Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

  She walked back over to the conference table and turned to address all of us. I winced, bracing myself for the worst. This was her moment to shout, I fucking TOLD YOU SO, morons! at the top of her lungs. Because she had told us. Many, many times. And now she might pay for our hubris with her own life, along with half a billion other innocent people. It was all our fault, and she would’ve had every right to say so.

  But I should’ve already known…that wasn’t her style.

  “We can handle this,” she said, making eye contact with each of us in turn. “Anorak isn’t some supergenius. He said so himself. He’s only as smart as James Halliday was when he was alive.” She made a show of rolling her eyes. “Halliday may have been a genius with computers, but we all know he was a total idiot when it came to understanding other people. He never understood human behavior. Which means Anorak will understand it even less—especially since Halliday erased a bunch of his memories. We can use that to our advantage.”

  “But this isn’t Halliday we’re dealing with here,” Aech said. “It’s Anorak. He’s read the entire Internet! Now he knows everything about everything!”

  “Yeah,” Shoto said. “Because there isn’t any false information on the Internet. At all.”

  “Hey!” Art3mis said, snapping her fingers at us like an annoyed schoolteacher. “I don’t want to hear one more word of negativity, guys! You got that? We’re the High Five! We beat Anorak once before, remember? And if we work together, we can do it again. Right?”

  Aech and Shoto both nodded silently in agreement. But their faces seemed to give a different answer.

  “Parzival?” Art3mis said, locking eyes with me. “Back me up, here….”

  I met her gaze.

  “You tried to warn us,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen.”

  “Being sorry isn’t going to save anyone,” she replied. “Even I couldn’t have predicted something this fucked-up would happen. But now that it has, it’s up to us to try and fix it. Right, Z?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m sorry I lost my cool before. I’ve got my game face on now.”

  “Good,” Art3mis said. “Because we need to figure out what we’re going to do, and do it A-S-A-F-P.” She tapped an invisible watch on her wrist. “Like Raistlin said, ‘Tick-tock.’ ”

  “Agreed,” I said. “But before we start discussing our game plan, we need to make sure Anorak isn’t still here in this room, eavesdropping on everything we say.” I turned to address everyone. “He has the Robes of Anorak now. If they give him all of the same abilities they gave me—when I wore them, they gave me unrestricted superuser access to the OASIS. They also made my avatar invulnerable and invincible in combat. And they allowed me to go anywhere I wanted to in the simulation. Anywhere. And they let me remain invisible and undetected to other avatars, even in null-tech and null-magic zones. I could also eavesdrop on private phone calls. And access private chatrooms too. Just like Og did, when he eavesdropped on us in Aech’s Basement.”

  Art3mis, Shoto, and Aech all appeared to be processing this new information. But not Faisal.

  “We may have a solution here,” he replied. “We’ve been aware of the robes’ powers for a long time now. Halliday used to use them occasionally, when he wanted to travel around the OASIS undetected. Just like you, Mr. Watts.” He gave me a knowing smile. “But we managed to isolate the unique item-identification code that Halliday assigned to the Robes of Anorak when he created them. We still can’t pinpoint their location in the OASIS, but we can detect the item’s presence within a defined volume.”

  He opened a browser window in front of his avatar and spun it around to face us. It displayed a three-dimensional wireframe diagram of our conference room, with the position of each of our avatars indicated by a glowing blue outline.

  “When Anorak revealed himself, our OASIS admins immediately conducted a server-side scan of this room,” Faisal explained. “This shows us everyone and everything located inside it, regardless of whether or not it’s visible to the room’s other occupants.”

  He tapped a few buttons and the wireframe diagram of the room began to rewind like a video recording, showing our avatars moving and walking around the conference table in reverse. Faisal paused the recording a few seconds before Anorak disappeared. The system classified him as an NPC, so his avatar appeared with a red outline around it. Faisal hit Play on the recording, and when Anorak teleported away, the outline of his avatar vanished from the room too.

  “As you can see, he really did teleport away,” Faisal said. “And he didn’t leave behind any monitoring or recording devices, or we would be able to detect those too.” He turned to me. “So there’s no way Anorak could be listening to us right now. Unless those robes give you the ability to remotely eavesdrop on other users, no matter where they are?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. “The wearer has to be in the same OASIS location or logged in to the same chatroom to listen in on them.”

  “Jesus,” Aech said, shaking her head. “So much for our famous user privacy policy.”

  “Are you sure there’s no other way Anorak could be spying on us?” Shoto asked Faisal. “Perhaps via some other modification he made to his ‘infirmware’?”

  Faisal waited to get an answer from his engineers, then he smiled and shook his head.

  “The admins tell me that’s impossible,” Faisal told us. “There’s no way to tap a person’s ONI connection to the OASIS and filter out just the audio or visual data—all of the sensory input and output is streamed simultaneously. They say it can’t be done.”

  “Maybe not by them,” Shoto said. “But if Anorak is a copy of Halliday, he probably understands the OASIS even better than our engineers.”

