Once my brain finally processed what had happened, I collapsed into a chair, clutching my chest. I was devastated. I was still in love with her. I knew I’d broken her heart. But I also believed releasing the ONI was the right thing to do. If I’d withheld it from billions of suffering people just to preserve our relationship, what would that have made me?
When I got her on the phone and tried to tell her this, she got furious once again. She said that I was the one who was being selfish, refusing to see the danger in what we were doing. Then she stopped speaking to me altogether.
Luckily, my new ONI headset offered an easy, ready-made escape from my misery. With the press of a button, it literally took my mind off of my broken heart, and focused it elsewhere. I could put on the headset and relive another person’s happy memories anytime I pleased. Or I could just log in to the OASIS, where I was treated like a god, and where everything now felt completely real—as real as the most vivid dreams feel while you’re having them.
When the Shard Riddle appeared, I’d seized on it as another distraction. But now, over three years later, my ongoing obsession with solving it had become a forced and desperate exercise and I knew it. It was really just an attempt to forget the mess I’d made of my personal life. Not that I ever would have admitted it out loud.
None of these distractions helped me fix what was broken, of course. I still thought about Samantha every day. And I still wondered what I could’ve done differently.
These days, I told myself that Samantha would’ve broken up with me eventually anyway. By the end of that first week at Og’s estate, I’d already begun to wonder if she was having second thoughts. She’d started to pick up on my annoying idiosyncrasies. My inability to recognize social cues. My total and complete lack of cool around strangers. My neediness and emotional immaturity. She was probably already looking for an excuse to dump my socially awkward ass, and when I chose to vote against her on releasing the ONI, it just fast-forwarded the inevitable.
Since our breakup, I’d seen Samantha only via her OASIS avatar, and only during our co-owners meetings. Even then, she rarely spoke to me directly or made eye contact. She seemed to be doing her best to pretend I didn’t exist.
After our split, she became laser focused on carrying out her master plan—the plan she’d told me about during our first meeting, when we discussed what we’d do if either of us managed to win Halliday’s contest.
“If I win that dough, I’m going to make sure everyone on this planet has enough to eat,” she’d proclaimed. “Once we tackle world hunger, then we can figure out how to fix the environment and solve the energy crisis.”
True to her word, she created the Art3mis Foundation, a global charity organization devoted to ending world hunger, saving the environment, and solving the energy crisis, and donated nearly all of her massive income to it.
She still kept an apartment on the top floor of the Art3mis Foundation building in downtown Columbus, a few blocks from GSS. But she spent very little time there. She traveled constantly, visiting the world’s most troubled and impoverished nations to focus media attention on their plight, and to oversee the Art3mis Foundation’s aid efforts.
She also used her newfound fame and wealth to champion a whole host of environmental and humanitarian causes around the world, and seemingly overnight, she transformed herself into a sort of rock-star philanthropist and humanitarian. She was like Oprah, Joan Jett, and Mother Teresa all rolled into one. She now had billions of admirers, and in spite of everything I couldn’t help but be one of them.
But she wasn’t the only one trying to make the world a better place. Aech, Shoto, and I were each doing our part too.
Shoto created his own charity organization called the Daisho Council, which provided free food, housing, healthcare, and counseling to the millions of isolated Japanese kids known as hikikomori, who lived in self-imposed seclusion from the outside world. Aech set up a similar charity in North America called Helen’s House, which provided a safe haven for homeless LBGTQIA kids throughout the United States and Canada, along with another foundation devoted to providing impoverished African nations with self-sustaining technology and resources. And for kicks, she called it the Wakandan Outreach Initiative.
I’d founded the Parzival Relief Organization, a nonprofit that provided free food, electricity, Internet access, and ONI headsets to orphaned and impoverished kids around the world. (It was honestly the sort of help I would’ve wanted to receive if I had still been a kid living in the stacks.)
We’d also started funneling cash to the struggling U.S. government and its citizens, who had been surviving on foreign aid for decades. We paid off the national debt and provided aerial-defense drones and tactical telebots to help reestablish the rule of law in the rural areas where local infrastructure had collapsed along with the power grid. Human law enforcement officers no longer had to risk their own lives to uphold the law. Our police telebots were able to carry out their mission to serve and protect without putting any human lives at risk. Their programming and their operational fail-safes prevented them from harming anyone in the line of duty.
Together, Samantha, Aech, Shoto, and I donated billions of dollars every year. But plenty of rich people (like Ogden Morrow) had been throwing mountains of money at these same problems for decades, with little effect. And so far, the High Five’s own noble efforts weren’t moving the dial much either. For the time being we were holding chaos and collapse at bay, but humanity’s perilous predicament just kept on getting worse.
The reason for this was painfully obvious to me. We’d already passed the point of no return. The world’s population was fast approaching ten billion people, and Mother Earth was making it abundantly clear that she could no longer sustain all of us—especially not after we’d spent the past two centuries poisoning her oceans and atmosphere with wild industrial abandon. We had made our bed, and now we were going to die in it.
That was why I was still working on my backup plan, the one I’d shared with Samantha that first night we met.
