Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

I pulled up the screenshots I’d taken of the Charlie and Raymond Babbitt NPCs and put them up on the viewscreen.

“I spotted these two NPCs on Halcydonia,” I said. “Charlie and Raymond Babbitt. They were both tapping out Morse code.”

I pulled up a street map of the New Albany neighborhood where I lived, located on the northeastern outskirts of the city. Then I zoomed in on my house, at 550 Babbitt Road.

“Guess who owns the property located a few miles down the street?” I said. “At 750 Babbitt Road, near the intersection with Morse Road?”

Art3mis jumped to her feet, eyes wide.

“Holy shit!” she whispered. “That used to be Og’s old house, right? Before he and Kira got married and left Ohio to move to Oregon?”

Faisal nodded.

“When Gregarious Games took off and they became multimillionaires, Halliday and Morrow both bought mansions located on Babbitt Road, just a few miles apart,” Faisal said. “Og moved out of his residence at 750 Babbitt Road when he got married, but he never sold the property.” He turned to me. “When he left GSS, Mr. Morrow told us he wanted to hold on to the house for sentimental reasons,” he said. “And just in case he ever needed to move back here. The place has been sitting vacant for decades. Guarded by automated security and maintenance drones, all of which are probably now under Anorak’s control.”

I pulled up an aerial satellite view of the building. All it showed was the roof of a large mansion, with a garage and a few other small buildings clustered around it, surrounded on all sides by empty, wide-open farm fields. “Hiding Og here would be a pretty clever move, actually. It’s definitely the last place I ever would’ve thought to look for him.”

Faisal nodded. “That house still has a direct fiber-optic connection to the main OASIS server hub,” he said. “We installed it for Mr. Morrow when he still lived there. It would give them the fastest possible connection to the simulation. Just like the connection at Mr. Watts’s estate down the road.”

“OK,” Aech said. “Let’s assume that is where Anorak and Sorrento are keeping Og. How are we going to get him out of there alive?”

“We need to offer him a trade,” I said. “Og’s freedom for the Siren’s Soul.” I turned to Art3mis. “But I’m betting Og left us more to work with, back on Middletown.”

I pulled up my HUD and sent a text message to L0hengrin, asking her to teleport to my location on Gregarious immediately, then instructed Faisal to give L0hengrin and the rest of her clan permission to join us in the conference room.

Less than a minute later, the conference-room doors flew open, and in walked L0hengrin, followed by Rizzo, Wukong, Lilith, and Kastagir.

They were all staring around wide-eyed, taking in their surroundings. But when they saw me, Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis, their eyes grew even wider. Then, in unison, all five of them dropped to their knees and bowed their heads. I told them to rise and we all ran over to greet them.

And that was how the High Five met the L0w Five for the very first time, under extremely dire circumstances.

L0hengrin’s avatar was still inher female form, but now she was dressed in some sort of futuristic battle armor. The rest of her clan was similarly attired and also heavily armed. Once I finished making introductions (and once L0hengrin and her friends finished freaking out), Lo told me what she’d been up to. To save time, she’d called up her friends, and together, the five of them had started checking each of the other 255 instances of Middletown, one after another. They had nearly searched them all before Wukong finally located a second instance of the town where the year had been changed from 1986 to 1989—the one Og had visited. Then the L0w Five converged on that instance and scoured it for clues.

“We found several things out of place in Og’s basement,” Lo told us. “When Og was there changing the calendar on the wall, he also moved one of the videotapes on the shelf next to the television. A VHS copy of John Belushi’s final film, Neighbors .”

“Holy shit!” Aech said. “Z, you were right!”

Lo glanced at her, then back at me.

“Right about what?” she asked. “What the hell is going on?”

I turned to address Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto. “We have to tell them,” I said. “If we want their help, they deserve to know what’s at stake.”

The others all nodded in agreement. Faisal started to protest, but I ignored him and told L0hengrin and her friends everything about Anorak, his infirmware, and the real reason why none of us was able to log out of the OASIS. Compared to us, they seemed to take the news that they were being held hostage extremely well. They did a lot of cursing and shouting, but nobody had a full-on meltdown. Eventually, they all fell silent and waited for me to continue. Then I told them how Anorak had taken Og hostage, too, and about our ongoing efforts to find him.

“Og has been leaving behind clues for us,” I said. “About his location in the real world. They appear to indicate that Anorak is holding Og hostage at his former residence here in Columbus. Just a few miles down the road from Halliday’s old house. Og and Halliday used to be neighbors.”

“Holy shit!” Lo said. “So that’s why he pulled out that VHS tape!”

Lo opened her HUD and began to search through her avatar’s inventory.

“We found an old Dungeons & Dragons campaign notebook too,” she said. “But it wasn’t in Og’s handwriting—”

“Did it belong to Halliday?” Shoto asked. “When he still lived at home, Halliday had to keep all of his D&D stuff over at Og’s house. Because his own parents thought D&D was satanic and forbid him from playing it.”

“Definitely not,” Lo replied. “It’s Kira’s old campaign notebook. It only exists in the 1989 version of Middletown.”

Lo removed the notebook from her inventory and held it up. It was a battered blue Trapper Keeper. Kira had sliced open the edge of its clear plastic covering so that she could slide a hand-drawn title page underneath it, with The Quest for the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul written on it in her distinctive cursive handwriting. She had also drawn six blue crystal shards in a circle, with a seventh in the center. And below that, at the bottom of the page, she had written: by Kira Underwood .

“It’s for an adventure module that Kira created, all by herself,” L0hengrin said. “After she left Middletown and returned home to London to finish her final year of high school.”

Aech, Art3mis, and Shoto all exchanged looks of surprise.

Lo held out the notebook, offering it to me, and I accepted it with both hands. I stared down at it in amazement, then back up at her.

“Lo, this is amazing!” I said. “It may end up saving all of our lives. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Z,” she said, beaming with pride.

I tore open the Trapper Keeper’s Velcro cover flap. Inside was a plastic three-ring binder filled with over 150 pages of Kira’s handwritten notes, along with dozens of detailed maps and illustrations.

“What’s interesting is that Kira set her Quest for the Seven Shards in Halliday’s D&D campaign setting—Chthonia.”

Chthonia was the name of the fantasy world Halliday had created for his high school Dungeons & Dragons campaign—the same campaign that Kira joined when Og invited her to play D&D with them. Halliday also used Chthonia as the setting for all of his early Anorak’s Quest adventure games. Then, years later, when Halliday created the OASIS, he built a full-scale replica of Chthonia inside the simulation. That was the planet where Castle Anorak was located.