“Faisal,” she said, turning to face him. “What would happen to all of Anorak’s ONI hostages if we shut the OASIS down manually? By taking all the servers offline, one by one?”
Shoto chimed in. “Or even take the whole Internet down, just for a few seconds. What would happen? Would all the ONI hostages wake up?”
Faisal held his index finger to his right ear to indicate that he was listening to the team of OASIS engineers he had on the phone. When they finished talking, Faisal shook his head.
“No, I’m afraid not,” he said. “Normally, when an ONI user loses their connection to the Internet or to the OASIS, the headset’s firmware triggers an automatic logout. But Anorak has disabled that feature. So even if the OASIS went completely offline, it still wouldn’t wake any of the hostages up. The techs think it would probably just leave all of us in a permanent ONI-induced coma. Unless…”
“Unless what, Faisal?” Shoto asked.
“Unless he also programmed his infirmware to lobotomize anyone who tries to escape by cutting off their OASIS or Internet connections.”
“Son of a bitch,” Art3mis said. “If he did that, he would be able to kill all of his ONI hostages at once, just by pressing the Big Red Button. Right?”
“Hold on a second,” I said. “Even if Anorak did want to press the Big Red Button, I doubt he could. I bet Halliday designed the button so that it could only be pressed by a real person, and not an NPC like Anorak. Considering the other restrictions Halliday placed on him, that seems like a pretty safe bet.”
“Maybe that’s the reason Anorak broke Sorrento out of prison,” Art3mis said. “So that he could give his robes to Sorrento and order him to press the Big Red Button.”
“Yeah,” Shoto said. “But if Anorak did that, he’d be killing himself too. Wouldn’t he?”
“Unless he has a backup,” Faisal said. “A standalone simulation we don’t know about.”
“Like that one TNG episode with Professor Moriarty,” Shoto said.
“？‘Ship in a Bottle,’？” Aech and Art3mis said in unison.
“Can our guys analyze Anorak’s firmware?” I asked. “To find out what he changed?”
Faisal shook his head. “Our software engineers are trying to do that right now,” he said. “But Anorak has completely rewritten the firmware in some sort of programming language they’ve never seen before. They don’t even know how to disassemble or decompile the code, and even if they could, they don’t think they would be able to understand it.”
“What about rolling it back to the previous build?” Shoto asked.
Faisal shook his head again. “We already have,” he said. “But to reinstall it, we would need to log out of the OASIS first. The headset can’t be active.”
“Great,” I said. “Wonderful. Just perfect!”
“OK,” Aech said. “Then we give him what he wants. Like, right fucking now. Whatever the Siren’s Soul is, it can’t be worth risking half a billion lives…”
“Og apparently thought it was,” Art3mis said. “Otherwise, he would have given it to Anorak. But he refused…” She locked eyes with me. “We’re missing something here.”
Aech shook her head.
“None of this matters right now, y’all!” she shouted. “We have to find the rest of those shards by sundown. We can figure out what the Siren’s Soul is and what it does along the way. Now, let’s fucking moooove!”
Aech made a herding motion with her arms, as if to spur all of us toward the exit. But Shoto stepped in front of the doors, blocking them.
“Hold on,” he said. “Aren’t we going to release some sort of statement to all the ONI users who are being held hostage? To inform them of their situation?”
Faisal shook his head.
“I believe that would be an extraordinarily bad idea, sir,” he said. “We don’t want to create a global panic—or admit any liability for this situation—until we have no other choice.”
The room fell silent for a moment.
“For now, we can say the problem is due to a minor glitch,” Faisal added. “Tell the users their temporary inability to log out is due to a harmless bug in our new firmware, and that they aren’t in any danger, because the system will still log them out automatically when they hit their twelve-hour ONI usage limit.” He spread his hands. “If we can pull that off, our customers will never know their lives were in danger, and that would save GSS billions in lawsuits.”