Leucosia stared at me blankly, as if she weren’t sure how to react. I don’t think she believed me. Or maybe she was just afraid to.
I held up the Rod of Resurrection.
“Let’s see if this thing really works,” I said.
I activated the artifact by holding it aloft, and a control menu appeared on my HUD. It contained a long, scrolling, alphabetized list of ONI user names, along with the name of their avatar, and the time and date they last accessed the OASIS.
Below the list of names, there was a large Resurrect button.
Every OASIS user who had ever put on an ONI headset was on the list. Most of those users were still alive, but a few of them were labeled as deceased.
The Rod of Resurrection allowed me to create digital copies of real human beings as autonomous DPCs inside the OASIS. And it didn’t matter if those people were still alive or not. I could clone the living or raise the dead, with the press of a button.
I continued to browse through the alphabetized list of digitized human souls. I quickly found backup copies of myself, and of Aech, and Shoto too.
The brain-scan file attached to my account had the same timestamp as my last ONI login the day before.
If I wanted to create a digital clone of myself inside the OASIS, all I had to do was highlight my name on the control menu and then press the Resurrect button.
My mind reeled at the implications. Were people going to suffer an identity crisis if they were suddenly forced to share the OASIS with an immortal backup copy of themselves? One that didn’t need to eat, sleep, work, or pay rent anywhere?
Of course, the implications of using ONI technology to resurrect copies of the deceased were equally huge. What Halliday had invented was no less than affordable, reliable, consumer-grade immortality.
I scrolled through this “consciousness database” until I found the one and only scan of Ogden Morrow. The one made just the day before, during his final OASIS login. Then I selected and activated it.
There was a flash of light and Og’s avatar appeared in front of us. He looked much younger now. His avatar looked like the real Og had when he was in his late twenties. Then I remembered I wasn’t looking at an avatar. It was really Og. An AI copy of his deceased counterpart, with the same personality and memories.
The reincarnated copy of Og remembered everything the real Og had experienced, right up until the moment of his last brain scan. For all intents and purposes, I had just brought him back to life—and he had been made immortal in the process.
I was about to explain to Og what had happened, and what he now was—but by then, he’d already spotted Leucosia, and she had already spotted him. The two of them ran into each other’s arms. She waited for him to kiss her first. And as soon as he did, she kissed him back—and for a much lengthier period of time.
Art3mis and I turned our backs to give them some privacy. I was trying to think of something clever or profound to say about what we’d just witnessed. But before I could come up with anything, I felt Art3mis take my hand in hers and rest her head on my shoulder. She was crying.
Once she calmed down a little bit, I held up the Rod of Resurrection once again.
“This thing can bring back anyone who ever used an ONI headset,” I told her. “Even if they’re not alive anymore.”
I watched Art3mis’s face closely, to gauge her reaction. She looked at me uncertainly, as if to confirm that what I’d just said really meant what she thought it did. When I nodded, I saw a spark of what looked like hope flare in her eyes.
“You can bring back a copy of any past ONI user?” she repeated.
I nodded. Then I handed her the Rod of Resurrection and explained how to use it. She didn’t hesitate. She took it from me and activated it, then she spent a few seconds locating her grandmother’s name in the consciousness database and selected it.
A split second later, Ev3lyn, her deceased grandmother’s OASIS avatar, appeared in front of her. She’d used a ravatar scan made before any signs of her illness had appeared, so she looked just like her real-world self. Samantha’s mother’s mother, Evelyn Opal Cook.
“Grandma?” Arty whispered in a very shaky voice.
“Sam?” she replied. “Is that you?”
Apparently her grandma was the only person who could get away with calling her that, because she nodded. And then they ran into each other’s arms.
I turned away to give them some privacy, but found myself staring back at Og and Kira, who were still making out a few feet away. I walked to the opposite side of the shrine, to be alone with my thoughts.
Witnessing these two impossible, blissful reunions filled me with joy too. Genuine, unbridled joy. And I wasn’t playing back an ONI recording of secondhand joy experienced by someone else, somewhere else, at some time in the past. It was my own, hard-won and earned at great personal cost. Humanity had just become the recipient of another strange and wonderful and unexpected gift—one that would change the very nature of our existence, even more than the OASIS or the ONI ever had.
Staring down at the Rod of Resurrection in my avatar’s hand, I couldn’t help but think about my own mother once again. I would’ve given away all of my wealth and everything I owned to bring her back, even if it was just for a single day. So that I could talk to her again, and apologize to her for not taking better care of her, and tell her how much I’d missed her.
But Loretta Watts died over a decade ago, long before the ONI was released. There were no backups of her consciousness stored on the OASIS servers. My mother wasn’t coming back. And neither was my father. Now they both only lived on in my memories.
That was when I realized—those memories of my parents were going to live on forever, along with all of my other memories. Because I was going to live forever. We all were. Every person who had ever put on an ONI headset.
We might be part of the last generation ever to know the sting of human mortality. From this moment forth, death would have no more dominion.
We were witnessing the dawn of the posthuman era. The Singularity by way of simulacra and simulation. One final gift to human civilization from the troubled-but-brilliant mind of James Donovan Halliday. He had delivered all of us unto this digital paradise, but his own tragic flaws had prevented him from passing through its gates himself.
Aech and Endira’s avatars arrived a few minutes later, and Shoto and Kiki teleported in just a few seconds after that, joining us high on the mountaintop where the Shrine of Leucosia was located.
As soon as their avatars finished rematerializing, all four of them ran over and pulled me into a group hug. When they released me, that was when they finally turned to see Leucosia and Og standing there, still locked in an embrace, nose-to-nose, whispering inaudible words to each other. And in the other direction, they could see Art3mis still in the midst of her tearful reunion with her grandmother’s avatar, Ev3lyn.
Then all of their jaws dropped open in unison.
“What’s wrong, guys?” I asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Two ghosts,” Aech said. “No, make that three! Holy shit. What the hell happened?”
I told them all what had happened. Then I showed them the Rod of Resurrection and told them what it could do.
After we gave Art3mis a few more minutes to catch up with Ev3lyn, I interrupted them and asked Arty to join us for a private conversation. I asked Og to join us too. Then the High Five held an impromptu co-owners meeting right there on the steps of Castle Anorak, to decide the fate of the newly resurrected AIs.
It was clear to all of us that the world wasn’t quite ready to accept digitized human beings as people. Not yet—and maybe not ever. The “Anorak Incident” as it would come to be known, had further sowed the seeds of distrust against artificial intelligence. Damage that might never be undone.