I saw that I had missed several calls from both Aech and Shoto, but I was too beat to call either of them back. I vowed to do so first thing in the morning.
When I logged out of the OASIS, my ONI headset woke me from the sleeplike state it induced and reconnected my mind with my physical body. As always, this process took a few minutes. It felt a bit like waking up from an incredibly vivid dream. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself back in my immersion vault, nestled in its gel-foam auto-recliner.
I pressed a button on the control panel and the armored canopy slid open with a pneumatic hiss. I pulled myself out, ritually humming the opening line of an old ’80s tune by Soul II Soul. Back to life. Back to re-al-it-y.
Feeling heavy in my own skin, I trudged back to the other end of the house, climbed the stairs, and collapsed into bed. A few minutes after my head hit the pillow, I drifted off to sleep.
Most daily ONI users lost the ability to remember their dreams, even though they still went into REM sleep each night. Unfortunately, I could still remember my dreams—or rather, one recurring dream that had been haunting me once or twice a week for several years now.
And despite my excitement over obtaining one of the shards, I had it again that night.
The details were always the same…
I found myself standing in Anorak’s study, next to the Big Red Button. Sometimes my right hand was poised above it and sometimes, like tonight, I was actually touching it. As always, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the button’s mirrored plastic surface. It was my face—Wade’s face—that I saw there, instead of that of my avatar, Parzival, though I was wearing the Robes of Anorak.
As soon as I got my bearings, two stacks of golden Marshall amplifiers magically appeared on either side of Halliday’s golden Easter egg and a hauntingly familiar song blasted out of them at earsplitting volume—“Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa.
Then the emcees themselves, Salt and Pepa, stepped out from behind the golden Marshall stacks, both singing into golden microphones, looking like they just stepped out of their music video in 1986. While DJ Spinderella rose up from behind Halliday’s egg, scratching a pair of solid gold records on a set of solid gold turntables.
Then, while I continued to stand there frozen, with my hand on the Big Red Button, Salt-N-Pepa performed the song’s chorus continuously, for what felt like several straight hours:
Ah, push it, push it good
Ah, push it, push it real good
Oooh, baby, baby! Baby, baby!
Oooh, baby, baby! Baby, baby!
As recurring nightmares go, I could’ve done a hell of a lot worse. But to say that those lyrics had gotten stuck in my head would’ve been the understatement of the century. They were permanently welded to every neuron in my brain. Whether I was online or offline, dreaming or awake, the image of my face reflected in the surface of the Big Red Button was always lurking at the back of my mind and those lyrics were playing on an endless loop, telling me over and over again that I should not only push it!, but that the sensible thing would be for me to go the extra mile and push it real good!
Normally, that was where the dream ended. But tonight, I actually worked up the courage to take Salt-N-Pepa’s advice…
Big money, no Whammies, I remember thinking, just before I hit the Big Red Button with the open palm of my right hand. It lit up, and a Death Star klaxon began to sound in the distance. Then the button began to pulse off and on rapidly, growing brighter each time as its color changed from red to white.
When I turned around, Salt-N-Pepa had vanished, and the guys from Men at Work were standing in their place, singing the chorus of their 1983 hit single “It’s a Mistake.”
I ran outside, onto the balcony. But I was no longer surrounded by the simulated landscape of Chthonia. Now I was in the Portland Avenue Stacks in Oklahoma City, where I’d grown up. And my aunt Alice’s trailer was right in front of me, perched precariously at the top of its stack. My aunt Alice was standing at her bedroom window, staring back at me with a look of bitter resignation on her face.
My gaze dropped to Mrs. Gilmore’s trailer, and I saw her, too, leaning out the window to feed some of her cats. She saw me and smiled. As she started to raise her hand to wave at me, the bombs IOI had planted outside detonated, and the entire stack exploded into an apocalyptic pillar of flame…
And this time, I couldn’t pretend Sorrento was to blame for their deaths. I was the one who had pushed the button. I had done this…
But I wasn’t going to have to live with the soul-crushing guilt I felt for more than a few seconds. Because the framework at the base of the flaming stack of trailers had just buckled, and now it was tilting and collapsing straight toward me.