Of course, as Art3mis was fond of pointing out, plenty of users didn’t take any precautions at all when they put on their ONI headsets. And plenty of them paid the price for doing so. A new breed of thieves, rapists, serial killers, and organ harvesters preyed on those ONI users who failed to lock up their bodies while their minds were on vacation. But over the past few years, thousands of “BodyLocker” capsule hotels had opened up around the world, where people could rent coffin-size rooms for just a few credits a day. It was the lowest-rent housing imaginable. They couldn’t build them fast enough to meet the demand.
To increase user safety, GSS had also started selling deluxe ONI headsets featuring built-in motion-activated cameras, with video feeds that could be monitored from inside the OASIS. Immersion vaults were also equipped with interior and exterior cameras that allowed their occupants to monitor their physical body and its surroundings from inside the OASIS, along with motion detectors that would alert them if anyone came within spitting distance of their body in the Earl.
I went into the office’s private bathroom and remained there until I’d emptied my bowels and bladder as much as possible. This had become a pre-login ritual for every ONI user—especially those who wanted to remain logged in for a full twelve hours without soiling themselves. When I emerged from the bathroom, I climbed into the MoTIV and settled into the form-fitting gel-foam flotation recliner. Its padded retaining bands locked into place around my arms, legs, and waist, to keep me from falling out. Throughout my long ONI session, the recliner would periodically rotate my body and flex my limbs to increase circulation and prevent muscle atrophy. There were also special suits you could wear that would electrically stimulate your muscles while you were under, but they irritated my skin so I never wore them.
I pressed a button to close the MoTIV’s canopy. Then I pressed another button to activate the circular elevator pad it was sitting on. I grinned and braced myself for a drop, just before the pad began to rocket down the elevator shaft. Lights embedded in the shaft’s reinforced titanium wall flew by in a blur.
This elevator had been designed so that, if you looked straight up during its descent, it perfectly recreated the look of the top-secret Pepsi elevator guarded by B. B. King in Spies Like Us. It, and the bunker it led to, had both been constructed by Halliday when he’d first moved into this house, so that he would have a place to ride out World War III, which was still threatening to break out at any moment, just as it had been for the past hundred years. Now I used his bunker for my daily twelve-hour ONI dives, content in the knowledge that I was deep enough and well protected enough to survive a missile strike on my house, on the off chance that some nutjob despot with a death wish managed to get one past our global defense network, and the redundant one GSS maintained over the entire city of Columbus to prevent terrorist attacks on our OASIS servers, and the even more redundant antiballistic-missile installations that surrounded my home.
The whole world knew my address, so I didn’t feel like I was being paranoid. I was just taking sensible precautions.
When the elevator’s blast doors slid open, I used the MoTIV’s cockpit controls to spider-walk it forward, into the bunker’s receiving bay, which was just a big empty concrete room with lights embedded in its ceiling. The elevator stood at one end and a pair of large armored doors stood at the other, leading to the high-tech, fully stocked bomb shelter beyond.
I secretly loved coming down here. Three kilometers beneath the earth, in this armored concrete bunker, I felt like I was in my own private Batcave. （Although it was obvious to me now that Bruce Wayne never would’ve been able to construct his crime-fighting crib all by himself, in total secrecy, with no one to help him lay the plumbing and pour the concrete but his geriatric butler. No way.）
I lowered my MoTIV to the concrete floor, retracted its legs, and placed it into standard defense mode. Then I removed my ONI headset from its cradle above my head and put it on. When I powered it on, its titanium sensor bands automatically retracted to fit the contours of my skull before locking themselves tightly in place so that the headset couldn’t be moved or jostled by even a micrometer. If that were to happen in the middle of my ONI session…it would be bad.
I pressed a button to close the MoTIV’s armored canopy and it slid shut with a pneumatic hiss, sealing me safely inside its roomy cockpit. Then I cleared my throat and said, “Initiate login sequence.”
I felt a familiar tingling sensation all over my scalp as the headset scanned my brain and verified my identity. Then a female voice prompted me to speak my passphrase and I recited it, being careful to enunciate each syllable. I’d recently reset it to the same passphrase I’d used during the latter days of Halliday’s Hunt—a lyric from the 1987 song “Don’t Let’s Start” by They Might Be Giants: No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful…