I had no control over my movements, but I could see, hear, smell, and feel everything—every sensation experienced by the woman who had made this recording. I could even feel the ONI headset on my—her—head, and I could also see the portable data drive it was connected to housed inside a waterproof casing that was strapped to her right arm.
That explained the difference in sensations too. I was no longer experiencing simulated input, created for me by the OASIS servers—I was actually feeling the world through this surfer’s body, moment by moment, delivered by her synapses. Raw neural input, from a brain that was not my own.
When the wave crashed over me a few seconds later, the experience clip ended and I found myself back inside my own avatar’s skin, standing back inside Anorak’s study.
I pulled up the next clip, and then the next. I drove a racecar, did some skydiving, kung-fu fighting, deep-sea diving, and horseback riding—all within the same half hour.
I played every .oni file on the list, one after the other, leaping from place to place, from body to body, and from one experience to another.
I stopped when I reached a series of files with names like SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni. I wasn’t ready for any of that. I was still truly, madly, deeply in love with Samantha. And I was still reeling from losing my virginity to her just a few days earlier. I didn’t want to be unfaithful to her. I figured that cheating was cheating, whether it was live or it was Memorex.
I logged out of the OASIS and took control of my own body once again. The process took a few minutes. Then I removed the ONI headset and opened my eyes. I looked around my office. I checked the time. Over an hour had passed, which seemed about right.
I gripped the arms of my chair. I reached up to touch my face. Reality didn’t feel any more real than the OASIS had just felt to me. My senses couldn’t discern between the two.
Halliday was right. The ONI was going to change the world.
* * *
How in the hell had Halliday done this? How had he managed to invent such a complex device in secret? Hardware hadn’t even been his specialty.
The documentation he’d sent me held the answer. When I read through the rest of it, I learned that Halliday had been working on this for over twenty-five years, with an entire research lab full of neuroscientists—hiding his secret in plain sight.
A few months after GSS launched the OASIS, Halliday set up an R&D division at the company called the Accessibility Research Lab. Ostensibly, its mission had been to create a line of neuroprosthetic hardware that would allow people with severe physical disabilities to use the OASIS more easily. Halliday hired the best and brightest minds in the field of neuroscience to staff the ARL, then he gave them all the funding they would ever need to conduct their research.
The ARL’s work over the next few decades was certainly no secret. To the contrary, their breakthroughs had created a new line of medical implants that became widely used. I’d read about several of them in my high school textbooks. First, they developed a new type of cochlear implant that—for those who chose to use it—allowed the hearing impaired to perceive sound with perfect clarity, both in the real world and inside the OASIS. A few years later, they unveiled a new retinal implant that allowed any blind people who wished to be sighted to “see” perfectly inside the OASIS. And by linking two head-mounted mini cameras to the same implant, their real-world sight could be restored as well.
The ARL’s next invention was a brain implant that allowed paraplegics to control the movements of their OASIS avatar simply by thinking about it. It worked in conjunction with a separate implant that allowed them to feel simulated sensory input. And the very same implants gave these individuals the ability to regain control of their lower extremities, while restoring their sense of touch. They also allowed amputees to control robotic replacement limbs, and to receive sensory input through them as well.
To accomplish this, the researchers devised a method of “recording” the sensory information transmitted to the human brain by the nervous system in reaction to all manner of external stimuli, then compiled these assets into a massive digital library of sensations that could be “played back” inside the OASIS to perfectly simulate anything a person could experience through their senses of touch, taste, sight, smell, balance, temperature, vibration—you name it.
GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery. This program made powerful new tools available to any physically disabled individuals who chose to use them, but it also provided the ARL with a nearly unlimited supply of willing human guinea pigs on whom to conduct their ongoing experiments.