Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

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.

“Half the world already spends every waking moment ignoring reality inside the OASIS. We already peddle the Opiate of the Masses. And now you want to up the dosage?”

Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century.

I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.

“Some people define themselves by railing against all of the things they hate, while explaining why everyone else should hate it too. But not me. I prefer to lead with my love—to define myself through joyous yawps of admiration, instead of cynical declarations of disdain.”

She probably hadn’t switched off any of her avatar’s other involuntary emotional responses either. Younger ONI users did this intentionally. They referred to it as “rolling real.”

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

“I think we need to consider the possibility that somehow, before Kira Morrow died, Halliday made a copy of her consciousness. Using the same technology he used to copy his own mind and create Anorak.”

Samantha used to say that Shermer was Hughes’s “post-adolescent paracosm.” A private fantasy world that he created and populated with his imagination, adding to it throughout his life—his own suburban, Midwest equivalent of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

The entire OASIS is like one giant graveyard, haunted by the undead pop-culture icons of a bygone era.

“DDR!” we shouted, as we both began to dance in sync to the arrows. Aech joined us, and the three of us danced side by side, hitting our marks on the floor in perfect sync.

“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.”

Wade made one more backup scan of his own consciousness, too, right before we left, to make sure that I would remember everything that happened to him, right up until the time of our departure. And I do. Right up until that final scan, our memories were identical. But from that moment on, our experiences and our personalities began to diverge, and we started to become different people. He continued to be Wade Watts back on Earth. And I woke up inside ARC@DIA aboard the Vonnegut. And that’s where I’ve been ever since. That’s where I am right now, as I tell you my account of this story.

And sometimes, when you think you’ve finally reached the end of the game, suddenly you find yourself standing at the start of a whole new level. A level that you’ve never seen before. And the only thing you can do is keep right on playing. Because the game that is your life still isn’t over yet. And there’s no telling how far you might be able to get, what you might discover, or who you might meet when you get there.