Ernest Cline - Ready Player One

I pulled up my programming grid and made a few changes to my evening lineup. I cleared away the episodes of Riptide and Misfits of Science I’d programmed and dropped in a few back-to-back flicks starring Gamera, my favorite giant flying turtle. I thought they should be real crowd pleasers. Then, to finish off the broadcast day, I added a few episodes of Silver Spoons .

Art3mis also ran her own vidfeed channel, Art3mivision, and I always kept one of my monitors tuned to it. Right now, she was airing her usual Monday evening fare: an episode of Square Pegs . After that would be ElectraWoman and DynaGirl , followed by back-to-back episodes of Isis and Wonder Woman . Her programming lineup hadn’t changed in ages. But it didn’t matter. She still got killer ratings. Recently, she’d also launched her own wildly successful clothing line for full-figured female avatars, under the label Art3Miss. She was doing really well for herself.

After that night in the Distracted Globe, Art3mis had cut off all contact with me. She blocked all of my e-mails, phone calls, and chat requests. She also stopped making posts to her blog.

I tried everything I could think of to reach her. I sent her avatar flowers. I made multiple trips to her avatar’s stronghold, an armored palace on Benatar, the small moon she owned. I dropped mix tapes and notes on her palace from the air, like lovesick bombs. Once, in a supreme act of desperation, I stood outside her palace gates for two solid hours, with a boom box over my head, blasting “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel at full volume.

She didn’t come out. I don’t even know if she was home.

I’d been living in Columbus for over five months now, and it had been eight long, torturous weeks since I’d last spoken to Art3mis. But I hadn’t spent that time moping around and feeling sorry for myself. Well, not all of it, anyway. I’d tried to enjoy my “new life” as a world-famous sector-hopping gunter. Even though I’d maxxed out my avatar’s power level, I continued to complete as many quests as possible, to add to my already impressive collection of weapons, magic items, and vehicles, which I kept in a vault deep within my stronghold. Questing kept me busy and served as a welcome distraction from the growing loneliness and isolation I felt.

I’d tried to reconnect with Aech after Art3mis had dumped me, but things weren’t the same. We’d grown apart, and I knew it was my fault. Our conversations were now stilted and reserved, as if we were both afraid of revealing some key piece of information the other might be able to use. I could tell he no longer trusted me. And while I’d been off obsessing over Art3mis, it seemed Aech had become obsessed with being the first gunter to find the Jade Key. But it had been almost half a year since we’d cleared the First Gate, and the Jade Key’s location still remained a mystery.

I hadn’t spoken to Aech in almost a month. My last conversation with him had devolved into a shouting match, which had ended when I reminded Aech that he “never even would have found the Copper Key” if I hadn’t led him straight to it. He’d glared at me in silence for a second, then logged out of the chat room. Stubborn pride kept me from calling him back right away to apologize, and now it seemed like too much time had passed.

Yeah. I was on a roll. In less than six months, I’d managed to wreck both of my closest friendships.

I flipped over to Aech’s channel, which he called the H-Feed. He was currently showing a WWF match from the late ’80s, featuring Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. I didn’t even bother checking Daito and Shoto’s channel, the Daishow, because I knew they’d be showing some old samurai movie. That’s all those guys ever aired.

A few months after our confrontational first meeting in Aech’s basement, I’d managed to form a tenuous friendship with Daito and Shoto when the three of us teamed up to complete an extended quest in Sector Twenty-two. It was my idea. I felt bad about how our first encounter had ended, and I waited for an opportunity to extend some sort of olive branch to the two samurai. It came when I discovered a hidden high-level quest called Shodai Urutoraman on the planet Tokusatsu. The creation date in the quest’s colophon said it had been launched several years after Halliday’s death, which meant it couldn’t have any relation to the contest. It was also a Japanese-language quest, created by GSS’s Hokkaido division. I could have tried to complete it on my own, using the Mandarax real-time translator software installed in all OASIS accounts, but it would have been risky. Mandarax had been known to garble or misinterpret quest instructions and cues, which could easily lead to fatal mistakes.

Daito and Shoto lived in Japan (they’d become national heroes there), and I knew that they both spoke Japanese and English fluently. So I’d contacted them to ask if they were interested in teaming up with me, just for this one quest. They were skeptical at first, but after I described the unique nature of the quest, and what I believed the payoff for solving it might be, they finally agreed. The three of us met outside the quest gate on Tokusatsu and entered it together.

The quest was a re-creation of all thirty-nine episodes of the original Ultraman TV series, which had aired on Japanese television from 1966 to 1967. The show’s storyline centered around a human named Hayata who was a member of the Science Patrol, an organization devoted to fighting the hordes of giant Godzilla-like monsters that were constantly attacking Earth and threatening human civilization. When the Science Patrol encountered a threat they couldn’t handle on their own, Hayata would use an alien device called a Beta Capsule to transform into an alien super-being known as Ultraman. Then he would proceed to kick the monster-of-the-week’s ass, using all sorts of kung-fu moves and energy attacks.

If I’d entered the quest gate by myself, I would have automatically played through the entire series storyline as Hayata. But because Shoto, Daito, and I had all entered at once, we were each allowed to select a different Science Patrol team member to play. We could then change or swap characters at the start of the next level or “episode.” The three of us took turns playing Hayata and his Science Patrol teammates Hoshino and Arashi. As with most quests in the OASIS, playing as a team made it easier to defeat the various enemies and complete each of the levels.

It took us an entire week, often playing over sixteen hours a day, before we were finally able to clear all thirty-nine levels and complete the quest. As we stepped out of the quest gate, our avatars were each awarded a huge amount of experience points and several thousand credits. But the real prize for completing the quest was an incredibly rare artifact: Hayata’s Beta Capsule. The small metal cylinder allowed the avatar who possessed it to transform into Ultraman once a day, for up to three minutes.

Since there were three of us, there was a debate over who should be allowed to keep the artifact. “Parzival should have it,” Shoto had said, turning to his older brother. “He found this quest. We wouldn’t even have known about it, were it not for him.”

Of course, Daito had disagreed. “And he would not have been able to complete the quest without our help!” He said the only fair thing to do would be to auction off the Beta Capsule and split the proceeds. But there was no way I could allow that. The artifact was far too valuable to sell, and I knew it would end up in the hands of the Sixers, because they purchased nearly every major artifact that went up for auction. I also saw this as an opportunity to get on Daisho’s good side.