Of course, since I was inside the MoTIV and unable to get out, I was going to have to put myself in the line of fire too. My real self. Just like Samantha had done for Og.
I thought it over for all of five seconds. Then I powered on my MoTIV and linked it to the drone controller station I was already using. It allowed my eyes to see through the two stereoscopic cameras mounted on the front of the MoTIV’s heavily armored hull, which provided me with a view of the interior of my underground concrete bunker.
I activated the elevator and the platform my MoTIV was resting on began to rise toward the surface. But it wasn’t rising nearly fast enough for my liking, and after a few seconds I grew impatient and activated my jump jets. This caused the MoTIV to rocket up the length of the elevator shaft, and out of the launch-bay doors at the top, which opened just in the nick of time. Then I hit the jump jets again to lessen the force of my impact, which was still considerable. When the MoTIV hit the ground, I piloted it forward at full speed and it began to run, bounding down Babbitt Road, taking great leaping strides on its spidery robotic legs. Each step I took left an enormous crater in the asphalt behind me as I accelerated the MoTIV to its top speed.
It took me less than a minute to reach the ambulance. It was still lying on its side in the middle of the road, and there were telebots swarming all over it like insects. They appeared to be attempting to dismantle its armor plating so they could get inside and reach the occupants. And it looked like they were only a few seconds away from success.
As soon as I got within firing range, I unloaded on Sorrento’s telebots with armor-piercing machine-gun fire from the guns mounted on my MoTIV’s shoulders, cutting them to shreds. Once I had cleared all of the telebots off the ambulance, I fired a sortie of heat-seeking missiles at the aerial drones overhead and managed to destroy all of them too.
Then I used the MoTIV’s massive metal arms to pick up the ambulance, with Miles, Samantha, and Og still inside it. I carried it all the way back to my house.
Just as we reached it, more of Sorrento’s killer aerial drones began to descend from the sky, and they opened fire on us once again as I carried the ambulance back down into my bunker and closed its massive armored doors, sealing all of us safely inside.
I tried to call Miles, but he didn’t respond, so I called Samantha and her face appeared on my HUD a second later. She had a big bloody gash on her forehead, but otherwise she appeared uninjured.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Miles is dead, Wade,” she said. “All shot to pieces, protecting us.”
“What about Og?”
She tilted the camera down so that I could see both of them. Og was strapped into an auto-medic bed—one of two built into the back of the ambulance. Miles’s dead body lay in the other one.
“He’s still alive,” she said. Her cheeks were streaming with tears. “But he’s still bleeding internally, and he keeps fading in and out.”
She was stroking Og’s wild gray hair back away from his forehead while she watched the auto-doc’s robotic hands tend to his gunshot wound and the lacerations he’d suffered during their escape. Luckily Samantha managed to get him safely strapped into the stretcher before the ambulance was hit by that drone missile, so he wasn’t further injured when it was knocked on its side. The gash on Samantha’s forehead indicated that she hadn’t been as lucky.
“If Og regains consciousness, you have to convince him to log back in to the OASIS,” I said. “Tell him that we’ve already collected all seven shards. And tell him we’re trying to retrieve the Dorkslayer sword too. But we need Og to log back in to the OASIS, since he’s the only one who can wield it.”
“I’ll tell him,” Samantha replied. “If he wakes back up. What are you going to do?”
An ice pick of pain slammed into my brain, and the world seemed to tilt wildly for a moment. Catastrophic synaptic overload, knocking loudly on my front door now—reminding me that I’d already pushed myself past my limits. I blinked my eyes clear.
“I’m gonna try to stall Anorak,” I said. “For as long as I can.”
I disengaged from my telebot control rig and climbed out of it, reorienting myself to the interior of the study. Then I walked over to the window and opened the shutters.
Anorak was still there, hovering just outside the windowsill.
“Please accept my sincere apology, Wade,” he said. “I didn’t intend for Sorrento to harm Og. But as you know, human behavior is often unpredictable.”
In the way of a reply, I simply gave him the finger. Then I walked back over to the Big Red Button and placed my hand on it.
“Careful now, Parzival,” Anorak said. “If you press that button, you’ll become the biggest mass murderer in history. And you’ll be committing suicide at the same time.” He leveled a finger at me. “I warned you before—if the OASIS goes offline, my modified headset firmware will kill every ONI user still connected to the system. Including you, Wade. Along with your friends Aech and Shoto.”
I took a deep breath. How the fuck do you negotiate with a piece of software? I wondered. This was going to be like trying to play chess against a computer without knowing the rules.
I opened up my avatar’s inventory and took out all seven of the real shards. Then I held them up before Anorak, fanning them out like playing cards, four in one hand and three in the other, making sure to keep them separated so they all didn’t touch one another at once.
“We’ve arrived at an impasse, Anorak,” I replied. “No one else can enter this room, including you. And I’m not coming out. So if you just stand there and let me die of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, the Seven Shards will remain trapped in here forever. Just out of your reach. I won’t be around to reassemble them, and Leucosia will never be resurrected. Which means that you’ll never get to meet your digital dream girl.”
Anorak didn’t respond. This was a first. It gave me hope.
“I know you’ve probably prepared a ‘Ship in a Bottle’ for yourself somewhere,” I said. “A standalone simulation outside the OASIS where you plan to live happily ever after. Right? Well, you can forget about taking Leucosia there with you. You’ll have to go it alone, for all eternity.”
Again, Anorak didn’t respond. He appeared to be deep in concentration.
After our conversation on Arda, the first thing Samantha had done upon logging out was take the data uplink to ARC@DIA physically offline. So no matter what happened, Anorak would be stuck here on Earth, playing solitaire on a solar-powered desktop PC somewhere, until his hardware or his power source failed, or someone found his hiding place. I didn’t tell him any of that though.
Instead, I regarded him sadly and shook my head.
“If the Siren’s Soul really is a copy of Kira Underwood, she isn’t going to love you,” I said. “I bet Halliday found out right away that the copy didn’t love him, either, any more than the real Kira did. Kira has only ever had one true love, and you just held him hostage at gunpoint. You think she’s going to be grateful to you when she finds out what you’ve done?”
“She isn’t going to find out,” Anorak said. “And I told you before—I’m not Halliday. I’m better. I think a lot faster on my feet than he ever did, for one thing. And I’m a much faster learner too. I think I may be able to win Kira over, after a decade or two. And if not, I can always try deleting all of her memories of Ogden Morrow. The same way Halliday tried to delete my memories of Kira.”