Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

No, she’s selfless and principled, replied a nagging little voice in my head. And you’re neither of those things. Is it any wonder she dumped you?

I clenched my teeth. These co-owners meetings were always bad for my self-esteem, and not just because it forced me to see Art3mis. Aech and Shoto were also living glamorous and fulfilling post-contest lives. The reclusive, obsessive existence I’d carved out for myself seemed painfully bleak by comparison.

These days, if I wanted to hang out with Aech or Shoto, I had to make an appointment several weeks in advance. But I didn’t mind. I was grateful they still made time to hang out with me at all. Unlike me, they had more than two friends. And they also spent a lot more of their time offline than I did. Instead of downloading pieces of other people’s lives off the ONI-net, Aech and Shoto were out in the world having (and recording) experiences of their own. In fact, they were two of the most popular celebrity posters on the ONI-net. Every clip either of them threw up went viral within a few seconds, regardless of its content.

Like Art3mis, they were brilliant, charismatic people, leading rock-star lives while also working to improve the lives of the less fortunate. More than once it had occurred to me that my friends were my one saving grace. The thing I took the most pride in—even more than winning Halliday’s fortune—was the three people I’d chosen to share that fortune with. Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis were all kinder, wiser, and saner than I was or ever would be.

After the contest ended, Helen legally changed her name to Aech, with no surname, just like Sting and Madonna. And since her true identity, appearance, and gender were now public knowledge in the wake of Halliday’s contest, she’d promptly ditched the world-famous white male avatar she’d used to mask her true identity since childhood. Like Samantha and Shoto and many other real-world celebrities, Aech now used an OASIS ravatar —an avatar that re-created her unaltered real-world appearance, and was updated each and every time she logged in to the simulation.

I had never been a huge fan of my real-world appearance, so I still used the same OASIS avatar I always had—an idealized version of myself. A bit taller, fitter, and more handsome.

These days, Aech spent most of her real-world time chilling in her Santa Monica beach house, or touring with her new fiancée, Endira Vinayak, a famous singer and Bollywood star.

Becoming a billionaire hadn’t altered Aech’s personality at all, as far as I could tell. She still liked to have ridiculous arguments about old movies. She still loved to get her kills on in PvP arena tournaments, and she remained one of the league’s highest-ranked combatants, in both the Deathmatch and Capture the Flag leagues. In other words, Aech was still a total badass. Except now she was a total badass who also happened to be insanely rich and world famous.

I still considered Aech my best friend, but we weren’t nearly as close now as we’d been in the old days. I hadn’t seen her in person in over two years, although we still got together online once or twice a month. But these meet-ups were always my suggestion, and I was beginning to worry that Aech only spent time with me out of some lingering sense of obligation. Or because she was worried about me. Either way, I didn’t care. I was just grateful that she still made time for me, and that she still wanted me in her life.

I saw Shoto even less frequently than Aech, which was understandable. His life had changed drastically in the years since the contest. Shoto’s parents had helped him manage his inheritance when he was still a minor, but he’d turned eighteen a year ago, making him a legal adult in Japan. Now he had full control of his own life, and his share of Halliday’s fortune.

To celebrate, he legally adopted his avatar’s name, just like Aech. Then he got married to a young woman named Kiki, whom he met when he relocated to Hokkaido. He and his new bride moved into a remodeled Japanese castle right on the shore. Then, about five months ago, during one of our GSS meetings, Shoto announced that he was going to become a father. He and Kiki had just learned that they were going to have a boy, and together they had already decided to name him Toshiro. But in confidence, Shoto told us he’d already decided to nickname the baby “Little Daito,” so that was what I called him too.

It was still hard to believe that Shoto would be a father in a few months, at such a young age. I was concerned for him, though I had no idea why. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t be able to afford to send Little Daito to a good school. I just didn’t understand why he was in such a big hurry, until he sat me down and explained it to me. Japan was in the midst of an “underpopulation crisis” because so many of its citizens had opted to stop having children over the past three decades. As the country’s wealthiest and most famous young couple, he and Kiki felt obligated to lead by example and reproduce as quickly as possible. So they had. And after Little Daito arrived, they planned to start working on a Little Shoto—or perhaps a Little Kiki.

In addition to his preparations for fatherhood, Shoto continued to oversee operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division, where he produced a wildly popular series of award-winning OASIS quests based on his favorite anime and samurai films. He’d become one of my favorite quest developers, and I was lucky enough to be one of his go-to beta testers, so we still got to hang out in the OASIS at least once or twice a month.

We rarely talked about Shoto’s late brother, Daito, or his murder. But the last time we had, Shoto told me he was still in mourning for him, and that he feared he always would be. I understood what he meant, because I felt the same way about my aunt Alice, and my old downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Gilmore. Both of them had been murdered, too, by the same man: Nolan Sorrento, the former head of operations at Innovative Online Industries.

After Halliday’s contest, Sorrento had been convicted of thirty-seven separate counts of first-degree homicide. He was now serving time on death row in a maximum-security prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, about fifty miles south of Columbus.

During his trial, IOI’s lawyers had managed to convince the jury that Sorrento had gone rogue, and that he’d acted without the IOI board’s knowledge or consent when he ordered his underlings to throw Daito off his forty-third-floor balcony. They also claimed that Sorrento had acted alone when he’d detonated a bomb outside my aunt’s trailer in the stacks, killing over three dozen people and injuring hundreds of others.

After Sorrento’s conviction and incarceration, IOI managed to settle all of the wrongful-death suits filed against them. Then they tried to go back to business as usual. But by then, they’d already lost their position as the world’s largest manufacturer of OASIS immersion hardware, thanks to the release of our ONI headsets. And thanks to the rollout of our free global Internet initiative, their ISP business had also shriveled.

Meanwhile, IOI also had the audacity to file a separate corporate lawsuit against me. They claimed that even though I’d created a false identity and used it to masquerade as an indentured servant to infiltrate their company headquarters, the indenturement contract I’d signed was still legally binding. Which meant, they argued, that I was still technically IOI’s property when I won Halliday’s contest, and so his fortune and his company should now also be classified as IOI’s property. Since the U.S. legal system still insisted on giving corporations even more rights than its citizens, this idiotic lawsuit dragged on for months…right up until GSS completed its hostile takeover of IOI. Then, as IOI’s new owners, we withdrew the lawsuit. We also fired the old IOI board of directors, their attorneys, and everyone else who had worked with or under Nolan Sorrento.