Excerpts from the Forthcoming Ready Player Two

Set forty years after the original Ready Player One , Ready Player Two brings readers back to the fantastic world of the OASIS where, amazingly, another nostalgic rich person has set up a scavenger hunt that only someone steeped in the cultural zeitgeist of his white American childhood can solve. The twist? This time the rich person was a millennial instead of a Gen Xer. Ready Player Two takes the same big stakes and narrow nerd gatekeeping to new heights. Check out these never before seen excerpts from the sequel everyone’s been dreading:

- — -

Calliday snaps his fingers and the vault disappears. In the same instant, Calliday shrinks and morphs into a small boy wearing prestressed blue jeans and a faded Tyrion Lannister t-shirt. The young Calliday stands in a sparsely decorated living room with stained concrete floors, low-to-the-ground Ikea furniture, and annoyingly minimalistic mid-’10s decor. A laptop sits nearby, with a Bernie 2016 sticker plastered across the cover.

“This was the first device I ever trolled from,” Calliday says, now in a child’s voice. “Memed the hell out of it. My parents gave it to me and took it away ten times over the course of 2015.” He plops down in front of the laptop, opens it, and begins to scroll through a Twitter feed. “My favorite handle was this one,” he says, nodding at the screen, where a thread of gifs has been posted. “It was @LeftShark696969. Like many early handles, it was based on my thirst for Katy Perry. But back then, no one gave credit to the creators of gifs, so I quickly learned just to steal good ones from other people instead of trying to come up with my own.” On the laptop screen, we see Calliday repost a gif, then slam the laptop shut when a reply notification appears.

- — -

The ’10s was a long decade (ten whole years), and Calliday didn’t seem to have very discerning taste. He listened to everything. So I did too. Pop, rock, trap, house, roséwave. From Drake to Lorde to Beyoncé to the Avett Brothers. I tackled it all.

I burned through the entire Childish Gambino discography in under two weeks. Sufjan Stevens took a little longer.

I watched a lot of YouTube videos of Jimmy Fallon singing ’10s cover tunes. Technically, this wasn’t part of my research, but I had a serious Jimmy-Fallon-singing-cover-tunes fetish that I can neither explain nor defend.

- — -

You’ be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, is a lot of study time.

I worked my way through every social media platform. Pre- and post-porn Tumblr, reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Yahoo! Answers and even an old archive of Vine. Stan communities, alt-right meme brigades, YouTube commenters. Gif memes, caption memes, text memes. The harder a meme was to understand, the more I enjoyed it. And as I consumed this ancient digital content, night after night, year after year, I discovered I had a talent for them. I could come up with my own meme variations in a few hours, and there wasn’t a thread or thinkpiece I couldn’t respond to. Everything just clicked. When I was in the zone scrolling through posts about Big Dick Energy, I felt like a hawk in flight, or the way a shark must feel as it cruises the ocean floor. For the first time, I knew what it was to be a natural at something. To have a gift.