Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

  A second later, Og’s avatar froze in place. Then it slowly vanished.

  * * *

  Anorak turned out to be an AI of his word after all. When he died, his infirmware shut down, and the ONI overrides took over. His hostages around the world were released and logged out, and everyone woke up all at once, all around the globe.

  I experienced two or three seconds of fleeting consciousness—just enough time to open my eyes, see the canopy of my immersion vault crack open, and feel the cool air outside hit my face. Then, due to the effects of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, and my complete physical and mental exhaustion, I immediately passed out and lost consciousness again.

  Then I was dead to the world.

  * * *

  I didn’t wake up again until the following day, a little over fifteen hours later. I was in a hospital bed in the private infirmary on the GSS Building’s tenth floor. I recognized the view. Faisal was sitting by the window, in the flesh, smiling at me. He looked to be in perfect health. I shifted my eyes to the right and saw Aech and Shoto smiling at me from vidfeed windows on a monitor mounted above my bed. They were teleconferencing in from their own recovery beds, which were in their own homes. They both looked fine too—alive, healthy, and enormously happy. They had emerged from their immersion vaults in perfect health, without any lingering signs of SOS.

  I realized someone was holding my left hand. I turned to see who it was and saw Samantha sitting there beside my bed. When she saw that I was awake, she squeezed my hand tightly.

  “Hey there, Sleeping Beauty,” she said, just before she planted a kiss on me.

  “Hey there, Prince Charming,” I replied once the kiss was finally over.

  I sat up in bed and looked around at all of my friends uncertainly. Then I asked them what happened. And they told me.

  For reasons I’m still not sure I understand, Anorak had told the truth. He’d programmed his hacked ONI firmware to suspend all headset activity once a user hit their usage limit, but to keep them logged in. This prevented all of his hostages from suffering the effects of Synaptic Overload Syndrome. Everyone had been released from their ONI headsets unharmed.

  Unfortunately, the same could not be said for Og.

  Samantha told me that he succumbed to his injuries just a few seconds after he killed Anorak inside the OASIS. It was like he’d summoned all of his strength to hold on just long enough to do what needed to be done.

  “Og was too weak to operate his avatar with a conventional OASIS rig,” Samantha said. “So he told me to put an ONI headset on him. That was how he was able to fight Anorak.”

  I’d already assumed this was what had happened. But hearing her confirm it, I was suddenly struck by a wave of grief. I felt my throat constricting. I couldn’t breathe. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. I was on the verge of breaking down into a gibbering, blubbering mess.

  “Wade, listen,” Samantha said. “There’s more. Og gave me a message to pass along to you. But I’m not sure he was making sense….He told me to tell you he was wrong. Leaving Kira locked away forever wasn’t his choice to make. It should be her decision. He said you should bring her back and let her decide what she wants. And, if she thinks it’s a good idea, bring him back too.” She shrugged. “Do you know what he meant by any of that?”

  The shards. They were still sitting in my avatar’s inventory. All seven of them. Waiting to be recombined into the Siren’s Soul.

  I suddenly recalled something L0hengrin had told me—something she’d read in Kira’s module notebook….

  The party has to collect all seven of the shards and reassemble them into the Siren’s Soul, she’d said. Only then can they free Leucosia from suspended animation. Once they do, she presents them with their reward. A powerful artifact with the power to resurrect the dead, and make them immortal in the process…

  Of course, that was just teenage Kira’s imagination running rampant. There was no such thing as immortality. Was there?

  My thoughts suddenly racing, I yanked the IV needle out of my arm and tossed it aside. Then I jumped up out of bed and began to put on my clothes.

  “Hey!” Aech said. “What do you think you’re doing? You need to stay in bed.”

  “I need to log back in,” I said. “There’s one more thing we have to do.”

  “Are you joking?” Samantha said. “You just escaped from the OASIS with your life, and you’re already dying to log back in?”

  “Please, Samantha,” I said. “There’s something I need you to see with me.”

  She studied me for a moment. Then she gave me a silent nod and walked out of the room. I followed her out of the infirmary and down the hall, to an OASIS immersion bay that contained half a dozen haptic rigs used for physical therapy and rehabilitation. Samantha walked over to one of these rigs and climbed into it.

  “Meet me at the Shrine to Leucosia,” I said, climbing into the rig next to hers.

  “OK, but Anorak killed my avatar, remember?” she said. “It’ll take me a minute to create a new one.”

  “You won’t have to,” I replied. “I stole my robes back from Anorak, remember? I can resurrect you! Just give me a minute before you log in.”

  She nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. She was still in shock from losing Og. I think I may have been too. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, that’s for sure.

  I finished strapping myself into the haptic rig, then I put on a visor and pulled on a pair of haptic gloves. Then I logged back in to the OASIS for the very last time, to reassemble the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul.

  As soon as I finished logging back in, I pulled up my HUD and used its superuser interface to resurrect Art3mis’s slain avatar. Then I did the same for Aech and Shoto. I also resurrected L0hengrin and the other members of the L0w Five, who had all been slain during their quest to retrieve the Dorkslayer.

