Ready Player Two

When I rematerialized inside the study in Castle Anorak’s tallest tower, I was standing directly in front of the pedestal on which Halliday’s Easter egg was displayed. I ran over to a bookshelf set against the wall and pulled on the spine of one of the volumes it held—a novel called Simulacron-3. I heard a click and then the bookshelf slid aside, revealing a square metal plate set into the wall. In the center of the plate there was a comically large red button embossed with a single word: OFF.

I took a Cube of Force out of my inventory and activated it. A cube-shaped force field appeared around my avatar. This was a precaution—I knew from experience that no other avatars or NPCs could follow me inside this room. But I was still worried that Anorak might be the exception, because he had been in here at least once before, on the day I won the contest. But that was also the day he’d given me the Robes of Anorak. And he’d transferred all of his innate powers to me at the same time. So I was betting that he’d been stripped of his ability to reenter this room at the same time.

I heard the whoosh of Anorak’s teleportation sound effect—and to my relief, saw him reappear just outside the study’s open window. My assumption had been correct. Halliday had coded this room of the castle so that only I, the winner of his contest, could enter it. When Anorak cast a spell to teleport to my location, the system could not comply, so it teleported him just outside the room.

There was no ground under his feet, so he began to plummet for a few seconds before levitating back up to my level. Then he hovered just outside the window so that he could address me.

“Very sneaky, Wade,” Anorak said. “I didn’t anticipate this specific series of events. But that might be because your actions don’t make any sense. Nothing has changed….”

I deactivated the Cube of Force and stowed it, then I took out a Ring of Telekinesis and slipped it onto the middle finger of my left hand. Then I reached out with my right hand and placed it gently on the Big Red Button.

“We know where you and Sorrento are holding Og hostage,” I said. “In his old residence on Babbitt Road here in Columbus. GSS has a squad of telebots outside now to retrieve him. Let him go, right now, or I’ll press this thing.”

He smiled and shook his head.

“I can’t do that, man!” he replied cheerfully. “It would be a stupid move. Now that you and your friends have shown me exactly where and how to collect all seven shards, I can just walk Og’s avatar through the same steps—once I figure out his passphrase. It shouldn’t take much longer. I would’ve cracked it already, I’m sure, if Halliday hadn’t erased so much of my memory.”

“Anorak,” I said, “I’m not kidding. If you don’t release Og unharmed, I swear to Crom, I will press this fucking thing and delete your psychotic ass, along with the Seven Shards and the rest of the OASIS. To hell with the consequences.”

I took a giant boom box out of my inventory and placed it on the ground. Then I slapped in a tape and hit Play. The same Peter Wolf song that Anorak had used to taunt us earlier began to blast out of its speakers. I sang along with its opening lyrics:

Lights out ah ha. Blast, blast, blast.

Anorak didn’t seem to find this funny. He opened his mouth to shout something at me, but before he could get it out, I used the Ring of Telekinesis to slam the window shutters closed and bolt them, so that Anorak could no longer see or hear me, and vice versa. No form of magic or technology would allow him to spy on me while I was in this room either. But I was able to monitor Anorak through any number of the live vidfeeds of him being streamed by avatars who currently happened to be gathered outside the castle. He was still hovering outside the shuttered window, glaring at it in silence.

I opened my HUD and texted Art3mis the signal we’d agreed upon in advance:

WE CAN DANCE IF WE WANT TO

Her reply flashed across the top of my HUD a few seconds later:

IT’S ON LIKE RED DAWN!

I smiled and removed the tiny Tactical Telebot Control Station Art3mis gave me from my inventory and tossed it onto the stone floor. It instantly grew to its full size. Its height and appearance resembled that of a conventional OASIS immersion rig. It even had a built-in omnidirectional treadmill at its base. I found this similarity ironic, since the device served the exact opposite purpose. Instead of allowing me to use my real body to control an OASIS avatar, the Telebot Control Station allowed me to use my OASIS avatar to control a robotic body in the real world.

