Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

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 the 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 teleportto 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.