Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

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. Only time would tell.

We live in a society. It really makes you think.

Nobody knew that the OASIS’s creator had rigged the whole simulation with a self-destruct button, and that I alone now had access to it. Nobody knew that the fate of the whole world was literally in my hands.

Maybe the worst hands?

A conventional OASIS immersion rig

That’s so NOT one hell of a rig now. Get with the times!

Of course, as Art3mis was fond of pointing out, plenty of users didn’t take any precautions at all when they put on their ONI headsets. And plenty of them paid the price for doing so. A new breed of thieves, rapists, serial killers, and organ harvesters preyed on those ONI users who failed to lock up their bodies while their minds were on vacation.

Thanks, I hate it! I in no way needed to know about new methods of sexual assault ushered in by our heroic protagonist. Wade really has been stripped of any redeeming qualities at a record rate.

I went into the office’s private bathroom and remained there until I’d emptied my bowels and bladder as much as possible. This had become a pre-login ritual for every ONI user—especially those who wanted to remain logged in for a full twelve hours without soiling themselves.

Another signifier of great literature is the hero “emptying [their] bowels and bladder as much as possible.”

When the elevator’s blast doors slid open, I used the MoTIV’s cockpit controls to spider-walk it forward, into the bunker’s receiving bay, which was just a big empty concrete room with lights embedded in its ceiling.

Wade is literally becoming a supervillain

I was seated in my command center. This was the same spot where my avatar had been sitting the previous night, when I’d reached my twelve-hour ONI usage limit and the system had automatically logged me out.

I accessed the teleportation menu on my avatar’s superuser HUD, then scrolled down the list of bookmarked locations until I found the listing for the planet Gregarious in Sector One, the home of Gregarious Simulation Systems’s virtual offices inside the OASIS. When I selected it and tapped the Teleport icon, my avatar was instantly transported to a set of previously saved coordinates, hundreds of millions of virtual kilometers away.

I will never be able to escape overly-detailed descriptions of travel minutiae

Being able to shake hands without any danger of spreading disease had always been one of the perks of the OASIS. But in the old days, before the ONI was released, it always felt like you were shaking hands with a mannequin, even with the best haptic gloves available. Without the sensation of skin-to-skin human contact, the ancient greeting lost most of its meaning. After we’d introduced the ONI, shaking hands had come back in vogue, along with high fives and fist bumps, because now they felt real.

By design, everything about the view was calming and peaceful. Unfortunately, the same could never be said of the meetings we held here.

I hope you like this conference room, because we’re going to see a LOT of it over the course of this book. There are more conference room scenes here than in one of the Star Wars prequels.

I walked over and received high fives from each of them.

Which must have felt extra-good, as the paragraph before explained.

Aech liked to stay up late and sleep in even later.

Did nobody in editing catch this sentence? Or is Aech actually sleeping for 24+ hours per night?

I still couldn’t fathom why Samantha felt the need to endure all of the hassles and risks of real-world travel when she could have visited safely via telepresence robot, or experienced any location in the world by downloading an .oni clip recorded there.

Wade is still the worst

In other words, she was crazy. No, she’s selfless and principled, replied a nagging little voice in my head. And you’re neither of those things. Is it any wonder she dumped you?

The reclusive, obsessive existence I’d carved out for myself seemed painfully bleak by comparison.

In fact, they were two of the most popular celebrity posters on the ONI-net. Every clip either of them threw up went viral within a few seconds, regardless of its content.

More than once it had occurred to me that my friends were my one saving grace. The thing I took the most pride in—even more than winning Halliday’s fortune—was the three people I’d chosen to share that fortune with. Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis were all kinder, wiser, and saner than I was or ever would be.

Even Wade knows he’s a terrible person without redeeming qualities

Becoming a billionaire hadn’t altered Aech’s personality at all, as far as I could tell. She still liked to have ridiculous arguments about old movies. She still loved to get her kills on in PvP arena tournaments, and she remained one of the league’s highest-ranked combatants, in both the Deathmatch and Capture the Flag leagues. In other words, Aech was still a total badass. Except now she was a total badass who also happened to be insanely rich and world famous.

