Read Player One: What Is to Become of Us for Free Online Page A

Luke said something about sparrows, during which Rachel looked around the bar.
    Luke then asked her what ideas she’d had that day, a question that seemed, even to Rachel, slightly out of the blue. Perhaps this was what she had read was called “foreplay.”
    “Is that a foreplay question, Luke?”
    Luke smiled and almost made a laughing noise, but pulled back, which came as a relief. “Nope. Not foreplay. Our church is losing younger members, so they give us brochures on how to connect with young men and women. This one brochure told me that women love being asked that question, but they never get asked it. So I asked it.”
    Rachel was unable to understand the veneer of emotion coating Luke’s voice. Bitterness? Decoding tone of voice was even harder for her than distinguishing one face from another. But she was almost paralyzed with pleasure at being called a woman, and the sensation made her rattle on more than she normally might as she answered his question. “I did have a new idea today. I was thinking about characters on science fiction TV shows who possess immortality, and how, when they’re shot, the bullet wound quickly heals and they come back to life. Or, if they lose a limb, it grows back. But what about when they get blown up? From the blown-up chunks there’s one piece that I suppose you would call the Master Chunk, which regenerates itself completely while the other body parts decompose. And then I got to thinking, what if an immortal character was blown up by an atomic bomb — which piece of the body would constitute the Master Chunk, and how would it reconstitute itself? And I figured that as long as one DNA molecule survived, then that’s what the character would need in order to reconstitute and make itself immortal. But also, Luke, from what I’ve read, from the way the universe is constructed, and from the way atoms are built, the creation of life is an inevitability; in fact, the universe seems to have been built to be one enormous life-generating machine. So, even if the immortal’s DNA was destroyed, its component atoms would still contain the inevitable destiny of forming a living being.”
    Luke looked at her. “Your thinking is way out there, lady.”
    “My doctor tells me I have multiple structural anomalies in my limbic system that affect my personality.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “But what we call ‘personality’ is actually the result of a multifactorial gene process. A structural anomaly in my limbic system alone wouldn’t account for the entirety of my personality.”
    “I suppose it wouldn’t.”
    “I also have prosopagnosia, which is an inability to tell faces apart, which, by association, also means I have trouble finding things inside other things, like finding faces or animal shapes in clouds.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I also lack subjective qualities like humour and irony and . . .” Rachel then remembered from her normalcy training that people prefer it when you ask them a question after they’ve asked one of you — and besides, a list of her brain anomalies could take a good fifteen minutes to properly index, so she stopped discussing herself and asked Luke, “Have you had any ideas today, Luke?”
    “Yes, I have. To fill the belief vacuum left by my lack of faith, I’ve decided that all I want from life is for people to like me or envy me — to either be my friend or wish they were me because I have a really cool life. But I’ve spent my life trying to get people to like me, and I’m not sure anyone does, and in any event, all it got me was nowhere. And I don’t have anything in my life anyone could envy, so what’s the point of either of those two wishes?”
    Rachel stared at Luke. She was pretty sure now that it was bitterness she heard in his tone. She decided to return to her core mission of finding a desirable father for a child and said, “I see you’re carrying large quantities of money. Is that something you do all the time?”
    Luke spat out the