"GAME OVER."

The message jolted me half out of my top-of-the-line haptic suit. The retro-pixelated words were emblazoned on my retinas for a few terrible seconds until, mercifully, everything went black.

This wasn't supposed to happen. It wasn't technically possible for a super-admin, impossibly rich, controlling-stake shareholder of the OASIS to be killed in his own simulation. It wasn't possible, at least, until I made it possible. "Baka," as Shoto had called me the last time we spoke. Idiot.

After more than six long years, with who knows how many dollars and man-hours spent in pursuit of Halliday's Egg, it was a weird loner from the burnt-out stacks who had found the ultimate prize. Parzival (me) competed against the best, included countless clans of gunters and the infamous Sixers, a corporation that literally killed people in pursuit of the most valuable asset in the world. Thanks to a bit (well, a lot) of help from my friends and a dim-witted plan that was hatched in desperation, I became the first and only person to collect all 3 keys, pass all 3 gates and win the biggest prize in the history of the world: Halliday's estate, which included a controlling stake in Gregarious Simulation Systems, billions of dollars and god-like powers within the OASIS simulation itself. Powers which I had foolishly just lost forever through my own stupidity.

But that mistake didn't happen overnight. What did happen overnight was 28% of the OASIS subscriber base had lost everything: their avatars, their inventory, their money. The IOI detonated the Cataclyst, a single-use artifact that killed every single avatar in the sector. And 28% of the OASIS was in the sector that night, watching me find Halliday's Egg. So while I celebrated my victory with Art3mis (Samantha, or Sam, as she preferred) the wheels of my destruction were already turning.

My victory celebration didn't last long. Little did I know the OASIS has a hard-coded limit on revivals. I had 24 hours in which I could have restored every single character killed by the Catalyst. But I didn't. Instead, I slept like a baby in one of Ogden's luxurious bedrooms and chatted with my friends over breakfast. By the time I thought to try to fix things, the deadline had already passed.

My second mistake, maybe bigger, was telling reporters about this. "Oh yeah, I tried to revive everyone but missed the 24 hour cutoff. Oops," I said, my still-bald head smiling dumbly into the camera. It was a short interview that would exist forever in vidfeeds, talk show monologues and memes. Smooth move, Wade. It didn't take long for the party to end when over a quarter of the OASIS had lost everything and I could have fixed it... except "oops, my bad."

Somehow, my shrug of an apology was cold comfort for the Cataclasts, as the new wave of avatars began to call themselves.

A quarter of the OASIS was now level 1. The Cataclasts included almost every hardcore gunter and experienced player. They rebuilt their avatars together. They power-leveled together. At their core, they became a tight-knit group in search of a new purpose. Companies sprouted up to cater specifically to the Cataclasts.

As they made their way up levels, the Cataclasts moved from quest to quest and from zone to zone like locusts, impeding access for everyone else. They quickly saw the power of this effect. They formed huge roving clans that started to look and act like the mafia. Small groups of bandits had always been around, but these were large-scale operations that swarmed across the OASIS. Businesses had to pay "protection fees," even in non-PvP zones. Cataclast clans blockaded travel and brought commerce to a crawl if their demands weren't met.

The prevailing attitude was one of distrust for anyone who wasn't a Cataclast. The end of Halliday's Hunt had left a huge, sucking void that was filled with a new goal for the denizens of the OASIS: tearing down Halliday and everything he had loved. The biggest clan of them all, the Goon Squad, was a major driving force against Halliday, the 80's and especially me. They were made of ex-gunters, including many of the gunter clans that had been on my side against the Sixers. Those guys had lost everything. Trying to make me pay for my mistake became their obsession. I empathized with their loss, but I simply couldn't fix it, at least not for everyone. Even godhood has its limits in the OASIS.

All of a sudden, the 80's were over. These Cataclasts were 90's kids. Grunge music, flannels, sarcasm and alienation were back in a big way. And, for some reason, ska. I never really understood how ska fit in with the rest of the 90's, but I didn't really understand why anyone liked that decade. I was an 80's kid through and through. Give me a cheesy synth over a mopey dropped D guitar any day.

The first few days after the Event were a blur. Ogden Morris was my rock through that mess. With his help I was able to navigate the immediate and pressing legal issues from GSS's board and Halliday's estate. Eventually I also negotiated a settlement ($14 billion dollars, which I considered cheap) for a class action lawsuit against me from the Cataclasts, though that one took a couple of hard years to finalize. I might have been able to win the case completely, but my guilt and shame led to a big settlement. Not that it made a lick of difference to anyone who lost their avatar.

As time went on, I started to believe that the Cataclyst had destroyed 28% of Oasis avatars but only one life: mine. Yes, I became a multi-billionaire who spent most of his days moping around feeling sorry for himself.