Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

wearing her trademark Legend of Billie Jean attire.

By definition, isn’t this using someone else’s trademark?

and several different classic home videogame consoles.

Didn’t feel like listing them this time?

“Of course the ignorant males doubt you,” she said. “But I believe you, sister!”

Sometimes you have to sit back and admire a true wordsmith in action

“Parzival would never do that,” L0hengrin said. “He’s a righteous dude.” “He’s a rich nutjob who acts like a total douchebag on social media,” Lilith said. “He also likes to hunt and kill his detractors for sport, remember? You shouldn’t trust him.”

Cline lamp-shading how unlikeable Wade is doesn’t make the situation any better. It just lets me know that you knew you had a bad protagonist on your hands, but didn’t do anything to fix it.

“I thought you’d never ask!” she replied. “First, I’m gonna buy a big house in Columbus for all of us to live in together.

Someone winning a billion dollars, then saying “Columbus, Ohio, here I come!” is very funny

“I’ll also make sure our new crib has the fastest OASIS connection money can buy,” she went on.

The war against lag is ever-waging

“Guys,” she said. “You’re my four best friends in the world. My only friends, if we’re being honest. And ever since my mom died, you’ve been my only family too.

It’s like she knows the audience-surrogate is in the room — the perfect time to drop some exposition!

I was smiling and tearing up, too, I realized.

He reached up to wipe his eyes on the back of his furry simian forearm.

Same

I suddenly felt like a jerk for eavesdropping on their conversation.

suddenly

I justified violating her right to privacy as an OASIS user the way I always did—by telling myself it was necessary.

Truly Wade is a many-facetted character, and the depths of his psychology will inspire hundreds of scholarly articles in the years to come

But that was a bullshit excuse and I knew it. What it really boiled down to was plain old curiosity. I was curious about who L0hengrin was in the real world. And I had the ability to find out. So I did.

Since I’d already violated her privacy, I decided to go full-on Big Brother and have a look at her headset feeds.

Why not

I had the ability to spy on people in their homes. This was one of GSS’s uglier secrets, and there would be riots and class-action suits galore if our customers ever found out about it. But these were exceptional circumstances, I assured myself.

Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise. She’d been DMAB—designated male at birth.

Why are you surprised that she’s trans when you mentioned a few pages ago that her gender-swapping avatar was one of her most famous qualities?

Discovering this minor detail didn’t send me spiraling into a sexual-identity crisis, the way it probably would have back when I was younger. Thanks to years of surfing the ONI-net, I now knew what it felt like to be all kinds of different people, having all different kinds of sex. I’d experienced sex with women while being another woman, and sex with men as both a woman and a man. I’d done playback of several different flavors of straight and gay and nonbinary sex, just out of pure curiosity, and I’d come away with the same realization that most ONI users came away with: Passion was passion and love was love, regardless of who the participants involved were, or what sort of body they were assigned at birth.

Wow, it took actually living in someone else’s skin and having sex as them for Wade to understand that LGBTQIA+ people are people. This is presented like we should be proud for Wade’s personal growth, when I’d have been much more proud if he’d just not mentioned why his worldview had shifted.

Around the same time, she’d changed her avatar’s sex classification to øgender, a brand-new option GSS had added due to popular demand. People who identified as øgender were individuals who chose to experience sex exclusively through their ONI headsets, and who also didn’t limit themselves to experiencing it as a specific gender or sexual orientation.

What was wrong with agender or non-binary or gender-fluid, etc? These terms already exist, but Cline acts like this is a new sci-fi concept he invented and deserves an ally medal for.

Thanks to the OASIS Neural Interface, your gender and your sexuality were no longer constrained by—or confined to—the physical body you happened to be born into.

I mean, gender never has been, unless you count the physicality of the brain (which I don’t think Cline would)

when her eyes locked on to me they seemed to double in size.

“I’ve read every single one of the books written about you over the past few years, including your autobiography, which I’ve read at least two dozen times.

This poor girl read Ready Player One 24+ times

Poor Lo.

Before anyone could try to claim the reward, they were required to sign a digital “Shard Clue Submission Contract” that my lawyers had drafted. I located the copy L0hengrin had signed and displayed it in a window in front of her. The print was too fine to read without squinting, and the text scrolled on for several pages.

Yawn!

“Oh, I’ve read the contract,” she said, grinning,

This person does not exist. My suspension of disbelief ends here.

“A few thousand times.

Still talking about the contract

L0hengrin turned and walked over to the bookshelves that lined the basement’s far wall. They were filled with sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, role-playing-game supplements, and back issues of various vintage gaming magazines, like Dragon and Space Gamer. Lo began to flip through the huge collection of old Dungeons & Dragons modules shelved there, apparently looking for one in particular.

Might as well have just said “she walked over to the bookshelf.” I assume all bookshelves in this universe contain sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks and role-playing modules.

“You know how in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Two Towers, there’s a scene were King Théoden places a Simbelmynë on Théodred’s tomb?” she asked. I nodded.

This book in a nutshell

two more bookshelves had appeared against the far wall, both filled with more gaming supplements.