It was still hard to believe that Shoto would be a father in a few months, at such a young age. I was concerned for him, though I had no idea why.

You *just* said why!

Japan was in the midst of an “underpopulation crisis” because so many of its citizens had opted to stop having children over the past three decades. As the country’s wealthiest and most famous young couple, he and Kiki felt obligated to lead by example and reproduce as quickly as possible. So they had.

Woof

After Halliday’s contest, Sorrento had been convicted of thirty-seven separate counts of first-degree homicide. He was now serving time on death row in a maximum-security prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, about fifty miles south of Columbus.

Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

This is a pretty bad throw-the-book-across-the-room line

I made small talk with Aech and Shoto for a few more minutes, until the conference room doors swung open and Samantha’s avatar, Art3mis, strolled in.

Four pages later, the scene finally resumes

Faisal continued to detail how great our company was doing, but I didn’t hear much of what he was saying. I was too busy stealing glances at Art3mis across the table. I knew she wouldn’t catch me, because she made a point of never looking in my direction.

When she gave interviews, she often spoke about what it had been like for her to grow up hating her birthmark, and how she’d spent most of her life trying to conceal it. But now she wore it like a badge of honor, in reality and in the OASIS. And as a result, she’d somehow transformed her birthmark into an internationally recognized trademark.

Compounding this problem was the fact that we didn’t purge any OASIS user’s account data when they died in the real world, including those huge UBS files.

Sticking a pin in this, because I’m guessing it’s used later to create artificial people later in the book Update (Spoiler warning from the end of the book): Correct! I actually forgot that I made a note of this, so good job past-me.

Thanks to our ironclad end-user license agreement, GSS couldn’t be held legally responsible for any of these deaths.

I don’t know about you, but when I read Ready Player One, I definitely thought, “Gee, that was great, but I wish it had more end-user license agreement talk. That stuff really raises my pulse.” Glad to see my concerns have been heard.

Aech, Shoto, and I all let out a sigh—unintentionally in unison.

For the first time in years, Art3mis locked eyes with me. “You,” she said, leveling a finger at me.

I clenched and unclenched my jaw a few times, to keep myself from screaming in frustration.

Love this!

Art3mis tried to interrupt, but I kept on talking over her.

By moving most human social interaction online and making so much tourism virtual, we’ve cut travel drastically and limited the spread of nearly all infectious diseases. Including sexually transmitted ones, since now most people have sex inside the OASIS.”

I stood there motionless for a long time, listening to the echo of Samantha’s accusations ricochet around inside my head until the noise finally faded away.

must be pretty empty in there for the echo to go on so long

“Hello!” I shouted at the Six-Fingered Man one final time. “My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father. Prepare to die!”

It was at this line that I decided, no, I don’t need to read another chapter tonight.

We rode them out of the kingdom to freedom, while the song “Storybook Love” played on the soundtrack. When the song ended, so did the quest. The horses and the other characters vanished and my avatar’s appearance returned to normal. I found myself standing alone outside the quest portal I’d originally entered, on the eastern shore of the kingdom of Guilder. A chime sounded and a message appeared on my HUD, congratulating me on completing the Princess Bride quest with a perfect score of one million points.

But what about the framing narrative in The Princess Bride??? Why doesn’t Wade have to go be little Fred Savage talking to his grandpa if he’s getting a perfect score in this movie? You can’t spend over a page reciting the Princess Bride exactly, then expect us not to notice when you veer from the script. Update: he mentions later that you play through the movie as different characters, so it ends wherever that character’s story ends. I still feel robbed of the grandpa scene, though.

The Princess Bride had been one of Kira Underwood’s all-time favorite films, and she’d helped create all of the interactive OASIS quests based on it. (Including the controversial gender-swapped The Prince Groom, in which Buttercup is the swashbuckling heroine and Westley serves as the damsel in distress.)

