I saw Shoto even less frequently than Aech, which was understandable. His life had changed drastically in the years since the contest. Shoto’s parents had helped him manage his inheritance when he was still a minor, but he’d turned eighteen a year ago, making him a legal adult in Japan. Now he had full control of his own life, and his share of Halliday’s fortune.
To celebrate, he legally adopted his avatar’s name, just like Aech. Then he got married to a young woman named Kiki, whom he met when he relocated to Hokkaido. He and his new bride moved into a remodeled Japanese castle right on the shore. Then, about five months ago, during one of our GSS meetings, Shoto announced that he was going to become a father. He and Kiki had just learned that they were going to have a boy, and together they had already decided to name him Toshiro. But in confidence, Shoto told us he’d already decided to nickname the baby “Little Daito,” so that was what I called him too.
It was still hard to believe that Shoto would be a father in a few months, at such a young age. I was concerned for him, though I had no idea why. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t be able to afford to send Little Daito to a good school. I just didn’t understand why he was in such a big hurry, until he sat me down and explained it to me. Japan was in the midst of an “underpopulation crisis” because so many of its citizens had opted to stop having children over the past three decades. As the country’s wealthiest and most famous young couple, he and Kiki felt obligated to lead by example and reproduce as quickly as possible. So they had. And after Little Daito arrived, they planned to start working on a Little Shoto—or perhaps a Little Kiki.
In addition to his preparations for fatherhood, Shoto continued to oversee operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division, where he produced a wildly popular series of award-winning OASIS quests based on his favorite anime and samurai films. He’d become one of my favorite quest developers, and I was lucky enough to be one of his go-to beta testers, so we still got to hang out in the OASIS at least once or twice a month.
We rarely talked about Shoto’s late brother, Daito, or his murder. But the last time we had, Shoto told me he was still in mourning for him, and that he feared he always would be. I understood what he meant, because I felt the same way about my aunt Alice, and my old downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Gilmore. Both of them had been murdered, too, by the same man: Nolan Sorrento, the former head of operations at Innovative Online Industries.
After Halliday’s contest, Sorrento had been convicted of thirty-seven separate counts of first-degree homicide. He was now serving time on death row in a maximum-security prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, about fifty miles south of Columbus.
During his trial, IOI’s lawyers had managed to convince the jury that Sorrento had gone rogue, and that he’d acted without the IOI board’s knowledge or consent when he ordered his underlings to throw Daito off his forty-third-floor balcony. They also claimed that Sorrento had acted alone when he’d detonated a bomb outside my aunt’s trailer in the stacks, killing over three dozen people and injuring hundreds of others.
After Sorrento’s conviction and incarceration, IOI managed to settle all of the wrongful-death suits filed against them. Then they tried to go back to business as usual. But by then, they’d already lost their position as the world’s largest manufacturer of OASIS immersion hardware, thanks to the release of our ONI headsets. And thanks to the rollout of our free global Internet initiative, their ISP business had also shriveled.
Meanwhile, IOI also had the audacity to file a separate corporate lawsuit against me. They claimed that even though I’d created a false identity and used it to masquerade as an indentured servant to infiltrate their company headquarters, the indenturement contract I’d signed was still legally binding. Which meant, they argued, that I was still technically IOI’s property when I won Halliday’s contest, and so his fortune and his company should now also be classified as IOI’s property. Since the U.S. legal system still insisted on giving corporations even more rights than its citizens, this idiotic lawsuit dragged on for months…right up until GSS completed its hostile takeover of IOI. Then, as IOI’s new owners, we withdrew the lawsuit. We also fired the old IOI board of directors, their attorneys, and everyone else who had worked with or under Nolan Sorrento.
Now the Sixers were a distant memory, and Innovative Online Industries was just another wholly owned subsidiary of Gregarious Simulation Systems. GSS was now far and away the largest corporation in the world. And if we kept growing at our current rate, before too long we might be the only one. That was the reason a lot of our own users had started to refer to GSS as the “New Sixers” and me, Aech, Shoto, and Samantha as the “Four Nerds of the Apocalypse.”