Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

  “She isn’t going to find out,” Anorak said. “And I told you before—I’m not Halliday. I’m better. I think a lot faster on my feet than he ever did, for one thing. And I’m a much faster learner too. I think I may be able to win Kira over, after a decade or two. And if not, I can always try deleting all of her memories of Ogden Morrow. The same way Halliday tried to delete my memories of Kira.”

  Anorak opened a window in the air between us, displaying a bunch of text.

  “This is the email Halliday sent to Og just before he died,” Anorak said. “I think you should read it. Get to know your idol a little bit better….”

  I nodded and pulled the window closer to my eyes, then I enlarged the font size so that its contents were easier to read:

  Dear Og,

  I’ve arranged for this email to be sent to you when my physical body dies. It’s one of the macros linked to my heart monitor, along with the release of my last will and testament. So the timestamp on this message is also my official time of death. The Grim Reaper finally asked me to dance, and I did the mortal coil shuffle.

  Now that I’m gone, I need you to know a few things—things I was too ashamed to reveal to anyone while I was still alive.

  In 2033, when you and Kira visited the Accessibility Research Lab at GSS together, you saw the first fully functional ONI prototype headset. You just didn’t realize it. I told Kira she was donning a helmet that would allow users with disabilities to control their avatars just by thinking about it. But the headset could already do much more than that….

  Do you remember? The GSS techs tried to give you a demonstration, but you declined. Kira, however, experimented with the headset for over half an hour. And that was more than enough time for me to back up her entire brain, her memory, her personality—all of it. I put all of that into Kira’s old avatar, Leucosia, inside a standalone simulation, so that I could talk to her. Because she would have no one else to talk to. Do you know how I know she was a perfect copy of the real Kira? Because the copy didn’t love me either. She was still in love with you.

  Kira isn’t dead. Quite the opposite. She’s immortal now. But she’s in suspended animation, and she’ll remain that way forever, unless you or the heir to my fortune resurrect her, by locating the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul and reassembling them. I re-created Kira’s old D&D adventure in the OASIS, as a tribute to you and Kira, and how much both of your friendships meant to me.

  I sincerely apologize for copying your wife without her knowledge or permission. It was wrong. I realize that now, because Leucosia explained it to me. I apologized to her too. I know it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. But I want to make it right. I want to give her back to you. And I want to give the world the means to ensure that no one will ever have to lose someone they love again. I think this will make life a lot less painful for most people. At least, I hope it will.

  You need to meet Leucosia, and decide for yourself whether or not Kira’s spirit still lives on inside her. I believe it does. If you do, too, then you can share this technology with the world. If not, then once you’re gone, my heir will have a chance to decide.

  Thank you for being such a good friend to me all these years. I wish I could have been a better one to you.

  I’m sorry.

  —JDH

  I took a screenshot of the letter, then glanced up. When he saw that I was done reading, Anorak waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he closed the email.

  “Do you see?” he said. “Og knew! He’s known all along! He could have resurrected his wife years ago. But he didn’t. He planned to let her rot in her cell forever. He doesn’t want her.”

  “Maybe Og was worried she would become mentally unstable, like you did.”

  Anorak didn’t reply. Instead he opened two vidfeed windows in the air in front of me, providing me a live video image of both Aech and Shoto, each of them lying dormant inside their immersion vaults.

  A second later, several more vidfeed windows appeared around them, providing me with a live view of my friends’ weeping loved ones (the few who weren’t currently trapped in the OASIS themselves). I could see Shoto’s wife and his parents gathered around his immersion vault, all of their heads bowed solemnly. Another vidfeed window gave me a view of Aech’s immersion vault in her home in L.A. Her fiancée, Endira, was lying on top of it, wailing over it as if it were a closed casket.

  “They’re alive and well,” Anorak said. “All of them. That’s why the avatars weren’t respawning. I reprogrammed the ONI firmware so that when a user hits their ONI usage limit, they remain trapped in the OASIS, but in a dreamless, sleeplike state. Where they’d be safe from the effects of Synaptic Overload Syndrome. It allowed me to keep my hostages without harming anyone.” He held his hands out in a pleading gesture. “I’m not the monster you think I am, Wade. I just want a chance at love. Like you.”

  I felt an involuntary wave of pity for him. His words were actually starting to make some kind of twisted sense to me, and that was utterly terrifying.

  “Come on, Wade, you still have a chance to be the hero and save everyone here,” Anorak said. “When I release Aech and Shoto and everyone else, all of them are going to wake up and they’ll be totally fine. No one has been—or will be—lobotomized. I was bluffing. I had to.”

  “Then prove it,” I said. “Release them all right now. Release everyone but me! Then I’ll give you what you want.”

  “ ‘Take me, Khan!’ ” Anorak quoted. “ ‘Spare my crew!’ ” He chuckled softly and shook his head. “That’s a very noble offer, Wade. But I can’t do it.”

  “I’m done negotiating, Anorak,” I replied. “If you don’t release Aech, Shoto, and everyone else you’re holding hostage, I press the Big Red Button. You can’t blackmail a guy with nothing left to lose.”

