Actually, our meetings were held in the OASIS, so I would only be seeing her avatar. But that didn’t really lessen my anxiety. Samantha and I first met online. We got to know each other through our OASIS avatars long before we met in the real world.
* * *
Samantha Evelyn Cook and I met in person for the first time at Ogden Morrow’s home in the mountains of Oregon, right after she’d helped me win Halliday’s contest.
Aech and Shoto were there, too, and we all spent the next seven days as Og’s honored guests, getting to know one another in person. After everything the four of us had been through together inside the OASIS, we already shared a strong bond. But the time we spent together in the real world that week transformed us into a family—albeit a highly dysfunctional one.
That was also the week Samantha and I fell in love.
Before we met in the Earl, I’d already convinced myself that I’d fallen in love with her inside the OASIS. And in my own na?ve, adolescent way maybe I had. But when the two of us finally began to spend time together in reality, I fell in love with her all over again. And I fell much harder, much faster the second time, because our connection was now physical as well as psychological, the way nature originally intended.
And this time, she fell in love with me too.
Right before she kissed me for the first time, she told me I was her best friend, and her favorite person. So I think she’d already started to fall in love with me inside the OASIS too. But unlike me, she’d been smart enough not to trust or act on those feelings until the filter of our avatars had been removed and we finally met in reality.
“You can’t know if you’re in love with someone if you’ve never actually touched them,” she told me. And as usual, she was right. Once she and I started touching each other, we both found it difficult to stop.
We lost our virginity to each other three days after that first kiss. Then we spent the rest of that week sneaking off to make the beast with two backs at every opportunity. Like Depeche Mode, we just couldn’t get enough.
Og’s estate was designed to resemble Rivendell from the Lord of the Rings films and, like its fictional counterpart, it was nestled in a deep valley, so the acoustics of the place caused loud sounds to carry a long distance and echo off the adjacent mountain walls. But our friends and our host generously pretended not to hear all of the noise we must have made.
I’d never experienced such dizzying happiness and euphoria. And I’d never felt so desired and so loved. When she put her arms around me, I never wanted her to let go.
One night, we decided that “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls was our song, and then we listened to it over and over again, for hours, while we talked or made love. Now I couldn’t stand to hear that song anymore. I had it filtered out in my OASIS settings, to ensure that I never heard it again.
Aech, Shoto, Samantha, and I also spent that week answering an endless barrage of questions from the media, giving statements to various law-enforcement officials, and signing a mountain of paperwork for the lawyers managing Halliday’s estate, who were now tasked with dividing it equally among the four of us.
We all grew extremely fond of Ogden Morrow during our brief stay at his home. He was the father figure none of us had ever had, and we were all so grateful for his help during and after the contest that we decided to make him an honorary member of the High Five. He graciously accepted. （And since there were now only four of us, Og’s induction into the High Five also prevented our nickname from becoming a misnomer.）
We also invited Og to return to Gregarious Simulation Systems as our chief adviser. After all, he was the company’s co-founder, and the only one of us with any experience running it. But Og declined our offer, saying he had no desire to come out of retirement. Though he did still promise to give us advice, whenever we felt like asking for it.
The morning we finally left Og’s estate and went our separate ways, he walked down to his private runway to bid us all farewell. He gave each of us one of his bear hugs, promising to stay in touch via the OASIS.
“Everything will be fine,” he assured us. “You’re all going to do a fantastic job!”
At the time, we had plenty of reasons to doubt his prediction. But we all acted as though we believed him, and that his faith in us was justified.
“Our future’s so bright, we gotta wear shades!” Aech declared as she slipped on a pair of Ray-Bans and boarded her jet, bound for her ancestral homeland.
When Samantha and I kissed each other goodbye on the runway that morning, I never would have imagined it would be our last kiss. But I discovered the OASIS Neural Interface headset the very next day, and everything changed.