I opened a window in front of her avatar, displaying the contract again. “Remember. You’ve agreed not to tell anyone else how to find this shard, or share any of the details of our interaction, until after I’ve found all seven shards. If you do, our deal will be nullified.”
She gave me an anxious look.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know you probably already told some of your friends that you found the shard, and that you were planning to contact me about it. That’s not a big deal….”
“Hey,” she said, leveling a finger at me. “Were you eavesdropping on us in our chatroom? You were, weren’t you? Like Og did to you and your friends during the contest!”
I ignored the accusation.
“Just make sure no one else knows where or how to find the shard, OK?” I said. “Not until after I’ve found all seven of them. Then you can each write a memoir for all I care.”
She nodded slowly, biting her lower lip.
“Understood,” she said finally. “But please, do all of your die-hard fans—like me—a favor and don’t do anything else to embarrass us, OK?”
Before I could respond, she held up both hands, gave me a sheepish grin, and kept right on talking at a rapid-fire pace.
“I say that with all due respect, of course. Because I do respect you, and everything you’ve accomplished. You just lost your way a little bit. Which makes perfect sense—you suddenly became rich and famous! You know what Bill Murray said about that? ‘When you become famous, you’ve got, like, a year or two where you act like a real asshole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got, like, two years to pull it together—or it’s permanent.’ ”
I frowned at her. “I’ve been famous for well over three years now.”
“I know!” she replied cheerfully. “But it’s never too late to turn things around.”
I nodded, trying not to show how much her words had wounded my pride.
She dropped her hands and exhaled. “Sorry. Had to be said. Has been said. Time to shut up now, Lo.”
She mimed zipping her lips. Way too late, in my opinion. I wasn’t sure if I was touched, hurt, or angered by everything she’d just said. Maybe all three at once.
“You want to know my favorite Bill Murray quote?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first. See if that doesn’t cover most of it.’ ”
She laughed and shook her head. “I have no idea how to be a millionaire, much less a billionaire. It’s pretty nuts….”
She gave me an anxious smile. I recognized the overwhelmed look on her face. I’d seen it in the mirror the morning after I won Halliday’s contest.
“Listen, Lo,” I said as I typed a brief text message on my HUD. “I’m gonna have one of my assistants at GSS get in touch with you. A guy named Marvin. He’s a good dude. He’ll be your assistant over the next few weeks, OK? He can help you relocate to Columbus. Hire a good lawyer and an accountant. Find a realtor and movers for you and your friends. Whatever you need. And I’d also like to arrange for you to have a GSS security escort until you’ve safely relocated. I promise they won’t bother you. Does that all sound all right with you?”
She nodded, and the tears that had accumulated around her eyes streamed down her cheeks.
“Thank you, Mr. Watts,” she said. “Wade.”
“Thank you, Lo,” I replied.
I handed her one of my contact cards, which were still designed to look like an old Adventure cartridge for the Atari 2600.
“Give me a call if there’s ever anything you need,” I said. “Anything at all.”
She stared down at the card. Then she snapped it out of my hands and rushed to give me one of her own contact cards. It was designed to look like a VHS copy of The Legend of Billie Jean. I immediately added it to my inventory.
“Thanks again for your help,” I said, giving her a tiny salute. “Take care of yourself, OK?”
Before she could respond, I teleported away, back to my stronghold on Falco.
* * *
I suddenly felt exhausted. And my daily twelve-hour ONI usage limit had nearly elapsed. I only had about forty-five minutes remaining. Some users could do a full twelve hours every day with no ill effects, but I wasn’t one of them. I always tried to log out before I hit the half-hour-remaining mark, to avoid the risk of giving myself the shakes or a migraine. I decided to wait until tomorrow to start looking for the Second Shard.
I saw that I had missed several calls from both Aech and Shoto, but I was too beat to call either of them back. I vowed to do so first thing in the morning.
When I logged out of the OASIS, my ONI headset woke me from the sleeplike state it induced and reconnected my mind with my physical body. As always, this process took a few minutes. It felt a bit like waking up from an incredibly vivid dream. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself back in my immersion vault, nestled in its gel-foam auto-recliner.
I pressed a button on the control panel and the armored canopy slid open with a pneumatic hiss. I pulled myself out, ritually humming the opening line of an old ’80s tune by Soul II Soul. Back to life. Back to re-al-it-y.
Feeling heavy in my own skin, I trudged back to the other end of the house, climbed the stairs, and collapsed into bed. A few minutes after my head hit the pillow, I drifted off to sleep.
Most daily ONI users lost the ability to remember their dreams, even though they still went into REM sleep each night. Unfortunately, I could still remember my dreams—or rather, one recurring dream that had been haunting me once or twice a week for several years now.
And despite my excitement over obtaining one of the shards, I had it again that night.
The details were always the same….
I found myself standing in Anorak’s study, next to the Big Red Button. Sometimes my right hand was poised above it and sometimes, like tonight, I was actually touching it. As always, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the button’s mirrored plastic surface. It was my face—Wade’s face—that I saw there, instead of that of my avatar, Parzival, though I was wearing the Robes of Anorak.
