Chthonia was the last planet on my list, and the one I was most confident belonged there. It was Halliday’s re-creation of the fantasy world he’d created for his epic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign back in high school, in which both Kira and Og had participated. Chthonia would later serve as the setting for many of Halliday’s earliest videogames, including Anorak’s Quest and its many sequels.
Chthonia was the very first planet Halliday had created, making it the oldest world in the simulation. And when he, Ogden, and Kira had created their OASIS avatars, they’d each named them after the characters they’d played in their Chthonia campaign. Halliday’s character had been a dark-robed magic user named Anorak, whom he’d played as an NPC while serving as Dungeon Master. Ogden Morrow had played a wisecracking wizard named “the Great and Powerful Og.” And Kira’s character had been a powerful druid called Leucosia, named after one of the Sirens of Greek mythology.
Of course, Chthonia was also where Halliday had hidden the Third Gate in his Easter-egg hunt, inside Castle Anorak. Because of this, many gunters believed it was unlikely he would’ve chosen to hide one of the Seven Shards there too. But I wasn’t so sure. Chthonia was clearly a world where the “Siren once played a role.” A very important role, from Halliday’s perspective. So I kept Chthonia on my list and searched the planet from top to bottom.
I hadn’t limited my search to just these nine planets, of course. I’d looked for the Seven Shards on dozens of other OASIS worlds as well, to no avail.
I let out a sigh and rubbed my temples, wishing for the thousandth time that I hadn’t sabotaged my friendship with Og, so that I could call him and ask for his help. Of course, asking for his help was precisely what had ended our friendship. Og had never been comfortable talking about Kira, and he’d communicated this to me in every way possible. But I’d been too fixated to hear him.
Thinking back on my behavior made me wince with shame now. Why would a retired billionaire want to spend his twilight years being hounded for information about his dead wife? It was no wonder he’d stopped speaking to me. I’d given him no real choice.
I realized that Og’s birthday was coming up again soon. If I patched things up with him, maybe he would start inviting me to his yearly birthday party at the Distracted Globe again.
I’d spent the past year trying to work up the nerve to call Og and apologize. Promise never to ask him about Kira or Halliday again. He might listen. If I just swallowed my pride, I could probably mend our friendship. But to do so, I’d also have to obey his wishes and abandon my search for the Seven Shards.
I closed my grail diary and stood up. Just seven more days, I promised myself. Another week. If I hadn’t made any progress by then, I’d hang it up for good and make my amends with Og.
I had made this promise to myself many times before, but this time I intended to keep it.
I pulled up my bookmarked destinations to teleport back to the Third Age of Middle-earth and get back to work. But as I went to select it, I noticed a small shard icon blinking at the edge of my heads-up display. I tapped it and my email client opened in a window in front of me. There was a single message waiting in my SSoSS Tip Submission account, stamped with a long system-generated ID number. Some gunter out there had just submitted a potential lead about the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul—one that had made it past all the filters and reached my inbox. This hadn’t happened in months.
I tapped the message to open it and began to read:
Dear Mr. Watts,
After three years of searching, I’ve finally discovered where one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul is hidden and how to reach it. It’s located on the planet Middletown, inside the guest bedroom at the Barnett residence, where Kira Underwood lived during her year as an exchange student at Middletown High School.
I can make the shard appear, but I can’t pick it up. Probably because I’m not you—Halliday’s “heir.” If you’d like me to show you what I mean, I can.
I know you probably receive a lot of bogus leads, but I promise this isn’t one of them.
Your Fan,
L0hengrin
I did a double-take when I read the sender’s name. L0hengrin was the host of a popular gunter-themed YouTube show called The L0w-Down. She had about fifty million subscribers, and I’d recently become one of them. For me, this was a huge endorsement.
Most gunter shows were hosted by clueless fame-seekers spouting a steady stream of complete nonsense about the Seven Shards, when they weren’t waging epic flame wars with viewers or rival hosts, or posting tearful apology videos in another desperate bid to win back followers.
But The L0w-Down was different. L0hengrin had an incredibly upbeat personality, and an infectious brand of enthusiasm that reminded me of how I’d felt in the early days of the contest. The brief voice over that opened her show seemed to sum up her life’s philosophy: “Some people define themselves by railing against all of the things they hate, while explaining why everyone else should hate it too. But not me. I prefer to lead with my love—to define myself through joyous yawps of admiration, instead of cynical declarations of disdain.”
L0hengrin also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of James Halliday’s life and his work. And she appeared to know just as much about Og and Kira Morrow.
My appreciation for L0hengrin and her show may have been slightly colored by the fact that I’d developed a mild crush on her. She was cute, smart, funny, and fearless. She was also a vocal High Five superfan. Her own gunter clan called themselves “The L0w Five.” Most flattering of all, her avatar’s name was a not-so-subtle tribute to my own, because in several German versions of the King Arthur legend, Lohengrin was the name of Parzival’s son.
L0hengrin had proven herself to be a loyal fan too. Her support of me hadn’t wavered over the past few years, despite the disastrous PR decisions I’d made. And she didn’t seem to care about the army of Parzival haters who attacked her on her meed feed every time she mentioned me on her show.
