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utanoprinces · 3 years

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Tokki Works Part-time

TN: This is a memorial (bonus text story) from Debut, written from Tokiya's perspective. He's been sent to do some work for the professor (yes, the same one who developed Ai) in exchange for help with operating a complicated video device used during the Master Course. I'm a fairly new translator still, so do take this with a grain of salt! Enjoy, and please don't repost anywhere without permission!

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“Here…?”

Based on the map I received from Kotobuki-san, I've arrived at the laboratory belonging to the professor who developed the monitor.

I look up at the building before me.

Given the dubious name, “Professor’s Laboratory”, I imagined something more ominous, but the exterior appearance gives a very tidy, somewhat ordinary impression.

I press the doorbell and a moment later the door opens to reveal a man wearing a white lab coat.

“Who is it?”

He seems to be somewhere in his thirties. No, maybe even older.

Because of his large glasses, it’s hard to see his face and what expression he has.

“Excuse me. Kotobuki-san referred me to…”

“Oh, I heard~ Ichinose Tokiya, right?”

“Yes. I’m Ichinose. Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise. Feel free to call me ‘Professor’. That's what everyone calls me.”

So this is the “Professor” Kotobuki-san was referring to… It may be rude to say, but his hair is shaggy and the way he talks has an overall shady atmosphere to it.

There's no way this is actually the person who designed the monitor…

“Right. So what is it you want me to do?”

Kotobuki-san had called it an experiment, but I hadn’t even been told what kind of research this person does.

“Ah, I’ll explain the details inside.”

The professor beckons me lightly and turns to go back inside. He guides me to a room that looks like a lab, with simple desks lined up against a gray wall. However, the surroundings are so cluttered that it’s impossible to set foot anywhere.

A mountain of books, an array of miscellaneous equipment... Because of the whole monitor affair, I assumed he might work in the electronic and electrical engineering field, and that assumption doesn’t seem to be wrong based on these surroundings.

“Before the experiment, I’d like to request that you do some office work for me.”

As he says that, he heads deeper into the room, dexterously avoiding the equipment that’s scattered haphazardly across the floor.

It might be my first time walking through such a messy room.

I take a small breath and follow, feeling as though I’m traversing a jungle.

The professor boots up the laptop on his desk and brings over two stacks of paper.

“I want you to input the data here… and rewrite these handwritten documents.”

“All… of it?”

As far as I can tell, there’s a considerable amount.

“It’s a lot, sure, but it’s simple so I don’t think it’ll be too hard. Still, if we had more manpower, we could get done right away.”

Come to think of it, Kotobuki-san also said four people could finish it immediately… and that it’d take one person half a day.

“Go with the manual data first. The format’s already been created, so you should be able to do it without even thinking.”

The professor opens the spreadsheet software and points me to a chair in front of the laptop.

It’s going to take a lot of effort, but it’s a job I’ve accepted, so I have to do it.

I slump down in the chair, feeling somewhat overwhelmed.

I flip through the stack of documents to briefly assess the contents.

It's all numbers lined up in rows. It does indeed seem like it should be done manually.

The one thing that’s bothering me a little is that there is almost no indication of what the data is for. It seems as if it’s been intentionally hidden.

The same goes for the handwritten papers I’m meant to rewrite—it looks as though most of the important details have been omitted.

...he's surprisingly secretive.

“Well, I’m sure you don’t know what any of it means, but since you just have to type it, don’t worry about it, alright?”

I get the impression from his tone that he’s implying I wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway, which makes me slightly irritated.

Even so, he is my employer. I’m a part-timer. Work is work.

“Well then, I’ll get started right away.”

“Sure. If there’s anything you don’t understand, just ask.”

I softly clear my throat and begin to work.

Once I've started, I discover that the formatting and the documents have been designed to be easy to work with, so it makes for surprisingly quick work.

I expected him to be working on something else, but instead, the professor sits beside me and props his elbows on the desk.

“Ichinose-kun. What are your thoughts on the recently-announced discovery that could potentially disprove the theory of relativity?”

When he asks me that nonchalantly, I stop working for a moment.

Why ask me that out of the blue?

It seems strange, but I decide to answer him anyway since I recently read about the news in a magazine.

“Wasn’t it from a foreign research institute? I can’t really speak on it unless I’m given proper evidence. In my opinion, I think it’s a measurement error.”

