These gunters were old high school friends, just like me and Aech. And all five of them had enrolled in GSS’s Disadvantaged Youth Empowerment Program, which provided free ONI headsets and OASIS consoles to orphaned and/or destitute kids around the world.
I suddenly felt like a jerk for eavesdropping on their conversation. So I logged out of the chatroom and resumed control of my avatar back inside Og’s basement on Middletown. But I was still invisible, so L0hengrin couldn’t see me.
I stood there for a few seconds, staring down at her avatar, pretending to wrestle with my conscience. Then I went ahead and pulled up L0hengrin’s private account profile to find out her real-world identity. I justified violating her right to privacy as an OASIS user the way I always did—by telling myself it was necessary. Before I accepted L0hengrin’s help in return for a billion dollars, I had to find out as much as I could about her, to get a sense of who I would be dealing with. But that was a bullshit excuse and I knew it. What it really boiled down to was plain old curiosity. I was curious about who L0hengrin was in the real world. And I had the ability to find out. So I did.
L0hengrin’s real name was Skylar Castillo Adkins. According to her private user profile she was an unmarried nineteen-year-old Caucasian female, and she lived in the Duncanville, Texas, stacks, a sprawling vertical slum near the apocalyptic epicenter of the DFW metroplex. It was an even rougher neighborhood than the one I’d grown up in.
Since I’d already violated her privacy, I decided to go full-on Big Brother and have a look at her headset feeds. There were ten wide-angle surveillance cameras mounted on the exterior of each ONI headset, which allowed the wearer to keep an eye on their body and its surroundings from inside the OASIS. The Robes of Anorak gave me access to a secret submenu on every ONI user’s account, where I could monitor the video feeds coming from those cameras. Meaning I had the ability to spy on people in their homes. This was one of GSS’s uglier secrets, and there would be riots and class-action suits galore if our customers ever found out about it. But these were exceptional circumstances, I assured myself.
When I pulled up Skylar’s headset feeds, I was not prepared for what I saw. The darkened interior of an ancient Airstream trailer, lit up bright green by the night-vision filters. I could see a helper bot silently washing dishes at the miniature kitchen sink. It was a battered Okagami Swap-Bot, so named because it could be used as both a telebot and an autonomous domestic helper robot. It had a sawed-off pistol-grip pump-shotgun in a makeshift holster strapped to its back, so she apparently used it to do more than just the dishes.
In the foreground of several of Skylar’s headset camera feeds, I could also see her—her thin, frail-looking body was stretched out on a worn mattress in the back of the trailer. Like a lot of people who lived in the stacks, she appeared to be suffering from borderline malnutrition. Her gaunt features seemed to conflict with the pleasant, dreamlike expression on her face. Someone had laid an old Snoopy blanket over her to keep her warm—or, no. She must’ve done this herself, using her telebot. Because she was all alone, with no one to rely on but herself.
My chest felt hollow. I closed all of the vidfeed windows and scanned Skylar’s user profile for more information about her. Her school records included a scan of her birth certificate, which revealed another surprise. She’d been DMAB—designated male at birth.
Discovering this minor detail didn’t send me spiraling into a sexual-identity crisis, the way it probably would have back when I was younger. Thanks to years of surfing the ONI-net, I now knew what it felt like to be all kinds of different people, having all different kinds of sex. I’d experienced sex with women while being another woman, and sex with men as both a woman and a man. I’d done playback of several different flavors of straight and gay and nonbinary sex, just out of pure curiosity, and I’d come away with the same realization that most ONI users came away with: Passion was passion and love was love, regardless of who the participants involved were, or what sort of body they were assigned at birth.
According to Skylar’s user profile history, she’d legally changed her gender to female when she was sixteen, a few months after she received her first ONI headset. Around the same time, she’d changed her avatar’s sex classification to øgender, a brand-new option GSS had added due to popular demand. People who identified as øgender were individuals who chose to experience sex exclusively through their ONI headsets, and who also didn’t limit themselves to experiencing it as a specific gender or sexual orientation.
Coming out as øgender became incredibly common in the wake of the ONI’s release. For the first time in human history, anyone eighteen years of age or older could safely and easily experience sexual intercourse with any gender and as any gender. This tended to alter their perception of gender identity and fluidity in profound ways. It had certainly altered mine. And I was certain it had done the same thing for every other ONI user with even a mildly adventurous spirit. Thanks to the OASIS Neural Interface, your gender and your sexuality were no longer constrained by—or confined to—the physical body you happened to be born into.
Skylar’s profile also indicated she had no living family members. Her mother, Iris Adkins, had died of heart failure two years ago. Somehow, Skylar had been living on her own since she was seventeen. In the DFW stacks, no less.
I heard movement and quickly closed Skylar’s user profile. Then I glanced back over at her avatar, just in time to see L0hengrin’s eyes flicker open—an indication that she’d logged out of Kastagir’s chatroom.
Her avatar stood up and began to walk toward the exit. I was standing directly in her path. Instead of stepping out of her way, I folded my arms and assumed an ominous wizard pose. Then I made my avatar visible once again.
L0hengrin froze, and when her eyes locked on to me they seemed to double in size. Then she bowed her head and slammed her right fist against her heart as she dropped to one knee.
“My liege,” she said in a shaky voice, keeping her eyes on the floor. “I’m L0hengrin. Your humble servant. And a huge fan, sir. Truly.”
“Please rise, L0hengrin,” I said. “I’m a big fan of yours too.”
She stood and slowly raised her eyes to meet mine.
“Sir Parzival,” she said, shaking her head in wonder. “It’s really you.”
“It’s really me,” I replied. “It’s an honor to meet you, L0hengrin.”
“The honor is all mine,” she said. “And please, call me Lo. All my friends do.”
“All right, Lo.” I offered her my hand and she shook it. “My friends call me Z.”
“I know,” she said, giving me a sheepish smile. “I’ve read every single one of the books written about you over the past few years, including your autobiography, which I’ve read at least two dozen times. So I know pretty much everything there is to know about you. Everything that’s ever been made public, anyway. I’m kinda obsessed with you—”
She suddenly cut herself off, wincing in embarrassment. Then she pounded her right fist lightly against her forehead several times before finally meeting my gaze again.