Like many of L0hengrin’s regular viewers, I was more than a little curious about her real-world identity. On her show, L0hengrin never talked about her real life, or her real name, age, or gender. She only appeared as her OASIS avatar, which usually looked and sounded exactly like Helen Slater in The Legend of Billie Jean—a teenage girl with short blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a faint Southern accent. But like Ranma Saotome in Ranma 1/2, L0hengrin was also famous for changing her avatar’s gender, unexpectedly and without warning—sometimes in midsentence. When she transformed into a male, she seemed to prefer the likeness of a young James Spader, especially his look from the 1985 film Tuff Turf. Regardless of her avatar’s current gender, L0hengrin’s public profile specified that her preferred gender pronouns were she and her. In her one-line user bio, she described herself as “A wild-eyed pistol-waver who ain’t afraid to die.”
My robes gave me the ability to bypass the system’s built-in security measures and access any OASIS user’s private account information, including their true identity and real-world address. But despite my curiosity, I’d never accessed L0hengrin’s account. Not because doing so would violate GSS company policy and several federal laws. That had never stopped me in the past. I told myself that I was respecting her privacy—but really I was just worried that learning L0hengrin’s true identity might ruin my enjoyment of her show, robbing me of one of the few pleasures I had in life that didn’t involve the ONI.
I reread her note several times, oscillating between skepticism and exhilaration. I knew the exact location she was talking about. I’d visited the Barnett residence in the Middletown simulation a few times during Halliday’s contest and found nothing of interest there. It was just an undecorated guest bedroom, because the Middletown simulation re-created Halliday’s hometown as it was in the fall of 1986, two years before Kira had moved there as a British exchange student during t
he 1988–89 school year. That was one reason I’d never considered Middletown a likely candidate for one of the “seven worlds where the Siren once played a role.” I’d also figured it was unlikely he would have chosen to hide one of the Seven Shards on the same planet he’d used as the location of the First Gate. But then again, it did have a certain symmetry to it. After all, that was where Halliday and Og and Kira all met. That was where it all began.
I closed L0hengrin’s message and weighed my options. There was really only one way to find out for certain whether she was telling the truth. I pulled up a three-dimensional map of the OASIS, then used my superuser HUD to pinpoint the current location of L0hengrin’s avatar. Just as I hoped, she was still on Middletown, in one of the 256 copies of Halliday’s hometown spread out across the planet’s surface.
I made my avatar invisible and undetectable, then teleported to her exact location.
If you attempted to teleport to a location inside the OASIS that was already occupied by an object or another avatar, the system would automatically adjust your arrival coordinates to the closest unoccupied location. When I finished rematerializing, I discovered that the system had placed me directly in front of L0hengrin’s avatar, which was currently in its female form. She was seated about a meter away, wearing her trademark Legend of Billie Jean attire. A baggy pair of men’s trousers tucked into a pair of cowboy boots, with a sleeveless neon-colored wetsuit as her top.
She didn’t notice my arrival, because my avatar was invisible. Her eyes were also closed, but that just meant she was “engaged” and currently had her attention focused elsewhere, like on a phone call or a private chatroom. L0hengrin would most likely still be monitoring her avatar’s view of this room via a small video-feed window in the corner of her HUD. Middletown was located in a PvP zone, making it a risky place to leave your avatar unattended.
I looked around and saw that we weren’t in Kira’s old bedroom at the Barnett residence. We were three blocks north of that location, in the world famous wood-paneled basement of Ogden Morrow’s childhood home. This was where Morrow, Halliday, and their close-knit group of friends spent most of their free time. They gathered here after school and on the weekends to escape to other worlds, via dozens of tabletop role-playing games. Og’s basement would also later serve as the first office of Gregarious Games, the company that Halliday and Morrow co-founded after high school, which evolved into Gregarious Simulation Systems a few decades later when they launched the OASIS.
In the real Middletown, Ohio, Og’s childhood home had been demolished decades ago to make room for a block of condominiums. But here in the OASIS, Halliday had re-created his best friend’s childhood home in loving detail, along with his own home and the rest of their hometown, using old maps, photographs, and video footage for reference.
Like everything else in the Middletown simulation, Og’s basement looked just like the real thing had back in the late 1980s. Vintage movie and comic-book posters covered the walls. Three beat-up couches were arranged in a U-shape in front of an old RCA television, which was half-buried by a Betamax VCR, a Pioneer Laserdisc player, and several different classic home videogame consoles.
On the other side of the room, a bunch of folding chairs were clustered around a scarred wooden table covered with multicolored polyhedral dice. A row of bookshelves lined the far wall, each crammed to capacity with role-playing-game supplements and back issues of Dragon magazine. Two ground-level windows looked out onto the Morrows’ backyard, where a fat orange sun hovered above the horizon, silhouetting a rusting swing set in the neighbor’s yard.
Being in this room filled me with fond memories of my own teenage years, because in a strange way, I’d grown up here too. Back when we were in high school, Aech had modeled her private OASIS chatroom after Ogden Morrow’s basement, and the two of us spent countless hours there over the years. Talking, gaming, doing our homework, listening to old music, watching old movies. Daydreaming about the things we would do when we won Halliday’s fortune.
