These days, I told myself that Samantha would’ve broken up with me eventually anyway. By the end of that first week at Og’s estate, I’d already begun to wonder if she was having second thoughts. She’d started to pick up on my annoying idiosyncrasies. My inability to recognize social cues. My total and complete lack of cool around strangers. My neediness and emotional immaturity. She was probably already looking for an excuse to dump my socially awkward ass, and when I chose to vote against her on releasing the ONI, it just fast-forwarded the inevitable.
Since our breakup, I’d seen Samantha only via her OASIS avatar, and only during our co-owners meetings. Even then, she rarely spoke to me directly or made eye contact. She seemed to be doing her best to pretend I didn’t exist.
After our split, she became laser focused on carrying out her master plan—the plan she’d told me about during our first meeting, when we discussed what we’d do if either of us managed to win Halliday’s contest.
“If I win that dough, I’m going to make sure everyone on this planet has enough to eat,” she’d proclaimed. “Once we tackle world hunger, then we can figure out how to fix the environment and solve the energy crisis.”
True to her word, she created the Art3mis Foundation, a global charity organization devoted to ending world hunger, saving the environment, and solving the energy crisis, and donated nearly all of her massive income to it.
She still kept an apartment on the top floor of the Art3mis Foundation building in downtown Columbus, a few blocks from GSS. But she spent very little time there. She traveled constantly, visiting the world’s most troubled and impoverished nations to focus media attention on their plight, and to oversee the Art3mis Foundation’s aid efforts.
She also used her newfound fame and wealth to champion a whole host of environmental and humanitarian causes around the world, and seemingly overnight, she transformed herself into a sort of rock-star philanthropist and humanitarian. She was like Oprah, Joan Jett, and Mother Teresa all rolled into one. She now had billions of admirers, and in spite of everything I couldn’t help but be one of them.
But she wasn’t the only one trying to make the world a better place. Aech, Shoto, and I were each doing our part too.
Shoto created his own charity organization called the Daisho Council, which provided free food, housing, healthcare, and counseling to the millions of isolated Japanese kids known as hikikomori, who lived in self-imposed seclusion from the outside world. Aech set up a similar charity in North America called Helen’s House, which provided a safe haven for homeless LBGTQIA kids throughout the United States and Canada, along with another foundation devoted to providing impoverished African nations with self-sustaining technology and resources. And for kicks, she called it the Wakandan Outreach Initiative.
I’d founded the Parzival Relief Organization, a nonprofit that provided free food, electricity, Internet access, and ONI headsets to orphaned and impoverished kids around the world. (It was honestly the sort of help I would’ve wanted to receive if I had still been a kid living in the stacks.)
We’d also started funneling cash to the struggling U.S. government and its citizens, who had been surviving on foreign aid for decades. We paid off the national debt and provided aerial-defense drones and tactical telebots to help reestablish the rule of law in the rural areas where local infrastructure had collapsed along with the power grid. Human law enforcement officers no longer had to risk their own lives to uphold the law. Our police telebots were able to carry out their mission to serve and protect without putting any human lives at risk. Their programming and their operational fail-safes prevented them from harming anyone in the line of duty.
Together, Samantha, Aech, Shoto, and I donated billions of dollars every year. But plenty of rich people (like Ogden Morrow) had been throwing mountains of money at these same problems for decades, with little effect. And so far, the High Five’s own noble efforts weren’t moving the dial much either. For the time being we were holding chaos and collapse at bay, but humanity’s perilous predicament just kept on getting worse.
The reason for this was painfully obvious to me. We’d already passed the point of no return. The world’s population was fast approaching ten billion people, and Mother Earth was making it abundantly clear that she could no longer sustain all of us—especially not after we’d spent the past two centuries poisoning her oceans and atmosphere with wild industrial abandon. We had made our bed, and now we were going to die in it.
That was why I was still working on my backup plan, the one I’d shared with Samantha that first night we met.
Over the past three years, I had funded the construction of a small nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft in low Earth orbit. It housed a self-sustaining biosphere, which could provide long-term living space and life support for a crew of up to two dozen human passengers—including Aech and Shoto, who had joined me in footing the enormous construction bill.
I’d christened my ship the Vonnegut, like my old Firefly-class spaceship in the OASIS, which I’d named after my favorite author.
If the Vonnegut’s fusion engines functioned as they were supposed to, and the radiation shielding held up, and the ship’s armored hull didn’t get punctured by any micrometeors or crushed by an asteroid, we would reach Proxima Centauri in approximately forty-seven years. There, we would search for a habitable Earthlike planet where we could make a new home for ourselves, our children, and the frozen human embryos we were going to bring along. (We’d been accepting embryo donations for over a year by this point, from every country around the world, with the hope of ensuring genetic diversity.)
The ship’s onboard computer contained a new standalone virtual-reality simulation for us to access on our long journey. After much debate over what we should call our new virtual realm, we finally agreed upon the name ARC@DIA. (It was Aech’s idea to replace the a in the middle with an @ sign, to give the name a l33t flourish and to help distinguish it from the geographic region in central Greece, the Duran Duran side project, the city on Gallifrey, the alternate plane of reality in Dungeons & Dragons, and all of the other Arcadias out there.) The addition of the @ was also fitting because, as Aech put it, “ARC@DIA will be where it’s at!”
ARC@DIA was going to serve as our own private scaled-down version of the OASIS during the voyage. It was still a work in progress, and likely would be until the day we departed. Due to various space and hardware limitations, our simulation wasn’t nearly as big—about half the size of one OASIS sector. But that was still a vast amount of virtual space for us and our tiny crew to inhabit. We had enough room to upload copies of more than two hundred of our favorite OASIS planets, along with their NPCs. We didn’t bother transferring any of the business content or retail planets over. Where we were going, we wouldn’t need stores or commerce. Besides, we had to be sparing with our data-storage space, since we were bringing along a backup copy of the entire ONI-net file database too. It was updated every night, along with new OASIS content.