Or I could take another Bollywood dance lesson. I was practicing for Aech and Endira’s wedding in a few months. I knew that Samantha would be in attendance, and I’d secretly begun to harbor an idiotic fantasy that I might be able to win her back when she saw me tearing up the dance floor.
A message popped up on my AR display, reminding me that I had an appointment scheduled with my therapist this morning. I always scheduled a therapy session before our GSS co-owners meeting, to help put me in a calm, nonconfrontational frame of mind, and—hopefully—prevent me from starting any unnecessary arguments with Samantha. Sometimes it even worked.
I selected the icon for the therapy program on the HUD of my AR specs, and my virtual therapist appeared in the empty chair across the table from me. When you first installed the software, you were allowed to select your therapist’s physical appearance and personality from thousands of premade options, from Freud to Frasier. I’d selected Sean Maguire—Robin Williams’s character in Good Will Hunting. His familiar demeanor, his warm smile, and his fake Boston accent made our sessions feel like I was talking to an old friend—even though he usually only said things like “Yes, go on” and “And how does that make you feel, Wade?”
I also had the ability to change the location where I met with him. The default setting was his office at the community college where he taught—the same location where most of his sessions with Will Hunting took place in the film. Or you could choose one of several bars in Southie, including Timmy’s Tap or the L Street Tavern. But I felt like changing things up this morning, so I selected the bench by the lake at Boston Public Garden, and an instant later, Sean and I were sitting on it, side by side, staring at the swans.
He began by asking me if I was still having nightmares about my aunt Alice’s death. I lied and told him no, because I didn’t feel like discussing the subject again.
He moved on to my social-media “addiction” (his term) and asked me how I felt my recovery was progressing. Just over a month ago, I’d placed an irreversible lock on all my social-media accounts. I couldn’t use any of them for a full year. I told Sean that I was still experiencing withdrawal symptoms, but they were beginning to subside.
Meed-Feed Addiction had been around since before I was born, but it had become even more common in the wake of the ONI’s release. Most of the early social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter had migrated into the OASIS shortly after it launched, and they all still existed there today in your meed feed, the consolidated social media feed timeline built into every user’s account. It allowed the billions of OASIS users around the world to share messages, memes, files, photos, songs, videos, celebrity gossip, pornography, and petty insults with one another, just as people had been doing on the Internet for the past half century.
I’d never been good in social situations of any kind, so I’d avoided social media entirely for most of my life. And I should have kept on avoiding it once I became a public figure.
It turned out I just wasn’t comfortable living in the spotlight. I was an awkward kid who was good at videogames and memorizing trivia. I was not mentally or emotionally equipped to have the whole world’s attention focused on me.
At any given moment, there were millions of people posting shit at or about me somewhere online. This had been the case ever since I first found the Copper Key, but it was only after I’d won the contest that the haters came out in force.
It made sense, in hindsight. The moment I inherited Halliday’s fortune, I was no longer the scrappy underdog from the stacks doing heroic battle with the Sixers. I was just another asshole billionaire, living a life of ease in his ivory tower. None of the stuff my friends and I did to try to help humanity seemed to make any difference.
My detractors in the media began to refer to my avatar as “Parvenu” instead of Parzival, while the less pretentious garden-variety assholes online instead chose to adopt I-Roc’s old nickname for me—“Penisville.”
Things got really bad when a previously unknown music group called Tapioca Shindig released a song titled “Sixer Fellatin’ Punk,” which used an autotuned sound bite from the live POV broadcast I’d made during the Battle of Castle Anorak, when I’d publicly declared to the world that “If I find Halliday’s Easter egg, I hereby vow to split my winnings equally with Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto….If I’m lying, I should be forever branded as a gutless Sixer-fellating punk.” But they only took the last part, so the lyrics to the whole song were just me singing “I should be forever branded as a gutless Sixer-fellating punk!” over and over.
The song instantly went viral. It was Tapioca Shindig’s one and only hit single. They posted a music video to the ONI-net that racked up over a billion downloads before I had it taken offline. Then I sued the band for defamation and bankrupted each of its members. Which, of course, only made the public hate me even more.
Samantha, Aech, and Shoto received their fair share of online hate, too, of course, but they took it in stride. They were somehow able to bask in the adoration of their billions of fans while ignoring the ire of even their most vocal detractors. I appeared to lack the emotional maturity necessary to pull off that little trick.
Yes, I knew the haters’ opinions were utterly meaningless, and had no effect whatsoever on our real lives. Unless, of course, we let it. Which, of course, I did.
And yes, the rational part of my brain knew that the vast majority of the people who trolled us online were acting out, due to crushing disappointment with their own miserable lives. And who could blame them? Reality was completely miserable for a vast majority of the world’s population. I should’ve taken pity on the sad, pathetic souls who had nothing better to do with their time than vent their frustrations by attacking me and my friends.
Instead I went on a rage-induced troll-killing spree. Several of them, actually.
The superuser abilities I’d inherited from Halliday allowed me to circumvent the OASIS’s strict policy of user anonymity. So when some snide douchebag using the handle PenisvilleH8r posted something nasty about me on the meed feeds, I pulled up his private account profile, pinpointed his avatar’s location inside the OASIS, and waited till he set foot inside a PvP zone. Then, before PenisvilleH8r even knew what was happening, I made my avatar invisible, teleported in, and zeroed his ass out with a ninety-ninth-level Finger of Death spell. Now that my avatar wore the Robes of Anorak, I was both omnipotent and invulnerable, so there was literally nothing anyone could do to stop me.
I gleefully zeroed out hundreds of trolls in this fashion. If someone talked shit about me, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted something hateful about Art3mis or her foundation, I found them and killed their avatar. If someone posted a racist meme about Aech or a video attacking Shoto’s work, I found them and killed their avatar—usually right after I asked them the rhetorical question, “Who run Bartertown?”
Eventually, people began to accuse me of being the untraceable, undetectable, ultrapowerful avatar behind the killings, and the resulting online media backlash, dubbed “Parzivalgate,” destroyed my public image. Thanks to my robes there was no hard evidence against me, and of course I denied everything, but even I had to admit that the circumstantial case was pretty strong. Gee, a bunch of avatars get killed by an undetectable, all-powerful avatar, and the only thing they have in common is that they trash-talked the one person most likely to have an undetectable, all-powerful avatar….