As soon as I got my bearings, two stacks of golden Marshall amplifiers magically appeared on either side of Halliday’s golden Easter egg and a hauntingly familiar song blasted out of them at earsplitting volume—“Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa.
Then the emcees themselves, Salt and Pepa, stepped out from behind the golden Marshall stacks, both singing into golden microphones, looking like they just stepped out of their music video in 1986. While DJ Spinderella rose up from behind Halliday’s egg, scratching a pair of solid gold records on a set of solid gold turntables.
Then, while I continued to stand there frozen, with my hand on the Big Red Button, Salt-N-Pepa performed the song’s chorus continuously, for what felt like several straight hours:
Ah, push it, push it good
Ah, push it, push it real good
Oooh, baby, baby! Baby, baby!
Oooh, baby, baby! Baby, baby!
As recurring nightmares go, I could’ve done a hell of a lot worse. But to say that those lyrics had gotten stuck in my head would’ve been the understatement of the century. They were permanently welded to every neuron in my brain. Whether I was online or offline, dreaming or awake, the image of my face reflected in the surface of the Big Red Button was always lurking at the back of my mind and those lyrics were playing on an endless loop, telling me over and over again that I should not only push it!, but that the sensible thing would be for me to go the extra mile and push it real good!
Normally, that was where the dream ended. But tonight, I actually worked up the courage to take Salt-N-Pepa’s advice….
Big money, no Whammies, I remember thinking, just before I hit the Big Red Button with the open
palm of my right hand. It lit up, and a Death Star klaxon began to sound in the distance. Then the button began to pulse off and on rapidly, growing brighter each time as its color changed from red to white.
When I turned around, Salt-N-Pepa had vanished, and the guys from Men at Work were standing in their place, singing the chorus of their 1983 hit single “It’s a Mistake.”
I ran outside, onto the balcony. But I was no longer surrounded by the simulated landscape of Chthonia. Now I was in the Portland Avenue Stacks in Oklahoma City, where I’d grown up. And my aunt Alice’s trailer was right in front of me, perched precariously at the top of its stack. My aunt Alice was standing at her bedroom window, staring back at me with a look of bitter resignation on her face.
My gaze dropped to Mrs. Gilmore’s trailer, and I saw her, too, leaning out the window to feed some of her cats. She saw me and smiled. As she started to raise her hand to wave at me, the bombs IOI had planted outside detonated, and the entire stack exploded into an apocalyptic pillar of flame….
And this time, I couldn’t pretend Sorrento was to blame for their deaths. I was the one who had pushed the button. I had done this….
But I wasn’t going to have to live with the soul-crushing guilt I felt for more than a few seconds. Because the framework at the base of the flaming stack of trailers had just buckled, and now it was tilting and collapsing straight toward me.
I didn’t try to run. I didn’t even move. I just stood there and let justice take its course.
I woke up to the pleasant electronic chirp of the vintage analog phone beside my bed. It was an Anova Electronics Communications Center Model 7000, manufactured in 1982—the very same sleek, silver, retro-futuristic telephone that Ferris Bueller’s best pal, Cameron Frye, had beside his bed. When Cameron was in Egypt’s land, let my Cameron go…
When I got woken up by my phone, it was usually a bad sign. Max was programmed to hold my calls if I was sleeping, unless Samantha, Aech, Shoto, Og, or Faisal called with the priority level set to emergency. If I didn’t get a solid eight hours of sleep every night, it threw off my daily ONI routine. Faisal knew that.
Then I realized: my avatar’s name had appeared on Halliday’s old Scoreboard last night with a blue shard icon beside it. That was trending at number one on the newsfeeds worldwide, no doubt. And the GSS PR department was probably getting inundated with questions for me.
I crawled out of bed, wincing at the sunlight that flooded into the room as the wraparound window shades retracted. When my vision returned, I cleared my throat and took Faisal’s call on the wallscreen. He looked worried, which usually meant I was about to be worried too.
“Hey, Faisal,” I muttered. “Good morning.”
“Good morning, sir,” he said. His video feed was shaky, because he was holding up his phone while running down an office corridor at GSS. The image stabilized as he boarded an elevator. “I apologize for waking you, but I wanted to—”
“To talk to me about finding the shard,” I said. “And making a public statement, et cetera—but can we do it in a few hours?”
“No, sir,” Faisal said. “I was calling to make sure you’d seen the news. About Mr. Morrow.”
I felt my heart rise into my throat. Og was in his mid-seventies. He’d appeared in good health the last time I’d seen him being interviewed, but that was months ago. Had he fallen ill? Or been in an accident? Had I waited too long to make amends with him and missed my chance?
“He’s missing,” Faisal said. “Possibly abducted. The police aren’t sure yet. The story is all over the newsfeeds.”
Max pulled all of the top video newsfeed channels up on my wallscreen, next to Faisal’s video-call window. My discovery wasn’t the day’s top news story after all. Photos or video clips of Og flashed in front of me, accompanied by headlines like OGDEN MORROW MISSING and OASIS CO-CREATOR MORROW VANISHES HOURS AFTER PARZIVAL FINDS FIRST SHARD.
