Up until now, I think Aech, Shoto, and I had all been thinking the same thing. If Anorak failed to release us before we hit our ONI usage limits, a lobo logout with a 10 percent chance of survival was better than no chance at all. But Anorak had robbed us of that option too. Even cutting off the power wouldn’t help; with the logout disabled, the redundancies designed to save users would instead power the headsets long enough to push each of us past our daily ONI usage limits. Each of those backup batteries held more than enough juice to cook our frontal lobes.
The armored shell of my tactical immersion vault was designed to be indestructible and impregnable. Even if I disabled all of its defenses and ordered a security team with plasma torches to come down into my bunker and start cutting open my vault right now, they wouldn’t be able to get my body out of it for at least a day or two. I would be long dead from Synaptic Overload Syndrome by then. And Aech, Shoto, and Faisal were all in the same boat. And so was every other ONI user with an OASIS immersion vault.
Anorak had thought of everything. Every precaution we’d taken to protect our bodies and our brains was now being used against us.
People often jokingly referred to OIVs as “coffins.” Now that felt terrifyingly prophetic.
“Z?” Aech said. “I see those wheels of yours turning over there. What’s your assessment of our situation?”
“That we’re totally screwed, pal,” I said. “At least for the time being…”
Aech let out a roar and punched the wall in frustration.
“This shit is unbelievable!” she said. “Faisal, how the hell did our admins let this happen? We’re always saying we have the smartest people on the planet working for us, right? And the ‘best cybersecurity infrastructure ever to exist in human history’？ Some shit like that?”
“We do,” Faisal said. “But we never anticipated an attack by an AI copy of our deceased CEO! How the hell were we supposed to prevent that? It’s impossible.” He grabbed a fistful of his own hair in each hand, as if preparing to yank all of it out. “He had unrestricted admin access to our entire internal network. All of our safeguards were to prevent someone on the outside from hacking in to our network. Anorak already had the key to the front door!”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “Just tell the engineers to keep working on a solution, OK?”
“They are, sir,” he said, giving me a grim smile. “Like their own lives depend on it.”
“Good,” I replied. “In the meantime, we’ll try to give the Dixie Flatline what he wants, and hope he makes good on his promise to release us.”
I glanced back over at Aech and Shoto. They both nodded mutely in agreement. We all looked at Art3mis, but she appeared to be lost in thought. She also appeared to be the only one who had fully regained her composure—maybe because she was the only person present whose brain wasn’t currently being held hostage.
She walked back over to the conference table and turned to address all of us. I winced, bracing myself for the worst. This was her moment to shout, I fucking TOLD YOU SO, morons! at the top of her lungs. Because she had told us. Many, many times. And now she might pay for our hubris with her own life, along with half a billion other innocent people. It was all our fault, and she would’ve had every right to say so.
But I should’ve already known…that wasn’t her style.
“We can handle this,” she said, making eye contact with each of us in turn. “Anorak isn’t some supergenius. He said so himself. He’s only as smart as James Halliday was when he was alive.” She made a show of rolling her eyes. “Halliday may have been a genius with computers, but we all know he was a total idiot when it came to understanding other people. He never understood human behavior. Which means Anorak will understand it even less—especially since Halliday erased a bunch of his memories. We can use that to our advantage.”
“But this isn’t Halliday we’re dealing with here,” Aech said. “It’s Anorak. He’s read the entire Internet! Now he knows everything about everything!”
“Yeah,” Shoto said. “Because there isn’t any false information on the Internet. At all.”
“Hey!” Art3mis said, snapping her fingers at us like an annoyed schoolteacher. “I don’t want to hear one more word of negativity, guys! You got that? We’re the High Five! We beat Anorak once before, remember? And if we work together, we can do it again. Right?”