I could feel my feet resting on the stone floor, snug inside the boots that my avatar was wearing.
I realized I could smell my surroundings too. I breathed in the musty scent of the ancient spell books that lined the walls, mingled with the smoke of the burning candles.
I reached out to touch a nearby worktable. I could feel the grooves in the woodgrain as I ran my fingertips across it. Then I spotted a large bowl of fruit on the table—one that hadn’t been there before. I picked up an apple and felt the weight of it in my hand, and its hard smoothness against my palm. I squeezed it with all five of my fingertips and felt them create tiny craters of pulp beneath the surface of the apple’s skin.
I was awestruck by the perfect replication of all that interlinked sensory input. These were subtle, nuanced sensations that could never be recreated or simulated by a pair of haptic gloves.
I raised the apple to my avatar’s lips, which now felt like my own lips, and bit into it with what felt like my own teeth. It tasted like a real apple. The most perfectly ripe and delicious apple I’d ever eaten.
An OASIS user had always been able to eat and drink things with their avatar. But eating a food power-up or drinking a healing potion had always been a senseless pantomime performed with your haptic gloves. You never felt anything pass through your lips, and you definitely never tasted anything on your tongue.
Now, thanks to the ONI, I could. And I did.
I began to sample the other fruits in the bowl. The orange, banana, grapes, and papaya tasted just as delicious, and as I took a bite out of each one, I felt the fruit travel down my esophagus to my stomach. I could even feel my stomach getting full.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed to the empty room. “This is fucking incredible!” But my words were garbled, because I was talking with a mouth full of papaya. I could feel the juice running down my chin. I wiped it on my sleeve. Then I began to run around the room, bursting with excitement, touching different surfaces and objects to see how they felt. And how did they feel? They all felt real. That’s how they fucking felt. It all felt real.
Once my initial euphoria began to wear off, I found myself wondering if the ONI also simulated pain. Because if pain felt as real as the fruit tasted, it was going to hurt. A lot.
As an experiment, I bit down lightly on my tongue. I could feel the pressure of each tooth against its surface, and the grain of my taste buds as I raked them against my incisors. But I didn’t feel any pain whatsoever, no matter how hard I bit. As I suspected, Halliday had put some sort of pain-prevention safeguard in place.
I drew one of my blasters and shot myself in the right foot. I took several hit points of damage, and felt a mild jolt of pain, but it seemed more like a hard pinch than a gunshot.
A giddy laugh escaped me as I holstered my blaster. Then I took three running steps toward the window and dove out of it, taking flight like Superman. As I rocketed up into the clouds, my robes fluttered in the wind like a cape. I felt like I was really flying.
I also suddenly felt like anything was possible. Because now it clearly was.
This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.
I knew Samantha wasn’t going to approve. But I was too exhilarated to let myself think about that. I wanted more. And the ONI had more in store for me. Much more.
I flew back to Anorak’s study and continued to experiment with the ONI’s abilities. That was when I discovered a new drop-down menu on my avatar’s heads-up display labeled ONI. When I selected it, I saw a list of a dozen large files that had already been downloaded to my account. They all had an .oni extension, and provocatively simple filenames like RACING, SURFING, SKYDIVING, and KUNG-FU FIGHTING.
I selected SURFING and suddenly found myself standing on a surfboard, expertly riding the curved wall of a giant wave off the coast of some tropical island. But when I reflexively tried to move to keep my balance, I realized that I wasn’t in control. This was a passive experience. I was just along for the ride. And somehow, it also felt different from what I’d experienced in Anorak’s study—where that had been eerily smooth and precise, this was somehow more intense but also jarring and dislocating.
Looking down at my body, I realized that I was no longer Parzival—I was someone else. Someone smaller and thinner, with darker skin, and strands of long black hair hanging in front of their eyes. Someone wearing a bikini. Someone with breasts. I was a woman! And an expert surfer. Not an avatar. A real person had recorded this experience. I was experiencing a piece of someone else’s life.