Tim O'Connell| Special to the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union USA TODAY NETWORK
"Ready Player Two"
Author: Ernest Cline
Ballantine Books, 370 pages, $28.99
“Ready Player Two” is a continuation of Ernest Cline’s mega-popular dystopian novel “Ready Player One,” about a near future world where an interactive virtual reality video game called OASIS allows players to escape from their harsh environment brought on by climate change and overpopulation.
In “One,” game designer James Halliday includes a treasure hunt within OASIS where the winner inherits Halliday’s company and his riches after he dies. Through their avatars, teen protagonist Wade Watts and his close friends solve the puzzles, and in the real world overcome some very bad guys and take control of the company and game.
“Two” opens a little over a week after the ending of “One.” Watts, whose avatar now possesses super-user powers, signs on and discovers that Halliday had developed, but not released, another level of the game accessed through a device called OASIS Neural Interface or ONI. The designer explained it through a video:
“It is the world’s first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows an OASIS user to hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar’s virtual environment, via signals transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex.” It also allows them to control their avatar “just as they do their physical body — simply by thinking about it.”
(It also) “allows you to relive moments of other people’s lives, to see the world through their eyes, hear it through their ears, smell it through their nose and taste it with their tongue, and feel it through their skin.”
“The ONI is the most powerful communications tool humans have ever invented. And I think it’s probably the last one we will ever need to invent.” He tapped the center of his forehead. “Now we can plug right in to the old noodle.”
But Halliday went on to warn: “This invention has the power to drastically alter the nature of the human existence. I think it could help humanity. But it could also make things even worse. It will all depend on the timing … that’s why I’m entrusting its fate to you … (to) decide when — or if — the world is ready for this technology.”
After much debate, Watts and his friends (with one dissenter) decide to release the device to the general public who gobbled it up “making it the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world” as well as making their company the richest. But Watts soon found that "logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin. It didn’t take long … to become addicted.”
When the number of simultaneous users reached 7,777,777, a new contest “Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul” appeared on Halliday’s dormant website. It wasn’t clear what would happen if someone managed to collect the Seven Shards but Watts started searching anyway. “Halliday had thrown down a gauntlet once again, and I couldn’t resist picking it up.”
Stymied in his hunt, he offered a billion dollar reward for help. And “… it finally happened. An enterprising young gunter (a contractionof Egg Hunter, an OASIS user who searches for Halliday's Easter Egg) led me to the First Shard. And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race.”
Welcome to “Ready Player Two.” Fans will lap it up, though many may find Cline’s incessant use of 1980s minutiae confounding. Newbies probably need to read “One” first. Watching the Steven Spielberg movie won’t work.
Tim O’Connell lives in Ponte Vedra Beach.
