She folded her arms and kept her eyes fixed on me, waiting for my response. I clenched and unclenched my jaw a few times, to keep myself from screaming in frustration. Then I switched on my emotion-suppressing software and did one of the breathing exercises Sean had taught me, to calm myself down.
My immediate instinct was to bring up Samantha’s grandmother. Her father’s mother, Evelyn Opal Cook, was the one who raised Samantha after her parents died. Her grandma had never shared Samantha’s prejudice against the ONI. Quite the opposite. She’d ordered one of the first headsets off the assembly line, and she used it every day for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, that wasn’t long. Just two years.
When Evelyn was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she started using her ONI headset for the maximum of twelve hours every day, to disconnect her mind from her chemotherapy-ravaged body as often and for as long as she possibly could. In the OASIS, Evelyn had a perfectly healthy body that never felt any trace of pain. While her body battled its disease, she could leave both behind and go for a run on any beach in the world, or picnic on a mountaintop. Or dance the night away in Paris with her friends. The OASIS Neural Interface allowed her to keep on living a joyous, happy life for half of each day, right up until she’d finally succumbed to her illness a little over a year ago. According to her nurses, Evelyn passed away peacefully and painlessly, because she’d been using her ONI headset at the time, to talk to Samantha inside the OASIS. The neural interface had allowed her to continue to communicate with her granddaughter long after her physical body had grown so weak she’d lost the power of speech.
I’d made the mistake of mentioning Samantha’s grandmother once before, during one of our previous arguments about the ONI. Samantha had gone ballistic. Then she’d warned me never to mention her grandmother’s name again. So I didn’t. No. I didn’t say anything. I did my deep-breathing exercises and I bit my goddamn tongue.
“What about education?” Shoto said when I failed to hold up my half of the argument. “People can learn all sorts of valuable skills through ONI playback. How to grow food or speak a foreign language. Doctors can learn how to perform new medical procedures from the best surgeons in their field. Why should people be denied access to such an important tool for learning just because of their age?”
“The main thing the ONI is teaching people is how to ignore the real world,” Samantha said. “That’s why it’s falling apart.”
“The world was already falling apart,” Aech said. “Remember?”
“And the ONI might be the thing that saves us,” I said. “It has spiritual, psychological, and cultural benefits that are still revealing themselves to us. In a very true sense, the ONI has the ability to free our minds, by temporarily liberating them from their containers.”
Art3mis tried to interrupt, but I kept on talking over her.
“ONI users around the world are developing a whole new kind of empathy that you can’t even begin to understand, until you’ve experienced it yourself…”
She mimed jerking off.
“Oh please,” she said, with an exaggerated roll of her eyes. “Spare me your transhumanist hive-mind bullshit, Locutus. I’m still not buying it.”
“You can’t deny that the OASIS Neural Interface has improved the quality of millions of people’s lives,” Aech interjected. “Numerous studies have shown a drastic increase in empathy and environmental conservation among daily ONI users, along with an overwhelming drop in racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies. And that’s all around the world, across all age groups and social strata. For the first time in human history, we have technology that gives us the ability to live in someone else’s skin for a little while. And we’ve seen a huge drop in hate crimes around the globe too. And crime rates in general—”
“Yes,” Art3mis said, cutting her off. “When you turn half of the world’s population into zombified ONI addicts, crime rates are going to drop. The flu outbreak that killed both of my parents made crime rates drop, too, Aech.”
I lowered my eyes to the table and clenched my teeth to keep my mouth shut. Aech cleared her throat, but then opted not to respond either. But Shoto couldn’t help himself.
“Odd for you to bring that up, Arty,” he replied. “Since we know that ONI technology is our best protection against other deadly pandemics like the one that killed your parents. They don’t happen anymore, thanks to us. By moving most human social interaction online and making so much tourism virtual, we’ve cut travel drastically and limited the spread of nearly all infectious diseases. Including sexually transmitted ones, since now most people have sex inside the OASIS.” He smiled. “Thanks to the ONI, people can still go to packed concerts and crowd surf without any fear of microscopic death. It brings people together and connects them…”