my throat and said, “Initiate login sequence.”

I felt a familiar tingling sensation all over my scalp as the headset scanned my brain and verified my identity. Then a female voice prompted me to speak my passphrase and I recited it, being careful to enunciate each syllable. I’d recently reset it to the same passphrase I’d used during the latter days of Halliday’s Hunt—a lyric from the 1987 song “Don’t Let’s Start” by They Might Be Giants: No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful….

Once my passphrase was accepted and I agreed to the ONI safety warning, the system finished logging me in. I heard myself breathe a sigh of relief as reality receded and the OASIS faded into existence all around me.

I materialized inside my strongholdon Falco, the small asteroid in Sector Fourteen that still served as my avatar’s home inside the OASIS. I’d tried relocating to Castle Anorak after I inherited it, but I didn’t really like the décor or the general vibe over there. I felt more at home here, in my old digs, which I’d designed and built myself.

I was seated in my command center. This was the same spot where my avatar had been sitting the previous night, when I’d reached my twelve-hour ONI usage limit and the system had automatically logged me out.

The control panels arrayed in front of me were crammed with switches, buttons, keyboards, joysticks, and display screens. The bank of security monitors on my left were linked to virtual cameras placed throughout the interior and exterior of my stronghold. To my right, another bank of monitors displayed vidfeeds from the real-world cameras mounted on the interior and exterior of my immersion vault. My sleeping body was visible from several different angles, along with a detailed readout of its vital signs.

I gazed out the transparent dome at the barren, cratered landscape surrounding my stronghold. This had been my avatar’s home during the final year of Halliday’s contest, and I’d cracked one of its major riddles while sitting in this very chair. I hoped the familiar setting would help me make a breakthrough in my quest for the Seven Shards. So far it hadn’t worked.

I accessed the teleportation menu on my avatar’s superuser HUD, then scrolled down the list of bookmarked locations until I found the listing for the planet Gregarious in Sector One, the home of Gregarious Simulation Systems’s virtual offices inside the OASIS. When I selected it and tapped the Teleport icon, my avatar was instantly transported to a set of previously saved coordinates, hundreds of millions of virtual kilometers away.

If I’d been a normal OASIS user, this trip would have cost me some serious coin. But since I wore the Robes of Anorak, I could teleport anywhere at any time, for free. It was a far cry from the days when I was a broke schoolkid stranded on Ludus.

My avatar reappeared on the top floor of Gregarious Tower, a virtual replica of the real GSS skyscraper in downtown Columbus. Our head of operations, Faisal Sodhi, was standing in the reception area waiting for me.

“Mr. Watts!” Faisal said. “Good to see you, sir.”

“It’s good to see you, too, man,” I replied. I’d given up on trying to convince Faisal to address me as Wade or Z years ago.

He walked over to greet me and I shook his outstretched hand. Being able to shake hands without any danger of spreading disease had always been one of the perks of the OASIS. But in the old days, before the ONI was released, it always felt like you were shaking hands with a mannequin, even with the best haptic gloves available. Without the sensation of skin-to-skin human contact, the ancient greeting lost most of its meaning. After we’d introduced the ONI, shaking hands had come back in vogue, along with high fives and fist bumps, because now they felt real.

The conference room itself was protected by both magical and technological means. We held our co-owners meetings here instead of in a standard OASIS chatroom because it allowed all sorts of additional security measures to be taken, to prevent anyone from recording or eavesdropping on us, including our own employees.

“Are the others already here?” I asked, nodding toward the closed doors behind him.

“Ms. Aech and Mr. Shoto both arrived a few minutes ago,” he said, opening the doors. “But Ms. Cook called to say she’s running a bit late.”

I nodded and went into the conference room. Aech and Shoto were standing over by the wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows, grazing from a ridiculously large assortment of snack trays that were laid out nearby, while they admired the impressive view. Gregarious Tower was surrounded by acres of pristine forestland, with snowcapped mountain peaks ringing the horizon. There were no other structures in sight. By design, everything about the view was calming and peaceful. Unfortunately, the same could never be said of the meetings we held here.

“Z!” Aech and Shoto shouted in unison when they spotted me.

I walked over and received high fives from each of them.

“How goes it, mis amigos?”

“It’s way too early for this shit, man,” Aech groaned. She was in L.A., where it was currently ten o’clock in the morning. Aech liked to stay up late and sleep in even later.

“Yeah,” Shoto added, after a quarter-second delay from his translator software. “And it’s also way too late for this shit.” He was in Japan, where it was the middle of the night. But Shoto was nocturnal by nature. He was just complaining because he’d grown to dread these meetings, just like me and Aech.

“Arty’s running late,” Aech said. “She’s supposed to be logging in from Liberia, I think.”

“Yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes. “That’s the most recent stop on her ongoing tour of the world’s most depressing places.”

I still couldn’t fathom why Samantha felt the need to endure all of the hassles and risks of real-world travel when she could have visited safely via telepresence robot, or experienced any location in the world by downloading an .oni clip recorded there. She also could have visited any of those countries inside the OASIS. There was an incredibly detailed re-creation of the Earth in Sector Ten called EEarth (short for “Ersatz Earth”), that was constantly being updated with data taken from live satellite imagery, drone footage, and traffic, security, and smartphone-camera feeds to make it as accurate as possible. Visiting Dubai, Bangkok, or Delhi on EEarth was a lot easier and safer than visiting them in reality. But Samantha felt it was imperative for her to witness the true state of the world with her own two eyes, even when it came to the most dangerous, war-torn countries. In other words, she was crazy.