Like the other wall decorations in Og’s basement, the calendar couldn’t be taken down or removed. And its pages couldn’t be flipped to another month.
“Halliday coded the Middletown simulation to re-create his hometown circa October 1986, right?” Lo said. “So why would there be a calendar for the year 1989 here?”
“Good question,” I said, glancing between the calendar on the wall and the one in her hand. “But gunters around the world spent years studying the contents of this room. Why didn’t any of them find it?”
“Because it wasn’t here,” Lo said, grinning wide. “I checked Gunterpedia. There’s an itemized list of every single object in this basement. The only calendar listed on it is the one hanging on the wall.” She held up the 1989 calendar. “So either they somehow missed this one, or—”
“It appeared on that bookshelf after Halliday’s contest ended,” I finished.
L0hengrin nodded and held the 1989 calendar out to me.
“Now try swapping it with the one on the wall.”
I took the calendar from L0hengrin, then, with my other hand, I reached out and tried to take the 1986 calendar down off the wall. To my surprise, it slid right off the nail it was hanging on. I carefully hung up the 1989 calendar in its place, and opened it to the month of January.
As soon as I let go of the calendar, its pages began to flip upward on their own, until the month of April was displayed. As the pages were flipping, the sky outside cycled rapidly between day and night, pulsing on and off like a strobe light. The entire Middletown simulation was fast-forwarding all around us, like time-lapse film footage played back at high speed.
When the strobing stopped, our surroundings had changed. The couches in Og’s basement had rearranged themselves, and two more bookshelves had appeared against the far wall, both filled with more gaming supplements. There were also several new posters on the walls. But the most striking difference was the time of day. Outside the basement windows, night had fallen. The streetlights were on and there was a full moon out.
“Whoa,” I heard myself whisper. I glanced at the digital alarm clock sitting on top of one of the bookshelves. Its glowing blue display said the local time was now 1:07 A.M.
I turned back to L0hengrin. She was beaming with pride.
“Swapping the calendars changes the time period of the Middletown simulation from October 1986 to April 1989,” she explained. “But only this one instance of the simulation has been updated. The other two hundred and fifty-five copies of Middletown spread out across the planet remain set to the 1986 version. I’ve checked.”
“If this is April in 1989,” I said, “then what happens if we go over to the Barnetts’ empty guest bedroom now?”
Lo grinned. “Before we head over there, you need to obtain an item located in this room. An audio cassette tape that Kira gifted to both Halliday and Og….”
She locked eyes with me, studying my reaction.
“What, are you actually quizzing me now?” I asked.
Lo nodded and folded her arms. The dubious expression on her face made me laugh out loud.
“It was called Leucosia’s Mix,” I said. “Oscar Miller mentions it in his memoir, The Middletown Adventurers’ Guild. But he doesn’t give the full track list. He just mentions one song that was on it—‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by the Smiths.”
Lo nodded. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “And now that we’ve jumped ahead to 1989, there are two copies of Leucosia’s Mix in the Middletown simulation. One in Halliday’s Walkman in his bedroom, and one here.”
She walked over to the ground-level window at the opposite end of the basement, which looked out onto the Morrows’ moonlit backyard. Og’s boombox was resting on the window ledge. She pressed the Eject button and removed the tape inside.
“According to Miller’s book, Kira made two copies of this mixtape,” she said, holding it up. “She gave one to Og and one to Halliday, a few months before her school year abroad ended and she had to go back home to London.”
She tossed the tape to me and I held it up to read the sticker on its A side: Leucosia’s Mix was written on it in cursive, above a track-list insert filled out in the same handwriting.
“Thanks,” I said, adding the tape to my inventory.
Lo was already running up the basement steps.
“Kira’s house is just a few blocks from here,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Follow me!”
When we reached the Barnetts’ house a few minutes later, L0hengrin halted at the end of the darkened sidewalk leading up to it. Then she pointed up to Kira’s bedroom window on the second floor. It was the only room in the house with a light on. In fact, glancing up and down the street, I saw that it was the only illuminated window on the entire block.
L0hengrin saw me noticing this and nodded her approval. But she didn’t say anything.
I thought for a moment, then took the copy of Leucosia’s Mix out of my inventory and examined the track list. There it was, the seventh song on side A. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths. One of Kira’s all-time favorites.
I turned to point this out to L0hengrin, but she was already sprinting into the house. I followed her inside.
* * *
L0hengrin was waiting for me inside the guest bedroom. On my previous visits, this room had been undecorated and empty, aside from a bed, a dresser, and a small wooden desk. Now sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks were piled everywhere, and posters adorned the walls. The Dark Crystal. The Last Unicorn. Purple Rain. The Smiths. Homemade collages hung there, too, made from magazine clippings of videogame characters and artwork.