This is probably Cline’s idea of what feminism is like

Once my avatar finished rematerializing,

We don’t need these preambles to sentences

I’d started my grail diary

Ugh

I considered calling it quits and giving up on the shards altogether. I mean, why was I wasting my time trying to solve Halliday’s insipid side quest anyway? What was I hoping would happen when I completed it? I had already achieved wealth and fame in reality, and in the OASIS my avatar was already all-powerful and invulnerable. I had nothing more to prove to anyone.

The planet Thra was a meticulous re-creation of the fantasy world depicted in The Dark Crystal, another of her favorite films. Her parents had named her Karen, but after she saw The Dark Crystal for the first time at age eleven, she’d insisted that her friends and family call her Kira, the name of the film’s Gelfling heroine. (She’d also renamed the family dog Fizzgig.)

But all I had to show for my efforts was an impressive familiarity with obscure Sailor Moon trivia and an inexplicable desire to cosplay as Tuxedo Mask (which I may or may not have acted upon in the solitude and privacy of my own home).

Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis didn’t have the ability to conceal their usage logs from the feds, our high-level OASIS admins, or from me. So unbeknownst to them, I was able to see how much time they spent inside the OASIS each day, as well as where they went and what they did while they were there. I’d stopped checking Aech and Shoto’s logs years ago—partly out of respect for their privacy, but mostly because I quickly discovered that I didn’t want or need to know when they were ducking me to spend time hanging out with other people. But I still checked Art3mis’s usage logs at least once a week. I couldn’t resist.

But like Bono before me, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

after they married, Og built Kira a real-world replica of Rivendell in the mountains of Oregon, where they lived together happily until her death. Og still lived there now,

He already told us this! It was memorable because of the sex noises bouncing off all the mountains.

Thinking back on my behavior made me wince with shame now. Why would a retired billionaire want to spend his twilight years being hounded for information about his dead wife? It was no wonder he’d stopped speaking to me.

I tapped the message to open it and began to read:

79 pages into the book, the inciting incident arrives at last!

But The L0w-Down was different. L0hengrin had an incredibly upbeat personality, and an infectious brand of enthusiasm that reminded me of how I’d felt in the early days of the contest. The brief voice over that opened her show seemed to sum up her life’s philosophy: “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.”

Omg! Is my prediction that we’d get a “not like other girls” girl in this book coming true???

My appreciation for L0hengrin and her show may have been slightly colored by the fact that I’d developed a mild crush on her. She was cute, smart, funny, and fearless. She was also a vocal High Five superfan. Her own gunter clan called themselves “The L0w Five.” Most flattering of all, her avatar’s name was a not-so-subtle tribute to my own, because in several German versions of the King Arthur legend, Lohengrin was the name of Parzival’s son.

This girl better run

But like Ranma Saotome in Ranma 1/2, L0hengrin was also famous for changing her avatar’s gender, unexpectedly and without warning—sometimes in midsentence. When she transformed into a male, she seemed to prefer the likeness of a young James Spader, especially his look from the 1985 film Tuff Turf. Regardless of her avatar’s current gender, L0hengrin’s public profile specified that her preferred gender pronouns were she and her. In her one-line user bio, she described herself as “A wild-eyed pistol-waver who ain’t afraid to die.”

Hmm... I guess I’ll give Cline points for the trans/non-binary representation here, but I have zero faith that he won’t screw it up somewhere down the line. (Spoiler from future-me: he takes less than a chapter to screw it up!)

despite my curiosity, I’d never accessed L0hengrin’s account. Not because doing so would violate GSS company policy and several federal laws. That had never stopped me in the past. I told myself that I was respecting her privacy—but really I was just worried that learning L0hengrin’s true identity might ruin my enjoyment of her show, robbing me of one of the few pleasures I had in life that didn’t involve the ONI.

Just when you thought Wade had hit the creepiness floor, he invents novel ways to keep on digging