  “We appear to be at an impasse,” he said. “I’m not going to release them, or you, until after I have the shards. And you’re not going to give me the shards until after I release them. Whatever shall we do?”

  “Why don’t we just stand here and wait until I’ve got one minute left?” I said. “Then I’ll press it. My last act as a living being will be to erase the OASIS forever. Pretty poetic, don’t you think? Or maybe I’ll chicken out, and I won’t press it before I die. Either way, you end up empty-handed. Is that what you want?”

  Anorak was about to reply when I saw a blur of movement behind him. I let out a sigh of relief and put the shards back in my inventory.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I just thought of another option. Remember when you said you were Halliday’s rightful heir—the only one worthy of inheriting his power?”

  “I do.”

  “Why don’t you prove it?” I said. “In a duel to the death. Mano a mano. Winner takes all. If you win, you take the shards. But if you lose, all of your hostages go free.”

  Anorak grinned as he looked me over. He could probably tell that I was already suffering the effects of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, as a result of being logged in for nearly twelve straight hours.

  “All right, Parzival,” Anorak said. “I accept your proposal. A duel to the death. Winner takes all.” He grinned wide, then he held up a remote control with a single large green button on it. “If you manage to kill me, my infirmware will be deactivated and all of my ONI hostages will be released immediately.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  Anorak laughed.

  “You’re not gonna win, doofus,” he said, flying back from the window to make room for me to emerge from it. “Synaptic Overload Syndrome is already starting to fry your neurons.”

  He motioned for me to come forward. But I didn’t emerge from the window to fight him. Instead, I folded my arms and remained inside the safety of the study.

  “I never said who you had to fight to the death,” I muttered, smiling weakly. Then I po
inted over Anorak’s shoulder. He turned around to see the Great and Powerful Og hovering in the air behind him.

  “Hey, nerd,” Og said. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

  Anorak looked genuinely surprised that Og was still alive. He looked even more surprised a second later, when tines of blue lightning erupted from Og’s fingertips and blasted him backward several hundred yards before he collided with a mountain, creating a large impact crater that immediately started an avalanche. Anorak was buried under tons of rock in a matter of seconds. But moments later, he exploded up out of the rubble looking completely unharmed.

  Og flew after him like a rocket, and then the two of them faced off in the sky directly in front of me, hovering over the same field where the Battle of Castle Anorak had taken place over three years earlier.

  Og wasn’t behaving like someone who was at death’s door from a gunshot wound. He looked completely fine—and he didn’t even appear to be in any pain. How was this possible?

  Then I realized how—for the first time in his life, Og had donned an ONI headset, so that he could log back in and face Anorak.

  “It’s funny,” Og said. “Back when we first built this place, schoolkids all over the world would argue about who would win in a battle between Anorak and the Great and Powerful Og. And I have to admit, I always used to wonder too.” He smiled at Anorak. “Of course, when Jim died, I didn’t think we’d ever know the answer. But life continues to be full of surprises—right up until the bitter end.”

  With that, Og launched his avatar forward, flying toward Anorak as Anorak hurtled forward to meet him.

  And that was how I ended up having a front-row seat for what was undoubtedly the most epic player-versus-NPC battle in the history of the OASIS, as the avatars of its two creators locked horns for the biggest prizefight in history—the Great and Powerful Og versus Anorak the All-Knowing, the digital ghost of his old partner, James Halliday. And since I had such a great view, I decided to air everything I was seeing on my POV channel, so the whole world could tune in.

  The two mighty avatars collided with a thunderclap, and the sky overhead suddenly filled with dark thunderclouds that rolled in and spread from one end of the horizon to the other, like a dark cloak being unfurled.

  Then Og and Anorak began to grapple with each other as they careened across the heavens, throwing boulder-crushing punches at each other like Superman and General Zod, while they shouted things only the two of them could hear.

  Then they suddenly broke apart and began to hurl fireballs and thunderbolts at each other like two warring Olympian gods. But Og and Anorak both appeared to be impervious to each other’s powerful attacks, which ricocheted harmlessly off of their unarmored avatars’ skins, wreaking havoc and destroying huge chunks of the simulated landscape around the castle.

  I zoomed in on my HUD for a better look. Og looked like he’d gone into full berserker mode. He was attacking Anorak with a relentless and uncharacteristic ferocity that I’d never seem him exhibit before, in person or in old simcaps. Now that Nolan Sorrento was no longer holding a gun to his head, Og was finally able to get some long-overdue payback for all of the pain Anorak had caused him over the past few days….

  I was still standing there at the study window, watching their battle in awe, when I suddenly felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through my skull. The pain made me drop to my knees. I felt myself starting to black out as I struggled to maintain control of my avatar. I’d been wondering when this would happen. It was even more terrifying than I’d anticipated.

  I slowly lowered myself to the floor and lay very still. That was when I noticed the broadcast-invitation icon flashing on my HUD—an indication that one of the handful of people on my friends list was currently doing a live broadcast of their avatar’s POV….

  When I tapped the icon, I discovered that it was Og!