My life had been a lot harder back then, but in retrospect it now also seemed a hell of a lot simpler.
I glanced back over at L0hengrin. Her avatar’s eyes were still closed, and they were still darting around rapidly beneath her eyelids, as if she were in REM sleep. I was about to make my avatar visible and alert her to my presence, but then a better idea occurred to me. I selected L0hengrin’s avatar on my display and pulled up a list of her active communication processes. It told me that she was currently logged in to a private chatroom called Cyberdelia, which was hosted by a fifty-ninth-level avatar named Kastagir.
If L0hengrin really had found one of the shards, she might be in that private chatroom discussing it with her friends. Or, if she was bullshitting me, she might be in there discussing that instead. And my robes let me enter private chatrooms uninvited and undetected, allowing me to eavesdrop on their occupants. This was a trick I’d learned from the Great and Powerful Og himself, the only other avatar in the OASIS who had this ability.
I tapped the small door icon at the edge of my display to activate my chatroom interface, then searched for the one named Cyberdelia and tapped the Login button. My view of Og’s basement shrank from the limits of my peripheral vision to a small window in the corner of my display, and I suddenly found myself standing just inside the chatroom’s entrance.
Cyberdelia was a multilevel warehouse space filled with archaic late-twentieth-century technology and retro-futurist décor. Oddly adorned mannequins, pay phones, roller-blade ramps, and air-hockey tables were scattered around the club, and its walls were covered with graffiti urging its denizens to Hack the Planet! When I recognized the old techno song playing on the sound system—“Cowgirl” by Underworld—I made the connection, and smiled. This was a re-creation of the underground cyberpunk nightclub featured in the 1995 film Hackers.
From my position near the entrance, the chatroom looked deserted. But over the blaring music, I could hear several overlapping voices engaged in a heated conversation. I ventured further inside, following the noise, until I spotted five avatars gathered on one of the club’s upper-level catwalks. They were sitting and standing around a circular table made from an empty wooden cable spool. L0hengrin was among them, gesturing excitedly as she spoke to the others.
Being careful not to bump into any furniture, I moved closer, until I could make out what she was saying. From this distance, I was also able to read the name tags floating above the other four avatars’ heads: Kastagir, Rizzo, Lilith, and Wukong.
“You are so full of shit, Lo,” the one named Wukong said in a deep voice. “Even more than usual, which is saying something.” His avatar was a tall half-man, half-monkey creature, which explained the name—Sun Wukong was a character from Chinese mythology known as “the Monkey King.”
“Come on, Kong,” L0hengrin said, rolling her eyes. “Why would I lie about something like this?”
“To try and impress us?” Kastagir said. The chatroom’s enormous host was leaning against an iron girder with his massive arms folded across his chest. He was a human male with ebony skin and a giant fro-hawk that added at least a foot to his already-impressive height. He wore a brightly colored dashiki and a long, curved sword in an ornate scabbard, just like the character of the same name in the original Highlander film.
Lilith took a step forward. Her avatar was a young woman with shaggy turquoise-colored hair, dressed in torn black jeans, combat boots, and a dark blue hoodie. She appeared to be going for a turn-of-the-century edgy emo look.
“Of course the ignorant males doubt you,” she said. “But I believe you, sister!”
“So do I, Lo!” Rizzo added, popping her bubblegum. Her avatar’s inspiration made me grin again: the character of the same name in the movie version of Grease—a young Stockard Channing, wearing a black motorcycle jacket and a pair of oversize sunglasses. But this Rizzo had a touch of Columbia from Rocky Horror, wi
th fishnet stockings and a glittery gold top hat.
“Thank you, ladies,” L0hengrin said, bowing to them.
Wukong snorted like an angry gorilla.
“OK,” he said. “If you really found one of the shards, then why don’t you show us some proof? A screenshot or simcap or something?”
“I will,” L0hengrin said, putting her boots up on the table and her hands behind her head. “As soon as I finish collecting my reward.”
“I bet Parzival gets thousands of emails about the shards every day,” Kastagir said. “He probably stopped reading them years ago.”
“He’ll read mine,” L0hengrin said. “Parzival knows I wouldn’t waste his time with a bogus lead. He’s one of my subscribers, remember?”
She mimed brushing dust off of her shoulder.
“Really?” Lilith said, feigning surprise. “Parzival is one of your subscribers? You’ve never mentioned this before!”
“It’s OK,” she said, playfully punching Wukong in the shoulder. “I know you’re just jealous. I would be, too, if I were you. Caesar.”
Wukong pointed a finger at her. “I warned you about the Planet of the Apes jokes, Goldilocks.”
“I know,” she said, smiling. “And it was a scary warning too. Made a big impression.”
“Hold on,” Lilith said. “What’s to stop Parzival from taking it and teleporting away, without paying you a dime?”
“Parzival would never do that,” L0hengrin said. “He’s a righteous dude.”
“He’s a rich nutjob who acts like a total douchebag on social media,” Lilith said. “He also likes to hunt and kill his detractors for sport, remember? You shouldn’t trust him.”
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