Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)

by Ernest Cline

ARC@DIA was going to serve as our own private scaled-down version of the OASIS during the voyage. It was still a work in progress, and likely would be until the day we departed. Due to various space and hardware limitations, our simulation wasn’t nearly as big—about half the size of one OASIS sector. But that was still a vast amount of virtual space for us and our tiny crew to inhabit. We had enough room to upload copies of more than two hundred of our favorite OASIS planets, along with their NPCs. We didn’t bother transferring any of the business content or retail planets over. Where we were going, we wouldn’t need stores or commerce. Besides, we had to be sparing with our data-storage space, since we were bringing along a backup copy of the entire ONI-net file database too. It was updated every night, along with new OASIS content. There was one other thing that made our simulation different from its predecessor. Unlike the OASIS, ARC@DIA could only be accessed via a neural-interface headset. (We didn’t want to waste any time, space, or money bringing outdated haptic technology along.) The Vonnegut was still about a year from being complete, but Aech, Shoto, and I were in no rush. We weren’t eager to leave the Earth behind for a long, cramped, and perilous voyage. And we weren’t ready to give up on Planet Earth yet either. Not while there was still a chance we could save it. What we were doing was doomsday-prepping on a multibillionaire scale, packing the ultimate bugout ...

This entire section is SO FUCKING BORING. Skipped.

And thanks to the rollout of our free global Internet initiative, their ISP business had also shriveled. Meanwhile, IOI also had the audacity to file a separate corporate lawsuit against me. They claimed that even though I’d created a false identity and used it to masquerade as an indentured servant to infiltrate their company headquarters, the indenturement contract I’d signed was still legally binding. Which meant, they argued, that I was still technically IOI’s property when I won Halliday’s contest, and so his fortune and his company should now also be classified as IOI’s property. Since the U.S. legal system still insisted on giving corporations even more rights than its citizens, this idiotic lawsuit dragged on for months…right up until GSS completed its hostile takeover of IOI. Then, as IOI’s new owners, we withdrew the lawsuit. We also fired the old IOI board of directors, their attorneys, and everyone else who had worked with or under Nolan Sorrento. Now the Sixers were a distant memory, and Innovative Online Industries was just another wholly owned subsidiary of Gregarious Simulation Systems. GSS was now far and away the largest corporation in the world. And if we kept growing at our current rate, before too long we might be the only one. That was the reason a lot of our own users had started to refer to GSS as the “New Sixers” and me, Aech, Shoto, and Samantha as the “Four Nerds of the Apocalypse.” Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enou...

I keep skipping swaths of boring exposition of things we missed between books. If you thought IOI and Wade & co got along afterwars, gues what . They did not. Wade is not a hero. Repeating the same things in different ways does not show the depth of their flaws. It shows flaws in the storytelling

“No g’news is good g’news with Gary Gnu!”

Um... Does pronounce the g?

I thought Art3mis would let go of my hand before Aech and Shoto saw her holding it, but she didn’t. She let them see. And Aech and Shoto pretended not to notice.

If Art3mis isn't hacked, this book is horrible