Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

“Load Temple of Doom,” I said as I reached the bottom of the grand staircase. The empty foyer and dimly lit hallways of the mansion were instantly transformed into a vast subterranean labyrinth of caverns and corridors. And when I glanced down at myself, the workout clothes I’d been wearing had been replaced with a perfectly rendered Indiana Jones costume, complete with a worn leather jacket, a bull-whip on my right hip, and a battered fedora. Indy’s theme music began to play as I jogged down the corridor, and a variety of obstacles and enemies started to appear in front of me, forcing me to either dodge them or attack them with my imaginary whip. I earned points for every obstacle I avoided and for every enemy I vanquished. I could also earn bonus points for keeping my heart rate up, and for freeing the captive children being used as slave labor in the temple from their holding cells, which were scattered along my path. I ran a total of five miles like this, sprinting from one end of my house to the other and back again. And I managed to beat my previous high score.

The estate’s enormous garage now contained four classic movie car replicas—the same four movie cars that had inspired my avatar’s OASIS mash-up vehicle, ECTO-88. I owned screen-accurate replicas of Doc Brown’s 1982 DeLorean DMC-12 time machine (pre–hover conversion); the Ghostbusters’ 1959 Cadillac hearse Ectomobile, Ecto-1; the black 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am Knight Industries 2000, KITT (with Super-Pursuit Mode); and finally, sitting down at the far end, a replica of Dr. Buckaroo Banzai’s matter-penetrating Jet Car, built from a heavily modified 1982 Ford F-series pickup truck, with air scoops from a DC-3 transport plane bolted onto its frame, along with a World War II German fighter plane cockpit, a turbine-powered jet engine, and parachute packs for rapid deceleration.

Beleaguered sigh

This allowed me to finally bring my longstanding fanboy dream to life: an epic cross-over film about Dr. Emmett Brown and Dr. Buckaroo Banzai teaming up with Knight Industries to create a unique interdimensional time vehicle for the Ghostbusters, who must use it to save all ten known dimensions from a fourfold cross-rip that could tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum.

Can we just read Wade’s fanfic movie instead of this book?

Next it was time for weight training, in the spare dining room I’d converted into a personal gym. Max occasionally offered words of encouragement as I pumped iron, with some snarky commentary mixed in. He made for a pretty good personal trainer. But after a few minutes I muted him to watch another Peter Davison–era episode of Doctor Who. It had been one of Kira Morrow’s favorite shows, and Davison had been her third-favorite Doctor, after Jodie Whittaker and David Tennant.

I guess it’s very important that we know Wade stayed ripped after the last book. But lest we fear he’s become a Chad, he reaffirms his nerd creeds in the same paragraph.

That was also the week Samantha and I fell in love.

Hahahaha

Before we met in the Earl,

Ugh, he’s actually going to use this phrase through the rest of the book Update: he did

But when the two of us finally began to spend time together in reality, I fell in love with her all over again. And I fell much harder, much faster the second time, because our connection was now physical as well as psychological, the way nature originally intended.

I hurl

“You can’t know if you’re in love with someone if you’ve never actually touched them,” she told me. And as usual, she was right. Once she and I started touching each other, we both found it difficult to stop. We lost our virginity to each other three days after that first kiss. Then we spent the rest of that week sneaking off to make the beast with two backs at every opportunity. Like Depeche Mode, we just couldn’t get enough.

Are the straights okay??? Are the allos okay???

the acoustics of the place caused loud sounds to carry a long distance and echo off the adjacent mountain walls. But our friends and our host generously pretended not to hear all of the noise we must have made.

Staaaaaaaahp!

One night, we decided that “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls was our song, and then we listened to it over and over again, for hours, while we talked or made love.

We all grew extremely fond of Ogden Morrow during our brief stay at his home.

Poor Og has to listen to teenage sex noises echoing through his home for hours

(And since there were now only four of us, Og’s induction into the High Five also prevented our nickname from becoming a misnomer.)

Guys, one of you died, and you’re concerned over the nickname accuracy?

I knew Samantha might be upset with me for testing the ONI before discussing it with her first. But since it had worked flawlessly and I wasn’t harmed in any way, I assumed she would forgive my risky behavior. Instead she got so pissed off she hung up on me before I even had a chance to finish describing all of the different things I’d experienced with the ONI—and the ones I had chosen not to experience.

Surprised Pikachu, you big dumdum. And you don’t get credit for *not* cheating on your partner. That’s just being a decent human being.

It was transcendental technology. The OASIS Neural Interface was the ultimate prosthesis. One that could temporarily cure any ailment or injury of the human body by disconnecting the mind and reconnecting it to a new, perfectly healthy, fully functional body inside the OASIS—a simulated body that would never feel any pain, through which you could experience every pleasure imaginable. The three of us talked ourselves into a frenzy, listing all the ways this device was going to change everything.