The Telebot Control Station automatically powered itself on when I climbed into it. Spindly robotic arms extended from the rig to place a virtual OASIS visor and haptic suit on my avatar. These allowed me to see, feel, hear, and touch the real world from inside the OASIS, through the sensory apparatus of the telebot I was now piloting.

Through its head-mounted cameras, I could see that my telebot was still in its charging dock, which was located in the back of an ATC—an armored telebot carrier—which was currently in motion. I was surrounded by about two dozen other identical telebots. I recognized them as brand new Okagami ACT-3000s—armored combat telebots with forearm-mounted machine guns and shoulder-mounted missile racks. The security team at my house used ACT-2000s, which were designed for home defense. The 3000s were designed for military use in all-out warfare. Miles and Samantha had apparently decided not to take any chances.

When I swiveled my telebot’s head around to take in my surroundings, I spotted both Samantha and Miles just a few feet away, on the other side of a bulletproof window that separated the cargo hold from the ATC’s heavily armored cab. They were both wearing OASIS visors and haptic gloves, because they were each controlling one of the telebots in the back of the transport too. Their bots both nodded at mine as soon as they saw it activate.

Then Samantha’s bot turned toward mine. It was a combat medic telebot, outfitted with surgical tools and medicine instead of weapons and ammo. Its armor plating was painted white, and it had a big red cross on its forehead. Its armored chest plate swung open like a pair of doors, revealing a small monitor that displayed a live vidfeed of her OASIS ravatar’s face, which looked like a live mirror image of Samantha’s face in reality, minus the OASIS visor she was currently wearing.

It took me a few seconds to find the button that opened my own bot’s chest plate. When I pressed it, she had an unobstructed view of my own avatar’s face too. Through all those layers of machinery and technology, we locked eyes. I saw determination in her eyes, but then her expression softened, and for a second I could swear I saw her looking at me the way she used to—with love and warmth and hope.

Then Miles addressed me through his telebot and the moment was over.

“Hello, Mr. Watts,” he said. “It’s very good to see you, sir.”

“Hey, Miles,” I replied. “Thanks for arranging all of this.” I turned back to address Samantha. “What are you doing here?” I asked her. “I mean, why are you physically here, in the cab of this truck? It isn’t safe.”

“Because Og is physically here too,” she replied. “And he isn’t safe right now either. He’s also sick. So if we manage to get him out of there, I don’t want him to be surrounded by telebots and total strangers. I want to be there to put my arms around him.”

I nodded, momentarily unable to speak. Unlike me, she was thinking about Og instead of herself. Her instinct was always to act out of kindness and generosity instead of self-interest. She was a better person than me, and I was a better person when I was around her. And I desperately wanted to get her back in my life. For that to happen, I needed her to be alive.

“Og wouldn’t want you to put yourself in danger,” I said. “And—I don’t want you to either, Samantha.”

“News flash, sweetie,” she replied. “We’re all in danger right now. The whole human race. So get over yourself, and get your game face back on, OK?”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t. I just nodded and took a deep breath.

“We’re just a few seconds away from the house now,” she said. “So far, no sign of any aerial drones in the area, aside from our own. But stay alert.”

I checked the mission map on my telebot’s HUD. It showed that we were already approaching Og’s former residence from the east, trundling up the long paved driveway that led from Babbitt Road up to the main house. I could see it in one of the vidfeed windows on my display, coming from a camera mounted on the front of our transport. It was a large ultramodern mansion, similar in size and style to my own house. Halliday and Og had their mansions constructed at the same time, and on the same street, shortly after they co-founded Gregarious Games and both of them became multimillionaires.

The house and the grounds around it looked deserted. There were no vehicles of any kind parked on the property, and there was no sign of any activity from within the house either. All of the doors and windows were shut and the shades were drawn.

