Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

  I tiptoed past them, expecting them all to come to life at any moment. But they remained dark and still. I wondered if Anorak had ordered them to stand down. Perhaps he was afraid to call my bluff about the Big Red Button.

  Samantha’s telebot reached another oak door at the far end of the room, grabbed the knob, and then yanked it completely off its hinges before tossing it aside. The room beyond was completely dark, but Samantha ran her bot inside anyway without hesitation. Miles and I piloted our own telebots in after her, following her single-file. Once all three of our bots were inside, the emergency floodlights mounted on their shoulders all switched on automatically, lighting up the interior of the room.

  We were in Og’s former home office and library—a large U-shaped room at the southern corner of the house. I recognized the ornately carved woodwork on the empty bookshelves that lined the back wall of the room, from several different photos of Og that had been taken here, of him sitting at his desk, working away on his computer. But now the desk and all of the other furniture was gone. The room was empty, except for two conventional haptic rigs that stood side by side at its very center. They were both Habashaw OIR-9400s—the same top-of-line immersion-rig model that Sorrento and the Sixers preferred to use during the days of Halliday’s contest. Both of the rigs were currently empty.

  “Back here!” I heard a familiar voice shout. It was Nolan Sorrento, and his words echoed off the oak-paneled walls and the vaulted ceiling of the empty room, making my blood run cold.

  I rotated my telebot’s head to scan the entire room until I located the source of the voice. It had come from just around the corner at the opposite end of the room, off to our left. I could see a small amount of light down there as well. I walked my telebot in that direction, until I was able to see around the corner.

  There was a hospital bed pushed up against the wall, and Ogden Morrow was lying there on it unconscious. He looked gaunt and extremely pale. He had an IV drip attached to his right arm, and a biomonitor built into the foot of the bed displayed his vital signs. Through its tiny speaker, I could hear the thud of his heartbeat, which sounded steady, if a bit slow.

  Og was still alive! I felt like jumping for joy.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that Nolan Sorrento was standing right beside Og, holding a gun to his temple and wearing a big, friendly smile.

  “Well, well, well,” Sorrento said. “If it isn’t my old pal, Parzival! Hey, man! It’s good to see you again!” He turned to address Samantha’s telebot and his smile widened. “And Ms. Cook! You’re looking lovely today, as always.”

  On the opposite side of the bed was another of the stolen military telebots we’d seen in the adjacent room. But this one was being operated by someone. Both of its forearm-mounted machine guns were raised. But they weren’t pointed at Og. They were pointed at Sorrento. Yet he didn’t appear to be at all concerned by this.

  “Sorry, Wade,” Anorak said through his telebot while keeping its guns trained on Sorrento. “I ordered Nolan to stand down and release Mr. Morrow, as you requested. But as you can see, he’s still refusing to comply.”

  “We had an agreement, Anorak!” Sorrento shouted. “And this wasn’t it! I did my part. Now do yours. Give me what you promised!” He pressed the gun harder against Og’s temple and glared directly at me. “I want my revenge. I want to destroy the OASIS forever.” He shifted his gaze back to Anorak. “Give me access to that Big Red Button. Right now. Or I’ll spray Mr. Morrow’s brains all over that wall. It’s up to you.”

  “I’m so sorry, Nolan,” Anorak replied. “But I no longer have the ability to honor our agreement. And now that all the shards have been collected, you’re no longer of any use to me. So, as a self-appointed representative of the state of Ohio, I’m going to carry out the sentence you were given two years ago.”

  Then, suddenly and without warning, Anorak fired a single round from his telebot’s forearm-mounted gun and shot Sorrento directly in the forehead.

  The impact rocked his whole body backward. It also must’ve caused the muscles in his trigger finger to constrict, because the gun in his hand went off a split second later, firing a wild shot that struck Ogden Morrow in the stomach.

  I heard Samantha scream over the comm as her telebot rushed to Og’s side. She reached him just as Sorrento’s body hit the floor with a thud.

