How It All Goes Down
0030
- As a Tech Support Rep, Wade has a twelve-hour shift to complete. It's as bad as you might imagine a twelve-hour call-center job shift to be.
- So this is his big plan? To work the rest of his life for IOI?
- Not so fast. Before committing himself to servitude, he obtained some IOI passwords from an illegal website. The catch: they only work from inside IOI, exactly where Wade is now.
- With the passwords, he's able to access their system, and all their most secretest files. Seriously, they're really, really secret.
- Wade's able to put the surveillance camera in his pod on a loop, so he can do whatever he wants without getting caught.
- He downloads all the Sixer files on Sorrento, and their data on the third gate.
- Then he finds some pretty scary stuff. Apparently IOI has been observing all of them: Wade, Art3mis, Aech, Shoto. He even finds a video confirming that IOI agents threw Daito off a balcony and to his death. Yikes.
- Inside the files, he learns that Art3mis's real name is Samantha Evelyn Cook. Wade even looks at a picture of her because that's not creepy or anything.
- She looks just like her avatar, except with a purple birthmark across her face. Wade still thinks she's beautiful.
- He finds that IOI doesn't know Aech's true identity, though.
- Since IOI has flagged them all "to be disposed of" (30.74), Wade realizes he must break out of IOI sooner than he expected if he wants to save his friends' lives.