Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

NICE TRY, CHEATER!

So I had no choice but to keep on searching for the shards myself. And once I committed to that quest, I gave it my absolute all. I did my due diligence.

I studied every reference to the number 7 in Anorak’s Almanac . I also played and solved every videogame in his collection that was related to the number 7. The Seven Cities of Gold (1984), The Seven Spirits of Ra (1987), Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs (1988), The Seven Gates of Jambala (1989), Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity (1994), Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996). Then I went overboard and also played any game that had the number 7 in its title, like Sigma 7, Stellar 7, Lucky 7, Force 7, Pitman 7, and Escape from Pulsar 7.

I even subjected myself to Keeper of the Seven Keys, a four-part concept album by Helloween, a German power-metal band from Hamburg, founded in 1984. I was not a fan of mid-’80s German power metal, but Halliday used to listen to it for hours when he was programming his first games, so I knew there was a chance he’d drawn inspiration from it.

If Halliday had left behind any additional clues about the location of the Seven Shards, I wasn’t able to find them. It was frustrating. And more than a little humiliating.

I considered calling it quits and giving up on the shards altogether. I mean, why was I wasting my time trying to solve Halliday’s insipid side quest anyway? What was I hoping would happen when I completed it? I had already achieved wealth and fame in reality, and in the OASIS my avatar was already all-powerful and invulnerable. I had nothing more to prove to anyone. I had already beaten the odds and accomplished the impossible once. I didn’t need to do it again.

There was nothing else I needed—except more time. I had a finite amount of it left, and when it was gone, I wouldn’t be able to buy any more of it. Time was precious. And yet here I was, wasting whole years of it on another one of Halliday’s glorified videogames…

Still, I’d never shaken my curiosity about the Siren’s Soul, or the nagging suspicion that something terrible would happen if I failed to obtain it. That was what ultimately prompted me to offer a billion-dollar reward for any information that would help me locate one of the Seven Shards. But I’d posted that reward two years ago, and it had yet to be claimed.

When I’d offered the reward, I’d set up a separate email address where people could send in any potential leads. It still received hundreds of submissions every day, but so far every last one had proven to be a dead end. I’d had to set up an elaborate series of email filters to sort out all the duplicate and obviously bogus submissions. These days very few emails got past these filters and made it to my inbox.

I often wondered if the whole idea of the reward was hopeless to begin with. The answer was right there, in the third line of the Shard Riddle: “For each fragment my heir must pay a toll….”

If I, Wade Watts, the sole heir to Halliday’s fortune, was the “heir” the riddle was referring to, then I would be the only person in the world who could find the Seven Shards, since I would be the only one who could “once again make the Siren whole.”

For all I knew, the shards and their locations might be invisible to everyone else. That would explain why the millions of gunters out there who were scouring the OASIS night and day for any trace of the shards had all come up empty-handed for three years running now.

On the other hand, if I alone had the ability to obtain the Siren’s Soul, why had Halliday posted the Shard Riddle on his website, for the whole world to see? He could’ve just emailed it to my OASIS account. Or mentioned it in his video message about the ONI. It was entirely possible that anyone could find the shards, and Halliday had simply hidden them fiendishly well—just as he’d done with his “three hidden keys” and “three secret gates.” And the first two lines of the Shard Riddle were infuriatingly vague: “Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul on the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role.”

If I was interpreting these lines correctly, the Seven Shards were hidden on seven planets inside the OASIS—seven worlds where the Siren, aka Leucosia, aka Kira Morrow, “once played a role.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t narrow things down too much. As GSS’s chief art director during the development of the OASIS and its first three years of operation, Kira had played a key role in the design and construction of every single planet added to the simulation during that time. (In interviews, Ogden Morrow had always gone out of his way to stress the importance of his wife’s contribution to the creation of the OASIS, while Halliday rarely even acknowledged it. Which was no surprise, since he had a history of doing the same thing to Og, and everyone else who worked for them at GSS.) Even after Kira left the company, the GSS artists who had worked under her continued to use the world-builder templates she’d created, so in a way, she’d “played a role” in creating nearly every planet in the OASIS.

However, by conducting extensive research into Kira’s life and interests, and by studying her GSS employee file and OASIS work account activity logs, I’d narrowed my search area down to a list of the nine most likely candidates and concentrated my efforts there.

Florin, the planet I’d just returned from, was Kira’s re-creation of the fictional Renaissance-era kingdom featured in The Princess Bride, one of her favorite films. There wasn’t much to do there, aside from visiting the various locations from the movie and completing the Flicksyncs.

The planet Thra was a meticulous re-creation of the fantasy world depicted in The Dark Crystal, another of her favorite films. Her parents had named her Karen, but after she saw The Dark Crystal for the first time at age eleven, she’d insisted that her friends and family call her Kira, the name of the film’s Gelfling heroine. (She’d also renamed the family dog Fizzgig.) And when Karen turned eighteen, she’d legally changed her first name to Kira. Decades later, when Kira helped launch the OASIS, Thra was the first planet she’d created inside the simulation, entirely on her own. And since the plot of The Dark Crystal concerned a quest to find a missing “crystal shard,” it seemed like an extremely likely candidate.

But I’d now played through every quest anchored there, and explored the entire kingdom, and done everything I could think of that might loosely be defined as “paying a toll.” I’d visited every instance of Aughra’s observatory I could find. I’d played the proper tune on Jen’s flute. But her basket was always empty, and there were never any shards to be found there.

Mobius Prime was another OASIS world created solely by Kira Morrow, as a tribute to her favorite videogame character, Sonic the Hedgehog. The planet was a re-creation of the fictional future Earth where most of Sonic’s adventures took place, and it featured reproductions of all of the different levels featured in early 2-D and 3-D Sonic games, along with environments and characters from the cartoons and comic books based on them.

Several Sonic the Hedgehog games involved a quest to collect seven “Chaos Emeralds” that could be harnessed to obtain special powers. Inside the OASIS, dozens of different quests on Mobius Prime allowed you to collect the seven Chaos Emeralds, and I’d completed all of them. But if there was a way to trade the emeralds for one of the shards, I still hadn’t discovered it.

I’d had a similarly frustrating experience on the planet Usagi, which was Kira’s tribute to Sailor Moon, her favorite anime series. One of the most difficult quests on Usagi involved collecting seven “Rainbow Crystals,” which could then be combined to form an incredibly powerful artifact known as the “Legendary Silver Crystal.” After a frustrating number of attempts, I’d finally managed to complete this quest, in the hope that once I obtained the Legendary Silver Crystal it would transform into one of the Seven Shards. But all I had to show for my efforts was an impressive familiarity with obscure Sailor Moon trivia and an inexplicable desire to cosplay as Tuxedo Mask (which I may or may not have acted upon in the solitude and privacy of my own home).