Whenever I saw the sun, I reminded myself that I was looking at a star.
We blasted out of the crater and rocketed around the moon’s opposite side, and the fragile Earth became visible to us once again, hovering in the blackness ahead. Over the comm channel, I heard my fat...
This is your QComm, he explained. It’s a Quantum Communicator—basically a smartphone with unlimited range. It will work anywhere in the world—or in outer space. He smiled. They also have insanely fast...
There was no downtime between calls, because there were always several hundred morons in the call queue, all of them willing to wait on hold for hours to have a tech rep hold their hand and fix their...
Not only was this the first time a girl had ever given me her card, it was also, by far, the coolest contact card I had ever seen. This is, by far, the coolest contact card I have ever seen, I said. T...
Nebraska, I said. What’s in Nebraska? A top-secret Earth Defense Alliance base.
My generation had never known a world without the OASIS. To us, it was much more than a game or an entertainment platform. It had been an integral part of our lives for as far back as we could remembe...
Many of the gunters on the front lines took an involuntary step backward. A few others turned and ran for their lives.
I made a big entrance when I arrived in my flying DeLorean, which I’d obtained by completing a Back to the Future quest on the planet Zemeckis.
At a game like this, a gifted human player could always triumph over the game’s AI, because software couldn’t improvise. It could either react randomly, or in a limited number of predetermined ways, b...
As soon as they saw Aech’s score increase, they would have used Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding and learned that he was currently on Frobozz.
As I watched them embrace, there on the front lawn, my heart was rocked by waves of unbridled joy. It occurred to me that up until this moment I'd only ever experienced the bridled kind. Having the re...
Art3mis also ran her own vidfeed channel, Art3mivision, and I always kept one of my monitors tuned to it. Right now, she was airing her usual Monday evening fare: an episode of Square Pegs. After that...
Anorak was a nickname Halliday had been given by a female British exchange student at his high school.
And I was just there, less than an hour ago, debugging subroutines in my cubicle, when a motherfucking Earth Defense Alliance shuttle suddenly shows up and lands right outside my office building! I fi...
Agarré uno al azar y lo metí en la ranura. Por los altavoces internos y externos del robot empezó a sonar Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, de AC/DC, a un volumen tan exagerado que la silla en la que iba s...
Halliday once said that he preferred to pretend the other Indiana Jones films, from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull onward, didn’t exist. I tended to agree.)
The ability to mute my peers was one of my favorite things about attending school online, and I took advantage of it almost daily. The best thing about it was that they could see that you’d muted them...
O ser humano é uma porcaria na maior parte do tempo.Os videogames são a única coisa que torna a vida suportável.
I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was...