Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

Those visits made me understand why Halliday had re-created Middletown in such loving detail, when it had been the setting of so many of his own unhappy childhood memories. He wanted to be able to revisit his own past, to get back in touch with the person he used to be, before the world had changed him.

And yes, the rational part of my brain knew that the vast majority of the people who trolled us online were acting out, due to crushing disappointment with their own miserable lives. And who could blame them? Reality was completely miserable for a vast majority of the world’s population. 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.

After a few sessions with Sean, I’d realized that the best thing for my mental health would be to abandon social media altogether. So I had. And it was the right choice. My anger abated, and my wounded pride began to heal. I’d finally gained enough distance from my addiction to realize something. Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle. That was why social media had been gradually driving the entire population of the world insane since it emerged back around the turn of the century.

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.

One of the locations that showed up most frequently in Kira’s OASIS account logs was the planet Miyazaki in Sector Twenty-Seven. It was a bizarre and beautiful world that paid tribute to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator behind anime masterpieces like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Visiting Miyazaki was like plunging your senses into a surreal mash-up of all of the different animated realities created inside Studio Ghibli’s films.

Kira Morrow had been a well-known Tolkien fanatic. She famously reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings every year from the time she was sixteen onward.

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.”

My life had been a lot harder back then, but in retrospect it now also seemed a hell of a lot simpler.

It’s cool to use the computer, don’t let the computer use you…. There is a war going on. The battlefield’s in the mind. And the prize is the soul. July 19, 1999

A beautiful spring morning in an upscale Midwestern suburb at the height of Reagan’s America. Period-appropriate cars and trucks—1989 or earlier—filled the tree-lined streets. “Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?” “Sure,” Art3mis replied. “But most of them hang out at a place called the Kandy Bar over in Chicago. This planet does have a serious diversity problem—like the whole of ’80s cinema….”

And until we managed to free Shoto’s mind from the OASIS, his comatose body would continue to be locked inside his OIV, just a few feet away from his family, but totally out of reach.

“Tolkien’s work directly inspired the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. And then D&D, in turn, inspired the first generation of videogame designers, who tried to re-create the experience of playing D&D on a computer. Kira, Og, and Halliday—they all grew up playing D&D and the videogames inspired by it. And that inspired all of them to make computer role-playing games. That’s how we got the Anorak’s Quest series, and eventually, the OASIS. If it weren’t for Tolkien, all of us nerds would’ve had a lot less fun during the last ninety years.”

Witnessing these two impossible, blissful reunions filled me with joy too. Genuine, unbridled joy.

Even with all of the problems confronting our counterparts back on Earth, it’s comforting to know that there are smart, resourceful people back there, doing everything in their power to make life better for their fellow human beings—while

Kira Underwood was right, when she said that life was like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. But sometimes the game can have a surprise ending…. And sometimes, when you think you’ve finally reached the end of the game, suddenly you find yourself standing at the start of a whole new level. A level that you’ve never seen before. And the only thing you can do is keep right on playing. Because the game that is your life still isn’t over yet. And there’s no telling how far you might be able to get, what you might discover, or who you might meet when you get there.