  “Why am I thinking of that scene in Heat?” Art3mis asked us. “The one where Pacino is starting to close in on De Niro and he tells his crew, ‘Assume they got our phones, assume they got our houses, assume they got us—right here, right now as we sit, everything. Assume it all.’ ”

  She looked at me, Aech, and Shoto. “I think it might be wise for us to observe the same policy, from here on out. Just to be safe.”

  I nodded. “If we need to say something to each other that we don’t want Anorak to hear, we should do it in this room.”

  “Do we have any way of finding out where Anorak is right now?” Shoto asked.

  Faisal closed his browser window and shook his head. “When Halliday created Anorak and released him inside the simulation as an autonomous NPC, he gave him the ability to move around the OASIS freely, uninhibited and undetected by our admins—just as Halliday and Morrow’s own avatars had always been able to.”

  I found myself wondering if Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding would be able to help us locate Anorak. Then I remembered—that artifact only gave you the ability to locate other avatars. It didn’t work on NPCs. And the admins said the system classified Anorak as an NPC. And there were no artifacts that gave you the ability to locate an NPC, because it would break every single OASIS quest that involved tracking one down. Probably at least half of them.

  “Thankfully, we have come up with a way for you to detect Anorak if he comes into your immediate vicinity,” Faisal said.

  He opened his inventory and removed four plain-looking silver chains. Then he gave one to each of us.

  “These are Bracelets of Detection, linked to the Robes of Anorak,” Faisal continued. “They will begin to glow bright red if the robes come within a hundred-meter radius of your current location. That should prevent Anorak from sneaking up on you.”

  “Nice,” I said, slipping my bracelet on. “Please thank the engineers for us.”

  Art3mis put her bracelet on, too, then she turned to face me.

  “OK,” she said. “Spill it, Watts. What’s this ‘Big Red Button’ that Anorak mentioned? And what does
it do, exactly?”

  I’d been dreading this question. But under the circumstances, I had no choice but to answer it truthfully.

  “The Big Red Button is a self-destruct mechanism for the OASIS,” I said. “It’s located inside Castle Anorak, in the study—a room that only the wearer of the Robes of Anorak can enter. If you press it, it will shut down the entire OASIS and launch a tapeworm that will erase all our backup servers, destroying the simulation forever.”

  Everyone’s eyes widened in surprise. For a second, Faisal looked as if he might faint.

  “Holy shit, Z,” Aech said. “Why didn’t you ever tell any of us about this?”

  “Halliday showed me the Big Red Button in secret, so I decided to keep it a secret.” I shook my head. “And I honestly couldn’t foresee a single reason why I would ever need to press it.”

  That made Art3mis laugh out loud.

  “Well, can you ‘foresee’ one now, Nostradamus?” she asked.

  I gave her a sober nod.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “Now I can think of several.”

  “Why would Mr. Halliday be reckless enough to build a self-destruct mechanism into the OASIS?” Faisal asked, still shaking his head in disbelief. “He knew there would be disastrous consequences if the OASIS ever went offline and stayed that way. We conducted several studies, involving dozens of simulated scenarios.” He turned to me. “Mr. Watts, if you—or anyone else—ever presses that button, it would disrupt global communications, law enforcement, transportation, and commerce….The world would be thrown into complete chaos.”

  Shoto nodded. “The entire drone protection force would go offline and remain offline,” he added. “There would be shipping delays, food and medicine shortages. Rioting. Markets would crash. States would fail.” He shook his head. “Jesus, the whole of human civilization might even collapse.”

  “Then why would Halliday take such an insane risk?” Faisal asked.

  “It’s better to have a self-destruct and not need it than to need one and not have it,” Art3mis said.

  I nodded. “Exactly.”

  “So that’s why Anorak went through all that trouble to steal the robes back?” Shoto asked. “To keep Z from pressing that button?”

  “If I erased the OASIS, Anorak would be erased along with it,” I said. “Now he doesn’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  Everyone fell silent for a moment. Art3mis began to pace back and forth while chewing absentmindedly on one of her thumbnails. Samantha was probably doing the exact same thing in the cabin of her autojet, and her movements were being mirrored onto her avatar.

  “Faisal,” she said, turning to face him. “What would happen to all of Anorak’s ONI hostages if we shut the OASIS down manually? By taking all the servers offline, one by one?”

  Shoto chimed in. “Or even take the whole Internet down, just for a few seconds. What would happen? Would all the ONI hostages wake up?”

  Faisal held his index finger to his right ear to indicate that he was listening to the team of OASIS engineers he had on the phone. When they finished talking, Faisal shook his head.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” he said. “Normally, when an ONI user loses their connection to the Internet or to the OASIS, the headset’s firmware triggers an automatic logout. But Anorak has disabled that feature. So even if the OASIS went completely offline, it still wouldn’t wake any of the hostages up. The techs think it would probably just leave all of us in a permanent ONI-induced coma. Unless…”

  “Unless what, Faisal?” Shoto asked.

  “Unless he also programmed his infirmware to lobotomize anyone who tries to escape by cutting off their OASIS or Internet connections.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Art3mis said. “If he did that, he would be able to kill all of his ONI hostages at once, just by pressing the Big Red Button. Right?”

