Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

“Kira’s adventure is comprised of seven different quests,” Lo continued. “One to retrieve each of the Seven Shards. Kira created all of the different quests, drew maps for all seven dungeons, and she also included a bunch of awesome illustrations at the back, depicting different monsters and locations that appear in the story. It’s pretty incredible.” She pointed at the Trapper Keeper. “From what I can gather, Kira gave that binder to Halliday just before she went back to England in June of ’89. There’s a brief note to him on the first page. In it, Kira asks Halliday to run her module for Og and the rest of the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild after she leaves, to explain why her character disappeared from their D&D campaign. She told him she created this adventure so that her friends would feel like she was still there with them in spirit. She said she hoped it would make all of them miss her a little less.”

“Does Kira’s character Leucosia appear in the module?” Aech asked.

Lo nodded.

“Right at the beginning,” she replied. “Leucosia is abducted by an evil wizard named Hagmar, who places her in suspended animation and imprisons her inside a powerful magic jewel called the Siren’s Soul. Then he shatters the jewel into seven pieces and hides them in seven different treacherous, trap-filled dungeons, which are each located on seven different continents. The players have to collect all seven of the shards and reassemble them into the Siren’s Soul to resurrect Leucosia. Then, once they bring her back, she gives them the power to resurrect other people too. Here, you have to check this out….”

L0hengrin flipped Kira’s notebook to a page near the back, which contained a drawing of Leucosia’s character symbol—a capital letter L formed by the intersection of a bejeweled longsword and an ornately carved magic wand, to symbolize Leucosia’s Magic User/Fighter dual character class.

I had seen this symbol before, in collections of Kira’s artwork and in several of the Anorak’s Quest games.

Kira was the first and only artist ever to join the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild, and as a gift to her new friends, Kira had taken it upon herself to design cool character symbols for everyone in the group—symbols that would all later be made famous, thanks to their inclusion in various RPGs released by Gregarious Games. Kira was the one who had designed Anorak’s famous character symbol—the calligraphic letter A that appeared on Anorak’s robes and above the entrance to Castle Anorak.

For Og, she designed a symbol of a capital letter O with a small letter g at its center, to represent his high-level Magic User character, the Great and Powerful Og. And for her own character, Leucosia, Kira had designed the sword-and-wand L symbol. In all the drawings and paintings she did of Leucosia, that L always appeared somewhere on the character’s clothing or armor. This had eventually earned her character the nickname “Laverne”—a reference that initially made no sense to her, because she hadn’t grown up watching Laverne & Shirley in the UK.

L0hengrin reached out and flipped to another page of the notebook, near the back. She appeared to have its entire contents memorized already.

“Right there,” she said, pointing to a page of dense handwritten text. “When they obtain the final shard at the end of the module, the evil wizard Hagmar shows back up and they have to defeat him before they can recombine the shards.” She smiled wide. Then, as an afterthought, she leaned forward and added, “Hagmar is an anagram of Graham, which was the name of Kira’s abusive stepfather. But I’m sure you guys already figured that out.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “We had no idea. Thanks, Lo. You did an amazing job!”

Art3mis and Aech both nodded and began to applaud. Shoto and I joined in. Lo took a small bow, then she motioned to her friends.

“The L0w Five did this together,” she added. “Please distribute your thanks evenly among all of us.”

Aech, Shoto, Art3mis, and I all turned to give the rest of the L0w Five a round of applause too.

But we didn’t have much time for congratulations. Along with the others, I buried my nose back in Kira’s notebook, trying to speed-read through the remainder of its contents….I didn’t know what I was looking for, but felt sure I’d know when I saw it.

In Kira’s module, the hiding places of the first four shards were all quite different from the ones we’d encountered in the OASIS, and so were the challenges required to obtain them. But to my surprise, I recognized many of them. I had encountered each of them in a slightly different form, in Anorak’s Quest II and III, two early releases by Gregarious Games. This was a huge shock, because Kira was only credited as the artist on those games, not as a writer or designer.

I remembered that, in his autobiography, Og had complained about Halliday’s sexist behavior toward Kira more than once. He wrote that Halliday always seemed to try to downplay Kira’s creative contribution to their games. Og once told an interviewer, “Jim always jokingly referred to Kira as Yoko, which infuriated me, because if we were Lennon and McCartney, then Kira was our George Harrison. She didn’t break up the Beatles. She was one of the Beatles! And without her help, we never would have had a single hit.”

I remembered having my first real argument with Art3mis once about that very subject, during the first few months we knew each other. She’d started it by stating that Kira Morrow deserved to be listed alongside Og and Halliday as one of the true co-creators of the OASIS. She’d made comparisons to Rosalind Franklin, a woman who deserved to be credited alongside Watson and Crick as one of the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA. Or Katherine Johnson, whose calculations helped us reach the moon. Or countless other women who had been brushed aside or blatantly ignored.

At the time, I’d reminded her that during Halliday’s reign, GSS had adopted an equal-hiring policy, which required the company to hire at least one woman for every man they employed. Samantha pointed out that Kira and Og were the ones who had lobbied for that change, not Halliday. I responded by pointing out that Halliday could’ve rolled back the policy after Og and Kira left the company, but he didn’t. The same hiring policy was still in force today. But Samantha only rolled her eyes at me.

Now, all these years later, I could finally see that she’d been right all along. I’d just been too much of a slavish Halliday fanboy to believe anything bad about him. How times had changed.

I continued to flip through the notebook’s remaining pages, looking for anything that might be useful. But nothing caught my interest until I reached the last few pages, where Kira described how the party obtained the seventh and final shard.

Once the party has collected the first six shards, they must bring them to the Shrine of the Siren, located atop the highest peak of the Xyxarian Mountains of southern Chthonia. When all six shards are placed on the altar, the Seventh Shard will appear in the Siren’s hand.

I interrupted the High Five/L0w Five love fest to show this line to Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis.

“Every inch of those mountains was explored during the contest,” Shoto said. “If there was a shrine to Leucosia up there, someone would’ve discovered it.”

“Maybe it only appears once the first six shards have been collected?” Lo said.

Art3mis was still reading Kira’s notebook over my shoulder.

“What’s supposed to happen when the players recombine the shards?” she asked.

Lo reached over to the notebook and pointed at a paragraph halfway down the last page. I read it out loud: