To my knowledge, Halliday had never given this place a name. But I thought it needed one, so I’d christened it Monsalvat, after the secluded castle where Sir Parzival finally locates the Holy Grail in some versions of the Arthurian legend.
I’d been living at Monsalvat for over three years now, but most of the house still remained empty and undecorated. It didn’t look that way to me, though, because the AR specs I wore decorated the house for me on the fly as I walked around it. It covered the sprawling mansion’s bare walls with grand tapestries, priceless paintings, and framed movie posters. It filled each of the empty rooms with illusory furniture and elegant décor.
That is, until I instructed my AR system to repurpose all that empty space, just as I was about to do now, for my morning run.
“Load Temple of Doom,” I said as I reached the bottom of the grand staircase.
The empty foyer and dimly lit hallways of the mansion were instantly transformed into a vast subterranean labyrinth of caverns and corridors. And when I glanced down at myself, the workout clothes I’d been wearing had been replaced with a perfectly rendered Indiana Jones costume, complete with a worn leather jacket, a bull-whip on my right hip, and a battered fedora.
Indy’s theme music began to play as I jogged down the corridor, and a variety of obstacles and enemies started to appear in front of me, forcing me to either dodge them or attack them with my imaginary whip. I earned points for every obstacle I avoided and for every enemy I vanquished. I could also earn bonus points for keeping my heart rate up, and for freeing the captive children being used as slave labor in the temple from their holding cells, which were scattered along my path. I ran a total of five miles like this, sprinting from one end of my house to the other and back again. And I managed to beat my previous high score.
I ended the game program and took off my AR goggles, then I toweled off and drank some water before heading to my workout room. On the way there, I stopped by the garage to admire my car collection. Of all my daily rituals, it was the one that never failed to make me smile.
The estate’s enormous garage now contained four classic movie car replicas—the same four movie cars that had inspired my avatar’s OASIS mash-up vehicle, ECTO-88. I owned screen-accurate replicas of Doc Brown’s 1982 DeLorean DMC-12 time machine (pre–hover conversion); the Ghostbusters’ 1959 Cadillac hearse Ectomobile, Ecto-1; the black 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am Knight Industries 2000, KITT (with Super-Pursuit Mode); and finally, sitting down at the far end, a replica of Dr. Buckaroo Banzai’s matter-penetrating Jet Car, built from a heavily modified 1982 Ford F-series pickup truck, with air scoops from a DC-3 transport plane bolted onto its frame, along with a World War II German fighter plane cockpit, a turbine-powered jet engine, and parachute packs for rapid deceleration.
I had never driven any of these cars. I just came out to the garage to admire them. Sometimes I sat inside them with all of the screens and control panels lit up while I listened to old movie soundtracks and brainstormed ideas for the next chapter in my ongoing ECTO-88 film series—a project I’d started working on after my therapist suggested that I might benefit from having a creative outlet.
GSS already owned the media companies that owned the movie studios that held the rights to Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Knight Rider, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and by paying hefty licensing fees to the estates of Christopher Lloyd, David Hasselhoff, Peter Weller, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, I was able to cast computer-generated FActors (facsimile actors) of each of them in my film. They were basically nonplayer characters with just enough artificial intelligence to take verbal directions after I placed them on my virtual movie sets inside GSS’s popular Cinemaster movie-creation software.
This allowed me to finally bring my longstanding fanboy dream to life: an epic cross-over film about Dr. Emmett Brown and Dr. Buckaroo Banzai teaming up with Knight Industries to create a unique interdimensional time vehicle for the Ghostbusters, who must use it to save all ten known dimensions from a fourfold cross-rip that could tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum.
I’d already written, produced, and directed two ECTO-88 films. They’d both done pretty well by today’s standards—getting people to pay for or sit through a movie was tough these days, with the reams of inexpensive ONI-net options out there—but the films didn’t make enough to cover my runaway production costs and all those special-effects sequences. I didn’t care what my homemade movies grossed, of course. All that mattered was the fulfillment I got out of making them, watching them, and letting other fans experience them. Now I was working on ECTO-88 Part III—the last chapter of my supremely nerdy trilogy.
I went over and said hello to KITT, and he wished me a good morning. Then Max appeared on one of his cockpit screens, and complimented KITT on his new onboard hard drive. KITT thanked him and the two of them began to discuss the hard drive’s specs, like two gearheads obsessing about engines. And they kept at it, even after I walked out of the garage.
Next it was time for weight training, in the spare dining room I’d converted into a personal gym. Max occasionally offered words of encouragement as I pumped iron, with some snarky commentary mixed in. He made for a pretty good personal trainer. But after a few minutes I muted him to watch another Peter Davison–era episode of Doctor Who. It had been one of Kira Morrow’s favorite shows, and Davison had been her third-favorite Doctor, after Jodie Whittaker and David Tennant.
Research, I reminded myself. You have to keep up with your research.
But I couldn’t seem to focus on the episode. All I could think about was the quarterly GSS co-owners meeting scheduled for later that day, because it meant I would be seeing Samantha for the first time since our last meeting, three months ago.
