Cline Ernest - Ready Player One

“Stop being a dick.”

“It’s understandable, man,” Aech said. “That girl is super cute.”

“So, have you had any luck with the new riddle?” I said, deliberately changing the subject. “That quatrain about the Jade Key?”

“Quatrain?”

“ ‘A poem or stanza with four lines and an alternating rhyme scheme,’ ” I recited. “It’s called a quatrain.”

Aech rolled his eyes. “You’re too much, man.”

“What? That’s the proper term for it, asshead!”

“It’s just a riddle, dude. And no. I haven’t had any luck figuring it out yet.”

“Me neither,” I said. “So we probably shouldn’t be standing around jabbering at each other. Time to put our noses to the grindstone.”

“I concur,” he said. “But—”

Just then, a stack of comic books on the other side of the room slid off the end table where they were piled and crashed to the floor, as if something had knocked them over. Aech and I both jumped, then exchanged confused looks.

“What the hell was that?” I said.

“I don’t know.” Aech walked over and examined the scattered comics. “Maybe a software glitch or something?”

“I’ve never seen a chat-room glitch like that,” I said, scanning the empty room. “Could someone else be in here? An invisible avatar, eavesdropping on us?”

Aech rolled his eyes. “No way, Z,” he said. “You’re getting way too paranoid. This is an encrypted private chat room. No one can enter without my permission. You know that.”

“Right,” I said, still freaked out.

“Relax. It was a glitch.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. “Listen. Let me know if you change your mind about needing a loan. Or a place to crash. OK?”

“I’ll be all right,” I said. “But thanks, amigo.”

We bumped fists again, like the Wonder Twins activating their powers.

“I’ll catch you later. Good luck, Z.”

“Same to you, Aech.”

A few hours later, the remaining slots on the Scoreboard beganto fill up, one after another, in rapid succession. Not with avatar names, but with IOI employee numbers. Each would appear with a score of 5,000 points (which now appeared to be the fixed value for obtaining the Copper Key); then the score would jump by another 100,000 points a few hours later, once that Sixer had cleared the First Gate. By the end of the day, the Scoreboard looked like this:

HIGH SCORES: 1. Parzival 110,000 2. Art3mis 109,000 3. Aech 108,000 4. Daito 107,000 5. Shoto 106,000 6. IOI-655321 105,000 7. IOI-643187 105,000 8. IOI-621671 105,000 9. IOI-678324 105,000 10. IOI-637330 105,000

I recognized the first Sixer employee number to appear, because I’d seen it printed on Sorrento’s uniform. He’d probably insisted that his avatar be the first to obtain the Copper Key and clear the gate. But I had a hard time believing he’d done it on his own. There was no way he was that good at Joust. Or that he knew WarGames by heart. But I now knew that he didn’t have to be. When he reached a challenge he couldn’t handle, like winning at Joust, he could just hand control of his avatar off to one of his underlings. And during the WarGames challenge he’d probably just had someone feeding him all of the dialogue via his hacked immersion rig.

Once the remaining empty slots were filled, the Scoreboard began to grow in length, to display rankings beyond tenth place. Before long, twenty avatars were listed on the Scoreboard. Then thirty. Over the next twenty-four hours, over sixty Sixer avatars cleared the First Gate.

Meanwhile, Ludus had become the most popular destination in the OASIS. Transport terminals all over the planet were spitting out a steady stream of gunters who then swarmed across the globe, creating chaos and disrupting classes on every school campus. The OASIS Public School Board saw the writing on the wall, and the decision was quickly made to evacuate Ludus and relocate all of its schools to a new location. An identical copy of the planet, Ludus II, was created in the same sector, a short distance away from the original. All students were given a day off from school while a backup copy of the planet’s original source code was copied over to the new site (minus the Tomb of Horrors code Halliday had secretly added to it at some point). Classes resumed on Ludus II the following day, and Ludus was left for the Sixers and gunters to fight over.

News spread quickly that the Sixers were encamped around a small flat-topped hill at the center of a remote forest. The tomb’s exact location appeared on the message boards that evening, along with screenshots showing the force field the Sixers had erected to keep everyone else out. These screenshots also clearly showed the skull pattern of the stones on the hilltop. In a matter of hours, the connection to the Tomb of Horrors D&D module was posted to every single gunter message board. Then it hit the newsfeeds.

All of the large gunter clans immediately banded together to launch a full-scale assault on the Sixers’ force field, trying everything they could think of to bring it down or circumvent it. The Sixers had installed teleportation disruptors, which prevented anyone from transporting inside the force field via technological means. They had also stationed a team of high-level wizards around the tomb. These magic users cast spells around the clock, keeping the entire area encased in a temporary null-magic zone. This prevented the force fields from being bypassed by any magical means.

The clans began to bombard the outer force field with rockets, missiles, nukes, and harsh language. They laid siege to the tomb all night, but the following morning, both force fields remained intact.

In desperation, the clans decided to break out the heavy artillery. They pooled their resources and purchased two very expensive, very powerful antimatter bombs on eBay. They detonated both of them in sequence, just a few seconds apart. The first bomb took down the outer shield, and the second bomb finished the job. The moment the second force field went down, thousands of gunters (all unharmed by the bomb blasts, due to the no-PvP zone) swarmed into the tomb and clogged the corridors of the dungeon below. Soon, thousands of gunters (and Sixers) had crammed into the burial chamber, all ready to challenge the lich king to a game of Joust. Multiple copies of the king appeared, one for every avatar who set foot on the dais. Ninety-five percent of the gunters who challenged him lost and were then killed. But a few gunters were successful, and at the bottom of the Scoreboard, listed after the High Five and the dozens of IOI employee numbers, new avatar names began to appear. Within a few days, the list of avatars on the Scoreboard was over a hundred names long.