I really hoped the board meeting would at least keep us on a single plot thread for a while. I don't know why I hoped that.
Last time on Dragonball Z, Wade was depressed, having broken up with Samantha, taken out his anger on Internet trolls, and planned a secret space mission to escape a dying world. Now, though, it's finally time for the board meeting we've been leading up to.
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Wade arrives at his asteroid headquarters and immediately teleports to GSS' virtual offices, where Faisal, the company's head of operations, greets him. These offices are protected by both technology and magic to avoid industrial espionage, which feels superfluous when Wade essentially has super-admin privileges and could just create, like, a private instance split off from the main OASIS that only the directors can access.
Aech and Shoto are already there, calling in from LA and Japan respectively. They're cordial to Wade, but he adds that it's getting harder to hang out when they're so busy and he suspects they don't really enjoy his company and are just putting up out of politeness. We learn that Aech is now engaged to a Bollywood actress and is still a "total badass", in Wade's words, while Shoto is married and expecting his first son, whom he intends to nickname after his dead brother Daito, while working on a quest chain in the OASIS based on his favourite anime.
I want to pause here, because the explanation for Shoto having children so early is incredible: he wants to lead the rest of Japan by example to solve the underpopulation crisis. Remember that meme from a couple of years ago, where every bit of Japanese media that mentioned pregnancy was secretly an attempt by Shinzo Abe to fix Japan's declining birth rate? That's canon now. That's worldbuilding.
Samantha's running late, and will be dialling in from Liberia, where she's doing philanthropic work, which Wade thinks is totally lame when she could just visit virtually.
We now get an extended recap of what happened to Sorrento, the main villain of RP1, and his company, IOI, between then and now. Here we see Cline quip about how IOI's lawsuit against Wade was way more successful than it should have been because the US gives corporations more rights than people, and, with it, another tiny nugget of "are we the baddies?" self-awareness that's immediately defused with an oh-so-thematically-appropriate Two-Face quote, the one about dying heroes or becoming villains.
Samantha finally shows up and the meeting begins, but Wade can't pay attention to the slideshow - he's too busy staring at his ex. She's gotten over the insecurity she had around her birthmark in RP1 and now it's on her avatar too, and has apparently become a sort of personal trademark. Her name tag also shows that she's logged in with an old-school VR setup, not an ONI.
We slide back into the slideshow and now we're talking about data centres. GSS collects and keeps brain scan data on everyone even after they die; Wade insists that the "main reason" is to improve the ONI's safety, but even he seems to doubt it. Another sliver of self-awareness, maybe, but honestly this is starting to feel tokenistic, like Cline recognises the optics of the bad shit his protagonists are doing and has to gesture at this being a complex, morally grey issue to avoid having to justify it outright.
This theme continues throughout the meeting. Yeah, excessive ONI use has killed some people... but illegal overclockers are the problem and this new firmware update should fix that, and thank goodness GSS can't be held legally responsible. Yeah, Samantha wants an 18+ age limit on ONI use because she's worried about the damage to developing brains... but Aech and Shoto and Wade all used VR while their brains were still developing and they're fine.
This second line of conversation triggers a rant from Samantha about saving the real world versus VR. Wade almost brings up Samantha's grandma, who was able to have a happy last couple of years through the miracle of ONI, but wisely avoids mentioning her dead family to make a cheap point about VR safety. The fact that it even crossed his mind, though, indicates clearly that Samantha's meant to be the unreasonable one here. This is further reinforced by Shoto talking about the educational benefits of ONI and Aech saying ONI has massively reduced bigotry and hate crime.
Oh, and remember the not mentioning Samantha's dead family? Shoto does just that. See, her parents died in a superflu pandemic, and Shoto is grateful that ONI lets people go to mass gatherings without risk of infection. I can't help but wonder whether Cline added this in the wake of COVID, in which case he should maybe have used that same editing pass to reconsider the fucking roboticised police force.
The meeting ends with Samantha's age limit proposal voted down by everyone else, and Wade and Shoto briefly discuss whether she might have a point, conclude that she doesn't, and part ways.
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Wade's playing a Princess Bride quest in the OASIS, and wins with a perfect score for reciting the film's whole script word for word. I'm astounded that Cline repeated this trick when the equivalent scene in RP1, in which Wade had to recite all of Matthew Broderick's lines from War Games, was such an accidentally revealing microcosm of the banal curatorial soullessness at the book's heart. But, see, it's different, because this time Wade feels empty afterwards. Not because of the depression, mind, but because it failed to yield a clue about the Seven Shards riddle.
