Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

I remained offline for nine straight days—a new personal record.

I love picturing 8-day-old Wade getting his first VR headset

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

Ernest Cline, probably: “Hmm... what would my only Black character do after winning power and influence in the last book... I know!”

I climbed into my brand-new top-of-the-line OASIS immersion rig, a Habashaw OIR-9400, then put on my visor and haptic gloves and initiated the login sequence.

One hell of a rig, and on the first page, too!

I walked over to admire it, and that was when I noticed something strange—an inscription on the egg’s otherwise pristine surface. One that definitely hadn’t been there when I’d last seen it, nine days earlier.

Halliday himself must have programmed it to appear on the egg’s surface. It could have appeared right after Anorak gave me his robes, and I’d just been too distracted to notice.

My pulse suddenly thudding in my ears, I immediately logged out of the OASIS and scrambled out of my rig. Then I bolted out of my new office, sprinted down the hall, and jumped into the first elevator to arrive.

Careful, Cline! At this rate you’ll run out of synonyms for “ran” before you finish the first chapter!

I gave them all a polite nod and pressed the “13” button. According to the interactive building directory on my phone, the thirteenth floor was where the GSS archives were located. Of course Halliday had put them there. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I just stood there for a few seconds, reminding myself to breathe.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs—I

nice

My heart had been thudding against my rib cage, but now it almost stopped. This had to be some sort of OASIS peripheral—one unlike any I’d ever seen before, and light-years more advanced.

“No fucking way,” I heard myself whisper.

In case you were wondering, Wade can, in fact, hear his own whispers

The concept of a brain-computer interface headset that allowed you to record, play back, and/or simulate a human being’s entire sensory experience had appeared in a bunch of Halliday’s favorite sci-fi novels, TV shows, and movies. There was SimStim—the fictional Simulated Stimulation technology William Gibson had envisioned in Neuromancer. And a similar form of experience-recording technology had also been featured in Brainstorm and Strange Days, two of Halliday’s favorite films…

If the ONI could do everything Halliday claimed, then he’d once again done the impossible. Through sheer force of will and brainpower, he’d once again turned science fiction into science fact, without much regard for the long-term consequences.

Could this be some sort of posthumous practical joke? Because the alternative didn’t seem to make any sense.

Almost like a contrived plot device in a bad sci-if novel

I put the headset back inside the egg, then I turned around and carried it out of the archives, planning to walk back to the elevator at a calm, dignified pace. But my self-control evaporated in seconds, and I began to run as fast as my legs would carry me.

(I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

Sounds unhealthy

I plugged the ONI headset into my OASIS console and placed it gently on my head. Its telescoping bands retracted automatically, pressing the array of sensor and transmitter pads mounted on them firmly against the unique contours of my cranium. Then its metal joints tightened up and the whole spiderlike device locked itself onto my skull so that its pads couldn’t be jostled or removed while the device was interfacing with my brain. According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

From reading the ONI documentation,

I’d seen this safety warning in the headset’s documentation,

This is gonna be this book’s version of Wade never being surprised by anything Update: actually no, this wasn’t the case. Only in the prologue.

I picked up an apple and felt the weight of it in my hand, and its hard smoothness against my palm. I squeezed it with all five of my fingertips and felt them create tiny craters of pulp beneath the surface of the apple’s skin. I was awestruck by the perfect replication of all that interlinked sensory input.

You never felt anything pass through your lips, and you definitely never tasted anything on your tongue. Now, thanks to the ONI, I could. And I did.

The orange, banana, grapes, and papaya tasted just as delicious, and as I took a bite out of each one, I felt the fruit travel down my esophagus to my stomach. I could even feel my stomach getting full.

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed to the empty room. “This is fucking incredible!” But my words were garbled, because I was talking with a mouth full of papaya.

Amazing! Edit: I noticed this line is truncated on my Goodreads notes, but you deserve to know how it ends: “But my words were garbled, because I was talking with a mouth full of papaya.”

A giddy laugh escaped me

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality.

Save something for Ready Player Three

And somehow, it also felt different from what I’d experienced in Anorak’s study—where that had been eerily smooth and precise, this was somehow more intense but also jarring and dislocating.

With descriptions like these, I feel like I’m really there

I pulled up the next clip, and then the next. I drove a racecar, did some skydiving, kung-fu fighting, deep-sea diving, and horseback riding—all within the same half hour.

I stopped when I reached a series of files with names like SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni. I wasn’t ready for any of that. I was still truly, madly, deeply in love with Samantha. And I was still reeling from losing my virginity to her just a few days earlier. I didn’t want to be unfaithful to her. I figured that cheating was cheating, whether it was live or it was Memorex.

1. We all know there are only three types of sex: M-F, F-F, and non-binary. 2. The end of the last book was Wade getting a kiss for the first time, and they apparently escalated to sex in the week since then?

I looked around my office. I checked the time. Over an hour had passed, which seemed about right.

lol

We didn’t make our decision lightly. We weighed all of the pros and cons. Then, after a heated debate, the four of us held a vote. The ayes had it. And just like that, we changed the course of human history forever.

Sounds like a scene that could provide zero drama or character-building opportunities. Good thing we skipped it to get to the next egg hunt.

And then, just a few days later, it happened—the event that set this whole tale in motion. A few seconds after the OASIS servers reached 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a message appeared on Halliday’s long-dormant website, where the Scoreboard for his contest had once resided: Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

The Shard Riddle appeared to announce the existence of a second Easter egg—another object hidden somewhere inside the OASIS by its eccentric creator sometime prior to his death.

Omg, it’s literally going to be the same!

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, an entire year passed.

10/10 sentence. Chef’s kiss! This man writes.

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.

Ready Player One: “We have to stop the evil company from having a monopoly!” Ready Player Two: “Guys, mission accomplished: we own the evil company and made it a monopoly!”

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.

Yay?

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.

I hear that’s going great for YouTube

“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.

Ernest Cline: “How do you do fellow kids?”

Moderating all of this user-generated content was a challenge—and a huge responsibility.

No duh

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.

So there is 100% a guy who has to check — by experiencing — any weird sex stuff that gets flagged

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.

Ah yes, the most obvious thing to do with this tech! (You okay, Ernest?)

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.

(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.

lol

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 is how all chapters in great literature open

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.

I rolled my eyes in his direction and manually flushed the toilet for effect.

then I put on my brand-new Okagami NexSpex augmented-reality glasses and headed downstairs.

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.

Maybe Halliday just didn’t like walking far when he has to poop

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…

Citizen Kane reference sitting right there and he didn’t take it

To my knowledge, Halliday had never given this place a name. But I thought it needed one, so I’d christened it Monsalvat, after the secluded castle where Sir Parzival finally locates the Holy Grail in some versions of the Arthurian legend.