Ready Player One (22 page)

“Shit!” I cursed. “Then every gunter in the sim will be headed here to search for the Copper Key.”

“Right,” Aech said. “And before long, the location of the tomb will be common knowledge.”

I sighed. “Well, then you better get the key before that happens.”

“I’ll do my best.” He held up a copy of the
Tomb of Horrors
module. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to reread this thing for the hundredth time today.”

“Good luck, Aech,” I said. “Give me a call once you’ve cleared the gate.”

“
If
I clear the gate …”

“You will,” I said. “And when you do, we should meet in the Basement to talk.”

“You got it, amigo.”

He waved good-bye and was about to end the call when I spoke up. “Hey, Aech?”

“Yeah?”

“You might want to brush up on your jousting skills,” I said. “You know, between now and midnight.”

He looked puzzled for a moment; then a smile of understanding spread across his face. “I got ya,” he said. “Thanks, pal.”

“Good luck.”

As his vidfeed window winked out, I found myself wondering how Aech and I would remain friends through everything that lay ahead. Neither
of us wanted to work as a team, so from here on out we would be in direct competition with each other. Would I eventually regret helping him today? Or come to resent that I’d unwittingly led him to the Copper Key’s hiding place?

I pushed these thoughts aside and opened the e-mail from Art3mis. It was an old-fashioned text message.

I reread her message several times, grinning like a dopey schoolboy. Then I typed out my reply:

After rewriting it a few dozen times, I tapped the Send button. Then I pulled up my screenshot of the Jade Key riddle and began to study it, syllable by syllable. But I couldn’t seem to concentrate. No matter how hard I tried to focus, my mind kept drifting back to Art3mis.

Aech cleared the First Gate early the next day
.

His name appeared on the Scoreboard in third place, with a score of 108,000 points. The value of obtaining the Copper Key had dropped another 1,000 points for him, but the value of clearing the First Gate remained unchanged at 100,000.

I returned to school that same morning. I’d considered calling in sick, but was concerned that my absence might raise suspicions. When I got there, I realized I shouldn’t have worried. Due to the sudden renewed interest in the Hunt, over half of the student body, and quite a few of the teachers, didn’t bother showing up. Since everyone at school knew my avatar by the name Wade3, no one paid any attention to me. Roaming the halls unnoticed, I decided that I enjoyed having a secret identity. It made me feel like Clark Kent or Peter Parker. I thought my dad would probably have gotten a kick out of that.

That afternoon, I-r0k sent e-mails to Aech and me, attempting to blackmail us. He said that if we didn’t tell him how to find the Copper Key and the First Gate, he would post what he knew about us to every gunter message board he could find. When we refused, he made good on his threat and began telling anyone who would listen that Aech and I were both students on Ludus. Of course, he had no way of proving he really knew us, and by that time there were hundreds of other gunters claiming to be our close personal friends, so Aech and I were hoping his posts would go unnoticed. But they didn’t, of course. At least two other gunters
were sharp enough to connect the dots between Ludus, the Limerick, and the
Tomb of Horrors
. The day after I-r0k let the cat out of the bag, the name “Daito” appeared in the fourth slot on the Scoreboard. Then, less than fifteen minutes later, the name “Shoto” appeared in the fifth slot. Somehow, they’d both obtained a copy of the Copper Key on the same day, without waiting for the server to reset at midnight. Then, a few hours later, both Daito and Shoto cleared the First Gate.

No one had ever heard of these avatars before, but their names seemed to indicate they were working together, either as a duo or as part of a clan.
Shoto
and
daito
were the Japanese names for the short and long swords worn by samurai. When worn as a set, the two swords were called
daisho
, and this quickly became the nickname by which the two of them were known.

Only four days had passed since my name had first appeared on the Scoreboard, and one new name had appeared below mine on each subsequent day. The secret was out now, and the hunt seemed to be shifting into high gear.

All week, I was unable to focus on anything my teachers were saying. Luckily, I only had two months of school left, and I’d already earned enough credits to graduate, even if I coasted from here on out. So I drifted from one class to the next in a daze, puzzling over the Jade Key riddle, reciting it again and again in my mind.

According to my English Lit textbook, a poem with four lines of text and an alternate-line rhyme scheme was known as a quatrain, so that became my nickname for the riddle. Each night after school, I logged out of the OASIS and filled the blank pages of my grail diary with possible interpretations of the Quatrain.

