Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

Anorak was about to reply when I saw a blur of movement behind him. I let out a sigh of relief and put the shards back in my inventory.

“Hold on,” I said. “I just thought of another option. Remember when you said you were Halliday’s rightful heir—the only one worthy of inheriting his power?”

“I do.”

“Why don’t you prove it?” I said. “In a duel to the death. Mano a mano. Winner takes all. If you win, you take the shards. But if you lose, all of your hostages go free.”

Anorak grinned as he looked me over. He could probably tell that I was already suffering the effects of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, as a result of being logged in for nearly twelve straight hours.

“All right, Parzival,” Anorak said. “I accept your proposal. A duel to the death. Winner takes all.” He grinned wide, then he held up a remote control with a single large green button on it. “If you manage to kill me, my infirmware will be deactivated and all of my ONI hostages will be released immediately.”

“Good to know,” I said.

Anorak laughed.

“You’re not gonna win, doofus,” he said, flying back from the window to make room for me to emerge from it. “Synaptic Overload Syndrome is already starting to fry your neurons.”

He motioned for me to come forward. But I didn’t emerge from the window to fight him. Instead, I folded my arms and remained inside the safety of the study.

“I never said who you had to fight to the death,” I muttered, smiling weakly. Then I pointed over Anorak’s shoulder. He turned around to see the Great and Powerful Og hovering in the air behind him.

“Hey, nerd,” Og said. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”

Anorak looked genuinely surprised thatOg was still alive. He looked even more surprised a second later, when tines of blue lightning erupted from Og’s fingertips and blasted him backward several hundred yards before he collided with a mountain, creating a large impact crater that immediately started an avalanche. Anorak was buried under tons of rock in a matter of seconds. But moments later, he exploded up out of the rubble looking completely unharmed.

Og flew after him like a rocket, and then the two of them faced off in the sky directly in front of me, hovering over the same field where the Battle of Castle Anorak had taken place over three years earlier.

Og wasn’t behaving like someone who was at death’s door from a gunshot wound. He looked completely fine—and he didn’t even appear to be in any pain. How was this possible?

Then I realized how—for the first time in his life, Og had donned an ONI headset, so that he could log back in and face Anorak.

“It’s funny,” Og said. “Back when we first built this place, schoolkids all over the world would argue about who would win in a battle between Anorak and the Great and Powerful Og. And I have to admit, I always used to wonder too.” He smiled at Anorak. “Of course, when Jim died, I didn’t think we’d ever know the answer. But life continues to be full of surprises—right up until the bitter end.”

With that, Og launched his avatar forward, flying toward Anorak as Anorak hurtled forward to meet him.

And that was how I ended up having a front-row seat for what was undoubtedly the most epic player-versus-NPC battle in the history of the OASIS, as the avatars of its two creators locked horns for the biggest prizefight in history—the Great and Powerful Og versus Anorak the All-Knowing, the digital ghost of his old partner, James Halliday. And since I had such a great view, I decided to air everything I was seeing on my POV channel, so the whole world could tune in.

The two mighty avatars collided with a thunderclap, and the sky overhead suddenly filled with dark thunderclouds that rolled in and spread from one end of the horizon to the other, like a dark cloak being unfurled.

Then Og and Anorak began to grapple with each other as they careened across the heavens, throwing boulder-crushing punches at each other like Superman and General Zod, while they shouted things only the two of them could hear.

Then they suddenly broke apart and began to hurl fireballs and thunderbolts at each other like two warring Olympian gods. But Og and Anorak both appeared to be impervious to each other’s powerful attacks, which ricocheted harmlessly off of their unarmored avatars’ skins, wreaking havoc and destroying huge chunks of the simulated landscape around the castle.

I zoomed in on my HUD for a better look. Og looked like he’d gone into full berserker mode. He was attacking Anorak with a relentless and uncharacteristic ferocity that I’d never seem him exhibit before, in person or in old simcaps. Now that Nolan Sorrento was no longer holding a gun to his head, Og was finally able to get some long-overdue payback for all of the pain Anorak had caused him over the past few days….

I was still standing there at the study window, watching their battle in awe, when I suddenly felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through my skull. The pain made me drop to my knees. I felt myself starting to black out as I struggled to maintain control of my avatar. I’d been wondering when this would happen. It was even more terrifying than I’d anticipated.

I slowly lowered myself to the floor and lay very still. That was when I noticed the broadcast-invitation icon flashing on my HUD—an indication that one of the handful of people on my friends list was currently doing a live broadcast of their avatar’s POV….

When I tapped the icon, I discovered that it was Og!

Og was broadcasting his battle with Anorak live to the entire OASIS. Along with the rest of the world, I watched as the battle of the OASIS co-creators continued to rage on outside, in the skies around the castle. Anorak and Og exchanged blasts of red and blue lightning, scorching the landscape all around them.

The pain in my head subsided somewhat, and I managed to pull myself back up to the windowsill. When I looked out, to my horror I saw that an army of Anorak’s acolytes had begun to arrive via teleportation. In just a few seconds there were hundreds of thousands of them.

I was worried they were all planning to try to gang up on Og. But they all remained on the sidelines, watching like spectators at a prizefight. They all began to broadcast their POVs to the rest of the OASIS, too, and suddenly it became possible to watch the battle from hundreds of different locations and angles.

Anorak and Og collided again in the sky above the castle, creating a massive shockwave that rocked the surrounding landscape.

A few seconds later, Art3mis teleported to Chthonia. Her avatar rematerialized on the steps of Castle Anorak far below me. Then she immediately launched herself into the sky to try to assist Og.

Art3mis had one of the most powerful and well-equipped avatars in the OASIS, and she was a deadly PvP combatant too. But it didn’t matter. Anorak dispatched her avatar with a single blast of energy from his right hand. Her ninety-ninth-level avatar instantly disintegrated, and its enormous inventory fell to the ground outside.

I desperately wanted to fly down to retrieve her things, but I was too weak to move. And I knew I couldn’t leave the study without making myself temporarily vulnerable to Anorak and all of the powerful magical artifacts in his possession.

When Og saw Anorak kill Art3mis, he looked completely enraged, even though he must’ve known that even though her avatar was dead, Samantha was still alive and well in the real world. Maybe he’d forgotten. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly either. Or maybe he’d just had enough of Anorak.

Og let out an angry cry of rage as his avatar took flight again. He rocketed toward Anorak like an ICBM and the two of them collided in another explosion of light and energy.