Sheets of graph paper were tacked up everywhere, filled with Kira’s meticulous renderings of characters, objects, and landscapes from classic role-playing videogames, like Bard’s Tale and Might and Magic. I’d read about this. Kira had spent hundreds of hours copying pixels from the screen onto the graph paper, coloring them in by hand one square at a time, to figure out how different artists achieved their effects and improve on their techniques. When she worked at GSS later on, she became famous for creating artwork that pushed the boundaries of the computer hardware available at the time. Og was fond of saying that his wife had “always had a knack for bringing pixels to life.”
I turned around slowly, trying to absorb as many details as I could. There were no family photos displayed anywhere. But she did have several pictures taped around the edge of her mirror, showing Kira with her nerdy new circle of friends—Halliday, Og, and the other misfit members of the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild. Several of those boys would later write tell-all books about growing up with Halliday and Og, and like every other die-hard gunter I’d scoured them all for details that might help me unlock the puzzles and riddles Halliday left behind. I’d reread them all again a few years ago, this time absorbing the details they contained about Kira’s life, so I knew that not a single one of them described the interior of her room at the Barnett residence. She was never allowed to have male visitors up there, and none of the boys in the guild had ever seen Kira’s room, including Og and Halliday. But I would’ve been willing to bet they’d both spent plenty of time imagining what it looked like. Maybe that was what I was looking at now—a simulation of what Halliday imagined Kira’s room looked like back then.
A small color television sat on Kira’s desk, with a Dragon 64 home computer connected to it. Seeing this made me smile. The Dragon 64 was a British PC built with the same hardware as the TRS-80 Color Computer 2, the first computer Halliday ever owned. According to one of the old journal entries he included in Anorak’s Almanac, when he found out that he and Kira owned compatible computers, Halliday took it as a sign they were meant to be together. He was wrong, of course.
Kira had a color dot-matrix printer hooked up to her computer, and the giant cork bulletin board on the wall above her desk was fil
led with printouts of her early original ASCII and ANSI artwork. Lots of pixelated dragons and unicorns and elves and hobbits and castles. I’d seen them all reprinted in collections of Kira’s artwork, but looking at them again now, I was still amazed at the detail and nuance she had been able to create with so few pixels and such a limited color palette.
L0hengrin walked across the room, over to Kira’s dresser, which had a small Aiwa stereo system sitting on top of it. She pressed the Eject button on its cassette deck, then pointed at the empty tray.
“Go ahead,” she said. “You can do the honors….”
I walked over, put Leucosia’s Mix into the tape player, and fast-forwarded it until I reached the end of the sixth song on the first side (“Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield). When I hit the Play button, I heard a few seconds of analog tape hiss before the next song began, and Morrissey began to croon: Take me out tonight…
I glanced around the room. Nothing happened. I glanced over at L0hengrin. She held up a hand and mouthed the word wait.
So we waited. We waited until about three minutes into the song, when Morrissey starts to sing a riff on the title over and over again. There is a light and it never goes out…
As he sang “light” for the first time, the lid of a wooden jewelry box sitting next to the stereo flew open, and a necklace floated up out of it, as if lifted by an invisible hand. It was silver with a blue gemstone, and I recognized it as the one Kira was wearing in her 1989 Middletown High School yearbook photo. According to his autobiography, Og gave it to her the first time he told her he was in love with her.
When the Smiths song ended, there was a blinding flash of light. When it faded the floating necklace had transformed into a large blue teardrop-shaped crystal, spinning in front of us at eye-level.
There it was, at long last—one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul.
I stared at the shard in awe, feeling a strange combination of exhilaration and disappointment. I’d finally uncovered the First Shard’s hiding place. But after three years of trying, I hadn’t been able to do it on my own. No, I’d had to be led here, like a noob following a walkthrough. Buying victory like some clueless Sixer instead of earning it on my own, or with the help of my friends…
But my shame couldn’t drown out the rush of relief and validation. The shards were real. I still wasn’t sure what I was hunting for, or why it mattered, but now I knew this wasn’t just some meaningless riddle. It really was another hunt created by Halliday. And whatever the prize was, it had to be important.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blur of motion as L0hengrin reached for the spinning shard. Her hand passed right through it, as if it were a hologram.
“I’ve tried picking it up dozens of times, dozens of different ways,” she said. “No matter what I try, my hand passes right through it. I don’t think anyone can touch it—except you, Halliday’s heir. To get the shard, you have to pay some sort of toll…whatever that means.”
For each fragment my heir must pay a toll, to once again make the Siren whole.
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, reaching out for the shard.
My fingers didn’t pass through it—they closed around it. And as they did…
* * *
…For a moment, I was somewhere else. I was in a school classroom filled with old BBC Microcomputers. There was no one else in the room. I was sitting at one of the computers, and I could see my reflection in its monitor. Except it wasn’t mine. It was Kira Underwood’s face staring back at me. She—or rather, I—looked about nine or ten years old. And I felt exhilarated! My skin and scalp were tingling, and I could feel my pulse racing and my heart thudding inside of my tiny chest. I was staring at the screen, admiring a piece of artwork I’d just finished creating—a pixelated unicorn rearing up on its hind legs, silhouetted against a crescent moon.
