It wasn’t clear what would happen if someone managed to collect the Seven Shards and “once again make the Siren whole.” But I started searching for them anyway. Halliday had thrown down a gauntlet once again, and I couldn’t resist picking it up.
And I wasn’t alone. The riddle’s appearance spawned a whole new generation of gunters, and they all began to scour the OASIS for the Seven Shards. But unlike Halliday’s egg, no reward for finding the Siren’s Soul had ever been announced, so no one knew exactly what they were searching for, or why.
* * *
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, an entire year passed.
We hit three billion units sold. Then four.
It quickly became evident that our patented, proprietary brain-computer-interface headsets had an endless array of non-OASIS-related applications in the fields of science, medicine, aviation, manufacturing, and warfare.
Innovative Online Industries’ stock continued to plummet. When it fell low enough, we orchestrated a hostile takeover of the company. GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform. To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.
Another year passed. The OASIS reached a new benchmark—five billion individual users logged in each day. Then six. Two-thirds of the people on our overcrowded, rapidly warming little planet. And over 99 percent of the people who accessed the OASIS now did so using one of our neural interface headsets.
* * *
Just as Halliday predicted, this new technology began to have a profound impact on people’s day-to-day lives, and on human civilization at large. There were new experiences to download every day. Anything and everything you could imagine. You could go anywhere, do anything, and be anyone. It was the most addictive pastime imaginable—far more addictive than the OASIS had ever been, and that was saying something.
Other companies made attempts to reverse-engineer the ONI headset and steal our neural-interface technology—but the software and processing power required to make the ONI technology function was all part of the OASIS. Experiences could be recorded offline as an .oni file, even a bootleg one, but the file could only be played back by being uploaded to the OASIS. This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users. It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.
GSS rolled out the ONI-net, a social-media platform built around .oni file-sharing. It allowed users to browse, purchase, download, rate, and review ONI experiences recorded by billions of other people around the world. It also allowed you to upload your own experiences and sell them to the rest of the OASIS.
“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.
Now instead of following their favorite celebrity on social media, ONI users could become their favorite celebrity for a few minutes each day. Exist inside their skin. Live short, heavily curated fragments of far more glamorous lives.
Now people no longer watched movies or television shows—they lived them. The viewer was no longer in the audience. Now they were one of the stars. Instead of just being in the audience at a rock concert, now you could experience the concert as each member of your favorite band, and be each one of them as they/you performed your favorite song.
Anyone with an ONI headset and an empty data drive could record a real-life experience, upload it to the OASIS, and sell it to billions of other people all around the world. You earned coin for every download, and GSS only took 20 percent off the top for making it all possible. If one of your clips went viral, the profits could make you rich overnight. Movie, rock, porn, and streaming stars were all scrambling to exploit this brand-new revenue stream.
For less than the cost of an iced latte, you could now safely experience just about anything that human beings could experience. You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences. You could relive uncut real-life experiences, or play your way through scripted interactive adventures inside the OASIS. Thanks to the ONI, it all felt completely real.
* * *
The ONI made the lives of impoverished people all around the world a lot more bearable—and enjoyable. People didn’t mind subsisting on dried seaweed and soy protein when they could log on to the ONI-net and download a delicious five-course meal anytime they pleased. People could sample any cuisine from any part of the globe, prepared by any of the world’s finest chefs, and have it served to them in a mansion, or on a mountaintop, or in a scenic restaurant, or on an autojet headed to Paris. And as a bonus, you could experience any of these meals as a diner with unusually sensitive taste buds. Or as a celebrity, dining with other celebrities, who were all being waited on by a bunch of ex-celebrities. Name your poison.
Moderating all of this user-generated content was a challenge—and a huge responsibility. GSS implemented CenSoft, our custom strong-AI censor software, which scanned every .oni recording before it was released and flagged suspicious content for human review. Questionable material was reviewed by GSS employees, who then decided whether the clip was safe to release—and, if any criminal behavior was captured, they forwarded it on to law enforcement officials in the uploader’s country or region.
New applications of ONI technology continued to reveal themselves. For example, it became fashionable for young mothers to make an ONI recording while they gave birth to their child, so that in a few decades, that child would be able to play back that recording and experience what it feels like to give birth to themselves.