Actually, our meetings were held in the OASIS, so I would only be seeing her avatar. But that didn’t really lessen my anxiety. Samantha and I first met online. We got to know each other through our OASIS avatars long before we met in the real world.
* * *
Samantha Evelyn Cook and I met in person for the first time at Ogden Morrow’s home in the mountains of Oregon, right after she’d helped me win Halliday’s contest.
Aech and Shoto were there, too, and we all spent the next seven days as Og’s honored guests, getting to know one another in person. After everything the four of us had been through together inside the OASIS, we already shared a strong bond. But the time we spent together in the real world that week transformed us into a family—albeit a highly dysfunctional one.
That was also the week Samantha and I fell in love.
Before we met in the Earl, I’d already convinced myself that I’d fallen in love with her inside the OASIS. And in my own naïve, adolescent way maybe I had. But when the two of us finally began to spend time together in reality, I fell in love with her all over again. And I fell much harder, much faster the second time, because our connection was now physical as well as psychological, the way nature originally intended.
And this time, she fell in love with me too.
Right before she kissed me for the first time, she told me I was her best friend, and her favorite person. So I think she’d already started to fall in love with me inside the OASIS too. But unlike me, she’d been smart enough not to trust or act on those feelings until the filter of our avatars had been removed and we finally met in reality.
“You can’t know if you’re in love with someone if you’ve never actually touched them,” she told me. And as usual, she was right. Once she and I started touching each other, we both found it difficult to stop.
We lost our virginity to each other three days after that first kiss. Then we spent the rest of that week sneaking off to make the beast with two backs at every opportunity. Like Depeche Mode, we just couldn’t get enough.
Og’s estate was designed to resemble Rivendell from the Lord of the Rings films and, like its fictional counterpa
rt, it was nestled in a deep valley, so the acoustics of the place caused loud sounds to carry a long distance and echo off the adjacent mountain walls. But our friends and our host generously pretended not to hear all of the noise we must have made.
I’d never experienced such dizzying happiness and euphoria. And I’d never felt so desired and so loved. When she put her arms around me, I never wanted her to let go.
One night, we decided that “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls was our song, and then we listened to it over and over again, for hours, while we talked or made love. Now I couldn’t stand to hear that song anymore. I had it filtered out in my OASIS settings, to ensure that I never heard it again.
Aech, Shoto, Samantha, and I also spent that week answering an endless barrage of questions from the media, giving statements to various law-enforcement officials, and signing a mountain of paperwork for the lawyers managing Halliday’s estate, who were now tasked with dividing it equally among the four of us.
We all grew extremely fond of Ogden Morrow during our brief stay at his home. He was the father figure none of us had ever had, and we were all so grateful for his help during and after the contest that we decided to make him an honorary member of the High Five. He graciously accepted. (And since there were now only four of us, Og’s induction into the High Five also prevented our nickname from becoming a misnomer.)
We also invited Og to return to Gregarious Simulation Systems as our chief adviser. After all, he was the company’s co-founder, and the only one of us with any experience running it. But Og declined our offer, saying he had no desire to come out of retirement. Though he did still promise to give us advice, whenever we felt like asking for it.
The morning we finally left Og’s estate and went our separate ways, he walked down to his private runway to bid us all farewell. He gave each of us one of his bear hugs, promising to stay in touch via the OASIS.
“Everything will be fine,” he assured us. “You’re all going to do a fantastic job!”
At the time, we had plenty of reasons to doubt his prediction. But we all acted as though we believed him, and that his faith in us was justified.
“Our future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades!” Aech declared as she slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans and boarded her jet, bound for her ancestral homeland.
When Samantha and I kissed each other goodbye on the runway that morning, I never would have imagined it would be our last kiss. But I discovered the OASIS Neural Interface headset the very next day, and everything changed.
I knew Samantha might be upset with me for testing the ONI before discussing it with her first. But since it had worked flawlessly and I wasn’t harmed in any way, I assumed she would forgive my risky behavior. Instead she got so pissed off she hung up on me before I even had a chance to finish describing all of the different things I’d experienced with the ONI—and the ones I had chosen not to experience.
Aech and Shoto reacted to my news far more enthusiastically. They both dropped everything and flew to Columbus to try the ONI out for themselves. And when they did, they were just as blown away by the experience as I had been. It was transcendental technology. The OASIS Neural Interface was the ultimate prosthesis. One that could temporarily cure any ailment or injury of the human body by disconnecting the mind and reconnecting it to a new, perfectly healthy, fully functional body inside the OASIS—a simulated body that would never feel any pain, through which you could experience every pleasure imaginable. The three of us talked ourselves into a frenzy, listing all the ways this device was going to change everything.
But when Samantha finally arrived on the scene, things began to go drastically downhill.
I still remember every word of our exchange that day, because I’d brazenly recorded it with an ONI headset while it was happening. In the three years since, I’d relived our conversation on an almost weekly basis. To me, it felt like our breakup had just happened a few days ago. Because for me, it had.