“Oh, I see.”

The professor nods, maintaining his relaxed demeanor.

“Then… why do you think people get so irritable during the rainy season?”

“That is… it’s probably because of the high humidity.”

“I know, right. Isn’t it awful when everything’s sticky?”

...what the hell is this guy going on about?

After that, the professor repeatedly tries to start a conversation with me.

“Have you tried the latest product from the donut shop in front of the station?”

“I don’t go to places like that too often.”

“Did you know that penicillin was discovered by accident?”

“I have read that. Quite the miracle.”

“Boooriiing~”

“...what was that?”

“An impression of Reiji. Did it sound like him?”

“...that person is even more annoying.”

“You’re right.”

The conversation jumps from topic to topic with seemingly no thread of continuity.

However, it's inefficient to keep talking like this, no matter how simple the work may be.

He doesn’t seem to be the type to enjoy teasing people for their reactions like Kotobuki-san, so just what is he up to?

I can’t help but wonder, but I try to give appropriate replies while continuing to work dispassionately.

Met only by my half-hearted replies, the professor eventually gives up and stops trying to speak to me.

I take advantage of the silence to increase the speed of my work output.

"...kun, Ichinose-kun."

"Yes?"

Before I know it, when I look up, the professor is standing beside me, smiling.

"I’ve been calling you for quite some time. Your concentration is amazing. You must be tired. Here, go ahead."

He offers me something steamy.

Is that… a beaker?

No, a beaker is a beaker… but this thing has a handle.

Is it something he uses for experiments? Inside, a steaming, dark-brown liquid shifts around.

"What is that…?"

"It's coffee."

"I can see that, but…"

I hesitate. To be honest, its appearance is reminiscent of chemicals, which spoils any desire I might have had to try it.

"Oh. It's my special mug. I call it 'bea-cup'."

"Why… the handle?"

"It'll be too hot if you grab it as-is."

Ah...

As I thought, he's a strange person.

I have a headache.

He’s one of Kotobuki-san’s acquaintances. I was prepared for this.

"Come on. Don't be shy. Don’t you like your coffee black?"

"It’s not that. It's just… I appreciate the offer, but I'm not thirsty right now."

"Is that so? Shame."

After I politely decline, the professor responds in a slightly lonely, dejected voice and slinks off to the corner of the room.

Well, the manual data is done. Rewriting doesn't seem to be too difficult either.

I get so absorbed in working that the only ambient sound is that of the keyboard tapping away.

"Finished."

The last one. When I look up after checking over the contents of my work, the professor, who had been reading for a while, raises his brows behind his glasses slightly.

"I'm surprised. You're quick, huh?"

"Thank you."

"Want some coffee?"

"I'm fine."

The doctor stands, pours some coffee for himself, and—bea-cup in hand—peers at me.

"You really saved me. It must have been boring with all those words you didn't understand."

All those words I… didn't understand?

“No, no. I actually found it quite interesting. I thought you specialized in electronics and electrical engineering, but it seems you’ve done a lot of research in a variety of fields like… medicine.”

When I say that, his eyebrows rise even higher.

“...did it say something like that?”

“No. However, with this many units and numbers, it should be easy to make a conjecture. The first half of the data was all about the human body.”

“Oh, I see...”

He shrugs slightly when I present one of the papers to him.

“It’s intriguing data. It seems to me that it entails how muscle and fat tone affect the elasticity of the skin. Not that I can see any use for researching something like this.”

The professor silently lifts the bea-cup to his lips, his large glasses fogging up with steam.

Immediately after, his mouth twists into a grimace.

"Haha. Is that right? Why that certainly strikes a nerve. It’s actually meant to be a countermeasure against middle-aged weight gain."

"Middle-aged… weight-gain?"

“I’m old enough to be curious about it, myself. Even so, when you hear 'macho' it doesn’t fit the image of 'professor', so it’s research to determine how to achieve the ideal body type—not too muscular and not too chubby.”

“I hate to say it, but… Wouldn’t it be better to just go to the gym instead of researching this kind of thing?”

“You don’t get it. It’s not just about how it looks, I care about the feel of it. It’s not enough to simply work out.”

“Haaa…”

“Now that you mention it, you seem surprisingly fit—would it be okay if I take a look?”

“No.”

