I spent a few more minutes piloting my telebot through the silent corridors of the ship before I returned it to its charging dock. Then I disconnected from it, and just like that, I was back on Earth, sitting on my patio.
I’d traveled all the way to space and back, and I’d only managed to kill fifteen minutes.
I tried calling Aech and Shoto, to see if either of them wanted to catch up before our co-owners meeting. But as usual, neither of them picked up. I took off my specs and threw them on the table in front of me with a sigh. I told myself that Aech was probably still asleep, and that Shoto was probably busy with work. I could’ve checked their account statuses to see, but I’d learned the hard way that if your friends were avoiding you, you didn’t want or need to know about it.
I continued to eat my breakfast in silence, listening to the wind in the trees and absentmindedly watching the flock of security drones overhead as they patrolled the perimeter of my estate. This was usually the only time I spent outdoors each day, to get my daily minimum dose of sunlight. Deep down, I still shared Halliday’s opinion that going outside was highly overrated.
I pulled my AR specs back on and skimmed over the emails that had collected in my inbox overnight. Then I spent some time updating my ONI-net queue with new Recs and Sims from the “Most Popular Downloads” list. I did this every morning, even though I already had thousands of hours of experiences in my queue—more than I would ever have time to make it through, even if I lived to be a hundred. That was why I constantly updated and rearranged the clips in my queue—to make sure I got to the best stuff first.
In the early days of the ONI-net, some people at GSS had worried that its popularity might cause the rest of the OASIS to become a ghost town, because everyone would spend all of their time doing playback instead of exploring the OASIS to have experiences of their own. But the OASIS continued to grow and thrive alongside the ONI-net, and most users divided their time equally between the two. Perhaps it was human nature to crave both passive and interactive forms of entertainment.
As usual, I searched the ONI-net for any newly listed clips tagged with the name Art3mis or Samantha Cook. Whenever anyone posted a recording in which she appeared, I would download it. Even if it was just a clip of her signing an autograph for someone, it still gave me a chance to experience standing next to her for a few seconds.
I knew how pathetic this was—which somehow made it even more pathetic.
But trust me, there were far more twisted and depraved clips I could’ve been playing back. The current top download in the NSFW section of the ONI-net library was a fifty-person orgy, recorded simultaneously by all fifty participants, giving the viewer the ability to jump from one participant’s body to the next at will, like some hedonistic demon. Cyberstalking my ex-girlfriend at her public appearances seemed like a pretty tame pastime in comparison.
Don’t get me wrong. The ONI-net wasn’t just a way for people to experience guilt-free sex and risk-free drug use. It was also an incredibly powerful tool for fostering empathy and understanding. Entertainers and politicians and artists and activists used this new communication medium to connect with a global audience, with profound results. The Art3mis Foundation had even started posting .oni clips now—first-person slice-of-life recordings made by impoverished and exploited people around the globe, designed to expose others to their plight. It was a brilliant and effective use of ONI technology. But it also seemed hypocritical of Samantha to use the ONI to further her own agenda after railing against its release. When I’d said so during one of our meetings, Samantha made it abundantly clear that she didn’t give a flying frak at a rolling Rathtar what I thought.
I ate the last bite of my now-cold omelet and dropped my napkin on my plate. Belvedere sprang into action and began to clear off the table, the servos in his robotic limbs whirring with each of his small, precise movements.
What now?
I could head over to my music room, to knock out my daily guitar lesson. One of my new hobbies was learning to play guitar in reality, which proved to be very different—and far more difficult—than playing a simulated axe in the OASIS. Luckily, I had the best guitar teacher imaginable—a fully licensed hologram of the great Edward Van Halen, circa the release of 1984. He was a taskmaster too. Thanks to his tutelage I was starting to get pretty good.
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.