* * *
And me?
All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right?
Not so much, as this account will show. I was suddenly way out of my depth, both personally and professionally, so it didn’t take very long for me to completely screw up my life once again. And when I did, I returned to seek solace from my oldest friend, the OASIS.
I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin. It didn’t take long for me to become an addict. When I wasn’t playing back ONI recordings, I was browsing the ONI-net and adding new recordings to my playback queue.
Meanwhile, I continued to search for the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul. I could teleport anywhere in the OASIS, buy anything I wanted, and kill anyone who got in my way. But I still wasn’t making any progress. And I couldn’t understand why.
* * *
Finally, out of a mixture of disgust and desperation, I offered a billion dollars to anyone who could provide me with information on how to locate just one of the Seven Shards. I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.
My billion-dollar shard bounty caused quite a stir inside the OASIS. The number of gunters searching for the shards quadrupled overnight. But none of them managed to claim my reward. (For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards
were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)
Another year passed.
Then, just a few weeks after the third anniversary of the ONI’s launch, it finally happened. An enterprising young gunter led me to the First Shard. And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race.
As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.
My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you’re born, you’re given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can.
Sometimes the game might seem easy. Even fun.
Other times it might be so difficult you want to give up and quit.
But unfortunately, in this game you only get one life.
When your body grows too hungry or thirsty or ill or injured or old, your health meter runs out and then it’s Game Over.
Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it.
To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all of the other players you encounter in your travels.
Kira says that if everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone.
—Anorak’s Almanac, chapter 77, verses 11–20
Like Marty McFly, I woke up at exactly 10:28 a.m., to the song “Back in Time” by Huey Lewis and the News.
This was courtesy of my vintage flip-clock radio—a Panasonic RC-6015, the model Marty owns in the film. I’d had it modified to play the same song at the same time Marty hears it, after he finally makes it back to the future.
I threw back the silk sheets of my king-size bed and lowered my feet to the preheated marble floor. The house computer saw that I was awake and automatically drew back the bedroom’s wraparound window shades, revealing a stunning 180-degree view of my sprawling woodland estate, and of the jagged Columbus skyline on the horizon.
I still couldn’t quite believe it. Waking up in this room, to this sight, every day. Not long ago, just opening my eyes here had been enough to put a grin on my face and a spring in my step.
But today, it wasn’t helping. Today I was just alone, in an empty house, in a world teetering on the brink of collapse. And on days like this, the four hours I had to wait until I could put my ONI headset back on and escape into the OASIS stretched out in front of me like an eternity.
My gaze focused on the Gregarious Simulation Systems building, a shining arrowhead of mirrored glass rising from the center of downtown. GSS HQ was just a few blocks from the old IOI skyscraper complex where I’d briefly been an indentured servant. Now it belonged to GSS too. We’d turned all three buildings into free BodyLocker hotels for the homeless. You can probably guess which one of the four of us spearheaded that initiative.
Following the skyline a few more centimeters to the right, I could also make out the silhouette of the converted Hilton hotel where I’d rented an apartment during the final year of the contest. It was a tourist attraction now. People actually bought tickets to see the tiny ten-by-ten efficiency where I’d locked myself away from the world to focus on my search for Halliday’s Easter egg. I’m not sure any of those people realized that was the darkest, loneliest time in my life.
By all appearances, my life was completely different now. Except that here I was, standing at the window, moping around, already jonesing for my ONI fix.
I’d had the Portland Avenue Stacks in Oklahoma City where I’d grown up demolished years ago, so that I could erect a memorial for my mother and my aunt and Mrs. Gilmore and all of the other poor souls unfortunate enough to have died in that hellhole. I paid to have all of its residents relocated to a new housing complex I had built for them on the city outskirts. It still warmed my heart to know that all of the former residents of the stacks had, like me, become something they’d never imagined they could be—homeowners.
Even though the stacks where I’d grown up no longer existed in the real world, I could still visit them anytime I pleased, because there was a highly accurate OASIS re-creation of the Portland Avenue Stacks just as I remembered them, constructed from photos and video of the real location taken before the bombing. It was now a popular OASIS tourist attraction and school field-trip destination.