Over the past three years, I had funded the construction of a small nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft in low Earth orbit. It housed a self-sustaining biosphere, which could provide long-term living space and life support for a crew of up to two dozen human passengers—including Aech and Shoto, who had joined me in footing the enormous construction bill.
I’d christened my ship the Vonnegut, like my old Firefly-class spaceship in the OASIS, which I’d named after my favorite author.
If the Vonnegut’s fusion engines functioned as they were supposed to, and the radiation shielding held up, and the ship’s armored hull didn’t get punctured by any micrometeors or crushed by an asteroid, we would reach Proxima Centauri in approximately forty-seven years. There, we would search for a habitable Earthlike planet where we could make a new home for ourselves, our children, and the frozen human embryos we were going to bring along. (We’d been accepting embryo donations for over a year by this point, from every country around the world, with the hope of ensuring genetic diversity.)
The ship’s onboard computer contained a new standalone virtual-reality simulation for us to access on our long journey. After much debate over what we should call our new virtual realm, we finally agreed upon the name ARC@DIA. (It was Aech’s idea to replace the a in the middle with an @ sign, to give the name a l33t flourish and to help distinguish it from the geographic region in central Greece, the Duran Duran side project, the city on Gallifrey, the alternate plane of reality in Dungeons & Dragons, and all of the other Arcadias out there.) The addition of the @ was also fitting because, as Aech put it, “ARC@DIA will be where it’s at!”
ARC@DIA was going to serve as our own private scaled-down version of the OASIS during the voyage. It was still a work in progress, and likely would be until the day we departed. Due to various space and hardware limitations, our simulation wasn’t nearly as big�
��about half the size of one OASIS sector. But that was still a vast amount of virtual space for us and our tiny crew to inhabit. We had enough room to upload copies of more than two hundred of our favorite OASIS planets, along with their NPCs. We didn’t bother transferring any of the business content or retail planets over. Where we were going, we wouldn’t need stores or commerce. Besides, we had to be sparing with our data-storage space, since we were bringing along a backup copy of the entire ONI-net file database too. It was updated every night, along with new OASIS content.
There was one other thing that made our simulation different from its predecessor. Unlike the OASIS, ARC@DIA could only be accessed via a neural-interface headset. (We didn’t want to waste any time, space, or money bringing outdated haptic technology along.)
The Vonnegut was still about a year from being complete, but Aech, Shoto, and I were in no rush. We weren’t eager to leave the Earth behind for a long, cramped, and perilous voyage. And we weren’t ready to give up on Planet Earth yet either. Not while there was still a chance we could save it. What we were doing was doomsday-prepping on a multibillionaire scale, packing the ultimate bugout bag—the means to escape the planet if, and when, everything went to shit.
We’d concealed the details of the Vonnegut Project from the world (and from Samantha) for as long as we could. But eventually word of what we were up to leaked to the press. Of course, Samantha was furious when she found out we’d spent over three hundred billion dollars to build a ship to escape our dying planet instead of using that money and manpower to help her try to save it.
I told her we were saving a spot for her on the Vonnegut’s crew, but you can imagine how that went over. She stormed out, then she crucified us in the press. She accused us of sabotaging humanity by releasing the ONI to the masses and then using the profits to build a lifeboat to save our own skin.
But I didn’t see it that way. And thankfully, neither did Aech or Shoto. We admired Samantha’s optimism, and maybe—on a good day—even shared in it. But with Earth teetering on the brink of destruction, leaving our eggs in one basket was foolish. Sending a small contingent of humanity out into space was the only responsible thing to do—and at this precarious moment in history, we were the only three people on the planet with the resources to do it.
After two dozen laps in my heated indoor Olympic-size swimming pool—which, thanks to my AR swim goggles, was teeming with rare tropical fish and even a pod of friendly dolphins to keep me company—I was standing in my walk-in closet, surrounded by tailored suits and designer clothes I had never worn and probably never would. I wore the same outfit every day, so I never had to expend any thought on what to wear next. I got the idea from Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, and he, in turn, got it from Albert Einstein.
I was equally disciplined about my daily workout, even when I was feeling under the weather. Exercising for at least two hours every day was an absolute necessity, since I frequently spent over eleven hours a day logged in to the OASIS with my ONI headset, followed by another eight hours of sleep on top of that. For me, it seemed to take at least two hours of vigorous exercise to balance out the twenty or so hours of each day that I spent not moving at all.
Like eating and sleeping, exercise was one of the things people still had to do in reality. None of the simulated physical activity you experienced through your ONI headset actually had any real-world effects, like improving your circulation or increasing your muscle tone.
I finished lacing up my vintage Air Jordans and stepped outside onto the balcony, where my usual breakfast was waiting for me. As I took a seat at the table, one of my humanoid service robots, Belvedere, uncovered my omelet and hash browns and poured me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Then he retreated to the corner of the balcony and stood there like a statue, waiting to be of further use.
I’d programmed Belvedere never to speak unless spoken to, because his synthesized voice set me on edge, regardless of how much I tweaked his tone or inflection. Probably because I’d seen too many robot-uprising movies.
