Those visits made me understand why Halliday had recreated 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.
“T-T-Top o’ the morning, Wade!” a familiar voice stuttered as I stepped into the bathroom. I glanced sideways to see Max, my long-suffering system-agent software, smiling at me from the surface of the giant smart mirror above the sink.
“Morning, Max,” I muttered. “What’s up?”
“The opposite of down,” he replied. “That was easy! Ask me another one. Go ahead.”
When I didn’t respond, he made a heavy-metal face and started to play air guitar while shouting: “Wade’s World! Wade’s Word! Party time! Excellent!”
I rolled my eyes in his direction and manually flushed the toilet for effect.
“Jeez,” Max said. “Tough crowd. Wake up on the wrong side of the coffin again today?”
“Yeah, it kinda feels like it,” I said. “Start morning playlist, please.”
“This Must Be the Place （Naive Melody）” by Talking Heads began to play over the house speakers, and I immediately felt more relaxed.
“Gracias, Max.”
“De nada, my little enchilada.”
I’d reinstalled MaxHeadroom v3.4.1 as my system-agent software a few months ago. I thought his presence might help me recapture the same mindset I’d had during Halliday’s contest. And it had worked, to a degree. It was like visiting with an old friend. And in truth, I needed the company. Even though, in the back of my mind, I knew that talking to your system-agent software was only slightly less weird than talking to yourself.
Max read me the day’s headlines as I dressed in my workout clothes. I told him to skip all of the stories that involved war, disease, or famine. So he started reading me the weather report. I told him not to bother, then I put on my brand-new Okagami NexSpex augmented-reality glasses and headed downstairs. Max came along with me, reappearing on a network of antique CRT monitors mounted along my route.
Even in the middle of the daytime, Halliday’s old mansion felt deserted. The housekeeping was all done by high-end humanoid robots who did most of their work while I slept, so I almost never saw them. I had a personal cook named Demetri, but he rarely left the kitchen. The team of security guards who manned the front gates and patrolled the grounds were human, too, but they only entered the house if an alarm went off or I summoned them.
Most of the time it was just me, all by my lonesome, in a giant house with over fifty rooms, including two kitchens, four dining rooms, fourteen bedrooms, and a total of twenty-one bathrooms. I still had no idea why there were so many toilets—or where they were all located. I chalked it up to the previous owner’s well-known eccentricity.
I’d moved into James Halliday’s old estate the week after I won his contest. The house was located on the northeastern outskirts of Columbus, and it was completely empty at the time. At his request, all of Halliday’s possessions had been auctioned off after his death five years earlier. But the deed to the house and the thirty acres of land it stood on had remained a part of his estate, so I’d inherited it along with the rest of his assets. Samantha, Aech, and Shoto had all been kind enough to sell their shares of the property back to me, making me its sole owner. Now I lived in the same secluded fortress where my childhood hero had locked himself away from the world for the latter part of his life. The place where he had created the three keys and gates…
To my knowledge, Halliday had never given this place a name. But I thought it needed one, so I’d christened it Monsalvat, after the secluded castle where Sir Parzival finally locates the Holy Grail in some versions of the Arthurian legend.
I’d been living at Monsalvat for over three years now, but most of the house still remained empty and undecorated. It didn’t look that way to me, though, because the AR specs I wore decorated the house for me on the fly as I walked around it. It covered the sprawling mansion’s bare walls with grand tapestries, priceless paintings, and framed movie posters. It filled each of the empty rooms with illusory furniture and elegant décor.
That is, until I instructed my AR system to repurpose all that empty space, just as I was about to do now, for my morning run.
“Load Temple of Doom,” I said as I reached the bottom of the grand staircase.
The empty foyer and dimly lit hallways of the mansion were instantly transformed into a vast subterranean labyrinth of caverns and corridors. And when I glanced down at myself, the workout clothes I’d been wearing had been replaced with a perfectly rendered Indiana Jones costume, complete with a worn leather jacket, a bull-whip on my right hip, and a battered fedora.