He heads home and pores over the riddle some more. And, joy of fucking joys, 73 pages in, we get our first reprise of one of RP1's most lambasted features: the contextless list of media. This time it's video games related to the number seven, of which Wade can name 12. At one point, Wade considers the possibility that, since the poem mentioned an "heir", the shards he's searching for might only be visible to him, and the contest is thus a wild goose chase for everyone else. He discards this theory fairly quickly, which is a shame, because the sheer heights of onanism on display in this fantasy might otherwise have been funny enough to stop the read-through there and then.
We do have some actual clues, though. We are fairly certain that the shards are on seven planets which Kira was somehow related to, and Wade has a shortlist of nine planets he think might be candidates. Does he describe all nine in exhaustive detail, with at least a paragraph each? You should know better than to ask by now. I'll just do a bullet point summary here:
- Florin, Princess Bride world
- Thra, Dark Crystal world
- Mobius Prime, Sonic the Hedgehog world
- Usagi, Sailor Moon world
- Gallifrey, Doctor Who world
- Halcydonia, an edutainment world that was apparently a big part of Wade's childhood
- Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli world
- Three different versions of Middle-earth, Arda I, II, and III, one for each of the First, Second, and Third Ages
- Chthonia, a recreation of Halliday's high school D&D campaign. Everyone thinks this is an unlikely candidate because one of the gates in the RP1 treasure hunt was here, but Wade knows better, because Wade is smart.
Slipped into this multi-page exposition dump is a whole bracketed paragraph about Wade's cyberstalking of his friends, this time through OASIS usage logs, and about how he stopped spying on Aech and Shoto because it meant he knew when they were avoiding him, but he still spies on Samantha. Great. Here we also learn that Wade and Og, Halliday's business partner and Kira's husband, are no longer on speaking terms because Wade kept asking Og really intrusive questions about his dead wife. At least he seems to get why that was a dick move.
At last, the book snaps back to the present and an actual event occurs that threatens to change the status quo. Wade gets an email from a treasure hunter (I'm not fucking calling them "gunters", sorry) who claims to have found the location of a shard. Her handle is Lohengrin, and she's the host of a Youtube show about the Seven Shards treasure hunt. She's named herself in honour of Wade (Lohengrin is Parzival's son), and her clan is the Low Five in honour of Wade's old clan, the High Five, so of course Wade has a crush on her. She's also very secretive about her real identity and sometimes changes her avatar's gender, just like in Ranma 1/2 (because this isn't a phenomenon that ever happens in real gaming so obviously we need an anime as a reference point). Wade could find her real identity if he wanted to, but he hasn't because not knowing who she is is fun. He specifically says it's not because it would be a gross invasion of privacy.
A brief aside: I get that all these admissions of being a bad person are Cline actively trying to depict Wade as unlikeable, setting the stage for character growth and redemption. But he does still need to have some sympathetic qualities, and I'm really struggling to find any. If I were feeling uncharitable, I guess I could classify "has similar shortcomings and insecurities to the hypothetical reader" as a sympathetic quality, but it's hard to buy that reading and not take it as a massive dunk on the audience.
Oh, and remember that point earlier in this chapter about Wade suspecting he might be the only person who can find the shards? Lohengrin can't pick them up, and speculates that only Wade can. By his encyclopaedic knowledge of nerd media, he won not only the world's most successful company, but the joy of being the only person who can solve the puzzle's sequel. Where are the stakes again? I seem to have lost track of them.
Wade tracks Lohengrin's avatar to Middletown, a planet of 256 identical replicas of Halliday's home town. He says that he'd thought of this place as unlikely because it was part of the last book's treasure hunt... but wait, everyone else discounted Chthonia on those grounds and he said they were wrong! He said it three pages ago! If his criteria are this inconsistent, it's a good thing he got a tip-off from someone who knows what they're doing.
He teleports down to Lohengrin's location (invisibly, because the stalker vibes weren't quite strong enough yet!), and that's the end of the chapter and the end of this installment.
The pacing of this opening is very rough. It's getting really tiring to read a few sentences of current events and then get bogged down in a few paragraphs of flashback, exposition, and/or pop culture, over and over again. I can only hope that we're in for some action now.
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