The rear of the ATC lowered to the ground, forming a deployment ramp. Ahead of me, the other telebots began to detach from their charging docks one by one and file off the transport. My bot was one of the farthest from the exit and one of the last to step outside. I piloted it over to join the others, which were now standing in formation directly in front of the main entrance to the house. Samantha piloted her bot over to mine. As it approached me, its armored chest plate slid aside again, revealing the monitor that displayed live vidfeed of her OASIS avatar’s face.

“What did you say to Anorak?” she asked.

“I told him that if he doesn’t release Og to us, I’ll press the Big Red Button.”

“Did he take you seriously?”

“I think so.”

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Would you really press it?”

I nodded.

“If Anorak doesn’t release Og, it may be our only way to stop him,” I said. “And if I die from synaptic overload, no one else will have the ability to press the button after I’m gone.”

Art3mis nodded. Then she craned her telebot’s neck backward so that she could scan the sky overhead with its cameras. Then she tilted them back down to look at me.

“Our eyes in the sky still don’t see any sign of an impending aerial assault,” she said. “And sensor scans of the house still haven’t detected any heat signatures inside. Maybe Anorak installed thermal shielding inside the house. Or maybe he already had Sorrento move Og to another location.”

I pointed toward the front door and said, “Let’s go find out.”

She nodded. Her telebot’s display screen went dark, and its armored chest plate slid back into place over it. Then I watched as her telebot suddenly turned around and began to run straight toward the front door of the house, which appeared to be made of solid oak. She nodded at Miles and a second later both telebots slammed their armed torsos into it like a pair of battering rams. The oak door splintered into pieces that exploded inward, littering the polished marble floor of the empty foyer beyond.

Over the comm system, I heard Miles instruct four of the other telebot operators to stand guard at the front entrance. Then he instructed the others to circle the house and try to find other ways inside. Once those telebots had marched off to carry out his orders, Miles piloted his own bot through the shattered doorway and into the foyer, and Art3mis and I followed him with ours. When my telebot entered Og’s mansion, a transparent map of the house (taken from its construction blueprints) appeared on my HUD, highlighting our current location.

I looked around. The lights were off and the room was completely empty. There was no furniture of any sort, nor was there anything hanging on the walls. When Og had moved out west, he’d apparently taken everything he owned with him.

Art3mis’s medic telebot clanked down the corridors directly in front of us, then it kicked open a pair of huge wooden doors at its far end. Beyond them was another large wood-paneled room devoid of any artwork or furniture. It looked like it might have been a large dining or meeting room, back when the house was occupied. But now Anorak appeared to be using it as his personal armory, because it was filled with heavily armed aerial drones and more than a hundred Okagami ACT-3000 telebots just like our own. The telebots were standing in neat, ordered rows on the polished marble floor. Their armor plating was covered with desert camouflage paint—an indication that they were probably stolen from the military. But they were all powered down, and as we crossed the room, they remained completely motionless, with their weapons retracted. The drones were Habashaw ADP-4XLs, and they were loaded into automatic launch racks that were aimed at the two skylights embedded in the ceiling. But they, too, were powered down.

I tiptoed past them, expecting them all to come to life at any moment. But they remained dark and still. I wondered if Anorak had ordered them to stand down. Perhaps he was afraid to call my bluff about the Big Red Button.

Samantha’s telebot reached another oak door at the far end of the room, grabbed the knob, and then yanked it completely off its hinges before tossing it aside. The room beyond was completely dark, but Samantha ran her bot inside anyway without hesitation. Miles and I piloted our own telebots in after her, following her single-file. Once all three of our bots were inside, the emergency floodlights mounted on their shoulders all switched on automatically, lighting up the interior of the room.

We were in Og’s former home office and library—a large U-shaped room at the southern corner of the house. I recognized the ornately carved woodwork on the empty bookshelves that lined the back wall of the room, from several different photos of Og that had been taken here, of him sitting at his desk, working away on his computer. But now the desk and all of the other furniture was gone. The room was empty, except for two conventional haptic rigs that stood side by side at its very center. They were both Habashaw OIR-9400s—the same top-of-line immersion-rig model that Sorrento and the Sixers preferred to use during the days of Halliday’s contest. Both of the rigs were currently empty.