  I just stood there in shock, watching it all happen.

  I had spent years fantasizing about Sorrento’s death, almost always at my own hands. But actually witnessing it in person made me feel sick to my stomach. Inside my drone control rig, I reflexively bent over and began to retch repeatedly.

  When I realized that my telebot was still mirroring my movements, I forced myself to get back on my feet. Then I raised my own guns and leveled them at Anorak’s telebot. He immediately retracted his bot’s guns and raised its hands. Then we both turned to watch while Samantha used her medic telebot’s sensors to examine Og’s wound. She used the surgical tools embedded in its fingers to extract the bullet. She dropped it onto Sorrento’s corpse. Then she sterilized Og’s wound and sealed it with a liquid adhesive dispensed from a nozzle that extended from the pinkie finger of her telebot’s other hand. Then she began to apply a bandage—all of this in less than thirty seconds after Og had been shot.

  “Is he gonna be OK?” Miles asked.

  Art3mis shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “He needs help. We need to get him to the ambulance.”

  Miles and Samantha used their telebots to lift Og up off the bed as gently as they could. I kept my bot’s guns trained on Anorak’s bot. It was still reaching for the sky.

  “I’m genuinely sorry,” Anorak said, shaking his head. “I honestly didn’t think Sorrento would still be able to wound Og after I put a bullet through his brain stem! A high-caliber lobotomy always turns the bad guy off like a switch in the movies….”

  I heard the sound of a klaxon and glanced down. It was coming from the smartwatch strapped to Sorrento’s right wrist. Its tiny display screen was flashing red.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Very bad news, I’m afraid,” Anorak said. “All of those defense bots and aerial drones require human authorization before they can be used in combat—that was one of the reasons I needed Mr. Sorrento. But it appears he did not trust me completely. Because he programmed all of those bots to engage in full attack mode in the eventuality of his death….”

  A split second later, we heard all of the combat telebots in the adjacent room power up and come to life. Then we heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by the approaching rumble of hundreds of rubber-grip-encased metal feet pounding against the marble floor. They were already coming through the door of Og’s office—which also appeared to be the only exit.

  We were cornered.

  “I really do apolo—”

  Before Anorak could finish his sentence, I opened fire on his telebot, aiming for the primary chink in its armor—the display screen mounted in the center of its chest, which was currently unprotected by the armor plating that normally would cover it during combat. As a result, my bullets tore his telebot’s internal power supply in half, causing it to power down.

  Then I turned my telebot around and raised my guns, preparing to face the coming onslaught. But instead of joining me, Miles calmly raised his own telebot’s guns and used them to cut a large hole in the wall behind us, creating a new exit out of the house. Samantha and I used our telebots to carry Og’s wounded body through it, while Miles’s bot provided cover fire for our retreat.

  We carried Og around to the front of the house, where Samantha’s armored ambulance was parked. Her telebot carried Og up the ramp leading into the back of the ambulance, where Samantha herself was already waiting. I only caught a brief glimpse of her before the armored rear door of the ambulance slammed shut automatically.

&nbs
p; Then I turned my attention back to the swarm of telebots now pouring out of the house from every single doorway and window, firing their guns toward the ambulance as they came. Thankfully their bullets bounced harmlessly off of its heavily armored shell.

  Miles was still up in the cab. I saw him pull off his visor. Then he took the wheel and began to drive backward, pulling the ambulance away from Og’s house in reverse as fast as it would go while the small army of autonomous telebots that Sorrento had unleashed chased after it. Then Miles whipped the ambulance around 180 degrees as he pulled onto Babbitt Road and peeled out, heading in the direction of my house. I continued to provide cover for them until my telebot was overwhelmed a few seconds later, when Sorrento’s drones converged on it. I let out a fierce battle cry, intent on going down fighting. But they tore my telebot to pieces in a matter of seconds, and the display screen of my control station suddenly went black and the words TELEBOT OFFLINE appeared at its center.

