I spent a few more minutes piloting my telebot through the silent corridors of the ship before I returned it to its charging dock. Then I disconnected from it, and just like that, I was back on Earth, sitting on my patio.
I’d traveled all the way to space and back, and I’d only managed to kill fifteen minutes.
I tried calling Aech and Shoto, to see if either of them wanted to catch up before our co-owners meeting. But as usual, neither of them picked up. I took off my specs and threw them on the table in front of me with a sigh. I told myself that Aech was probably still asleep, and that Shoto was probably busy with work. I could’ve checked their account statuses to see, but I’d learned the hard way that if your friends were avoiding you, you didn’t want or need to know about it.
I continued to eat my breakfast in silence, listening to the wind in the trees and absentmindedly watching the flock of security drones overhead as they patrolled the perimeter of my estate. This was usually the only time I spent outdoors each day, to get my daily minimum dose of sunlight. Deep down, I still shared Halliday’s opinion that going outside was highly overrated.
I pulled my AR specs back on and skimmed over the emails that had collected in my inbox overnight. Then I spent some time updating my ONI-net queue with new Recs and Sims from the “Most Popular Downloads” list. I did this every morning, even though I already had thousands of hours of experiences in my queue—more than I would ever have time to make it through, even if I lived to be a hundred. That was why I constantly updated and rearranged the clips in my queue—to make sure I got to the best stuff first.
In the early days of the ONI-net, some people at GSS had worried that its popularity might cause the rest of the OASIS to become a ghost town, because everyone would spend all of their time doing playback instead of exploring the OASIS to have experiences of their own. But the OASIS continued to grow and thrive alongside the ONI-net, and most users divided their time equally between the two. Perhaps it was human nature to crave both passive and interactive forms of entertainment.
As usual, I searched the ONI-net for any newly listed clips tagged with the name Art3mis or Samantha Cook. Whenever anyone posted a recording in which she appeared, I would download it. Even if it was just a clip of her signing an autograph for someone, it still gave me a chance to experience standing next to her for a few seconds.
I knew how pathetic this was—which somehow made it even more pathetic.
But trust me, there were far more twisted and depraved clips I could’ve been playing back. The current top download in the NSFW section of the ONI-net library was a fifty-person orgy, recorded simultaneously by all fifty participants, giving the viewer the ability to jump from one participant’s body to the next at will, like some hedonistic demon. Cyberstalking my ex-girlfriend at her public appearances seemed like a pretty tame pastime in comparison.
Don’t get me wrong. The ONI-net wasn’t just a way for people to experience guilt-free sex and risk-free drug use. It was also an incredibly powerful tool for fostering empathy and understanding. Entertainers and politicians and artists and activists used this new communication medium to connect with a global audience, with profound results. The Art3mis Foundation had even started posting .oni clips now—first-person slice-of-life recordings made by impoverished and exploited people around the globe, designed to expose others to their plight. It was a brilliant and effective use of ONI technology. But it also seemed hypocritical of Samantha to use the ONI to further her own agenda after railing against its release. When I’d said so during one of our meetings, Samantha made it abundantly clear that she didn’t give a flying frak at a rolling Rathtar what I thought.
I ate the last bite of my now-cold omelet and dropped my napkin on my plate. Belvedere sprang into action and began to clear off the table, the servos in his robotic limbs whirring with each of his small, precise movements.
What now?
I could head over to my music room, to knock out my daily guitar lesson. One of my new hobbies was learning to play guitar in reality, which proved to be very different—and far more difficult—than playing a simulated axe in the OASIS. Luckily, I had the best guitar teacher imaginable—a fully licensed hologram of the great Edward Van Halen, circa the release of 1984. He was a taskmaster too. Thanks to his tutelage I was starting to get pretty good.
Or I could take another Bollywood dance lesson. I was practicing for Aech and Endira’s wedding in a few months. I knew that Samantha would be in attendance, and I’d secretly begun to harbor an idiotic fantasy that I might be able to win her back when she saw me tearing up the dance floor.