In addition to his preparations for fatherhood, Shoto continued to oversee operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division, where he produced a wildly popular series of award-winning OASIS quests based on his favorite anime and samurai films. He’d become one of my favorite quest developers, and I was lucky enough to be one of his go-to beta testers, so we still got to hang out in the OASIS at least once or twice a month.
We rarely talked about Shoto’s late brother, Daito, or his murder. But the last time we had, Shoto told me he was still in mourning for him, and that he feared he always would be. I understood what he meant, because I felt the same way about my aunt Alice, and my old downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Gilmore. Both of them had been murdered, too, by the same man: Nolan Sorrento, the former head of operations at Innovative Online Industries.
After Halliday’s contest, Sorrento had been convicted of thirty-seven separate counts of first-degree homicide. He was now serving time on death row in a maximum-security prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, about fifty miles south of Columbus.
During his trial, IOI’s lawyers had managed to convince the jury that Sorrento had gone rogue, and that he’d acted without the IOI board’s knowledge or consent when he ordered his underlings to throw Daito off his forty-third-floor balcony. They also claimed that Sorrento had acted alone when he’d detonated a bomb outside my aunt’s trailer in the stacks, killing over three dozen people and injuring hundreds of others.
After Sorrento’s conviction and incarceration, IOI managed to settle all of the wrongful-death suits filed against them. Then they tried to go back to business as usual. But by then, they’d already lost their position as the world’s largest manufacturer of OASIS immersion hardware, thanks to the release of our ONI headsets. And thanks to the rollout of our free global Internet initiative, their ISP business had also shriveled.
Meanwhile, IOI also had the audacity to file a separate corporate lawsuit against me. They claimed that even though I’d created a false identity and used it to masquerade as an indentured servant to infiltrate their company headquarters, the indenturement contract I’d signed was still legally binding. Which meant, they argued, that I was still technically IOI’s property when I won Halliday’s contest, and so his fortune and his company should now also be classified as IOI’s property. Since the U.S. legal system still insisted on giving corporations even more rights than its citizens, this idiotic lawsuit dragged on for months…right up until GSS completed its hostile takeover of IOI. Then, as IOI’s new owners, we withdrew the lawsuit. We also fired the old IOI board of directors, their attorneys, and everyone else who had worked with or under Nolan Sorrento.
Now the Sixers were a distant memory, and Innovative Online Industries was just another wholly owned subsidiary of Gregarious Simulation Systems. GSS was now far and away the largest corporation in the world. And if we kept growing at our current rate, before too long we might be the only one. That was the reason a lot of our own users had started to refer to GSS as the “New Sixers” and me, Aech, Shoto, and Samantha as the “Four Nerds of the Apocalypse.”
Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
I made small talk with Aech and Shoto for a few more minutes, until the conference room doors swung open and Samantha’s avatar, Art3mis, strolled in. She glanced in our direction, but didn’t offer anything in the way of a greeting. Faisal walked in after her and closed the doors behind him.
We all took our usual seats, which put me and Art3mis on opposite sides of the circular conference table—as far away from each other as possible, but also directly facing each other.
“Thank you all for coming,” Faisal said, taking a seat next to Samantha. “I think we’re ready to call this co-owners meeting to order. We only have a few items to cover today—the first one being our quarterly revenue report.” An array of charts and graphs appeared on the large screen behind him. “As usual, it’s all good news. ONI headset sales remain steady, and immersion-vault sales have nearly doubled since last quarter. OASIS Advertising and Surreal Estate revenue also both remain at an all-time high.”
Faisal continued to detail how great our company was doing, but I didn’t hear much of what he was saying. I was too busy stealing glances at Art3mis across the table. I knew she wouldn’t catch me, because she made a point of never looking in my direction.
Her avatar looked the same as it always had, with one minor change. After the contest, she’d added the reddish-purple birthmark that covered the left half of her real face to her avatar’s face as well. So now there was no discernible difference between her avatar’s appearance and her appearance in real life. When she gave interviews, she often spoke about what it had been like for her to grow up hating her birthmark, and how she’d spent most of her life trying to conceal it. But now she wore it like a badge of honor, in reality and in the OASIS. And as a result, she’d somehow transformed her birthmark into an internationally recognized trademark.
I glanced up at the name tag floating above her avatar’s head. It had a thin rectangular border around it, which indicated that the avatar’s operator was not using an ONI headset to experience the OASIS. We’d added this feature due to overwhelming customer demand. OASIS users with this name-tag border were now known as Ticks. (A truncation of the word “haptics.”) Most Ticks were people who had already used up their twelve hours of ONI time and had logged back in with a haptic rig to squeeze in a few more hours of conventional OASIS time before bed. Full-time Ticks like Samantha, who never used an ONI headset at all, now comprised less than five percent of our user base. Despite Samantha’s best efforts, there were fewer and fewer ONI holdouts every year.
“I’m also happy to report that our newest server farm is now online, upping our data-storage capacity by another million yottabytes,” Faisal said. “Our data engineers estimate that this should be more than enough to meet our storage needs for the coming year, if user population growth remains steady.”
Another side effect of releasing the headsets had been a huge increase in the company’s data-storage needs, due to the enormous UBS (user brain scan) files that were stored in every ONI user’s account, which got updated every time they logged in or out of the OASIS. So as the total number of ONI users continued to increase, so did our massive data-storage requirements.
Compounding this problem was the fact that we didn’t purge any OASIS user’s account data when they died in the real world, including those huge UBS files. Faisal explained to me that this was because we own all of that data, and it was extremely valuable to the company for several reasons, including shit like “user marketing trend analysis.” But the main reason we held on to those ONI user brain scans was because that data helped our neural-interface engineers improve the safety and operability of the ONI headset. That was why our neural-interface software and the hardware both worked so flawlessly on such a wide variety of people. Because we had such a huge pool of willing guinea pigs who didn’t mind giving us complete access to the contents of their skull, as long we gave them access to our high-quality sensory-immersive bread-and-circus simulator.