When your body grows too hungry or thirsty or ill or injured or old, your health meter runs out and then it’s Game Over.
Some people play the game for a hundred years without ever figuring out that it’s a game, or that there is a way to win it.
To win the videogame of life you just have to try to make the experience of being forced to play it as pleasant as possible, for yourself, and for all of the other players you encounter in your travels.
Kira says that if everyone played the game to win, it’d be a lot more fun for everyone.
—Anorak’s Almanac, chapter 77, verses 11–20
Like Marty McFly, I woke up at exactly 10:28 a.m., to the song “Back in Time” by Huey Lewis and the News.
This was courtesy of my vintage flip-clock radio—a Panasonic RC-6015, the model Marty owns in the film. I’d had it modified to play the same song at the same time Marty hears it, after he finally makes it back to the future.
I threw back the silk sheets of my king-size bed and lowered my feet to the preheated marble floor. The house computer saw that I was awake and automatically drew back the bedroom’s wraparound window shades, revealing a stunning 180-degree view of my sprawling woodland estate, and of the jagged Columbus skyline on the horizon.
I still couldn’t quite believe it. Waking up in this room, to this sight, every day. Not long ago, just opening my eyes here had been enough to put a grin on my face and a spring in my step.
But today, it wasn’t helping. Today I was just alone, in an empty house, in a world teetering on the brink of collapse. And on days like this, the four hours I had to wait until I could put my ONI headset back on and escape into the OASIS stretched out in front of me like an eternity.
My gaze focused on the Gregarious Simulation Systems building, a shining arrowhead of mirrored glass rising from the center of downtown. GSS HQ was just a few blocks from the old IOI skyscraper complex where I’d briefly been an indentured servant. Now it belonged to GSS too. We’d turned all three buildings into free BodyLocker hotels for the homeless. You can probably guess which one of the four of us spearheaded that initiative.
Following the skyline a few more centimeters to the right, I could also make out the silhouette of the converted Hilton hotel where I’d rented an apartment during the final year of the contest. It was a tourist attraction now. People actually bought tickets to see the tiny ten-by-ten efficiency where I’d locked myself away from the world to focus on my search for Halliday’s Easter egg. I’m not sure any of those people realized that was the darkest, loneliest time in my life.
By all appearances, my life was completely different now. Except that here I was, standing at the window, moping around, already jonesing for my ONI fix.
I’d had the Portland Avenue Stacks in Oklahoma City where I’d grown up demolished years ago, so that I could erect a memorial for my mother and my aunt and Mrs. Gilmore and all of the other poor souls unfortunate enough to have died in that hellhole. I paid to have all of its residents relocated to a new housing complex I had built for them on the city outskirts. It still warmed my heart to know that all of the former residents of the stacks had, like me, become something they’d never imagined they could be—homeowners.
Even though the stacks where I’d grown up no longer existed in the real world, I could still visit them anytime I pleased, because there was a highly accurate OASIS recreation of the Portland Avenue Stacks just as I remembered them, constructed from photos and video of the real location taken before the bombing. It was now a popular OASIS tourist attraction and school field-trip destination.
I still went there occasionally myself. I would sit inside the meticulous recreation of my old hideout, marveling at the journey that had led me from there to where I was now. The real van that I’d used as my hideout had been extracted from the junk pile and airlifted to Columbus, so it could be put on display in the GSS Museum. But I preferred to visit the simulation of my hideout over the real deal, because in the OASIS, my hideout was still buried in a pile of abandoned vehicles at the base of the Portland Avenue Stacks, which still stood intact, as they had throughout my childhood, before Sorrento’s bombs brought them crashing down and brought my childhood to its end.
Sometimes I wandered over to the replica of my aunt Alice’s old stack. I would climb the stairs to her trailer, go inside, curl up in the corner of the laundry room where I used to sleep, and apologize to my mother and my aunt Alice for indirectly causing their deaths. I didn’t know where else to go to talk to them. Neither of them had a grave or a tombstone I could visit. Neither did my father. All three of them had been cremated—my aunt Alice at the time of her death, and my parents after the fact, courtesy of the city’s free cremation and remains-recycling program. Now all they were was dust in the wind.