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“It appeared on that bookshelf after Halliday’s contest ended, ” I finished.

L0hengrin nodded and held the 1989 calendar out to me.

“Now try swapping it with the one on the wall. ”

I took the calendar from L0hengrin, then, with my other hand, I reached out and tried to take the 1986 calendar down off the wall. To my surprise, it slid right off the nail it was hanging on. I carefully hung up the 1989 calendar in its place, and opened it to the month of January.

As soon as I let go of the calendar, its pages began to flip upward on their own, until the month of April was displayed. As the pages were flipping, the sky outside cycled rapidly between day and night, pulsing on and off like a strobe light. The entire Middletown simulation was fast-forwarding all around us, like time-lapse film footage played back at high speed.

When the strobing stopped, our surroundings had changed. The couches in Og’s basement had rearranged themselves, and two more bookshelves had appeared against the far wall, both filled with more gaming supplements. There were also several new posters on the walls. But the most striking difference was the time of day. Outside the basement windows, night had fallen. The streetlights were on and there was a full moon out.

“Whoa, ” I heard myself whisper. I glanced at the digital alarm clock sitting on top of one of the bookshelves. Its glowing blue display said the local time was now 1: 07 A. M.

I turned back to L0hengrin. She was beaming with pride.

“Swapping the calendars changes the time period of the Middletown simulation from October 1986 to April 1989, ” she explained. “But only this one instance of the simulation has been updated. The other two hundred and fifty-five copies of Middletown spread out across the planet remain set to the 1986 version. I’ve checked. ”

“If this is April in 1989, ” I said, “then what happens if we go over to the Barnetts’ empty guest bedroom now? ”

Lo grinned. “Before we head over there, you need to obtain an item located in this room. An audio cassette tape that Kira gifted to both Halliday and Og…. ”

She locked eyes with me, studying my reaction.

“What, are you actually quizzing me now? ” I asked.

Lo nodded and folded her arms. The dubious expression on her face made me laugh out loud.

“It was called Leucosia’s Mix, ” I said. “Oscar Miller mentions it in his memoir, The Middletown Adventurers’ Guild. But he doesn’t give the full track list. He just mentions one song that was on it—‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by the Smiths. ”

Lo nodded. “That’s exactly right, ” she said. “And now that we’ve jumped ahead to 1989, there are two copies of Leucosia’s Mix in the Middletown simulation. One in Halliday’s Walkman in his bedroom, and one here. ”

She walked over to the ground-level window at the opposite end of the basement, which looked out onto the Morrows’ moonlit backyard. Og’s boombox was resting on the window ledge. She pressed the Eject button and removed the tape inside.

“According to Miller’s book, Kira made two copies of this mixtape, ” she said, holding it up. “She gave one to Og and one to Halliday, a few months before her school year abroad ended and she had to go back home to London. ”

She tossed the tape to me and I held it up to read the sticker on its A side: Leucosia’s Mix was written on it in cursive, above a track-list insert filled out in the same handwriting.

“Thanks, ” I said, adding the tape to my inventory.

Lo was already running up the basement steps.

“Kira’s house is just a few blocks from here, ” she shouted over her shoulder. “Follow me! ”

When we reached the Barnetts’ house a few minutes later, L0hengrin halted at the end of the darkened sidewalk leading up to it. Then she pointed up to Kira’s bedroom window on the second floor. It was the only room in the house with a light on. In fact, glancing up and down the street, I saw that it was the only illuminated window on the entire block.

L0hengrin saw me noticing this and nodded her approval. But she didn’t say anything.

I thought for a moment, then took the copy of Leucosia’s Mix out of my inventory and examined the track list. There it was, the seventh song on side A. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths. One of Kira’s all-time favorites.

I turned to point this out to L0hengrin, but she was already sprinting into the house. I followed her inside.

L0hengrin was waiting for me inside the guest bedroom. On my previous visits, this room had been undecorated and empty, aside from a bed, a dresser, and a small wooden desk. Now sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks were piled everywhere, and posters adorned the walls. The Dark Crystal. The Last Unicorn. Purple Rain. The Smiths. Homemade collages hung there, too, made from magazine clippings of videogame characters and artwork.

