* * *
Witnessing these two impossible, blissful reunions filled me with joy too. Genuine, unbridled joy. And I wasn’t playing back an ONI recording of secondhand joy experienced by someone else, somewhere else, at some time in the past. It was my own, hard-won and earned at great personal cost. Humanity had just become the recipient of another strange and wonderful and unexpected gift—one that would change the very nature of our existence, even more than the OASIS or the ONI ever had.
Staring down at the Rod of Resurrection in my avatar’s hand, I couldn’t help but think about my own mother once again. I would’ve given away all of my wealth and everything I owned to bring her back, even if it was just for a single day. So that I could talk to her again, and apologize to her for not taking better care of her, and tell her how much I’d missed her.
But Loretta Watts died over a decade ago, long before the ONI was released. There were no backups of her consciousness stored on the OASIS servers. My mother wasn’t coming back. And neither was my father. Now they both only lived on in my memories.
That was when I realized—those memories of my parents were going to live on forever, along with all of my other memories. Because I was going to live forever. We all were. Every person who had ever put on an ONI headset.
We might be part of the last generation ever to know the sting of human mortality. From this moment forth, death would have no more dominion.
We were witnessing the dawn of the posthuman era. The Singularity by way of simulacra and simulation. One final gift to human civilization from the troubled-but-brilliant mind of James Donovan Halliday. He had delivered all of us unto this digital paradise, but his own tragic flaws had prevented him from passing through its gates himself.
* * *
Aech and Endira’s avatars arrived a few minutes later, and Shoto and Kiki teleported in just a few seconds after that, joining us high on the mountaintop where the Shrine of Leucosia was located.
As soon as their avatars finished rematerializing, all four of them ran over and pulled me into a group hug. When they released me, that was when they finally turned to see Leucosia and Og standing there, still locked in an embrace, nose-to-nose, whispering inaudible words to each other. And in the other direction, they could see Art3mis still in the midst of her tearful reunion with her grandmother’s avatar, Ev3lyn.
Then all of their jaws dropped open in unison.
“What’s wrong, guys?” I asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Two ghosts,” Aech said. “No, make that three! Holy shit. What the hell happened?”
I told them all what had happened. Then I showed them the Rod of Resurrection and told them what it could do.
After we gave Art3mis a few more minutes to catch up with Ev3lyn, I interrupted them and asked Arty to join us for a private conversation. I asked Og to join us too. Then the High Five held an impromptu co-owners meeting right there on the steps of Castle Anorak, to decide the fate of the newly resurrected AIs.
It was clear to all of us that the world wasn’t quite ready to accept digitized human beings as people. Not yet—and maybe not ever. The “Anorak Incident” as it would come to be known, had further sowed the seeds of distrust against artificial intelligence. Damage that might never be undone.
Eventually, if humanity survived long enough, the world might acclimate to this new paradigm. People in the future would be comfortable coexisting alongside AI copies of their dead friends and relatives. Or maybe not.
Og and Kira didn’t want to wait around and find out. Neither did Ev3lyn or Samantha. And I wasn’t willing to risk it either. Not after everything I’d just been through. I thought I’d lost Samantha, the love of my life, forever. And we both did lose Og, before we miraculously got him back. If it was at all possible, I wanted to make sure I would never have to suffer the loss of someone I loved again. And I wanted that for all of us.
Luckily, I already had a fully formed plan—a way for the AIs to coexist with us in peace and safety, forever. A way for all of us to have what Van Hagar referred to as “the best of both worlds.” And I knew it was a good plan, because Anorak had apparently thought so too.
But unlike him, we actually managed to pull it off.
All Wade had to do was have the engineers at GSS reconnect the OASIS data uplink to ARC@DIA on board the Vonnegut. Then they were able to copy all of the resurrected AIs from the OASIS servers to the duplicate ARC@DIA servers. Og, Kira, and Ev3lyn all disappeared from the old, overcrowded simulation and reappeared inside the brand-new （and completely empty） one that had been prepared aboard the ship.