Yeah, we get it already

“I told you,” Samantha says, snatching one of the headsets off the table, “I am never going to let one of these things take control of my brain. Not ever.”

This seems inconsistent with her characterization in the last book

She pulls up half a dozen different world newsfeeds on the conference-room viewscreen, filling it with images of poverty, famine, disease, war, and a wide array of natural disasters.

The sudden change in her eyes says it all. One second she loves me, and the next she loves me not.

Did Wade turn into Yoda for a sec?

letting too much anger creep into my voice.

Too much

She couldn’t forgive me. She told me so right after I cast my vote against her. Right before she dumped me.

Once my brain finally processed what had happened, I collapsed into a chair, clutching my chest.

lol

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.

Wade sounds like he needs a lot of therapy, and then some more to get over this breakup

She was like Oprah, Joan Jett, and Mother Teresa all rolled into one.

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.

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.

Anyone getting weirdly nationalistic vibes from Cline here? Like, “don’t worry, we made sure our super police drones only have good apples; it’s fine...”

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.

What a pessimistic worldview this book has so far

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

Is Wade just Elon Musk?

I’d christened my ship the Vonnegut, like my old Firefly-class spaceship in the OASIS, which I’d named after my favorite author.

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.)

You’ve been WHAT?!

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!”

This is one of those passages where you can feel braincells dying as you read

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.

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.

Accurate

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.

This gives off “Renowned author Dan Brown” vibes

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.

Like I said earlier, very important that we know Wade stays in shape.

There wasn’t any actual chance of my service robots staging a revolt, of course.

That’s what they want you to think...

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.

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. I knew how pathetic this was—which somehow made it even more pathetic.

Black Mirror territory

But trust me, there were far more twisted and depraved clips I could’ve been playing back. The current top download in the NSFW section of the ONI-net library was a fifty-person orgy, recorded simultaneously by all fifty participants, giving the viewer the ability to jump from one participant’s body to the next at will, like some hedonistic demon. Cyberstalking my ex-girlfriend at her public appearances seemed like a pretty tame pastime in comparison.

Once again, you don’t get credit for being only the medium level of creepy

It was a brilliant and effective use of ONI technology.

What even is this sentence?

she didn’t give a flying frak at a rolling Rathtar what I thought.

I was practicing for Aech and Endira’s wedding in a few months. I knew that Samantha would be in attendance, and I’d secretly begun to harbor an idiotic fantasy that I might be able to win her back when she saw me tearing up the dance floor.

But I felt like changing things up this morning, so I selected the bench by the lake at Boston Public Garden,

That is NOT a lake. It is a pond.

I’d never been good in social situations of any kind, so I’d avoided social media entirely for most of my life.

The idea that social skills == social media skills is one of the funniest presented so far in this book

This had been the case ever since I first found the Copper Key, but it was only after I’d won the contest that the haters came out in force.

My detractors in the media began to refer to my avatar as “Parvenu” instead of Parzival, while the less pretentious garden-variety assholes online instead chose to adopt I-Roc’s old nickname for me—“Penisville.”

But they only took the last part, so the lyrics to the whole song were just me singing “I should be forever branded as a gutless Sixer-fellating punk!” over and over. The song instantly went viral. It was Tapioca Shindig’s one and only hit single. They posted a music video to the ONI-net that racked up over a billion downloads before I had it taken offline. Then I sued the band for defamation and bankrupted each of its members. Which, of course, only made the public hate me even more.

Our hero

I appeared to lack the emotional maturity

Gonna cut you off here to say that you are correct

I should’ve taken pity on the sad, pathetic souls who had nothing better to do with their time than vent their frustrations by attacking me and my friends. Instead I went on a rage-induced troll-killing spree. Several of them, actually.

Again, this is the hero character we are supposed to root for

Now that my avatar wore the Robes of Anorak, I was both omnipotent and invulnerable, so there was literally nothing anyone could do to stop me.

You hear that? That’s the sound of the stakes in this book crumbling away in the distance...

If someone talked shit about me, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted something hateful about Art3mis or her foundation, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted a racist meme about Aech or a video attacking Shoto’s work, I found them and killed their avatar—usually right after I asked them the rhetorical question, “Who run Bartertown?” Eventually, people began to accuse me of being the untraceable, undetectable, ultrapowerful avatar behind the killings, and the resulting online media backlash, dubbed “Parzivalgate,” destroyed my public image.

Considering what’s happened to people who post clips from *this book,* I really wonder if this is the type of thing Cline does with his own work. Not killing people, of course, but tracking down people who post negative comments or criticism and having those posts deplatformed.

A few dozen class-action lawsuits were filed against me. In the end, none of them amounted to anything; I was a multibillionaire with unlimited resources and the world’s best lawyers on my payroll, and there was no proof of wrongdoing on my part.