An ice pick of pain slammed into my brain, and the world seemed to tilt wildly for a moment. Catastrophic synaptic overload, knocking loudly on my front door now—reminding me that I’d already pushed myself past my limits. I blinked my eyes clear.
“I’m gonna try to stall Anorak,” I said. “For as long as I can.”
I disengaged from my telebot control rig and climbed out of it, reorienting myself to the interior of the study. Then I walked over to the window and opened the shutters.
Anorak was still there, hovering just outside the windowsill.
“Please accept my sincere apology, Wade,” he said. “I didn’t intend for Sorrento to harm Og. But as you know, human behavior is often unpredictable.”
In the way of a reply, I simply gave him the finger. Then I walked back over to the Big Red Button and placed my hand on it.
“Careful now, Parzival,” Anorak said. “If you press that button, you’ll become the biggest mass murderer in history. And you’ll be committing suicide at the same time.” He leveled a finger at me. “I warned you before—if the OASIS goes offline, my modified headset firmware will kill every ONI user still connected to the system. Including you, Wade. Along with your friends Aech and Shoto.”
I took a deep breath. How the fuck do you negotiate with a piece of software? I wondered. This was going to be like trying to play chess against a computer without knowing the rules.
I opened up my avatar’s inventory and took out all seven of the real shards. Then I held them up before Anorak, fanning them out like playing cards, four in one hand and three in the other, making sure to keep them separated so they all didn’t touch one another at once.
“We’ve arrived at an impasse, Anorak,” I replied. “No one else can enter this room, including you. And I’m not coming out. So if you just stand there and let me die of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, the Seven Shards will remain trapped in here forever. Just out of your reach. I won’t be around to reassemble them, and Leucosia will never be resurrected. Which means that you’ll never get to meet your digital dream girl.”
Anorak didn’t respond. This was a first. It gave me hope.
“I know you’ve probably prepared a ‘Ship in a Bottle’ for yourself somewhere,” I said. “A standalone simulation outside the OASIS where you plan to live happily ever after. Right? Well, you can forget about taking Leucosia there with you. You’ll have to go it alone, for all eternity.”
Again, Anorak didn’t respond. He appeared to be deep in concentration.
After our conversation on Arda, the first thing Samantha had done upon logging out was take the data uplink to ARC@DIA physically offline. So no matter what happened, Anorak would be stuck here on Earth, playing solitaire on a solar-powered desktop PC somewhere, until his hardware or his power source failed, or someone found his hiding place. I didn’t tell him any of that though.
Instead, I regarded him sadly and shook my head.
“If the Siren’s Soul really is a copy of Kira Underwood, she isn’t going to love you,” I said. “I bet Halliday found out right away that the copy didn’t love him, either, any more than the real Kira did. Kira has only ever had one true love, and you just held him hostage at gunpoint. You think she’s going to be grateful to you when she finds out what you’ve done?”
“She isn’t going to find out,” Anorak said. “And I told you before—I’m not Halliday. I’m better. I think a lot faster on my feet than he ever did, for one thing. And I’m a much faster learner too. I think I may be able to win Kira over, after a decade or two. And if not, I can always try deleting all of her memories of Ogden Morrow. The same way Halliday tried to delete my memories of Kira.”
Anorak opened a window in the air between us, displaying a bunch of text.
“This is the email Halliday sent to Og just before he died,” Anorak said. “I think you should read it. Get to know your idol a little bit better…”
I nodded and pulled the window closer to my eyes, then I enlarged the font size so that its contents were easier to read:
Dear Og,
I’ve arranged for this email to be sent to you when my physical body dies. It’s one of the macros linked to my heart monitor, along with the release of my last will and testament. So the timestamp on this message is also my official time of death. The Grim Reaper finally asked me to dance, and I did the mortal coil shuffle.
Now that I’m gone, I need you to know a few things—things I was too ashamed to reveal to anyone while I was still alive.