  The next time Lo and her friends logged back in, they would discover that their slain avatars had been restored to life, along with their inventories. They would also find their inboxes filled with offers to buy the film rights to their story. By the end of the week, there would be several Quest for the Dorkslayer movie and TV projects in development.

  After I finished bringing their avatars back to life, I texted Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto the coordinates for the Shrine of Leucosia, high in the Xyxarian Mountains. Then I teleported my avatar to those same coordinates.

  An instant later, I reappeared on the platform atop the highest peak of the Xyxarian Mountains. I was standing before the stone altar at its base. I stepped up to it, and then, one by one, I removed the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul from my inventory and laid them on the altar side by side. These weren’t the counterfeits I’d used to fool Anorak, here in this very same place. No, these seven shards were the real deal….

  I saw a flash of light and heard the sound of someone arriving via teleportation. I turned around just in time to see Art3mis’s newly resurrected avatar rematerialize directly in front of me, in the same spot where my own avatar had arrived.

  She walked over to join me, and then we both turned to gaze down at the seven multifaceted jewels spread out on the altar before us, each one glowing with its own internal blue light.

  “ ‘Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul,’ ” I recited. “ ‘On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role.’ ”

  “ ‘For each fragment my heir must pay a toll,’ ” Art3mis continued, “ ‘To once again make the Siren whole…’ ”

  Our eyes met and we nodded in silent agreement. And then together, we reached out with all four of our hands and pressed the Seven Shards together….

  I felt the shards flip and lock themselves together like powerful magnets as each piece snapped perfectly into place. Then there was a flash of blinding white light, and I suddenly felt as if both of my hands were repelled and thrown backward,
as if some sort of invisible force field had appeared around the recombined shards. I saw the same thing happen to Art3mis. Then we both stumbled backward several steps, momentarily blinded. When our vision recovered, we saw that the Seven Shards had coalesced into a single glittering blue jewel that was now spinning rapidly in the air a few feet in front of us.

  As we continued to watch, it began to grow and transform, until it had morphed into a familiar human form—that of a beautiful young woman in her mid-twenties. Kira Underwood. And she was dressed in the dark-blue-and-white robes of her OASIS avatar, Leucosia. The ornate L-shaped character symbol was embroidered on each of her avatar’s sleeves in silver thread.

  She opened her eyes and looked down at herself in wonderment, placing both of her hands on her cheeks to feel her own face. Then she wrapped her arms around her body and hugged herself. The sensation appeared to make her laugh out loud. Then she dropped her arms and turned around slowly, taking in the whole scene, until her eyes finally came to rest on me and Art3mis.

  She looked pleased to see us. But she also looked slightly disappointed to discover that her husband’s avatar, Og, wasn’t the one who had revived her.

  “My name is Parzival,” I said. “And this is Art3mis.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you both,” she said, with Kira Morrow’s voice. “My name is Leucosia. Thank you for bringing me back. I wasn’t sure anyone ever would.”

  “You’re a copy of Kira Morrow’s consciousness,” I said. It wasn’t a question. “The copy Halliday made without her knowledge, during her visit to the Accessibility Lab. In that flashback I experienced when I collected the final shard.”

  Leucosia nodded.

  “I know you both must have a lot of questions for me,” Kira said. “But first, I need to ask one of my own. Where is my husband? Is he still alive?”

  I glanced over at Art3mis for emotional support, then turned back to Leucosia and shook my head. I took a deep breath and told Kira everything that had happened, from Anorak’s ultimatum to Og’s heroic final act. It all came out in a rambling, tearful mess, and I bawled through the last part of it, explaining how Og had died, so Art3mis had to finish for me, which immediately put her in tears too.

  When we finished telling her what had happened, Leucosia nodded. Then, to our surprise, she walked over and gave each of us a hug.

  “Thank you for sharing all of that with me,” she said. “As soon as you woke me back up, I was able to access the Internet, like any other OASIS avatar. The newsfeeds are already running stories about Og’s death, but the story is still unconfirmed and there weren’t any details about what happened to him.” She gave both of us a sad smile. “I’m grateful he died helping people he loved. And I’m grateful he was with a friend when he died.”

  “Og saved my life,” I told her. “Twice. Once three years ago, when he gave us safe haven from Sorrento and the Sixers, and then again yesterday, when he sacrificed himself to stop Anorak.”

  Art3mis nodded.

  “Og died saving hundreds of millions of lives,” she told Leucosia tearfully. “You should be very proud of him.”

  “Thank you, dear,” she said, turning her face away to hide the anguish on it. “I am proud of him. And I always will be. He was my Og.”

  She fell silent and so did we. It took me a moment to work up my courage, but when I did, I asked Leucosia what she remembered. About Halliday and Anorak, and about Kira.

  Leucosia was silent a moment before she responded.

  “Anorak was the result of Halliday’s first attempt to digitize a human consciousness—his own,” she said. “He referred to it as a real-life ‘savegame’ file.”

  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?”