A message popped up on my AR display, reminding me that I had an appointment scheduled with my therapist this morning. I always scheduled a therapy session before our GSS co-owners meeting, to help put me in a calm, nonconfrontational frame of mind, and—hopefully—prevent me from starting any unnecessary arguments with Samantha. Sometimes it even worked.
I selected the icon for the therapy program on the HUD of my AR specs, and my virtual therapist appeared in the empty chair across the table from me. When you first installed the software, you were allowed to select your therapist’s physical appearance and personality from thousands of premade options, from Freud to Frasier. I’d selected Sean Maguire—Robin Williams’s character in Good Will Hunting. His familiar demeanor, his warm smile, and his fake Boston accent made our sessions feel like I was talking to an old friend—even though he usually only said things like “Yes, go on” and “And how does that make you feel, Wade?”
I also had the ability to change the location where I met with him. The default setting was his office at the community college where he taught—the same location where most of his sessions with Will Hunting took place in the film. Or you could choose one of several bars in Southie, including Timmy’s Tap or the L Street Tavern. But I felt like changing things up this morning, so I selected the bench by the lake at Boston Public Garden, and an instant later, Sean and I were sitting on it, side by side, staring at the swans.
He began by asking me if I was still having nightmares about my aunt Alice’s death. I lied and told him no, because I didn’t feel like discussing the subject again.
He moved on to my social-media “addiction” （his term） and asked me how I felt my recovery was progressing. Just over a month ago, I’d placed an irreversible lock on all my social-media accounts. I couldn’t use any of them for a full year. I told Sean that I was still experiencing withdrawal symptoms, but they were beginning to subside.
Meed-Feed Addiction had been around since before I was born, but it had become even more common in the wake of the ONI’s release. Most of the early social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter had migrated into the OASIS shortly after it launched, and they all still existed there today in your meed feed, the consolidated social media feed timeline built into every user’s account. It allowed the billions of OASIS users around the world to share messages, memes, files, photos, songs, videos, celebrity gossip, pornography, and petty insults with one another, just as people had been doing on the Internet for the past half century.
I’d never been good in social situations of any kind, so I’d avoided social media entirely for most of my life. And I should have kept on avoiding it once I became a public figure.
It turned out I just wasn’t comfortable living in the spotlight. I was an awkward kid who was good at videogames and memorizing trivia. I was not mentally or emotionally equipped to have the whole world’s attention focused on me.
At any given moment, there were millions of people posting shit at or about me somewhere online. This had been the case ever since I first found the Copper Key, but it was only after I’d won the contest that the haters came out in force.
It made sense, in hindsight. The moment I inherited Halliday’s fortune, I was no longer the scrappy underdog from the stacks doing heroic battle with the Sixers. I was just another asshole billionaire, living a life of ease in his ivory tower. None of the stuff my friends and I did to try to help humanity seemed to make any difference.
My detractors in the media began to refer to my avatar as “Parvenu” instead of Parzival, while the less pretentious garden-variety assholes online instead chose to adopt I-Roc’s old nickname for me—“Penisville.”
Things got really bad when a previously unknown music group called Tapioca Shindig released a song titled “Sixer Fellatin’ Punk,” which used an autotuned sound bite from the live POV broadcast I’d made during the Battle of Castle Anorak, when I’d publicly declared to the world that “If I find Halliday’s Easter egg, I hereby vow to split my winnings equally with Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto…If I’m lying, I should be forever branded as a gutless Sixer-fellating punk.” But they only took the last part, so the lyrics to the whole song were just me singing “I should be forever branded as a gutless Sixer-fellating punk!” over and over.
The song instantly went viral. It was Tapioca Shindig’s one and only hit single. They posted a music video to the ONI-net that racked up over a billion downloads before I had it taken offline. Then I sued the band for defamation and bankrupted each of its members. Which, of course, only made the public hate me even more.