  “Hold on a second,” I said. “Even if Anorak did want to press the Big Red Button, I doubt he could. I bet Halliday designed the button so that it could only be pressed by a real person, and not an NPC like Anorak. Considering the other restrictions Halliday placed on him, that seems like a pretty safe bet.”

  “Maybe that’s the reason Anorak broke Sorrento out of prison,” Art3mis said. “So that he could give his robes to Sorrento and order him to press the Big Red Button.”

  “Yeah,” Shoto said. “But if Anorak did that, he’d be killing himself too. Wouldn’t he?”

  “Unless he has a backup,” Faisal said. “A standalone simulation we don’t know about.”

  “Like that one TNG episode with Professor Moriarty,” Shoto said.

  “ ‘Ship in a Bottle,’ ” Aech and Art3mis said in unison.

  “Can our guys analyze Anorak’s firmware?” I asked. “To find out what he changed?”

  Faisal shook his head. “Our software engineers are trying to do that right now,” he said. “But Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they’ve never seen before. They don’t even know how to disassemble or decompile the code, and even if they could, they don’t think they would be able to understand it.”

  “What about rolling it back to the previous build?” Shoto asked.

  Faisal shook his head again. “We already have,” he said. “But to reinstall it, we would need to log out of the OASIS first. The headset can’t be active.”

  “Great,” I said. “Wonderful. Just perfect!”

  “OK,” Aech said. “Then we give him what he wants. Like, right fucking now. Whatever the Siren’s Soul is, it can’t be worth risking half a billion lives….”

  “Og apparently thought it was,” Art3mis said. “Otherwise, he would have given it to Anorak. But he refused….” She locked eyes with me. “We’re missing something here.”

  Aech shook her head.

  “None of this matters right now, y’all!” she shouted. “We have to find the rest of those shards by sundown. We can figure out what the Siren’s Soul is and what it does along the way. Now, let’s fucking moooove!”

  Aech made a herding motion with her arms, as if to spur all of us toward the exit. But Shoto stepped in front of the doors, blocking them.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Aren’t we going to release some sort of statement to all the ONI users who are being held hostage? To inform them of their situation?”

  Faisal shook his head.

  “I believe that would be an extraordinarily bad idea, sir,” he said. “We don’t want to create a global panic—or admit any liability for this situation—until we have no other choice.”

  The room fell silent for a moment.

  “For now, we can say the problem is due to a minor glitch,” Faisal added. “Tell the users their temporary inability to log out is due to a harmless bug in our new firmware, and that they aren’t in any danger, because the system will still log them out automatically when they hit their twelve-hour ONI usage limit.” He spread his hands. “If we can pull that off, our customers will never know their lives were in danger, and that would save GSS billions in lawsuits.”

  Art3mis sighed. “Forget the lawsuits,” she said. “But I agree with Faisal—the longer we can keep this quiet, the safer our users will be.”

  “Great,” Aech said, clapping her hands together. “Motion carried.”

  * * *

  We told the ONI users the logout issue was due to a minor firmware bug, apologized profusely for the temporary inconvenience, and announced that all teleportation fares would be waived until the problem was fixed. We also offered to deposit a thousand credits in each ONI user’s OASIS account, to help them “make the most of this unfortunate situation”—in return for digitally signing an agreement stating they wouldn’t sue us over this incident. Faisal told us this was just an extra precaution, because each time our users logged on they were already clicking Agree to an end-user li
cense that classified our headsets as experimental technology and absolved GSS of any liability for injuries.

  We sent the message out to every single ONI user who was currently logged in. Faisal also posted it to the official GSS media feeds, looking visibly relieved as soon as he had done so.

  “OK,” Shoto said. “Now we can get to work.”

  “Agreed,” Arty said as she stood up and moved to the corner of the conference room. “But you’re gonna have to start looking for the Second Shard without me.”

  We exchanged confused looks.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Aech asked.

  “My jet just reduced its airspeed to link up with a midair refueling tanker,” Art3mis said. “So it’s time to rock and roll.”

  She tapped a series of icons on her HUD, then placed her hands on her hips—a pose that made her look like Wonder Woman for a brief moment.

  “I’m not gonna let some two-bit Gandalf wannabe take me hostage,” she said. “And I’m not going to sit on my ass and do nothing while Og is being held prisoner.” She raised her right hand and saluted all of us. “I’ll call you back!”

  Then she did what none of the rest of us could—she logged out of the OASIS, and her avatar disappeared.

  But then, a few seconds later, Faisal received two incoming vidfeeds from Samantha—one from her mobile phone, and another from her jet’s onboard phone line, which was tied to the plane’s internal and external cameras.

  Displayed side by side on the conference-room viewscreen, we saw shaky footage of the cabin of Samantha’s private jet from two different angles. Samantha fumbled with her phone for a few seconds as she clipped it to the front of her jacket, leaving us with a POV shot from her perspective.

  We all watched in shock as Samantha slipped both of her arms into the harness of an emergency parachute applicator mounted on the bulkhead and buckled its safety belt around her waist. The parachute’s straps tightened automatically and a computerized voice spoke from a strap-mounted speaker, announcing that both main and reserve chutes were ready to deploy.