When Wade uses ONI for the first time, he discovers that everything the device promises is true. He can smell the musty books in Anorak’s Castle and taste an apple. He tests out a series of pre-loaded real-life experiences, including surfing a giant wave and deep-sea diving. He also locates a series of sex recreations but is not ready to try them, having only recently lost his virginity to his girlfriend, Samantha—Art3mis in the OASIS.

At once astounded and terrified by the device’s potential, Wade consults with Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto, the three “gunters”—or, egg hunters—to whom he granted co-ownership of GSS after they helped him win Halliday’s contest. Wade, Aech, and Shoto vote to release ONI to the public, outnumbering Art3mis. Given the extent to which the original OASIS interface gave Wade and billions of others an escape from their real lives, he puts ONI on the market at the lowest price point possible. ONI is a massive success, selling a million units on the first day.

A few days later, when ONI hits 7,777,777 simultaneous users, a message appears on Halliday’s long-inactive account, much like the one announcing the original Easter egg hunt. It reads, “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” (18).

Wade immediately goes to work trying to unravel the mystery. He intuits that the Siren is Kira Morrow, the deceased wife of OASIS cofounder Ogden “Og” Morrow. All three were friends in high school in Middletown, Ohio, and Halliday was in love with Kira, though she did not return his affection.

Within a year, GSS sells four billion ONI units, as applications emerge across a variety of fields, including medicine, manufacturing, and warfare. By the time another year passes, ONI has six billion users—or two-thirds of Earth’s population.

Despite his company’s success, Wade is terribly unhappy. The Shard Hunt becomes an obsession, and he spends the maximum 12 hours a day in the ONI interface searching for clues. He even offers a billion dollars to any user who unearths a clue leading to one of the Shards.

It is 2048, roughly three years after ONI’s launch. As he does every morning, Wade wakes up in Halliday’s empty, cavernous mansion and endures an intense two-hour workout regimen. He then attends a virtual therapy session with a computer-generated individual—referred to as a non-player character or NPC—modeled after the psychiatrist from the film Good Will Hunting.

Today, Wade dreads his quarterly co-owner meeting because it means he will see Art3mis, with whom his relationship disintegrated not long after ONI’s public launch because of their fundamental disagreement over ONI’s value to society. While Art3mis believes that the OASIS, even before ONI, is an addiction that prevents people from engaging in real, meaningful experiences, Wade believes it is the only thing keeping the vast majority of the world from dying deaths of despair, as global poverty and climate change continue to ravage the planet. Moreover, as deadly flu pandemics—including one that killed Art3mis’s parents—become commonplace in the real world, Wade believes OASIS and ONI will cut down on transmission rates. Wade recalls later, “[Art3mis’s] face hardens and that’s it—the exact instant her love for me disappears” (37).

While Wade obsesses over the Shard Hunt, Art3mis focuses her energies on her charitable foundation, which is committed to ending the problems of the real world. Although Art3mis refuses to use ONI herself, she regularly promotes .oni files made by oppressed or underprivileged individuals in an effort to foster empathy for them.

Meanwhile, GSS engages in various public-private partnerships, like helping the U.S. government pay down the national debt and supplying police telebots to rural municipalities where the rule of law collapsed. To Wade, however, these are merely stopgap measures to slow humanity’s inevitable demise. This is why Wade funds a nuclear-powered interstellar spacecraft called the Vonnegut, which will house roughly two-dozen crew members as it searches for a habitable planet to populate. The ship also includes a virtual space modeled after the OASIS, called ARC@DIA, that will store human experiences in the form of .oni files.

As Wade tries to kill time before his meeting, he reflects on how public opinion soured on him after he became GSS’s CEO. Some of this is to be expected, given that Wade transformed from a penniless underdog into “just another asshole billionaire” (49). Yet Wade exacerbates the issue; for example, when an unknown band scores a viral hit with a highly critical song, Wade removes the video from the ONI-net and sues the band for defamation. As Wade’s social media activity grows increasingly toxic, he takes solace in “the Big Red Button” (52), a self-destruct protocol inside Anorak’s Castle that would take the entire OASIS offline. Given the extent to which financial, defense, and security systems are integrated into the OASIS, shutting it down could cause human civilization to collapse.

Inside the OASIS, Wade teleports to planet Gregarious for the board meeting, where he is greeted by GSS’s head of operations, Faisal Sodhi. Upon entering the boardroom, Wade reflects on the state of his friendships with Aech and Shoto. A Black lesbian who recently stopped using a White straight man as her avatar, Aech is among the most popular OASIS celebrities. Although she is still Wade’s best friend, she’s grown more distant since they won the contest. The same is true of Shoto, a Japanese man who is expecting a child with his wife, Kiki.

Once all four co-owners arrive, Faisal announces the day’s only order of business: a vote on a new firmware update designed to prevent users from hacking the ONI to pass the 12-hour limit. All vote to approve the update except for Art3mis, who almost always abstains.

As Wade hits another dead end in his efforts to solve the riddle of the Seven Shards, he considers calling Og, Kira’s widower, for information. However, the two have grown estranged in the years since the contest ended. Wade offered to bring Og on as a consultant at GSS, but Og refused, preferring to put the OASIS and his rocky history with Halliday behind him. Og also agreed with Art3mis that ONI should not have been made public. Og begged Wade not to pursue the Seven Shards hunt, then cut off contact with him entirely after Wade made too many requests for information about Kira.

Just as Wade is about to resume his search for the Seven Shards, he receives a tip from a user eager to claim the billion-dollar award. It is from an avatar named L0hengrin who hosts a popular YouTube channel devoted to gunters. Though she uses female pronouns, Wade points out that L0hengrin regularly alters how she presents her gender on the show. L0hengrin is also one of the few popular OASIS celebrities who continues to defend Wade.