Art3mis sighed. “Forget the lawsuits,” she said. “But I agree with Faisal—the longer we can keep this quiet, the safer our users will be.”
“Great,” Aech said, clapping her hands together. “Motion carried.”
* * *
We told the ONI users the logout issue was due to a minor firmware bug, apologized profusely for the temporary inconvenience, and announced that all teleportation fares would be waived until the problem was fixed. We also offered to deposit a thousand credits in each ONI user’s OASIS account, to help them “make the most of this unfortunate situation”—in return for digitally signing an agreement stating they wouldn’t sue us over this incident. Faisal told us this was just an extra precaution, because each time our users logged on they were already clicking Agree to an end-user license that classified our headsets as experimental technology and absolved GSS of any liability for injuries.
We sent the message out to every single ONI user who was currently logged in. Faisal also posted it to the official GSS media feeds, looking visibly relieved as soon as he had done so.
“OK,” Shoto said. “Now we can get to work.”
“Agreed,” Arty said as she stood up and moved to the corner of the conference room. “But you’re gonna have to start looking for the Second Shard without me.”
We exchanged confused looks.
“Where the hell are you going?” Aech asked.
“My jet just reduced its airspeed to link up with a midair refueling tanker,” Art3mis said. “So it’s time to rock and roll.”
She tapped a series of icons on her HUD, then placed her hands on her hips—a pose that made her look like Wonder Woman for a brief moment.
“I’m not gonna let some two-bit Gandalf wannabe take me hostage,” she said. “And I’m not going to sit on my ass and do nothing while Og is being held prisoner.” She raised her right hand and saluted all of us. “I’ll call you back!”
Then she did what none of the rest of us could—she logged out of the OASIS, and her avatar disappeared.
But then, a few seconds later, Faisal received two incoming vidfeeds from Samantha—one from her mobile phone, and another from her jet’s onboard phone line, which was tied to the plane’s internal and external cameras.
Displayed side by side on the conference-room viewscreen, we saw shaky footage of the cabin of Samantha’s private jet from two different angles. Samantha fumbled with her phone for a few seconds as she clipped it to the front of her jacket, leaving us with a POV shot from her perspective.
We all watched in shock as Samantha slipped both of her arms into the harness of an emergency parachute applicator mounted on the bulkhead and buckled its safety belt around her waist. The parachute’s straps tightened automatically and a computerized voice spoke from a strap-mounted speaker, announcing that both main and reserve chutes were ready to deploy.
By this point we had all started shouting at her to reconsider, as if she could hear us. Samantha stepped away from the applicator, now wearing the parachute on her back. She pulled on a pair of goggles. Then she went to the emergency exit and pulled down on the manual-release handle with all of her weight, briefly hanging from it before it finally gave. The door detached itself from the fuselage and flew off, depressurizing the cabin and sucking everything outside through the opening.
Including Samantha.
Her vidfeed became a spinning whorl of blue, then stabilized as she went into a back-first free fall. We caught a glimpse of the jet above her, and could just make out that it was still connected to the much larger refueling drone by its automated umbilical.
Faisal cycled through the cameras on board the jet itself, pulling up a downward-facing external camera mounted on its underside. It gave us a perfectly centered shot of Samantha, just in time to see her pull the ripcord. Her parachute unfurled and opened, revealing the Art3mis Foundation logo printed on top of it—the one where the adjacent letter t and number 3 in her name resembled an armored woman in profile, drawing back on a futuristic hunting bow.
“Holy shit, Arty!” Aech said, amid a fit of anxious laughter. “I can’t believe she just did that. Girl got a death wish!”
Faisal and Shoto burst into applause. I joined in, trying to ignore my fear. Was outsmarting Anorak really going to be so easy?
That was when the view from the autojet’s video feed veered off to the side. The plane was changing course. Its camera was now showing only empty sky. On the feed from Samantha’s phone, still clipped to her chest, we had a POV shot of her feet, which she appeared to be kicking up like a girl on an amusement park ride, as her parachute floated downward.