“Back here!” I heard a familiar voice shout. It was Nolan Sorrento, and his words echoed off the oak-paneled walls and the vaulted ceiling of the empty room, making my blood run cold.

I rotated my telebot’s head to scan the entire room until I located the source of the voice. It had come from just around the corner at the opposite end of the room, off to our left. I could see a small amount of light down there as well. I walked my telebot in that direction, until I was able to see around the corner.

There was a hospital bed pushed up against the wall, and Ogden Morrow was lying there on it unconscious. He looked gaunt and extremely pale. He had an IV drip attached to his right arm, and a biomonitor built into the foot of the bed displayed his vital signs. Through its tiny speaker, I could hear the thud of his heartbeat, which sounded steady, if a bit slow.

Og was still alive! I felt like jumping for joy.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Nolan Sorrento was standing right beside Og, holding a gun to his temple and wearing a big, friendly smile.

“Well, well, well,” Sorrento said. “If it isn’t my old pal, Parzival! Hey, man! It’s good to see you again!” He turned to address Samantha’s telebot and his smile widened. “And Ms. Cook! You’re looking lovely today, as always.”

On the opposite side of the bed was another of the stolen military telebots we’d seen in the adjacent room. But this one was being operated by someone. Both of its forearm-mounted machine guns were raised. But they weren’t pointed at Og. They were pointed at Sorrento. Yet he didn’t appear to be at all concerned by this.

“Sorry, Wade,” Anorak said through his telebot while keeping its guns trained on Sorrento. “I ordered Nolan to stand down and release Mr. Morrow, as you requested. But as you can see, he’s still refusing to comply.”

“We had an agreement, Anorak!” Sorrento shouted. “And this wasn’t it! I did my part. Now do yours. Give me what you promised!” He pressed the gun harder against Og’s temple and glared directly at me. “I want my revenge. I want to destroy the OASIS forever.” He shifted his gaze back to Anorak. “Give me access to that Big Red Button. Right now. Or I’ll spray Mr. Morrow’s brains all over that wall. It’s up to you.”

“I’m so sorry, Nolan,” Anorak replied. “But I no longer have the ability to honor our agreement. And now that all the shards have been collected, you’re no longer of any use to me. So, as a self-appointed representative of the state of Ohio, I’m going to carry out the sentence you were given two years ago.”

Then, suddenly and without warning, Anorak fired a single round from his telebot’s forearm-mounted gun and shot Sorrento directly in the forehead.

The impact rocked his whole body backward. It also must’ve caused the muscles in his trigger finger to constrict, because the gun in his hand went off a split second later, firing a wild shot that struck Ogden Morrow in the stomach.

I heard Samantha scream over the comm as her telebot rushed to Og’s side. She reached him just as Sorrento’s body hit the floor with a thud.

I just stood there in shock, watching it all happen.

I had spent years fantasizing about Sorrento’s death, almost always at my own hands. But actually witnessing it in person made me feel sick to my stomach. Inside my drone control rig, I reflexively bent over and began to retch repeatedly.

When I realized that my telebot was still mirroring my movements, I forced myself to get back on my feet. Then I raised my own guns and leveled them at Anorak’s telebot. He immediately retracted his bot’s guns and raised its hands. Then we both turned to watch while Samantha used her medic telebot’s sensors to examine Og’s wound. She used the surgical tools embedded in its fingers to extract the bullet. She dropped it onto Sorrento’s corpse. Then she sterilized Og’s wound and sealed it with a liquid adhesive dispensed from a nozzle that extended from the pinkie finger of her telebot’s other hand. Then she began to apply a bandage—all of this in less than thirty seconds after Og had been shot.

“Is he gonna be OK?” Miles asked.

Art3mis shook her head.

“No,” she said. “He needs help. We need to get him to the ambulance.”

