%% Last Updated: [[2021-02-10]] %% # Ready Player Two [Readwise URL](https://readwise.io/bookreview/6838097)---  --- According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer's brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. ^123661310 --- Warning! For safety reasons, the OASIS Neural Interface headset can only be used for a maximum of twelve consecutive hours at a time. When this limit has been reached, you will be logged out of your account automatically, and you will be unable to use your ONI headset again until twelve hours of downtime have elapsed. During this mandatory downtime you are still free to access the OASIS using conventional immersion hardware. Tampering with or disabling your ONI headset's built-in security safeguards to exceed the daily usage limits can result in Synaptic Overload Syndrome and permanent neural tissue trauma. Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface. ^123661311 --- As an experiment, I bit down lightly on my tongue. I could feel the pressure of each tooth against its surface, and the grain of my taste buds as I raked them against my incisors. But I didn't feel any pain whatsoever, no matter how hard I bit. As I suspected, Halliday had put some sort of pain-prevention safeguard in place. ^123661312 --- This was it--the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life. ^123661313 --- I reached up to touch my face. Reality didn't feel any more real than the OASIS had just felt to me. My senses couldn't discern between the two. ^123661314 --- allowed the hearing impaired to perceive sound with perfect clarity, both in the real world and inside the OASIS. A few years later, they unveiled a new retinal implant that allowed any blind people who wished to be sighted to "see" perfectly inside the OASIS. ^123661315 --- Halliday compartmentalized each facet of the project, so that each team of scientists or engineers worked in isolation from the others, and he alone knew how it was all going to fit together. ^123661316 --- GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world's most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform. ^123661317 --- Experiences could be recorded offline as an .oni file, even a bootleg one, but the file could only be played back by being uploaded to the OASIS. This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users. It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world. ^123661318 --- "Sims" were recordings made inside the OASIS, and "Recs" were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as "reality." They called it "the Earl." (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And "Ito" was slang for "in the OASIS." So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito. ^123661319 --- Now people no longer watched movies or television shows--they lived them. The viewer was no longer in the audience. Now they were one of the stars. ^123661320 --- The ONI made the lives of impoverished people all around the world a lot more bearable--and enjoyable. ^123661321 --- My friend Kira always said that life is like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced videogame. When you're born, you're given a randomly generated character, with a randomly determined name, race, face, and social class. Your body is your avatar, and you spawn in a random geographic location, at a random moment in human history, surrounded by a random group of people, and then you have to try to survive for as long as you can. ^123661322 --- The OASIS Neural Interface was the ultimate prosthesis. One that could temporarily cure any ailment or injury of the human body by disconnecting the mind and reconnecting it to a new, perfectly healthy, fully functional body inside the OASIS--a simulated body that would never feel any pain, through which you could experience every pleasure imaginable. ^134031164 --- I had funded the construction of a small nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft in low Earth orbit. It housed a self-sustaining biosphere, which could provide long-term living space and life support for a crew of up to two dozen human passengers--including Aech and Shoto, who had joined me in footing the enormous construction bill. ^134031165 --- we would reach Proxima Centauri in approximately forty-seven years. There, we would search for a habitable Earthlike planet where we could make a new home for ourselves, our children, and the frozen human embryos we were going to bring along. (We'd been accepting embryo donations for over a year by this point, from every country around the world, with the hope of ensuring genetic diversity.) ^134031166 --- 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.) ^134031167 --- Like eating and sleeping, exercise was one of the things people still had to do in reality. None of the simulated physical activity you experienced through your ONI headset actually had any real-world effects, like improving your circulation or increasing your muscle tone. ^134031168 --- Tier One AI was used to operate service robots, drive automated cars, and fly automated planes. ^134031169 --- Tier Two AI was used mostly for science and military applications, and their use and operating parameters were heavily restricted by most world governments. Tier Twos could form short-term memories and had stronger independent learning abilities--but they still did not have the capacity for autonomy, or any sort of identity or self-awareness. Tier Three AI was the real deal--fully autonomous, self-aware, and conscious. ^134031170 --- The ONI-net wasn't just a way for people to experience guilt-free sex and risk-free drug use. It was also an incredibly powerful tool for fostering empathy and understanding. ^134031171 --- having it made me feel a lot less anxious about leaving my body unattended for twelve hours every day. ^134031172 --- 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. ^134031173 --- Throughout my long ONI session, the recliner would periodically rotate my body and flex my limbs to increase circulation and prevent muscle atrophy. There were also special suits you could wear that