Sheets of graph paper were tacked up everywhere, filled with Kira’s meticulous renderings of characters, objects, and landscapes from classic role-playing videogames, like Bard’s Tale and Might and Magic. I’d read about this. Kira had spent hundreds of hours copying pixels from the screen onto the graph paper, coloring them in by hand one square at a time, to figure out how different artists achieved their effects and improve on their techniques. When she worked at GSS later on, she became famous for creating artwork that pushed the boundaries of the computer hardware available at the time. Og was fond of saying that his wife had “always had a knack for bringing pixels to life. ”

I turned around slowly, trying to absorb as many details as I could. There were no family photos displayed anywhere. But she did have several pictures taped around the edge of her mirror, showing Kira with her nerdy new circle of friends—Halliday, Og, and the other misfit members of the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild. Several of those boys would later write tell-all books about growing up with Halliday and Og, and like every other die-hard gunter I’d scoured them all for details that might help me unlock the puzzles and riddles Halliday left behind. I’d reread them all again a few years ago, this time absorbing the details they contained about Kira’s life, so I knew that not a single one of them described the interior of her room at the Barnett residence. She was never allowed to have male visitors up there, and none of the boys in the guild had ever seen Kira’s room, including Og and Halliday. But I would’ve been willing to bet they’d both spent plenty of time imagining what it looked like. Maybe that was what I was looking at now—a simulation of what Halliday imagined Kira’s room looked like back then.

A small color television sat on Kira’s desk, with a Dragon 64 home computer connected to it. Seeing this made me smile. The Dragon 64 was a British PC built with the same hardware as the TRS-80 Color Computer 2, the first computer Halliday ever owned. According to one of the old journal entries he included in Anorak’s Almanac, when he found out that he and Kira owned compatible computers, Halliday took it as a sign they were meant to be together. He was wrong, of course.

Kira had a color dot-matrix printer hooked up to her computer, and the giant cork bulletin board on the wall above her desk was filled with printouts of her early original ASCII and ANSI artwork. Lots of pixelated dragons and unicorns and elves and hobbits and castles. I’d seen them all reprinted in collections of Kira’s artwork, but looking at them again now, I was still amazed at the detail and nuance she had been able to create with so few pixels and such a limited color palette.

L0hengrin walked across the room, over to Kira’s dresser, which had a small Aiwa stereo system sitting on top of it. She pressed the Eject button on its cassette deck, then pointed at the empty tray.

“Go ahead, ” she said. “You can do the honors…. ”

I walked over, put Leucosia’s Mix into the tape player, and fast-forwarded it until I reached the end of the sixth song on the first side (“Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield). When I hit the Play button, I heard a few seconds of analog tape hiss before the next song began, and Morrissey began to croon: Take me out tonight…

I glanced around the room. Nothing happened. I glanced over at L0hengrin. She held up a hand and mouthed the word wait.

So we waited. We waited until about three minutes into the song, when Morrissey starts to sing a riff on the title over and over again. There is a light and it never goes out…

As he sang “light” for the first time, the lid of a wooden jewelry box sitting next to the stereo flew open, and a necklace floated up out of it, as if lifted by an invisible hand. It was silver with a blue gemstone, and I recognized it as the one Kira was wearing in her 1989 Middletown High School yearbook photo. According to his autobiography, Og gave it to her the first time he told her he was in love with her.

When the Smiths song ended, there was a blinding flash of light. When it faded the floating necklace had transformed into a large blue teardrop-shaped crystal, spinning in front of us at eye-level.

There it was, at long last—one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul.

I stared at the shard in awe, feeling a strange combination of exhilaration and disappointment. I’d finally uncovered the First Shard’s hiding place. But after three years of trying, I hadn’t been able to do it on my own. No, I’d had to be led here, like a noob following a walkthrough. Buying victory like some clueless Sixer instead of earning it on my own, or with the help of my friends…

But my shame couldn’t drown out the rush of relief and validation. The shards were real. I still wasn’t sure what I was hunting for, or why it mattered, but now I knew this wasn’t just some meaningless riddle. It really was another hunt created by Halliday. And whatever the prize was, it had to be important.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blur of motion as L0hengrin reached for the spinning shard. Her hand passed right through it, as if it were a hologram.

“I’ve tried picking it up dozens of times, dozens of different ways, ” she said. “No matter what I try, my hand passes right through it. I don’t think anyone can touch it—except you, Halliday’s heir. To get the shard, you have to pay some sort of toll…whatever that means. ”

For each fragment my heir must pay a toll, to once again make the Siren whole.

“There’s only one way to find out, ” I said, reaching out for the shard.

My fingers didn’t pass through it—they closed around it. And as they did…

…For a moment, I was somewhere else. I was in a school classroom filled with old BBC Microcomputers. There was no one else in the room. I was sitting at one of the computers, and I could see my reflection in its monitor. Except it wasn’t mine. It was Kira Underwood’s face staring back at me. She—or rather, I—looked about nine or ten years old. And I felt exhilarated! My skin and scalp were tingling, and I could feel my pulse racing and my heart thudding inside of my tiny chest. I was staring at the screen, admiring a piece of artwork I’d just finished creating—a pixelated unicorn rearing up on its hind legs, silhouetted against a crescent moon.

I recognized this image. It was famous. It was the very first piece of digital artwork Kira Underwood ever created. And I appeared to be reliving the moment just after she had created it….