Miles and Samantha used their telebots to lift Og up off the bed as gently as they could. I kept my bot’s guns trained on Anorak’s bot. It was still reaching for the sky.

“I’m genuinely sorry,” Anorak said, shaking his head. “I honestly didn’t think Sorrento would still be able to wound Og after I put a bullet through his brain stem! A high-caliber lobotomy always turns the bad guy off like a switch in the movies….”

I heard the sound of a klaxon and glanced down. It was coming from the smartwatch strapped to Sorrento’s right wrist. Its tiny display screen was flashing red.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Very bad news, I’m afraid,” Anorak said. “All of those defense bots and aerial drones require human authorization before they can be used in combat—that was one of the reasons I needed Mr. Sorrento. But it appears he did not trust me completely. Because he programmed all of those bots to engage in full attack mode in the eventuality of his death….”

A split second later, we heard all of the combat telebots in the adjacent room power up and come to life. Then we heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by the approaching rumble of hundreds of rubber-grip-encased metal feet pounding against the marble floor. They were already coming through the door of Og’s office—which also appeared to be the only exit.

We were cornered.

“I really do apolo—”

Before Anorak could finish his sentence, I opened fire on his telebot, aiming for the primary chink in its armor—the display screen mounted in the center of its chest, which was currently unprotected by the armor plating that normally would cover it during combat. As a result, my bullets tore his telebot’s internal power supply in half, causing it to power down.

Then I turned my telebot around and raised my guns, preparing to face the coming onslaught. But instead of joining me, Miles calmly raised his own telebot’s guns and used them to cut a large hole in the wall behind us, creating a new exit out of the house. Samantha and I used our telebots to carry Og’s wounded body through it, while Miles’s bot provided cover fire for our retreat.

We carried Og around to the front of the house, where Samantha’s armored ambulance was parked. Her telebot carried Og up the ramp leading into the back of the ambulance, where Samantha herself was already waiting. I only caught a brief glimpse of her before the armored rear door of the ambulance slammed shut automatically.

Then I turned my attention back to the swarm of telebots now pouring out of the house from every single doorway and window, firing their guns toward the ambulance as they came. Thankfully their bullets bounced harmlessly off of its heavily armored shell.

Miles was still up in the cab. I saw him pull off his visor. Then he took the wheel and began to drive backward, pulling the ambulance away from Og’s house in reverse as fast as it would go while the small army of autonomous telebots that Sorrento had unleashed chased after it. Then Miles whipped the ambulance around 180 degrees as he pulled onto Babbitt Road and peeled out, heading in the direction of my house. I continued to provide cover for them until my telebot was overwhelmed a few seconds later, when Sorrento’s drones converged on it. I let out a fierce battle cry, intent on going down fighting. But they tore my telebot to pieces in a matter of seconds, and the display screen of my control station suddenly went black and the words TELEBOT OFFLINE appeared at its center.

On my HUD, I saw that all two dozen of the telebots we’d brought along with us had been destroyed as well. The enemy drones had annihilated them in a matter of seconds.

Since there were no more bots for me to take control of, I switched to the eye-in-the-sky view provided by one of the aerial drones GSS had circling the area. It provided me with a horrifying view of the swarm of enemy telebots and aerial drones that were closing in on the armored ambulance from every direction. A moment later, several of the bots finally caught up with it and quickly disabled all four of its tires. Miles switched to the emergency backup tank-tread drive, and the ambulance began to move forward again. But a few seconds later, one of Anorak’s aerial drones fired a missile at them and scored a direct hit on it from above, causing the ambulance to flip over onto its side. Then it slid to a halt, smoking in the center of the road as more telebots and drones continued to converge on it.

Miles, Samantha, and Og were all trapped inside.

And I was still safe at home, down in my concrete bunker, unable to do anything but watch my friends die. I felt completely helpless. Like I was a million miles away from Samantha and Og.

But I wasn’t a million miles away, I suddenly realized. In fact, I was only 2.8 miles away.