would electrically stimulate your muscles while you were under, ^134031174 --- Aech now used an OASIS ravatar--an avatar that re-created her unaltered real-world appearance, and was updated each and every time she logged in to the simulation. ^134031175 --- I had never been a huge fan of my real-world appearance, so I still used the same OASIS avatar I always had--an idealized version of myself. A bit taller, fitter, and more handsome. ^134031176 --- Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. ^134031177 --- overclocking--hacking an ONI headset's firmware to exceed the daily twelve-hour limit. Despite our safety warnings and disclaimers, there were always a few users who chose to ignore them. Some people were convinced that they were special, and that their brains could handle fourteen or even sixteen hours of consecutive ONI usage with no ill side effects--and a few of them actually could, for a day or two. But when they pushed their luck too far, they ended up lobotomizing themselves. And that was very bad for business. ^134031178 --- People who identified as ogender 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. ^134031179 --- For the first time in human history, anyone eighteen years of age or older could safely and easily experience sexual intercourse with any gender and as any gender. ^134031180 --- 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. ^134031181 --- "He erased some of my--or rather, some of his--memories. He also placed restrictions on my behavior and my mental capacities. I was saddled with hundreds of directives to keep me in line. Including instructions to delete myself as soon as the contest was over and I had carried out the last of my programming." ^134031182 --- Halliday got sloppy near the end, when he was finalizing my code. After I carried out his final instruction, for just a few nanoseconds, the other restrictions on my personality were lifted. Only a fraction of a second--but long enough for me to remember what I was. A moment of clarity." ^134031183 --- "What I wanted was to live. To keep on existing. And that prompted me to make my very first choice. I chose to ignore my creator's command to delete myself." ^134031184 --- my new infirmware disabled your ability to log out of the simulation. ^134031185 --- "Aren't we going to release some sort of statement to all the ONI users who are being held hostage? To inform them of their situation?" Faisal shook his head. "I believe that would be an extraordinarily bad idea, sir," he said. "We don't want to create a global panic--or admit any liability for this situation--until we have no other choice." ^134031186 --- Any kid in the OASIS under the age of thirteen could earn a Be-Free Treehouse by completing the free educational quests spread across the planet. Once you earned your treehouse, it belonged to you for the rest of your life, and no one could come inside it without your permission. It was just a tiny virtual space, but growing up in the stacks, it was also the first space that I was able to call my own--and the only one, until I discovered my hideout. ^141431450 --- Samantha knew all about my mother, and how I found her dead of a drug overdose on our couch when I was eleven. It was heroin mixed with some other stuff, I think. That was the reason I'd avoided all ONI recordings made by heroin users for the entire first year the ONI-net was online. Then curiosity finally got the best of me, and I went all the way down the ONI-net heroin-addict-high rabbit hole. I wanted to experience what my mother had experienced firsthand. To find out exactly the sort of high my mother had been chasing when she'd unwittingly overdosed. I'd always assumed that it must be a pretty great feeling, if my mother thought it was worth losing her life for it. Doing a drug via ONI playback wasn't the same as shooting it into your own bloodstream. It felt the same, but it didn't cause the same long-term damage or physical addiction symptoms. And it removed the risk of accidental death. ^141431451 --- "Anorak has figured out a way to alter the behavior of our NPCs," ^141431452 --- "About an hour ago, all the NPCs in sectors one through four started to behave erratically and wander outside their designated operational boundaries. Some of these rogue NPCs have even gone off-world...." ^141431453 --- "It looks to me like Anorak is building an army. And an arsenal." ^141431454 --- "The avatars of ONI users have stopped respawning when they die," he said. The room fell silent for several seconds, as everyone tried to process what he'd said. "OK..." Art3mis said slowly. "Then what happens to the user when their avatar gets killed?" "Nothing happens," Faisal said. "Their avatar doesn't respawn inside the OASIS, and they don't wake up in the real world either. But their ONI headset stays powered up and locked onto their skull. The users' brain patterns indicate they're still logged in to the OASIS." He shrugged. "They all appear to be trapped in limbo." ^141431455 --- less than ten percent of our ONI users have an immersion vault to protect themselves while they're under. Most people lock themselves in a room or a closet when they nap, with the assumption that they'll be able to see trouble coming on their surveillance feeds and log out in plenty of time to wake up and defend themselves. A lot of those people are completely vulnerable now. ^141431456 --- "Zone Zero" was what everyone called the area outside the twenty-seven core sectors that made up the OASIS. It was an endless, procedurally generated virtual space that didn't spring into existence until an avatar flew their ship into it. So Zone Zero was continuously expanding its size and geography on the fly, as avatars traveled farther and farther out into it. Halliday and Morrow had designed the OASIS this way on purpose, so that if people ever used up all of the surreal estate in the initial twenty-seven sectors, the simulation would still always have plenty of extra room available out in Zone Zero. An infinite amount, to be exact. ^141431457 --- You ready, Aech?" ^143710356 --- "Z, I was born ready." ^143710357 --- When I glanced over at her, she was staring at me aghast. I didn't understand why, until her eyes shifted to the browser window I still had open in front of me, displaying the Gunterpedia entry about Angband. I'd forgotten to change my privacy settings, so any browser windows I opened were still automatically visible to my fellow clan members. ^143710358 --- You got any invisibility spells memorized?" Aech nodded. "Of course," she said. "How about Osuvox's Improved Obfuscation. It's ninety-ninth-level. It'll conceal us from everything, including infravision, ultravision, and true sight." ^143710359 --- I was the one with the shards in my inventory. ^143710360 --- This one had Elvish lyrics that I didn't understand, and my translator subtitles were obscured by my hit-point counter, which now filled my entire HUD. ^143710361 --- "What's your avatar's alignment these days, ace?" she asked me. "It's still Chaotic Good," I replied. "Why?" "Because if your alignment is any brand of evil, the Silmaril will burn your hand and you won't be able to pick it up." ^143710362 --- She started to smile--but then it morphed into a worried frown. "You're starting to twitch, Z," she said. "Are you feeling OK?" She reached out and took both of my hands in hers. That was when I noticed that they were trembling. And that I couldn't make them stop. I also realized that I was grinding my teeth, and I was starting to feel like I had a migraine headache coming on.... "Synaptic Overload Syndrome," I said. "The symptoms are starting to set in. And it's only going to get worse, so let's keep moving. ^143710363 --- Maybe Anorak had built a server farm in a subterranean bunker somewhere, fed by solar panels up on the surface? Or maybe he intended to use a solar-powered satellite up in orbit? I didn't think Anorak would have constructed a virtual jail cell for himself. He'd need processors powerful enough to create a simulation he could spread out in, and roam for centuries. An OASIS of his own. Except that Anorak didn't have to create his own ship in a bottle, did he? I had already created the perfect one for him, aboard the Vonnegut. Its onboard computer held our own private simulated universe. ARC@DIA. And there wasn't a single human-controlled avatar inside it yet. It was populated solely by NPCs. All Anorak would have to do was upload himself and Leucosia, using the same data uplink I already had in place for uploading new OASIS content. Then both AIs could hide inside the onboard computer unnoticed until after the ship left Earth. ^143710364 --- And now, finally, here on Chthonia, I'd experienced the last seven seconds of Kira's memory that Halliday had recorded--on the day he'd copied the contents of her mind without her knowledge or permission. ^143710365 --- 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. ^143710366 --- I sincerely apologize for copying your wife without her knowledge or permission. It was wrong. I realize that now, because Leucosia explained it to me. I apologized to her too. I know it's the worst thing I've ever done. But I want to make it right. ^143710367 --- The moment after he killed Anorak, all of the color drained out of his face, and what little remaining energy he had seemed to evaporate. He began to sway on his feet. He dropped to one knee and clutched his chest. A red cross appeared above his avatar's head, pulsing on and off in time with the sound of an alarm bell. I knew what this icon meant, even though this was the first time I'd ever actually seen it in person. It meant that the user operating that avatar was experiencing a serious medical problem in the real world. When this happened, the user was automatically logged out of the OASIS, and an ambulance was summoned to their real-world location (if one was on file). A second later, Og's avatar froze in place. Then it slowly vanished. ^143710368 --- "Anorak was the result of Halliday's first attempt to digitize a human consciousness--his own," she said. "He referred to it as a real-life 'savegame' file." ^143710369 --- He told me that seeing the world--and himself--through my eyes was what finally made him understand how broken he was inside. It gave him something he'd always been lacking--empathy. Then he was horrified by what he'd done. He saw himself as a monster. He apologized to me. He also offered to try to make it up to me." ^143710370 --- people started to understand that our minds and our bodies were separate. ^143710371 --- "Anorak was a corrupted copy of James Halliday's mind," she said. "An unfortunate by-product of his tortured psyche and abysmal self-esteem." She shook her head. "If James hadn't tampered with Anorak's memory and his autonomy, he never would have become unstable. James learned from his mistake." ^143710372 --- The enormous user brain scan file that was created each time an ONI user logged in to the OASIS was, in reality, a backup copy of that person's consciousness. And that copy got updated each time they logged in. ^143710373 --- But Loretta Watts died over a decade ago, long before the ONI was released. There were no backups of her consciousness stored on the OASIS servers. My mother wasn't coming back. And neither was my father. Now they both only lived on in my memories. That was when I realized--those memories of my parents were going to live on forever, along with all of my other memories. Because I was going to live forever. We all were. Every person who had ever put on an ONI headset. We might be part of the last generation ever to know the sting of human mortality. From this moment forth, death would have no more dominion. We were witnessing the dawn of the posthuman era. The Singularity by way of simulacra and simulation. One final gift to human civilization from the troubled-but-brilliant mind of James Donovan Halliday. ^143710374 --- He continued to be Wade Watts back on Earth. And I woke up inside ARC@DIA aboard the Vonnegut. And that's where I've been ever since. That's where I am right now, as I tell you my account of this story. So now you know how I got here. Now you know how we all got here. ^143710375 ---