There wasn’t any actual chance of my service robots staging a revolt, of course. Like most of the artificial intelligence people interacted with on a daily basis, Belvedere and his fellow household bots were Tier One AI, which was classified as “extremely weak.” Tier One AI was used to operate service robots, drive automated cars, and fly automated planes. All of our OASIS NPCs were Tier Ones.
Tier Two AI was used mostly for science and military applications, and their use and operating parameters were heavily restricted by most world governments. Tier Twos could form short-term memories and had stronger independent learning abilities—but they still did not have the capacity for autonomy, or any sort of identity or self-awareness.
Tier Three AI was the real deal—fully autonomous, self-aware, and conscious. The kind that science fiction films warn you about. This level of artificial intelligence was still theoretical, praise be to Crom. But according to GSS’s top engineers, probably not for much longer. The race to create true artificial intelligence had become like the race to create the atomic bomb. Several different countries—including my own—were working to create full-blown self-aware, as-smart-if-not-smarter-than-the-average-human-being artificial intelligence. Maybe some of them already had, and now it was just a waiting game to see who would unleash it first, probably in an army of sentient aerial drones and battle telebots that said “Roger, Roger” to one another while machine-gunning civilian populations. That was, if we didn’t nuke ourselves into oblivion first.
I ate in silence for a few minutes, staring up at the sky overhead. When I finished my food, I put my AR specs on again and used them to log in to my OASIS account. Then I used a heavily encrypted remote-access code to take control of a telebot—a humanoid telepresence robot—that was located in orbit high above the Earth aboard the Vonnegut. Once my link to the bot was established, my AR specs allowed me to see through its “eyes”—a set of stereoscopic video cameras mounted in its head. I disconnected the telebot from its charging dock, which was anchored to a bulkhead in the ship’s forward cargo hold. This was in the ring-shaped section of the craft, which rotated constantly to generate centripetal force and create simulated gravity.
I piloted the telebot over to a circular observation window set into the outer hull. Then I waited a few seconds for the ring to rotate around, until the luminous blue curve of the Earth came into view, filling my field of vision. The Vonnegut was currently passing over North America, and through a break in the cloud cover I was able to locate the outline of Lake Erie, and then the dense urban grid of Columbus just below it. I stabilized and magnified the image until I had a satellite’s view of my own house and the patio where I was currently sitting. For a second or two, I was able to gaze down at myself through the eyes of a telepresence robot aboard a starship orbiting the Earth.
When the Earth rotated out of view again, I turned the telebot away from the window, then I used it to make a quick circuit of the ship. Dozens of other telebots floated through each of its sections, under the control of the technicians and engineers back on Earth. They were running diagnostic tests on the experimental heavy-duty radiation shielding around the frozen embryo storage compartment. After watching them work for a while, I piloted my telebot into the ship’s Network Operations Center, to check on the ARC@DIA backup servers, and the OASIS uplink from Earth that we used to keep our copy of various planets in the simulation up to date. Everything appeared to be running smoothly. We still had plenty of extra storage space for future ARC@DIA content updates on the Vonnegut’s computer. Its processing power limited us to a maximum of one hundred simultaneous ARC@DIA users, but that was far more than we needed.
I spent a few more minutes piloting my telebot through the silent corridors of the ship before I returned it to its charging dock. Then I disconnected from it, and just like that, I was back on Earth, sitting on my patio.
I’d traveled al
l the way to space and back, and I’d only managed to kill fifteen minutes.
I tried calling Aech and Shoto, to see if either of them wanted to catch up before our co-owners meeting. But as usual, neither of them picked up. I took off my specs and threw them on the table in front of me with a sigh. I told myself that Aech was probably still asleep, and that Shoto was probably busy with work. I could’ve checked their account statuses to see, but I’d learned the hard way that if your friends were avoiding you, you didn’t want or need to know about it.
I continued to eat my breakfast in silence, listening to the wind in the trees and absentmindedly watching the flock of security drones overhead as they patrolled the perimeter of my estate. This was usually the only time I spent outdoors each day, to get my daily minimum dose of sunlight. Deep down, I still shared Halliday’s opinion that going outside was highly overrated.
I pulled my AR specs back on and skimmed over the emails that had collected in my inbox overnight. Then I spent some time updating my ONI-net queue with new Recs and Sims from the “Most Popular Downloads” list. I did this every morning, even though I already had thousands of hours of experiences in my queue—more than I would ever have time to make it through, even if I lived to be a hundred. That was why I constantly updated and rearranged the clips in my queue—to make sure I got to the best stuff first.
In the early days of the ONI-net, some people at GSS had worried that its popularity might cause the rest of the OASIS to become a ghost town, because everyone would spend all of their time doing playback instead of exploring the OASIS to have experiences of their own. But the OASIS continued to grow and thrive alongside the ONI-net, and most users divided their time equally between the two. Perhaps it was human nature to crave both passive and interactive forms of entertainment.
As usual, I searched the ONI-net for any newly listed clips tagged with the name Art3mis or Samantha Cook. Whenever anyone posted a recording in which she appeared, I would download it. Even if it was just a clip of her signing an autograph for someone, it still gave me a chance to experience standing next to her for a few seconds.
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