“Take that stupid thing off!” Samantha says, glancing up at the ONI headset I’m wearing. The original headset I found in Halliday’s vault lies on the conference table between us, along with three duplicates, fresh from the 3-D printer.
“No,” I say angrily. “I want to record how ridiculous you’re being right now, so you can play it back later and see for yourself.”
Aech and Shoto are sitting between us, on either side of the conference table, swiveling their heads back and forth like they’re watching a tennis match. Shoto is hearing our conversation with a slight delay, through the Mandarax translator earpiece he’s wearing.
“I told you,” Samantha says, snatching one of the headsets off the table, “I am never going to let one of these things take control of my brain. Not ever.”
She hurls the headset against the wall, but it doesn’t break. They’re very durable.
“How can you form an educated opinion when you haven’t even tried it?” Aech asks quietly.
“I’ve never tried sniffing paint thinner either,” Samantha snaps back. She sighs in frustration and runs her hands through her hair. “I don’t know why I can’t make you guys understand. This is the last thing humanity needs. Can’t you see that? The world is a complete mess right now….”
She pulls up half a dozen different world newsfeeds on the conference-room viewscreen, filling it with images of poverty, famine, disease, war, and a wide array of natural disasters. Even with the audio muted, the barrage of images was pretty horrific.
“Half the world already spends every waking moment ignoring reality inside the OASIS. We already peddle the Opiate of the Masses. And now you want to up the dosage?”
I roll my eyes and shake my head. I can feel my adrenaline rising.
“That’s total bullshit, Arty, and you know it,” I say. “We could turn off the OASIS tomorrow, and it wouldn’t solve any of humanity’s problems. It would just rob people of the only escape they have. I mean, I get where you’re coming from—and I agree that everyone should balance their time in the OASIS with equal time in reality. But it’s not our place to mandate how our users live their lives. Growing up in the stacks would have been hell for me if I hadn’t had access to the OASIS. It literally saved my life. And I’ve heard Aech say the same thing.”
We both glance over at Aech. She nods in agreement.
“We weren’t all lucky enough to grow up in some ritzy Vancouver suburb like you, Samantha,” I say. “Who are you to judge how other people deal with reality?”
Samantha clenches her jaw and narrows her eyes at me, but she still doesn’t reply. And I apparently take this as my cue to shove my foot even further into my mouth. All the way, in fact.
“ONI technology is also going to save hundreds of millions of lives,” I say self-righteously. “By preventing the spread of all sorts of infectious diseases—like the flu pandemic that killed both of your parents.” Now it’s my turn to level a finger at her. “How can you be against an invention that could’ve prevented their deaths?”
She snaps her head around and looks at me in wounded surprise, like I’ve just slapped her across the face. Then her gaze hardens and that’s it—the exact instant her love for me disappears. I’m too amped up on adrenaline to notice it there in the moment, but I spot it plain as day on every single one of my repeat viewings. The sudden change in her eyes says it all. One second she loves me, and the next she loves me not.
She never responds to my question. She just stares daggers at me in silence, until Shoto finally chimes in.
“We’re going to make trillions of dollars selling these headsets, Arty,” he says calmly. “We can use that money to help the world. To try and fix all of the things that need fixing.”
Samantha shakes her head. “No amount of money will be able to undo the damage these headsets are going to cause,” she replies, sounding defeated now. “You guys read Og’s email. He thinks releasin
g the ONI is a bad idea too.”
“Og hasn’t even tried the ONI,” I say, letting too much anger creep into my voice. “He’s like you. Condemning it without even trying to understand its potential.”
“Of course I understand its potential, you idiot!” Samantha shouts. She looks around the table. “Christ! Haven’t any of you rewatched The Matrix lately? Or Sword Art Online? Plugging your brain and your nervous system directly into a computer simulation is never a good idea! We’re talking about giving complete control of our minds to a machine. Turning ourselves into cyborgs…”
“Come on,” Aech says. “You’re overreacting—”
“No!” she shouts back. “I’m not.” Then she takes a deep breath before glancing around the table at all three of us. “Don’t you see? This is why Halliday never released the ONI technology himself. He knew it would only hasten the collapse of human civilization, by encouraging people to spend even more time escaping from reality. He didn’t want to be the one responsible for opening Pandora’s box.” She looks at me, and now her eyes are filling with tears. “I thought you wanted to live here. In the real world. With me. But you haven’t learned a goddamn thing, have you?”
She reaches over and brings her fist down on the power button of the data drive connected to my ONI headset, ending my recording.
* * *
When we held an official vote on the matter, Aech, Shoto, and I voted to patent the ONI headset and release it to the world, with Samantha being the lone voice of dissent.
She couldn’t forgive me. She told me so right after I cast my vote against her. Right before she dumped me.
“We can’t be together anymore, Wade,” she said evenly, her voice suddenly devoid of emotion. “Not when we disagree on something so basic. And so important. Your actions today will have disastrous consequences. I’m sorry you can’t see that.”
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