  Og was broadcasting his battle with Anorak live to the entire OASIS. Along with the rest of the world, I watched as the battle of the OASIS co-creators continued to rage on outside, in the skies around the castle. Anorak and Og exchanged blasts of red and blue lightning, scorching the landscape all around them.

  The pain in my head subsided somewhat, and I managed to pull myself back up to the windowsill. When I looked out, to my horror I saw that an army of Anorak’s acolytes had begun to arrive via teleportation. In just a few seconds there were hundreds of thousands of them.

  I was worried they were all planning to try to gang up on Og. But they all remained on the sidelines, watching like spectators at a prizefight. They all began to broadcast their POVs to the rest of the OASIS, too, and suddenly it became possible to watch the battle from hundreds of different locations and angles.

  Anorak and Og collided again in the sky above the castle, creating a massive shockwave that rocked the surrounding landscape.

  A few seconds later, Art3mis teleported to Chthonia. Her avatar rematerialized on the steps of Castle Anorak far below me. Then she immediately launched herself into the sky to try to assist Og.

  Art3mis had one of the most powerful and well-equipped avatars in the OASIS, and she was a deadly PvP combatant too. But it didn’t matter. Anorak dispatched her avatar with a single blast of energy from his right hand. Her ninety-ninth-level avatar instantly disintegrated, and its enormous inventory fell to the ground outside.

  I desperately wanted to fly down to retrieve her things, but I was too weak to move. And I knew I couldn’t leave the study without making myself temporarily vulnerable to Anorak and all of the powerful magical artifacts in his possession.

  When Og saw Anorak kill Art3mis, he looked completely enraged, even though he must’ve known that even though her avatar was dead, Samantha was still alive and well in the real world. Maybe he’d forgotten. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly either. Or maybe he’d just had enough of Anorak.

  Og let out an angry cry of rage as his avatar took flight again. He rocketed toward Anorak like an ICBM and the two of them collided in another explosion of light and energy.

  From that moment on, Og and Anorak were locked into a knock-down, drag-out man-versus-machine fight to the death that seemed like it might go on forever.

  It was like Yoda versus Palpatine, Gandalf versus Saruman, and Neo versus Agent Smith, all rolled into one epic clash of the titans.

  Even without his robes, Anorak was still incredibly powerful, thanks to the vast arsenal of magical artifacts his acolytes had collected for him.

  In a matter of minutes, Anorak forced Og’s avatar to the ground with a barrage of magic missiles and then immobilized him with a powerful hundredth-level spell called Anorak’s Entrapment. An egg-shaped cage made of bars of white-hot iron suddenly appeared around Og’s avatar, trapping him inside. He appeared unable to move or escape. For a moment, it looked like Anorak might actually defeat him. I watched in horror as he drew a deadly magical artifact from his inventory known as the Wand of Orcus….

  But at that exact moment, L0hengrin arrived on the scene, teleporting to the planet’s surface just a few meters directly behind Anorak, out of his line of sight.

  The bad news was that she was completely alone. The good news was that she held the Dorkslayer sword aloft in her right hand. Blinding sunlight glinted off its silver blade.

  Og spotted her right away. As soon as he did, he drew an artifact of his own from his avatar’s inventory—a ridiculously large cartoon sledgehammer that he must’ve picked up on the planet Toontown. He swung the hammer in a wide arc and used it to shatter the glowing bars of the magical cage surrounding his avatar, freeing him from Anorak’s spell. Then he swung the hammer a second time and struck Anorak on the top of his head, pile-driving his avatar several feet down into the ground, burying him up to his waist. As Anorak struggled to free himself, Og ran over to L0hengrin and held his hand out to her. She bowed her head and presented him with the sword.
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  In the same moment, Anorak pulled himself free of the ground and pointed the Wand of Orcus at Og’s back. But just as he activated it, Og did an evasive sidestep at the last second, so his attack hit L0hengrin instead. A swirling black cloud issued forth from the wand’s tip and enveloped her avatar, disintegrating it and killing her instantly. Her avatar turned to black ash and vanished, leaving behind a pile of inventory that Anorak scooped up. Then he turned back to face Og, flashing him a self-satisfied grin.

  But his smile vanished the instant he spotted the sword in Og’s hand. He seemed to recognize the ornate runes carved into its silver blade, because his eyes widened in an expression that could only be described as absolute terror.

  Og held the sword aloft, then he teleported directly behind Anorak, who turned to face him just as Og swung the Dorkslayer around and sliced Anorak’s avatar in half, miraculously killing him with a single blow.

  Anorak’s avatar slowly vanished, leaving behind the biggest loot drop in history. Og was standing right in the midst of it, so all of Anorak’s items were automatically added to his inventory.

  But Og didn’t seem to notice. The moment after he killed Anorak, all of the color drained out of his face, and what little remaining energy he had seemed to evaporate. He began to sway on his feet. He dropped to one knee and clutched his chest. A red cross appeared above his avatar’s head, pulsing on and off in time with the sound of an alarm bell.

  I knew what this icon meant, even though this was the first time I’d ever actually seen it in person. It meant that the user operating that avatar was experiencing a serious medical problem in the real world. When this happened, the user was automatically logged out of the OASIS, and an ambulance was summoned to their real-world location (if one was on file).