Cline Ernest - Ready Player One

But like I said, I didn’t have that problem. I was stuck at school.

Ludus had been designed as a place of learning, so the planet had been created without a single quest portal or gaming zone anywhere on its surface. The only thing to be found here were thousands of identical school campuses separated by rolling green fields, perfectly landscaped parks, rivers, meadows, and sprawling template-generated forests. There were no castles, dungeons, or orbiting space fortresses for my avatar to raid. And there were no NPC villains, monsters, or aliens for me to fight, so there was no treasure or magic items for me to plunder.

This totally sucked, for a lot of reasons.

Completing quests, fighting NPCs, and gathering treasure were the only ways a low-level avatar like mine could earn experience points (XPs). Earning XPs was how you increased your avatar’s power level, strength, and abilities.

A lot of OASIS users didn’t care about their avatar’s power level or bother with the gaming aspects of the simulation at all. They only used the OASIS for entertainment, business, shopping, and hanging out with their friends. These users simply avoided entering any gaming or PvP zones where their defenseless first-level avatars could be attacked by NPCs or by other players. If you stayed in safe zones, like Ludus, you didn’t have to worry about your avatar getting robbed, kidnapped, or killed.

I hated being stuck in a safe zone.

If I was going to find Halliday’s egg, I knew I would eventually have to venture out in the dangerous sectors of the OASIS. And if I wasn’t powerful or well-armed enough to defend myself, I wasn’t going to stay alive for very long.

Over the past five years, I’d managed to slowly, gradually raise my avatar up to third level. This hadn’t been easy. I’d done it by hitching rides off-world with other students (mostly Aech) who happened to be headed to a planet where my wuss avatar could survive. I’d have them drop me near a newbie-level gaming zone and spend the rest of the night or weekend slaying orcs, kobolds, or some other piddly class of monster that was too weak to kill me. For each NPC my avatar defeated, I would earn a few meager experience points and, usually, a handful of copper or silver coins dropped by my slain foes. These coins were instantly converted to credits, which I used to pay the teleportation fare back to Ludus, often just before the final school bell rang. Sometimes, but not often, one of the NPCs I killed would drop an item. That was how I’d obtained my avatar’s sword, shield, and armor.

I’d stopped hitching rides with Aech at the end of the previous school year. His avatar was now above thirtieth level, and so he was almost always headed to a planet where it wasn’t safe for my avatar. He was happy to drop me on some noob world along the way, but if I didn’t earn enough credits to pay for my fare back to Ludus, I’d wind up missing school because I was stuck on some other planet. This was not an acceptable excuse. I’d now racked up so many unexcused absences that I was in danger of being expelled. If that happened, I would have to return my school-issued OASIS console and visor. Worse, I’d be transferred back to school in the real world to finish out my senior year there. I couldn’t risk that.

So these days I rarely left Ludus at all. I was stuck here, and stuck at third level. Having a third-level avatar was a colossal embarrassment. None of the other gunters took you seriously unless you were at least tenth level. Even though I’d been a gunter since day one, everyone still considered me a noob. It was beyond frustrating.

In desperation, I’d tried to find a part-time after-school job, just to earn some walking-around money. I applied for dozens of tech support and programming jobs (mostly grunt construction work, coding parts of OASIS malls and office buildings), but it was completely hopeless. Millions of college-educated adults couldn’t get one of those jobs. The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants.

So I remained stuck at school. I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.

After lunch, I headed to my favorite class, Advanced OASISStudies. This was a senior-year elective where you learned about the history of the OASIS and its creators. Talk about an easy A.

For the past five years, I’d devoted all of my free time to learning as much as I possibly could about James Halliday. I’d exhaustively studied his life, accomplishments, and interests. Over a dozen different Halliday biographies had been published in the years since his death, and I’d read them all. Several documentary films had also been made about him, and I’d studied those, too. I’d studied every word Halliday had ever written, and I’d played every videogame he’d ever made. I took notes, writing down every detail I thought might be related to the Hunt. I kept everything in a notebook (which I’d started to call my “grail diary” after watching the third Indiana Jones film).

The more I’d learned about Halliday’s life, the more I’d grown to idolize him. He was a god among geeks, a nerd über-deity on the level of Gygax, Garriott, and Gates. He’d left home after high school with nothing but his wits and his imagination, and he’d used them to attain worldwide fame and amass a vast fortune. He’d created an entirely new reality that now provided an escape for most of humanity. And to top it all off, he’d turned his last will and testament into the greatest videogame contest of all time.

I spent most of my time in Advanced OASIS Studies class annoying our teacher, Mr. Ciders, by pointing out errors in our textbook and raising my hand to interject some relevant bit of Halliday trivia that I (and I alone) thought was interesting. After the first few weeks of class, Mr. Ciders had stopped calling on me unless no one else knew the answer to his question.

Today, he was reading excerpts from The Egg Man , a bestselling Halliday biography that I’d already read four times. During his lecture, I kept having to resist the urge to interrupt him and point out all of the really important details the book left out. Instead, I just made a mental note of each omission, and as Mr. Ciders began to recount the circumstances of Halliday’s childhood, I once again tried to glean whatever secrets I could from the strange way Halliday had lived his life, and from the odd clues about himself he’d chosen to leave behind.

James Donovan Halliday was born on June 12, 1972, in Middletown, Ohio. He was an only child. His father was an alcoholic machine operator and his mother was a bipolar waitress.

By all accounts, James was a bright boy, but socially inept. He had an extremely difficult time communicating with the people around him. Despite his obvious intelligence, he did poorly in school, because most of his attention was focused on computers, comic books, sci-fi and fantasy novels, movies, and above all else, videogames.

One day in junior high, Halliday was sitting alone in the cafeteria reading a Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook . The game fascinated him, but he’d never actually played it, because he’d never had any friends to play it with. A boy in his class named Ogden Morrow noticed what Halliday was reading and invited him to attend one of the weekly D&D gaming sessions held at his house. There, in Morrow’s basement, Halliday was introduced to an entire group of “mega geeks” just like himself. They immediately accepted him as one of their own, and for the first time in his life, James Halliday had a circle of friends.