I recognized this image. It was famous. It was the very first piece of digital artwork Kira Underwood ever created. And I appeared to be reliving the moment just after she had created it….
* * *
And then I was back, in my own body, standing in Kira’s bedroom—the guest room in Middletown.
Somehow, I’d just spent a moment inside Kira’s past.
I was still reeling when a series of cascading chimes rang in my ears and a message appeared on my HUD: Congratulations, Parzival! You’ve found the first of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul!
“What happened?” L0hengrin said. “You zoned out for a second. Are you all right?”
I looked down at the luminous blue shard in my hand.
“I had some sort of vision,” I said. “Like a momentary flashback. I guess that was the ‘toll’ I had to pay?”
“A flashback?” she repeated slowly. “What do you mean?”
“It felt like an ONI recording,” I said. “But it only lasted for a few seconds. I was Kira Underwood—or at least, it felt like I was her—and I was reliving the moment when she created that unicorn on a computer at her school when she was ten.”
“The Crescent Moon Unicorn?” Lo said, eyes wide with awe. “But it had to be a simulation, right? ONI headsets didn’t exist back in the ’80s. And Kira died years before they were even invented.”
I nodded. I’d just been thinking the same thing.
“No, it obviously couldn’t have been a real ONI recording,” I said. “But it felt like one. Halliday must have simulated it. Though I don’t have the first clue how he could’ve done it so convincingly….”
“Or why,” Lo said, shaking her head. “Why would he create a Sim of one of Kira’s childhood memories? From her perspective? That would be a pretty messed-up night of programming, man. Even for Halliday…”
I was considering this question when an urgent notification flashed on my HUD. It was an icon I hadn’t seen in years—a Scoreboard alert. When I selected it, a web-browser window appeared in front of my avatar, displaying Halliday’s old website, where the Scoreboard for his contest had once resided. A few seconds after I had found the egg and won the contest, the Scoreboard had been replaced with an image of my avatar dressed in Anorak’s Robes, along with the message: PARZIVAL WINS!
That image had disappeared. Now a new Scoreboard had appeared in its place. But instead of a list of the top-ten players, this Scoreboard only displayed one avatar’s name—my own. And instead of a numerical score, there was a single blue shard icon beside my name, followed by six empty slots.
“Whoa,” L0hengrin whispered, running her hands through her short blond hair. She motioned to the blue shard icon glittering on the Scoreboard. “Now the whole world knows you have the First Shard. The newsfeeds must be blowing up.”
I turned the shard over in my hands, then held it up and examined it more closely. There was an inscription engraved into its crystalline surface:
Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero
The very first heroine, demoted to hero
“ ‘The very first heroine, demoted to hero,’ ” L0hengrin repeated, suddenly standing right next to me. “Oh shit! I think I know—”
“Please, don’t!” I said, muting her avatar until she’d finished speaking. “I appreciate your help, but I can take it from here.”
“Oh,” she said quietly. “OK. I understand.”
“I appreciate it,” I said, placing the shard in my inventory to conceal it from view.
“If you get stuck, call me,” Lo said. “I’ve already conducted a complete search of this 1989 version of Middletown, and I found a ton of stuff you won’t believe! Clues I bet will be helpful! This is stuff no one else knows about—”
“I appreciate the offer,” I said again. “But I think you’re going to be pretty busy for the next few months…spending your reward. Time for you to get paid, Billie Jean.”
Her face lit up.
“Wai
t, you mean right now?”
I reached up to open up my avatar’s HUD and I saw her hold her breath. I opened the Financial Transactions menu, selected her avatar on my display, and tapped a series of icons. And that was it. One billion dollars were transferred from my OASIS account to hers.
L0hengrin looked like she might pass out when she saw the transfer go through.
“Congratulations, Lo,” I said. “You’re a self-made billionaire. Don’t spend it all in one place.”
I offered her my hand and she shook it. Her mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out. Then she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around me. I stood there frozen for a few seconds, then I hugged her back.
“I can’t tell you what this means to me, sir,” she said, once she finally let go of me. “This is going to change everything for me. And for all of my friends. I’m gonna be able to buy a house in Columbus for us to live in together.”
“That sounds like a pretty great plan,” I said, hearing my voice catch. “Once you’re all moved in, I hope you guys will invite me over to hang out sometime. Or you can come to my place. I could use some more real-world friends.”
“Well, we’ll have to see….” She laughed nervously. “You’ve still got six more shards to find….And I’ve got…a lot of things to figure out….”
She frowned as she appeared to contemplate the logistics involved in using her newfound wealth to make her dreams come true. I knew from experience how overwhelming that could be.
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