She snaps her head around and looks at me in wounded surprise, like I’ve just slapped her across the face. Then her gaze hardens and that’s it—the exact instant her love for me disappears. I’m too amped up on adrenaline to notice it there in the moment, but I spot it plain as day on every single one of my repeat viewings. The sudden change in her eyes says it all. One second she loves me, and the next she loves me not.
She never responds to my question. She just stares daggers at me in silence, until Shoto finally chimes in.
“We’re going to make trillions of dollars selling these headsets, Arty,” he says calmly. “We can use that money to help the world. To try and fix all of the things that need fixing.”
Samantha shakes her head. “No amount of money will be able to undo the damage these headsets are going to cause,” she replies, sounding defeated now. “You guys read Og’s email. He thinks releasing the ONI is a bad idea too.”
“Og hasn’t even tried the ONI,” I say, letting too much anger creep into my voice. “He’s like you. Condemning it without even trying to understand its potential.”
“Of course I understand its potential, you idiot!” Samantha shouts. She looks around the table. “Christ! Haven’t any of you rewatched The Matrix lately? Or Sword Art Online? Plugging your brain and your nervous system directly into a computer simulation is never a good idea! We’re talking about giving complete control of our minds to a machine. Turning ourselves into cyborgs…”
“Come on,” Aech says. “You’re overreacting—”
“No!” she shouts back. “I’m not.” Then she takes a deep breath before glancing around the table at all three of us. “Don’t you see? This is why Halliday never released the ONI technology himself. He knew it would only hasten the collapse of human civilization, by encouraging people to spend even more time escaping from reality. He didn’t want to be the one responsible for opening Pandora’s box.” She looks at me, and now her eyes are filling with tears. “I thought you wanted to live here. In the real world. With me. But you haven’t learned a goddamn thing, have you?”
She reaches over and brings her fist down on the power button of the data drive connected to my ONI headset, ending my recording.
* * *
When we held an official vote on the matter, Aech, Shoto, and I voted to patent the ONI headset and release it to the world, with Samantha being the lone voice of dissent.
She couldn’t forgive me. She told me so right after I cast my vote against her. Right before she dumped me.
“We can’t be together anymore, Wade,” she said evenly, her voice suddenly devoid of emotion. “Not when we disagree on something so basic. And so important. Your actions today will have disastrous consequences. I’m sorry you can’t see that.”
Once my brain finally processed what had happened, I collapsed into a chair, clutching my chest. I was devastated. I was still in love with her. I knew I’d broken her heart. But I also believed releasing the ONI was the right thing to do. If I’d withheld it from billions of suffering people just to preserve our relationship, what would that have made me?
When I got her on the phone and tried to tell her this, she got furious once again. She said that I was the one who was being selfish, refusing to see the danger in what we were doing. Then she stopped speaking to me altogether.
Luckily, my new ONI headset offered an easy, ready-made escape from my misery. With the press of a button, it literally took my mind off of my broken heart, and focused it elsewhere. I could put on the headset and relive another person’s happy memories anytime I pleased. Or I could just log in to the OASIS, where I was treated like a god, and where everything now felt completely real—as real as the most vivid dreams feel while you’re having them.
When the Shard Riddle appeared, I’d seized on it as another distraction. But now, over three years later, my ongoing obsession with solving it had become a forced and desperate exercise and I knew it. It was really just an attempt to forget the mess I’d made of my personal life. Not that I ever would have admitted it out loud.
None of these distractions helped me fix what was broken, of course. I still thought about Samantha every day. And I still wondered what I could’ve done differently.
These days, I told myself that Samantha would’ve broken up with me eventually anyway. By the end of that first week at Og’s estate, I’d already begun to wonder if she was having second thoughts. She’d started to pick up on my annoying idiosyncrasies. My inability to recognize social cues. My total and complete lack of cool around strangers. My neediness and emotional immaturity. She was probably already looking for an excuse to dump my socially awkward ass, and when I chose to vote against her on releasing the ONI, it just fast-forwarded the inevitable.