What “captain” was Anorak talking about? Captain Kangaroo? Captain America? Captain Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth century?

And where in the hell was this “dwelling long neglected”? That part of the clue seemed maddeningly nonspecific. Halliday’s boyhood home on
Middletown couldn’t really be classified as “neglected,” but maybe he was talking about a different house in his hometown? That seemed too easy, and too close to the hiding place of the Copper Key.

At first, I thought the neglected dwelling might be a reference to
Revenge of the Nerds
, one of Halliday’s favorite films. In that movie, the nerds of the title rent a dilapidated house and fix it up (during a classic ’80s music montage). I visited a re-creation of the
Revenge of the Nerds
house on the planet Skolnick and spent a day searching it, but it proved to be a dead end.

The last two lines of the Quatrain were also a complete mystery. They seemed to say that once you found the neglected dwelling, you would have to collect a bunch of “trophies” and then blow some kind of whistle. Or did that line mean
blow the whistle
in the colloquial sense, as in “to reveal a secret or alert someone to a crime”? Either way, it didn’t make any sense to me. But I continued to go over each line, word by word, until my brain began to feel like Aquafresh toothpaste.

That Friday after school, the day Daito and Shoto cleared the First Gate, I was sitting in a secluded spot a few miles from my school, a steep hill with a solitary tree at the top. I liked to come here to read, to do my homework, or to simply enjoy the view of the surrounding green fields. I didn’t have access to that kind of view in the real world.

As I sat under the tree, I sorted through the millions of messages still clogging my inbox. I’d been sifting through them all week. I’d received notes from people all over the globe. Letters of congratulation. Pleas for help. Death threats. Interview requests. Several long, incoherent diatribes from gunters whose quest for the egg had clearly driven them insane. I’d also received invitations to join four of the biggest gunter clans: the Oviraptors, Clan Destiny, the Key Masters, and Team Banzai. I told each of them thanks, but no thanks.

When I got tired of reading my “fan mail,” I sorted out all the messages that were tagged as “business related” and began reading through those. I discovered that I’d received several offers from movie studios and book publishers, all interested in buying the rights to my life story. I deleted them all, because I’d decided never to reveal my true identity to the world. At least, not until after I found the egg.

I’d also received several endorsement-deal offers from companies who wanted to use Parzival’s name and face to sell their services and products. An electronics retailer was interested in using my avatar to promote their line of OASIS immersion hardware so they could sell “Parzival-approved” haptic rigs, gloves, and visors. I also had offers from a pizza-delivery chain, a shoe manufacturer, and an online store that sold custom avatar skins. There was even a toy company that wanted to manufacture a line of Parzival lunch boxes and action figures. These companies were offering to pay me in OASIS credits, which would be transferred directly to my avatar’s account.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

I replied to every single one of the endorsement inquires, saying that I would accept their offers under the following conditions: I wouldn’t have to reveal my true identity, and I would only do business through my OASIS avatar.

I started receiving replies within the hour, with contracts attached. I couldn’t afford to have a lawyer look them over, but they all expired within a year’s time, so I just went ahead and signed them electronically and e-mailed them back along with a three-dimensional model of my avatar, to be used for the commercials. I also received requests for an audio clip of my avatar’s voice, so I sent them a synthesized clip of a deep baritone that made me sound like one of those guys who did voice-overs for movie trailers.

Once they received everything, my avatar’s new sponsors informed me that they’d wire my first round of payments to my OASIS account within the next forty-eight hours. The amount of money I was going to receive wouldn’t be enough to make me rich. Not by a long shot. But to a kid who’d grown up with nothing, it seemed like a fortune.

I did some quick calculations. If I lived frugally, I would have enough to move out of the stacks and rent a small efficiency apartment somewhere. For a year, at least. The very thought filled me with nervous excitement. I’d dreamed of escaping the stacks for as long as I could remember, and now it appeared that dream was about to come true.

With the endorsement deals taken care of, I continued to sort through my e-mail messages. When I sorted the remaining messages by sender, I discovered that I’d received over five thousand e-mails from Innovative Online Industries. Actually, they’d sent me five thousand copies of the
same e-mail. They’d been resending the same message all week, since my name first appeared on the Scoreboard. And they were still resending it, once every minute.