“Jesus,” I muttered. “When did this happen?”
“Last night,” Faisal said. “Mr. Morrow’s home-security system, surveillance cameras, and robot sentries were all deactivated at exactly seven o’clock Pacific Time. They all just shut off. When his staff came in this morning, Mr. Morrow was gone. He didn’t leave a note, and there were no signs of a break-in. One of his telebots is missing, and so is his private jet. Transponders disabled. And Mr. Morrow’s phone has been turned off too.” He shrugged. “The police think he must’ve decided to go off the grid for some reason.”
“But you said he might have been abducted?”
“An intruder would’ve had to hack his home security system,” Faisal said. “And his robot sentries. And his jet’s security system. Who could pull that off?”
I nodded. I had the same Odinware system as Og. And the same robot sentries were guarding my estate at that very moment. It was the best home-security tech available—or at least the most expensive.
“But why would Og want to go ‘off the grid’? Where would he go? He already lives in the middle of nowhere, in total seclusion.”
Faisal shrugged. “We’re wondering if…if it’s somehow linked to your discovery last night,” he said. “Congratulations on that, by the way.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling a tinge of shame instead of pride.
Og had asked me to abandon my search for the Seven Shards years ago. But he’d refused to give me a reason, or tell me anything about the riddle, which had only made me even more determined to figure it out on my own.
How had he reacted last night, when he saw that blue shard appear beside my name?
“Did Mr. Morrow contact you?” Faisal asked. “Or did you contact him?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Og and I haven’t communicated in over two years.”
Because I wouldn’t stop hounding him for information about his dead wife.
“I see,” Faisal said after an awkward silence. “Well, I think you should consider coming in to the office today, sir. PR thinks you should make a statement as soon as possible, before any of these conspiracy theories start to gain traction. We’re being bombarded with interview requests for you. And there are a few hundred reporters camped out downstairs in the lobby.”
“Forget the press, Faisal,” I said. “I just want to find out what happened to Og.”
“We’ve already got our security firm out searching for him, sir,” Faisal said. “And we’re sweeping the global sensor nets too. If his face, voice, retinas, or fingerprints get scanned anywhere in the world, we’ll know about it immediately.”
“Did you check his OASIS account log?”
He nodded. “His last logout occurred shortly after five o’clock last night.”
“Do we still have a GSS security team at Og’s estate?”
“Yes,” he said. “And we still have a telebot on site, if you’d like to have a look around.”
“I would,” I said. “Can you send me its access code?”
“Right away, sir.”
* * *
I got dressed and ran down to my office. Then I climbed into my conventional OASIS haptic rig and put on a visor and a pair of haptic gloves. Once I had logged in to the OASIS, I used the remote-access code Faisal sent me to take control of a telebot located at Og’s mansion in Oregon, over two thousand miles away.
Once my link to the bot was established, its head-mounted cameras gave me a live view of Og’s stunningly beautiful home. Judging by the angle of my POV, I was standing in front of Og’s small jet hangar. It was at the edge of his private airstrip, which he’d had constructed in a valley between several of the highest peaks of the Wallowa Mountains in eastern Oregon.
In the distance, beyond the runway, I saw the steep cobblestone staircase at the edge of the runway, which led up to Og’s multilevel mansion, constructed on a series of plateaus carved into the base of the mountain range. From the outside, it lo
oked like a perfect replica of Rivendell, as it appeared in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Several waterfalls were visible in the distance, spilling off the peaks beyond the enormous house and its grounds.
Even under these circumstances—and even though I’d spent an entire week of my life there—the scale and the beauty of it all still took my breath away. Og had literally moved mountains and rerouted rivers to make the fictional valley of Imladris a reality, here in this secluded place. He’d kept the cost of the project a secret, but some estimated he’d spent close to two billion dollars. A higher price tag than Buckingham Palace. Gazing at it now through the telebot’s eyes, it seemed like money well spent.
I disconnected the GSS telebot from its charging dock, which was built into the rear of an armored GSS security transport. Two GSS security officers standing nearby waved at me and I waved back. Then I turned my telebot around and piloted it over to the long, winding staircase leading up to the house.
At the top of the stairs, a stone path led me across the grounds and up to the main entrance of the house—a set of enormous wooden doors, with ornate Elvish runes carved into them. They swung open for me as I approached, but I still felt like a trespasser. If I’d shown up here unannounced a few days ago, when Og was still home, I wasn’t sure he would’ve invited me in.
I took a quick look around the foyer. Og owned four telebots, all brand-new Okagami TB-6000s with gleaming gunmetal-blue chassis and chrome trim. Three of them were still in their charging rack just inside the front entrance. But the fourth one was missing. It had disappeared the previous evening, along with its owner. Its transponder had been deactivated at the same time the house security system went offline.
I kept moving, through the entrance hall and on into the main house. It had been over three years since I last set foot here, but to my eyes everything looked the same. Giant tapestries and fantasy artwork covered the walls, and stone gargoyle statues and antique suits of armor lined the dark wood-paneled hallways.
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