I duck away from the professor’s outstretched hand and pick up another document.

“Then, how about this one? Chemistry this time. It seemed to me like textile research.”

“Ah, well…”

“This new fiber, when exposed to a certain amount of ultraviolet light, takes in carbon dioxide from the air and—”

“Yeah, I know, it’s my research. Fibers that gradually grow as they’re exposed to sunlight. You want to know why I’m studying something like that?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I like plants a lot, but I always end up killing them by accident. I was thinking I could develop a grass that can grow without water or fertilizer.”

The doctor looks out the window.

“I’m actually growing it right now. Oh—it withered.”

“Isn’t that bad?”

“No… it’s…”

“It’s bad. Next, this one. At a glance, it seems to be a small rocket. A unique feature of this model is that it’s designed to minimize its impact when launched.”

“Don’t all boys dream about rockets?”

“That’s it?”

“You don’t need a reason to dream.”

“...this is all just nonsense.”

I sigh in exasperation.

The person who designed that monitor… I’d been thinking they must be quite remarkable when he was actually just doing all of this...

“I don’t mean to sound like an amateur, but you should at least narrow down your field of research.”

“No! I like doing all types of research, so I can’t pick just one.”

Seeing his flippant smile, I realize he’s even more difficult to interact with than Kotobuki-san.

“If that’s the case, then why not make some sort of composite of the data and try using it for more meaningful research? For example, based on the data about the human body, we can use the fiber to…”

I’m about to turn over the document when the professor hurriedly sets the bea-cup down beside me.

“...?!”

“Coffee… you want some?”

“No…”

The lenses of his glasses glint. I clear my throat and take my hands off the documents.

“So… what do I need to do for the experiment?”

I wasn’t interested in his research from the start. I just wanted to get back at him for treating me like an ignorant teenager twice.

It doesn't seem to be in either of our best interests to pursue this any further.

“Experiment? Oh, it’s already over.”

“Eh…?”

The doctor grins and laughs at my surprise.

“You know how I’ve been talking to you for some time? Lately, I’ve developed an interest in human reactions. I’ve been collecting data from you.”

“And you didn’t even ask for my permission? Isn’t that a little in poor taste?”

“If you’d declined earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to gather accurate data. Besides, I thought the condition was that you were supposed to help with any experiment.”

When he says that, I fall silent. It doesn’t feel good to admit, but he’s right.

“I didn’t think you majored in psychology as well.”

At my pained reply, the professor grins as if to get back at me.

“I research what I want when I want.”

Really… he’s a shady person from top to bottom. Just how serious is that statement?

“You made an unexpected point earlier, but honestly, the reactions of a serious person like you aren’t interesting because you’re so predictable. I would have liked to work with someone with more unpredictability, more erratic behavior, instead.”

“That really is too bad. As you can see, I’m an extremely uninteresting person.”

As I reply, I consider how relieved I am that I hadn’t brought Otoya or [MC] to this part-time job.

I couldn’t endure [MC] being observed this way, let alone Otoya.

Even if it yielded data more akin to what the professor had in mind...

“If you’ve finished your experimenting, then I guess my work is done?”

“Yeah. I suppose you’re right.”

“Then. If you’ll excuse me.”

As I move to stand, a thought strikes me, and I turn back to the professor.

“Speaking of psychology, I do know one thing.”

“Oh…?”

I point in the direction of the eyes watching me through lenses.

“The reason people hide their faces with glasses or sunglasses is that they think that by doing so, they’ll be the only one to see the other person, that the other won’t be able to see their eyes. In other words, it makes them feel less anxious to have a psychological advantage. People who hide their faces for most of the time are actually shy and awkward.”

I wag my finger in front of his large glasses and receive a laugh in reply.

“Haha. You’re a funny one, huh? I see how Reiji’s having a hard time.”

“I’m the one who’s having a hard time.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

I pick up my bag, and this time, the professor approaches me.

“Ichinose-kun. If you don’t mind, I’d like for you to come work for me again.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I’m busy with other things.”

“That’s a terrible shame.”

For a moment, our eyes meet through the lenses of his glasses. We exchange faint smiles and I leave the lab at last.

#uta no prince sama #utapri #ichinose tokiya #hakase

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snarktheater · 3 years

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Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

#ready player two #ernest cline #st: ready player two #book reviews

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