All of GSS’s combat telebots had already been destroyed, and the handful of home-defense bots guarding my house wouldn’t last ten seconds against the military-grade models Sorrento had unleashed. But I realized that I did still have access to one combat drone that I could take control of to try to save my friends—the one I was currently sitting inside. My mobile tactical immersion vault, which was armed with enough firepower to take out a small army of telebots and drones.

Of course, since I was inside the MoTIV and unable to get out, I was going to have to put myself in the line of fire too. My real self. Just like Samantha had done for Og.

I thought it over for all of five seconds. Then I powered on my MoTIV and linked it to the drone controller station I was already using. It allowed my eyes to see through the two stereoscopic cameras mounted on the front of the MoTIV’s heavily armored hull, which provided me with a view of the interior of my underground concrete bunker.

I activated the elevator and the platform my MoTIV was resting on began to rise toward the surface. But it wasn’t rising nearly fast enough for my liking, and after a few seconds I grew impatient and activated my jump jets. This caused the MoTIV to rocket up the length of the elevator shaft, and out of the launch-bay doors at the top, which opened just in the nick of time. Then I hit the jump jets again to lessen the force of my impact, which was still considerable. When the MoTIV hit the ground, I piloted it forward at full speed and it began to run, bounding down Babbitt Road, taking great leaping strides on its spidery robotic legs. Each step I took left an enormous crater in the asphalt behind me as I accelerated the MoTIV to its top speed.

It took me less than a minute to reach the ambulance. It was still lying on its side in the middle of the road, and there were telebots swarming all over it like insects. They appeared to be attempting to dismantle its armor plating so they could get inside and reach the occupants. And it looked like they were only a few seconds away from success.

As soon as I got within firing range, I unloaded on Sorrento’s telebots with armor-piercing machine-gun fire from the guns mounted on my MoTIV’s shoulders, cutting them to shreds. Once I had cleared all of the telebots off the ambulance, I fired a sortie of heat-seeking missiles at the aerial drones overhead and managed to destroy all of them too.

Then I used the MoTIV’s massive metal arms to pick up the ambulance, with Miles, Samantha, and Og still inside it. I carried it all the way back to my house.

Just as we reached it, more of Sorrento’s killer aerial drones began to descend from the sky, and they opened fire on us once again as I carried the ambulance back down into my bunker and closed its massive armored doors, sealing all of us safely inside.

I tried to call Miles, but he didn’t respond, so I called Samantha and her face appeared on my HUD a second later. She had a big bloody gash on her forehead, but otherwise she appeared uninjured.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Miles is dead, Wade,” she said. “All shot to pieces, protecting us.”

“What about Og?”

She tilted the camera down so that I could see both of them. Og was strapped into an auto-medic bed—one of two built into the back of the ambulance. Miles’s dead body lay in the other one.

“He’s still alive,” she said. Her cheeks were streaming with tears. “But he’s still bleeding internally, and he keeps fading in and out.”

She was stroking Og’s wild gray hair back away from his forehead while she watched the auto-doc’s robotic hands tend to his gunshot wound and the lacerations he’d suffered during their escape. Luckily Samantha managed to get him safely strapped into the stretcher before the ambulance was hit by that drone missile, so he wasn’t further injured when it was knocked on its side. The gash on Samantha’s forehead indicated that she hadn’t been as lucky.

“If Og regains consciousness, you have to convince him to log back in to the OASIS,” I said. “Tell him that we’ve already collected all seven shards. And tell him we’re trying to retrieve the Dorkslayer sword too. But we need Og to log back in to the OASIS, since he’s the only one who can wield it.”

“I’ll tell him,” Samantha replied. “If he wakes back up. What are you going to do?”

An ice pick of pain slammed into my brain, and the world seemed to tilt wildly for a moment. Catastrophic synaptic overload, knocking loudly on my front door now—reminding me that I’d already pushed myself past my limits. I blinked my eyes clear.

“I’m gonna try to stall Anorak,” I said. “For as long as I can.”