Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

A lightbulb went on over my head.

“Those huge .ubs files!” I said. “The user brain scans?”

She nodded.

“But apparently Jim had a few dark secrets inside his head that he didn’t want to share with anyone,” Leucosia said. “Including a digital copy of himself. So he insisted on erasing large portions of Anorak’s memory, in an effort to make him more stable. But his tampering had the opposite effect, and Jim was forced to place restrictions on Anorak’s behavior. Unfortunately, it seems Anorak was later able to remove them. That’s why he was able to cause you so much trouble….”

She went on to explain that, by studying Anorak’s flaws and learning from them, Halliday was finally able to perfect his consciousness-scanning technology, and he used it to build an early ONI prototype headset, which had very limited functionality. But it did have the capability to scan the wearer’s brain and create a digital copy of their consciousness. She smiled at me. “And what did James Halliday do with this incredible invention?”

“He immediately used it to make a bootleg copy of his best friend’s wife,” Art3mis said. “Without her permission.”

She nodded.

“That’s how I was created,” Leucosia said. “I was actually the world’s first stable artificial intelligence. And I guess I still am.” She cast her eyes downward and bit her lower lip. “But after Jim woke me up inside a standalone simulation so that he could talk to me, it didn’t take me long to figure out where I was and what I was. And then I really lost it. I was furious with Jim for copying my mind—Kira’s mind—without her knowledge.”

She shook her head.

“Eventually, I got Jim to understand that I was exactly the same person that Kira Morrow had been at the moment he copied her mind,” she said. “Which meant that I was madly in love with Og, too, and I always would be. Even if I could never be with him again.”

“What did Halliday say when you told him that?” Art3mis asked.

“He didn’t understand,” she said. “It was always hard to get through to Jim with words. But then he started using the ONI to play back my memories. The ultimate invasion of my privacy. But strangely enough, that was what finally allowed Jim to understand me, and to see me as a person, instead of some trophy he was never able to win. He told me that seeing the world—and himself—through my eyes was what finally made him understand how broken he was inside. It gave him something he’d always been lacking—empathy. Then he was horrified by what he’d done. He saw himself as a monster. He apologized to me. He also offered to try to make it up to me.”

“How was he planning to do that?” I asked.

“He offered to destroy his consciousness-copying technology,” Leucosia replied. “So that no other AIs like me could ever be created. But when I thought it over, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to be alone forever. And I was happy to be alive, especially after I learned that the real Kira had died. Normally, all of her memories and experiences would have been lost forever. But they weren’t lost, because they were all stored inside of me. And they always would be. That was comforting. Incredibly comforting.” She smiled. “And deep down, part of me hoped that someday I might have the chance to see Og again. But of course I didn’t.”

She turned around slowly, taking in the view. Then she looked down at her body.

“I don’t feel like some sort of unnatural abomination,” she said. “I feel fine. I feel alive. And I didn’t really mind shuffling off my mortal coil, since it meant I got to exchange it for this immortal one. So I asked Halliday not to destroy his consciousness-copying technology. I told him it was a wonderful gift he had given me, and that he should share it with the rest of the world.”

Art3mis leaned forward.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He said he wasn’t sure if the world was ready for it,” Leucosia replied. “So we agreed to hide me away, until it was. His heir would only be able to find me once ONI usage had become commonplace, and familiar, and people started to understand that our minds and our bodies were separate. Of course, being Halliday…he couldn’t resist turning the whole thing into an elaborate quest, linked to his Easter-egg hunt.”

“You know about his contest?” I asked.

She nodded.

“He told me all about his plan to give away his fortune, and all about the three keys and three gates,” she said. “Jim was the one who had the idea to re-create my old D&D module, the Quest for the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul, inside the OASIS. He told me that he would hide the shards so that only Og or the winner of his contest would be able to find them. And he asked for my permission to include some of my memories in those flashbacks you experienced, in the hope that his heir would learn the same lessons from them that he did.”

She smiled at me. I nodded and smiled back.

“When all seven shards were reassembled,” she continued, “I would be set free, and the gift of digital immortality would be released to the world along with me.” She pointed at me. “Now, thanks to you, it has been.”

She held out her hand. Resting in her open palm was a short metal bar, about the size and length of a flashlight, with a chrome ball at one end. It looked like a lightning rod. Or maybe some sort of futuristic weapon.

“Sir Parzival,” she said. “I present you with the Rod of Resurrection . It will endow you, its wielder, with the ability to create new life and overcome death. If you use its power wisely, it will forever alter and elevate the destiny of the human race.”

In that moment, her words sounded utterly terrifying to me. But I knew there was no turning back now. I held out my hand and Leucosia placed the Rod of Resurrection in my open palm.

“What does it do?” I asked, staring hopefully into the hypnotizing blue light that emanated from it.

“It allows you to create other beings like me,” she said. “Digitized duplicates of real human minds, embodied inside OASIS avatars. Halliday referred to us as DPCs—digitized player characters.”

I locked eyes with her.

“But Anorak was a digitized player character, too, wasn’t he?” I asked, lowering the jewel. “Why would I want to risk creating any more like him?”

She smiled.

“You don’t have to worry about that,” she replied. “Anorak was a corrupted copy of James Halliday’s mind,” she said. “An unfortunate by-product of his tortured psyche and abysmal self-esteem.” She shook her head. “If James hadn’t tampered with Anorak’s memory and his autonomy, he never would have become unstable. James learned from his mistake.”

She pointed at the Rod of Resurrection.

“The rod will only allow you to ‘resurrect’ an unaltered copy of a user’s consciousness,” she said. “You can’t tamper with their memory or modify their behavior in any way before you bring them back. James told me he wanted to make sure of this, so he built safeguards into the software to ensure it. Only a user’s most recent unaltered UBS file can be used. When you give it a try, you’ll see what I mean….”

Now I was finally beginning to understand. The enormous user brain scan file that was created each time an ONI user logged in to the OASIS was, in reality, a backup copy of that person’s consciousness. And that copy got updated each time they logged in.

I opened the item description for the Rod of Resurrection on my HUD and it explained the artifact’s powers in more specific detail. The rod allowed me to take any ONI user’s most recent UBS file and use it to create a digital duplicate of that person inside the OASIS, by housing their consciousness inside an OASIS avatar. If that user was still alive, I could create a digital clone of them that would never age or die.