She was never allowed to have male visitors up there, and none of the boys in the guild had ever seen Kira’s room, including Og and Halliday. But I would’ve been willing to bet they’d both spent plenty of time imagining what it looked like. Maybe that was what I was looking at now—a simulation of what Halliday imagined Kira’s room looked like back then.

Gross

When the Smiths song ended, there was a blinding flash of light. When it faded the floating necklace had transformed into a large blue teardrop-shaped crystal, spinning in front of us at eye-level. There it was, at long last—one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul.

“It felt like an ONI recording,” I said. “But it only lasted for a few seconds. I was Kira Underwood—or at least, it felt like I was her—and I was reliving the moment when she created that unicorn on a computer at her school when she was ten.”

I was considering this question when an urgent notification flashed on my HUD. It was an icon I hadn’t seen in years—a Scoreboard alert.

“I say that with all due respect, of course. Because I do respect you, and everything you’ve accomplished. You just lost your way a little bit. Which makes perfect sense—you suddenly became rich and famous! You know what Bill Murray said about that? ‘When you become famous, you’ve got, like, a year or two where you act like a real asshole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got, like, two years to pull it together—or it’s permanent.’ ” I frowned at her. “I’ve been famous for well over three years now.”

“You want to know my favorite Bill Murray quote?” I asked. She nodded. “I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first. See if that doesn’t cover most of it.’ ”

I handed her one of my contact cards, which were still designed to look like an old Adventure cartridge for the Atari 2600. “Give me a call if there’s ever anything you need,” I said. “Anything at all.” She stared down at the card. Then she snapped it out of my hands and rushed to give me one of her own contact cards. It was designed to look like a VHS copy of The Legend of Billie Jean. I immediately added it to my inventory.

*beleaguered sigh*

I pressed a button on the control panel and the armored canopy slid open with a pneumatic hiss. I pulled myself out, ritually humming the opening line of an old ’80s tune by Soul II Soul. Back to life. Back to re-al-it-y.

As soon as I got my bearings, two stacks of golden Marshall amplifiers magically appeared on either side of Halliday’s golden Easter egg and a hauntingly familiar song blasted out of them at earsplitting volume—“Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa. Then the emcees themselves, Salt and Pepa, stepped out from behind the golden Marshall stacks, both singing into golden microphones, looking like they just stepped out of their music video in 1986. While DJ Spinderella rose up from behind Halliday’s egg, scratching a pair of solid gold records on a set of solid gold turntables. Then, while I continued to stand there frozen, with my hand on the Big Red Button, Salt-N-Pepa performed the song’s chorus continuously, for what felt like several straight hours: Ah, push it, push it good Ah, push it, push it real good Oooh, baby, baby! Baby, baby! Oooh, baby, baby! Baby, baby!

Wade’s nightmares are even worse than his name-dropping info dumps

They were permanently welded to every neuron in my brain.

those lyrics were playing on an endless loop, telling me over and over again that I should not only push it!, but that the sensible thing would be for me to go the extra mile and push it real good!

Lol

When I turned around, Salt-N-Pepa had vanished, and the guys from Men at Work were standing in their place, singing the chorus of their 1983 hit single “It’s a Mistake.”

I woke up to the pleasant electronic chirp of the vintage analog phone beside my bed. It was an Anova Electronics Communications Center Model 7000, manufactured in 1982—the very same sleek, silver, retro-futuristic telephone that Ferris Bueller’s best pal, Cameron Frye, had beside his bed. When Cameron was in Egypt’s land, let my Cameron go…

“I was calling to make sure you’d seen the news. About Mr. Morrow.”

“He’s missing,” Faisal said. “Possibly abducted.

“An intruder would’ve had to hack his home security system,” Faisal said. “And his robot sentries. And his jet’s security system. Who could pull that off?” I nodded. I had the same Odinware system as Og. And the same robot sentries were guarding my estate at that very moment. It was the best home-security tech available—or at least the most expensive.

Just a guess: the security system turned sentient AI and kidnapped Morrow. Or maybe just the robot did. Update: almost, but not exactly what happened

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Og and I haven’t communicated in over two years.” Because I wouldn’t stop hounding him for information about his dead wife.

Our hero

In the distance, beyond the runway, I saw the steep cobblestone staircase at the edge of the runway, which led up to Og’s multilevel mansion, constructed on a series of plateaus carved into the base of the mountain range. From the outside, it looked like a perfect replica of Rivendell, as it appeared in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Is this the third time we’ve gotten this information in this book?

He’d kept the cost of the project a secret, but some estimated he’d spent close to two billion dollars.

The dollar amounts being tossed around by our nearly-omnipotent characters are so high that I can’t tell which ones I’m supposed to be impressed by. Last chapter, Wade threw a billion to Lo for a hint to the first shard, and he didn’t act like it was some huge financial loss.

A higher price tag than Buckingham Palace.

Well, sure, but Buckingham Palace was completed in... (googles...) 1850. So, yeah, two billion would probably have been a little steep.

Og owned four telebots, all brand-new Okagami TB-6000s with gleaming gunmetal-blue chassis and chrome trim.

Cool story bro

I put on my imaginary Detroit Lions ball cap and shifted my brain into Magnum PI detective mode.

Why weren’t there any signs of a struggle? Og was in his mid-seventies, but he still would have put up a fight.

I love this line