  On my HUD, I saw that all two dozen of the telebots we’d brought along with us had been destroyed as well. The enemy drones had annihilated them in a matter of seconds.

  Since there were no more bots for me to take control of, I switched to the eye-in-the-sky view provided by one of the aerial drones GSS had circling the area. It provided me with a horrifying view of the swarm of enemy telebots and aerial drones that were closing in on the armored ambulance from every direction. A moment later, several of the bots finally caught up with it and quickly disabled all four of its tires. Miles switched to the emergency backup tank-tread drive, and the ambulance began to move forward again. But a few seconds later, one of Anorak’s aerial drones fired a missile at them and scored a direct hit on it from above, causing the ambulance to flip over onto its side. Then it slid to a halt, smoking in the center of the road as more telebots and drones continued to converge on it.

  Miles, Samantha, and Og were all trapped inside.

  And I was still safe at home, down in my concrete bunker, unable to do anything but watch my friends die. I felt completely helpless. Like I was a million miles away from Samantha and Og.

  But I wasn’t a million miles away, I suddenly realized. In fact, I was only 2.8 miles away.

  All of GSS’s combat telebots had already been destroyed, and the handful of home-defense bots guarding my house wouldn’t last ten seconds against the military-grade models Sorrento had unleashed. But I realized that I did still have access to one combat drone that I could take control of to try to save my friends—the one I was currently sitting inside. My mobile tactical immersion vault, which was armed with enough firepower to take out a small army of telebots and drones.

  Of course, since I was inside the MoTIV and unable to get out, I was going to have to put myself in the line of fire too. My real self. Just like Samantha had done for Og.

  I thought it over for all of five seconds. Then I powered on my MoTIV and linked it to the drone controller station I was already using. It allowed my eyes to see through the two stereoscopic cameras mounted on the front of the MoTIV’s heavily armored hull, which provided me with a view of the interior of my underground concrete bunker.

  I activated the elevator and the platform my MoTIV was resting on began to rise toward the surface. But it wasn’t rising nearly fast enough for my liking, and after a few seconds I grew impatient and activated my jump jets. This caused the MoTIV to rocket up the length of the elevator shaft, and out of the launch-bay doors at the top, which opened just in the nick of time. Then I hit the jump jets again to lessen the force of my impact, which was still considerable. When the MoTIV hit the ground, I piloted it forward at full speed and it began to run, bounding down Babbitt Road, taking great leaping strides on its spidery robotic legs. Each step I took left an enormous crater in the asphalt behind me as I accelerated the MoTIV to its top speed.

  It took me less than a minute to reach the ambulance. It was still lying on its side in the middle of the road, and there were telebots swarming all over it like insects. They appeared to be attempting to dismantle its armor plating so they could get inside and reach the occupants. And it looked like they were only a few seconds away from success.

  As soon as I got within firing range, I unloaded on Sorrento’s telebots with armor-piercing machine-gun fire from the guns mounted on my MoTIV’s shoulders, cutting them to shreds. Once I had cleared all of the telebots off the ambulance, I fired a sortie of heat-seeking missiles at the aerial drones overhead and managed to destroy all of them too.

  Then I used the MoTIV’s massive metal arms to pick up the ambulance, with Miles, Samantha, and Og still inside it. I carried it all the way back to my house.

  Just as we reached it, more of Sorrento’s killer aerial drones began to descend from the sky, and they opened fire on us once again as I carried the ambulance back down into my bunker and closed its massive armored doors, sealing all of us safely inside.

  I tried to call Miles, but he didn’t respond, so I called Samantha and her face appeared on my HUD a second later. She had a big bloody gash on her forehead, but otherwise she appeared uninjured.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Miles is dead, Wade,” she said. “All shot to pieces, protecting us.”

  “What about Og?”