I still went there occasionally myself. I would sit inside the meticulous re-creation of my old hideout, marveling at the journey that had led me from there to where I was now. The real van that I’d used as my hideout had been extracted from the junk pile and airlifted to Columbus, so it could be put on display in the GSS Museum. But I preferred to visit the simulation of my hideout over the real deal, because in the OASIS, my hideout was still buried in a pile of abandoned vehicles at the base of the Portland Avenue Stacks, which still stood intact, as they had throughout my childhood, before Sorrento’s bombs brought them crashing down and brought my childhood to its end.
Sometimes I wandered over to the replica of my aunt Alice’s old stack. I would climb the stairs to her trailer, go inside, curl up in the corner of the laundry room where I used to sleep, and apologize to my mother and my aunt Alice for indirectly causing their deaths. I didn’t know where else to go to talk to them. Neither of them had a grave or a tombstone I could visit. Neither did my father. All three of them had been cremated—my aunt Alice at the time of her death, and my parents after the fact, courtesy of the city’s free cremation and remains-recycling program. Now all they were was dust in the wind.
Those visits made me understand why Halliday had re-created Middletown in such loving detail, when it had been the setting of so many of his own unhappy childhood memories. He wanted to be able to revisit his own past, to get back in touch with the person he used to be, before the world had changed him.
“T-T-Top o’ the morning, Wade!” a familiar voice stuttered as I stepped into the bathroom. I glanced sideways to see Max, my long-suffering system-agent software, smiling at me from the surface of the giant smart mirror above the sink.
“Morning, Max,” I muttered. “What’s up?”
“The opposite of down,” he replied. “That was easy! Ask me another one. Go ahead.”
When I didn’t respond, he made a heavy-metal face and started to play air guitar while shouting: “Wade’s World! Wade’s Word! Party time! Excellent!”
I rolled my eyes in his direction and manually flushed the toilet for effect.
“Jeez,” Max said. “Tough crowd. Wake up on the wrong side of the coffin again today?”
“Yeah, it kinda feels like it,” I said. “Start morning playlist, please.”
“This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” by Talking Heads began to play over the house speakers, and I immediately felt more relaxed.
“Gracias, Max.”
“De nada, my little enchilada.”
I’d reinstalled MaxHeadroom v3.4.1 as my system-agent software a few months ago. I thought his presence might help me recapture the same mindset I’d had during Halliday’s contest. And it had worked, to a degree. It was like visiting with an old friend. And in truth, I needed the company. Even though, in the back of my mind, I knew that talking to your system-agent software was only slightly less weird than talking to yourself.
Max read me the day’s headlines as I dressed in my workout clothes. I told him to skip all of the stories that involved war, disease,
or famine. So he started reading me the weather report. I told him not to bother, then I put on my brand-new Okagami NexSpex augmented-reality glasses and headed downstairs. Max came along with me, reappearing on a network of antique CRT monitors mounted along my route.
Even in the middle of the daytime, Halliday’s old mansion felt deserted. The housekeeping was all done by high-end humanoid robots who did most of their work while I slept, so I almost never saw them. I had a personal cook named Demetri, but he rarely left the kitchen. The team of security guards who manned the front gates and patrolled the grounds were human, too, but they only entered the house if an alarm went off or I summoned them.
Most of the time it was just me, all by my lonesome, in a giant house with over fifty rooms, including two kitchens, four dining rooms, fourteen bedrooms, and a total of twenty-one bathrooms. I still had no idea why there were so many toilets—or where they were all located. I chalked it up to the previous owner’s well-known eccentricity.
I’d moved into James Halliday’s old estate the week after I won his contest. The house was located on the northeastern outskirts of Columbus, and it was completely empty at the time. At his request, all of Halliday’s possessions had been auctioned off after his death five years earlier. But the deed to the house and the thirty acres of land it stood on had remained a part of his estate, so I’d inherited it along with the rest of his assets. Samantha, Aech, and Shoto had all been kind enough to sell their shares of the property back to me, making me its sole owner. Now I lived in the same secluded fortress where my childhood hero had locked himself away from the world for the latter part of his life. The place where he had created the three keys and gates…
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