The Columbus Hotel is a relatively inexpensive old high-rise hotel; a relic from the days when people physically travelled for business and pleasure. Wade Watts rented an apartment at the hotel during his hunt for the egg after leaving the Stacks in Oklahoma City.
The rooms had all been converted into one-room efficiency apartments and each unit had been modified to meet the very specific needs of a full-time Gunter. The hotel boasted low rent, a high-end security system and a steady reliable access to as much electricity as the user can afford. It offered a direct fibre-optic connection to the main OASIS server vault in Colorado that wasn't provided by IOI or one of its subsidiaries.
Locales[]
Room 4211 (Wade's Apartment)[]
Wade's Apartment was a ten-meters-cubed room with a modular shower and toilet unit embedded in one wall and an ergonomic kitchen in the opposite wall.
The room had no furniture and only one window; which Wade spray-painted black to block out any distractions. He also replaced the flimsy door with a new airtight armour-plated vacuum-sealed WarDoor.
Whenever he needed something like food, toilet paper, or new gear he ordered it online and had it delivered.
The room was dominated by Wade's OASIS immersion rig; which was a customized OASIS console, built inside a modded mirror-black Odinware sphere chassis. It had a new overclocked processor that was so fast its cycle-time bordered on pre-cognition. The internal hard drive had enough storage space to hold three digitized copies of "Everything in Existence".
The rig had a Shaptic Technologies HC5000 fully adjustable haptic chair that was suspended by two jointed robotic arms anchored to the apartment's walls and ceiling. These arms could rotate the chair on all four axes, so when Wade was strapped in to it, the unit could flip, spin, or shake his body to create the sensation that he was falling, flying or sitting behind the wheel of a nuclear-powered rocket sled hurtling at Mach 2 through a canyon of the fourth moon of Altair VI.
Underneath the haptic chair was an Okagami Runaround omnidirectional treadmill which was about two meters square and six centimetres thick. When activated Wade could run at top speed in any direction and never reach the edge of the platform. The model was also equipped with built-in lifts and an amorphous surface, so that it could simulate walking up inclines and staircases.
The chair worked in conjunction with the Shaptic Bootsuit, a full-body haptic feedback suit. It covered every inch of the body from the neck down and had discreet openings for the wearer to relieve themselves without removing the suit. The outside of the suit was covered with an elaborate exoskeleton; a network of artificial tendons and joints that could both sense and inhibit the wearer's movements. Built inside the suit was a weblike network of miniature actuators that made contact with the wearer's skin every few centimetres. These could be activated in small or large groups for the purpose of tactile simulation.
Wade also had a pair of state-of-the art Okagami IdleHands haptic data-gloves; special tactile feedback pads that covered both palms, allowing the gloves to create the illusion that the wearer was touching objects and surface that didn't actually exist.
Wade's VR visor was a brand-new Dinatro RLR-7800 WreckSPex, featuring a top-of-the-line virtual retinal display. The visor drew the OASIS directly onto the wearer's retinas, at the highest frame rate and resolution perceptible to the human eye. The RLR-7800 was a "not-yet-available-to-the-masses" prototype, but Wade had an endorsement deal with Dinatro, so they sent him free gear.
An AboundSound audio system consisting of an array of ultrathin speakers mounted on the apartment's walls, floor, and ceiling, provided 360 degrees of perfect spatial pin-drop sound reproduction. Complete with a Mjolnur subwoofer powerful enough to make Wade's back teeth vibrate.
Olfatrix smell tower in the corner was capable of generating over two thousand discernible odours. It also doubled as an industrial-strength air conditioner/purifier which was primarily what Wade used it for as a lot of programmers liked to code really horrific smells into their simulations just to mess with people who owned smell towers.
The room and all of the items within were later seized by Innovative Online Industries when Wade enacted his plan to get inside the IOI building by becoming an indebted labourer.
Trivia[]
- Wade's apartment was on the 42nd floor, Room 11.
- A MoshWash cleaning unit in the corner of the room washed Wade's two haptic suits.
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