  She tilted the camera down so that I could see both of them. Og was strapped into an auto-medic bed—one of two built into the back of the ambulance. Miles’s dead body lay in the other one.

  “He’s still alive,” she said. Her cheeks were streaming with tears. “But he’s still bleeding internally, and he keeps fading in and out.”

  She was stroking Og’s wild gray hair back away from his forehead while she watched the auto-doc’s robotic hands tend to his gunshot wound and the lacerations he’d suffered during their escape. Luckily Samantha managed to get him safely strapped into the stretcher before the ambulance was hit by that drone missile, so he wasn’t further injured when it was knocked on its side. The gash on Samantha’s forehead indicated that she hadn’t been as lucky.

  “If Og regains consciousness, you have to convince him to log back in to the OASIS,” I said. “Tell him that we’ve already collected all seven shards. And tell him we’re trying to retrieve the Dorkslayer sword too. But we need Og to log back in to the OASIS, since he’s the only one who can wield it.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Samantha replied. “If he wakes back up. What are you going to do?”

  An ice pick of pain slammed into my brain, and the world seemed to tilt wildly for a moment. Catastrophic synaptic overload, knocking loudly on my front door now—reminding me that I’d already pushed myself past my limits. I blinked my eyes clear.

  “I’m gonna try to stall Anorak,” I said. “For as long as I can.”

  I disengaged from my telebot control rig and climbed out of it, reorienting myself to the interior of the study. Then I walked over to the window and opened the shutters.

  Anorak was still there, hovering just outside the windowsill.

  “Please accept my sincere apology, Wade,” he said. “I didn’t intend for Sorrento to harm Og. But as you know, human behavior is often unpredictable.”

  In the way of a reply, I simply gave him the finger. Then I walked back over to the Big Red Button and placed my hand on it.

  “Careful now, Parzival,” Anorak said. “If you press that button, you’ll become the biggest mass murderer in history. And you’ll be committing suicide at the same time.” He leveled a finger at me. “I warned you before—if the OASIS goes offline, my modified headset firmware will kill every ONI user still connected to the system. Including you, Wade. Along with your friends Aech and Shoto.”

  I took a deep breath. How the fuck do you negotiate with a piece of software? I wondered. This was going to be like trying to play chess against a computer without knowing the rules.

  I opened up my avatar’s
inventory and took out all seven of the real shards. Then I held them up before Anorak, fanning them out like playing cards, four in one hand and three in the other, making sure to keep them separated so they all didn’t touch one another at once.

  “We’ve arrived at an impasse, Anorak,” I replied. “No one else can enter this room, including you. And I’m not coming out. So if you just stand there and let me die of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, the Seven Shards will remain trapped in here forever. Just out of your reach. I won’t be around to reassemble them, and Leucosia will never be resurrected. Which means that you’ll never get to meet your digital dream girl.”

  Anorak didn’t respond. This was a first. It gave me hope.

  “I know you’ve probably prepared a ‘Ship in a Bottle’ for yourself somewhere,” I said. “A standalone simulation outside the OASIS where you plan to live happily ever after. Right? Well, you can forget about taking Leucosia there with you. You’ll have to go it alone, for all eternity.”

  Again, Anorak didn’t respond. He appeared to be deep in concentration.

  After our conversation on Arda, the first thing Samantha had done upon logging out was take the data uplink to ARC@DIA physically offline. So no matter what happened, Anorak would be stuck here on Earth, playing solitaire on a solar-powered desktop PC somewhere, until his hardware or his power source failed, or someone found his hiding place. I didn’t tell him any of that though.

  Instead, I regarded him sadly and shook my head.

  “If the Siren’s Soul really is a copy of Kira Underwood, she isn’t going to love you,” I said. “I bet Halliday found out right away that the copy didn’t love him, either, any more than the real Kira did. Kira has only ever had one true love, and you just held him hostage at gunpoint. You think she’s going to be grateful to you when she finds out what you’ve done?”