Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

Now the Sixers were a distant memory, and Innovative Online Industries was just another wholly owned subsidiary of Gregarious Simulation Systems. GSS was now far and away the largest corporation in the world. And if we kept growing at our current rate, before too long we might be the only one. That was the reason a lot of our own users had started to refer to GSS as the “New Sixers” and me, Aech, Shoto, and Samantha as the “Four Nerds of the Apocalypse.”

Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

I made small talk with Aech and Shoto for a few more minutes, until the conference room doors swung open and Samantha’s avatar, Art3mis, strolled in. She glanced in our direction, but didn’t offer anything in the way of a greeting. Faisal walked in after her and closed the doors behind him.

We all took our usual seats, which put me and Art3mis on opposite sides of the circular conference table—as far away from each other as possible, but also directly facing each other.

“Thank you all for coming,” Faisal said, taking a seat next to Samantha. “I think we’re ready to call this co-owners meeting to order. We only have a few items to cover today—the first one being our quarterly revenue report.” An array of charts and graphs appeared on the large screen behind him. “As usual, it’s all good news. ONI headset sales remain steady, and immersion-vault sales have nearly doubled since last quarter. OASIS Advertising and Surreal Estate revenue also both remain at an all-time high.”

Faisal continued to detail how great our company was doing, but I didn’t hear much of what he was saying. I was too busy stealing glances at Art3mis across the table. I knew she wouldn’t catch me, because she made a point of never looking in my direction.

Her avatar looked the same as it always had, with one minor change. After the contest, she’d added the reddish-purple birthmark that covered the left half of her real face to her avatar’s face as well. So now there was no discernible difference between her avatar’s appearance and her appearance in real life. When she gave interviews, she often spoke about what it had been like for her to grow up hating her birthmark, and how she’d spent most of her life trying to conceal it. But now she wore it like a badge of honor, in reality and in the OASIS. And as a result, she’d somehow transformed her birthmark into an internationally recognized trademark.

I glanced up at the name tag floating above her avatar’s head. It had a thin rectangular border around it, which indicated that the avatar’s operator was not using an ONI headset to experience the OASIS. We’d added this feature due to overwhelming customer demand. OASIS users with this name-tag border were now known as Ticks. (A truncation of the word “haptics.”) Most Ticks were people who had already used up their twelve hours of ONI time and had logged back in with a haptic rig to squeeze in a few more hours of conventional OASIS time before bed. Full-time Ticks like Samantha, who never used an ONI headset at all, now comprised less than five percent of our user base. Despite Samantha’s best efforts, there were fewer and fewer ONI holdouts every year.

“I’m also happy to report that our newest server farm is now online, upping our data-storage capacity by another million yottabytes,” Faisal said. “Our data engineers estimate that this should be more than enough to meet our storage needs for the coming year, if user population growth remains steady.”

Another side effect of releasing the headsets had been a huge increase in the company’s data-storage needs, due to the enormous UBS (user brain scan) files that were stored in every ONI user’s account, which got updated every time they logged in or out of the OASIS. So as the total number of ONI users continued to increase, so did our massive data-storage requirements.

Compounding this problem was the fact that we didn’t purge any OASIS user’s account data when they died in the real world, including those huge UBS files. Faisal explained to me that this was because we own all of that data, and it was extremely valuable to the company for several reasons, including shit like “user marketing trend analysis.” But the main reason we held on to those ONI user brain scans was because that data helped our neural-interface engineers improve the safety and operability of the ONI headset. That was why our neural-interface software and the hardware both worked so flawlessly on such a wide variety of people. Because we had such a huge pool of willing guinea pigs who didn’t mind giving us complete access to the contents of their skull, as long we gave them access to our high-quality sensory-immersive bread-and-circus simulator.

My thoughts always seemed to gravitate to a dark place during these meetings.

“If none of you have any questions, we can move on to the final item on our agenda,” Faisal said. No one spoke up, so he continued. “Fantastic! There’s just one more thing that needs your approval—the ONI headset firmware update we’re planning to roll out tomorrow. Very little has been changed since our last update earlier this year. Our engineers have just added a few more security measures to prevent illegal overclocking.”

“That was the same reason for your last two updates, wasn’t it?” Art3mis asked. She had a talent for making her questions sound like accusations.

“Yes, it was,” Faisal replied. “Unfortunately, each time we implement a new set of security measures, hackers quickly figure out new workarounds. But we’re hoping this update finally does the trick, and puts an end to overclocking once and for all.”

There had only been a handful of deaths caused by the ONI since its release, and every last one of them had been due to overclocking—hacking an ONI headset’s firmware to exceed the daily twelve-hour limit. Despite our safety warnings and disclaimers, there were always a few users who chose to ignore them. Some people were convinced that they were special, and that their brains could handle fourteen or even sixteen hours of consecutive ONI usage with no ill side effects—and a few of them actually could, for a day or two. But when they pushed their luck too far, they ended up lobotomizing themselves. And that was very bad for business.

Thanks to our ironclad end-user license agreement, GSS couldn’t be held legally responsible for any of these deaths. But we still wanted to protect the overclockers from themselves, so we updated the ONI firmware whenever a new exploit was discovered.

Ever since the ONI’s introduction, there had been an urban legend floating around the OASIS, claiming that Halliday himself had exceeded the ONI’s daily usage limit when he was testing the first prototype headset, and that this is what had caused his terminal cancer. But it was complete bullshit. According to all of the intensive studies and tests we’d conducted, there was no link between the OASIS Neural Interface and the lymphoma that had ended Halliday’s life.

Faisal called for a vote on the ONI firmware upgrade. Aech, Shoto, and I all voted to approve it, while Art3mis chose to abstain. She always abstained from any vote related to the ONI headsets, even in instances like this, when we were voting to enact new safety measures.

“Fantastic!” Faisal said, maintaining a cheerful tone despite the tension in the room. “That was our last order of business. If no one has anything further, we can adjourn—”

“Oh, I have something further,” Art3mis announced, cutting him off.

Aech, Shoto, and I all let out a sigh—unintentionally in unison.

Art3mis ignored us and continued.

“Studies have shown that the human brain doesn’t finish developing until around the age of twenty-five,” she said. “I think that should be the age limit for using an ONI headset, but I know you’ll never agree to that. So, as a compromise, and for the safety of our youngest customers, I propose that, going forward, we only allow ONI headsets to be used by people who are eighteen or older. At least until we have a better understanding of the ONI’s long-term neurological and psychological effects.”