I thanked the guard and told him he could go as I scanned the doors. There it was: number 42. Another of Halliday’s jokes—according to one of his favorite novels, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 was the “Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.”
I just stood there for a few seconds, reminding myself to breathe. Then I punched in the seven-digit combination from the egg’s inscription into the code pad beside the vault door: 8-6-7-5-3-0-9, a combination no self-respecting gunter would have trouble remembering. Jenny, I’ve got your number. I need to make you mine…
The lock disengaged with a thud and the door swung open, revealing the vault’s cube-shaped interior—and a large silver egg sitting inside. It looked identical to the virtual egg on display in Anorak’s study, except this one had no inscription on its surface.
I wiped my sweaty palms on my thighs—I did not want to drop this—and removed the egg, then set it on a steel table in the center of the room. The bottom of the egg was weighted, so it wobbled slightly before standing perfectly upright—like a Weeble. （Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.） As I leaned in to examine the egg more closely, I spotted a small oval-shaped thumb scanner pad near the top, flush with its curved surface. When I pressed my thumb to it, the egg split in half and hinged open.
Inside it, resting in form-fitting blue velvet, was some sort of headset.
I lifted it out and turned it over in my hands. The device had a segmented central spine that appeared to stretch from a wearer’s forehead to the nape of their neck, with a row of ten C-shaped metal bands attached to it. Each band was comprised of jointed, retractable segments, and each segment had a row of circular sensor pads on its underside. This made the whole sensor array adjustable, so that it could fit around heads of all shapes and sizes. A long fiber-optic cable stretched from the base of the headset, with a standard OASIS console plug at the end of it.
My heart had been thudding against my rib cage, but now it almost stopped. This had to be some sort of OASIS peripheral—one unlike any I’d ever seen before, and light-years more advanced.
A short electronic beep emanated from the egg and I glanced back over at it. A flash of red swept across my vision as a tiny retinal scanner verified my identity a second time. Then a small video monitor embedded in the egg’s open lid turned itself on and the GSS logo appeared for a few seconds, before it was replaced by the withered face of James Donovan Halliday. Judging by his age and emaciated features, he’d made this video recording shortly before his death. But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.
“The device you now hold in your hands is an OASIS Neural Interface, or ONI.” He pronounced it Oh-En-Eye. “It is the world’s first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows an OASIS user to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment, via signals transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex. The headset’s sensor array also monitors and interprets its wearer’s brain activity, allowing them to control their OASIS avatar just as they do their physical body—simply by thinking about it.”
“No fucking way,” I heard myself whisper.
“That’s just for starters,” Halliday said, as if he’d heard me. “An ONI headset can also be used to record its wearer’s experiences in the real world. All sensory input received by their brain is digitized and stored as a .oni （dot-oh-en-eye） file on an external data drive attached to their headset. Once that file is uploaded to the OASIS, the entire experience can be played back and reexperienced by the person who recorded it, or by any other ONI user with whom they choose to share the file.”
Halliday managed a thin smile.
“In other words, the ONI allows you to relive moments of other people’s lives. To see the world through their eyes, hear it through their ears, smell it through their nose, taste it with their tongue, and feel it through their skin.” Halliday gave the camera a matter-of-fact nod. “The ONI is the most powerful communication tool humans have ever invented. And I think it’s also probably the last one we will ever need to invent.” He tapped the center of his forehead. “Now we can plug right in to the old noodle.”
I heard the words, but I couldn’t process them. Was Halliday for real? Or had he been delusional when he made this recording, losing his grip on reality as he entered the final stages of his illness? The technology he was describing was still the stuff of science fiction. Yes, millions of physically disabled people used brain-computer interfaces every day, to see or hear or move paralyzed limbs. But these medical miracles could still only be achieved by cutting a hole in the patient’s skull and sticking implants and electrodes directly into their brain.