Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

When I stepped through the portal, I didn’t find myself inside a videogame, or in a historical simulation of feudal Japan. Instead, I found myself standing in a place I’d visited once before—years ago, during the contest. Happytime Pizza. The original Happytime Pizza was a small mom-and-pop pizza parlor and video arcade that had existed in Middletown, Ohio, from 1981 to 1989. Halliday had spent countless hours there during his youth, and he’d re-created it in loving detail inside the OASIS, along with the rest of his hometown, on the planet he’d named after it. But during the contest I’d discovered another instance of Happytime Pizza, hidden in the subterranean videogame museum on the planet Archaide. That was where I’d played my perfect game of Pac-Man and earned the extra life quarter that allowed me to survive the detonation of the Cataclyst on Chthonia. Given my previous visits to Happytime Pizza, my surroundings should have felt familiar. But it was the opposite, because this time, I was wearing the ONI. This time, I could smell the tomato sauce and burnt pepperoni grease in the air. I could feel the subtle vibration of the sound system’s speakers through the floorboards, pulsing in time with the bass line as they blasted the song “Obsession” by Animotion. This time, I felt like I was really here, like I’d genuinely traveled back in time to Middletown, Ohio, sometime in the late 1980s.