And then I was back, in my own body, standing in Kira’s bedroom—the guest room in Middletown.

Somehow, I’d just spent a moment inside Kira’s past.

I was still reeling when a series of cascading chimes rang in my ears and a message appeared on my HUD: Congratulations, Parzival! You’ve found the first of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul!

“What happened? ” L0hengrin said. “You zoned out for a second. Are you all right? ”

I looked down at the luminous blue shard in my hand.

“I had some sort of vision, ” I said. “Like a momentary flashback. I guess that was the ‘toll’ I had to pay? ”

“A flashback? ” she repeated slowly. “What do you mean? ”

“It felt like an ONI recording, ” I said. “But it only lasted for a few seconds. I was Kira Underwood—or at least, it felt like I was her—and I was reliving the moment when she created that unicorn on a computer at her school when she was ten. ”

“The Crescent Moon Unicorn? ” Lo said, eyes wide with awe. “But it had to be a simulation, right? ONI headsets didn’t exist back in the ’80s. And Kira died years before they were even invented. ”

I nodded. I’d just been thinking the same thing.

“No, it obviously couldn’t have been a real ONI recording, ” I said. “But it felt like one. Halliday must have simulated it. Though I don’t have the first clue how he could’ve done it so convincingly…. ”

“Or why, ” Lo said, shaking her head. “Why would he create a Sim of one of Kira’s childhood memories? From her perspective? That would be a pretty messed-up night of programming, man. Even for Halliday…”

I was considering this question when an urgent notification flashed on my HUD. It was an icon I hadn’t seen in years—a Scoreboard alert. When I selected it, a web-browser window appeared in front of my avatar, displaying Halliday’s old website, where the Scoreboard for his contest had once resided. A few seconds after I had found the egg and won the contest, the Scoreboard had been replaced with an image of my avatar dressed in Anorak’s Robes, along with the message: PARZIVAL WINS!

That image had disappeared. Now a new Scoreboard had appeared in its place. But instead of a list of the top-ten players, this Scoreboard only displayed one avatar’s name—my own. And instead of a numerical score, there was a single blue shard icon beside my name, followed by six empty slots.

“Whoa, ” L0hengrin whispered, running her hands through her short blond hair. She motioned to the blue shard icon glittering on the Scoreboard. “Now the whole world knows you have the First Shard. The newsfeeds must be blowing up. ”

I turned the shard over in my hands, then held it up and examined it more closely. There was an inscription engraved into its crystalline surface:

Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero

The very first heroine, demoted to hero

“ ‘The very first heroine, demoted to hero, ’ ” L0hengrin repeated, suddenly standing right next to me. “Oh shit! I think I know—”

“Please, don’t! ” I said, muting her avatar until she’d finished speaking. “I appreciate your help, but I can take it from here. ”

“Oh, ” she said quietly. “OK. I understand. ”

“I appreciate it, ” I said, placing the shard in my inventory to conceal it from view.

“If you get stuck, call me, ” Lo said. “I’ve already conducted a complete search of this 1989 version of Middletown, and I found a ton of stuff you won’t believe! Clues I bet will be helpful! This is stuff no one else knows about—”

“I appreciate the offer, ” I said again. “But I think you’re going to be pretty busy for the next few months…spending your reward. Time for you to get paid, Billie Jean. ”

Her face lit up.

“Wait, you mean right now? ”

I reached up to open up my avatar’s HUD and I saw her hold her breath. I opened the Financial Transactions menu, selected her avatar on my display, and tapped a series of icons. And that was it. One billion dollars were transferred from my OASIS account to hers.

L0hengrin looked like she might pass out when she saw the transfer go through.

“Congratulations, Lo, ” I said. “You’re a self-made billionaire. Don’t spend it all in one place. ”

I offered her my hand and she shook it. Her mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out. Then she lunged forward and wrapped her arms around me. I stood there frozen for a few seconds, then I hugged her back.

“I can’t tell you what this means to me, sir, ” she said, once she finally let go of me. “This is going to change everything for me. And for all of my friends. I’m gonna be able to buy a house in Columbus for us to live in together. ”

“That sounds like a pretty great plan, ” I said, hearing my voice catch. “Once you’re all moved in, I hope you guys will invite me over to hang out sometime. Or you can come to my place. I could use some more real-world friends. ”

“Well, we’ll have to see…. ” She laughed nervously. “You’ve still got six more shards to find…. And I’ve got…a lot of things to figure out…. ”

She frowned as she appeared to contemplate the logistics involved in using her newfound wealth to make her dreams come true. I knew from experience how overwhelming that could be.

I opened a window in front of her avatar, displaying the contract again. “Remember. You’ve agreed not to tell anyone else how to find this shard, or share any of the details of our interaction, until after I’ve found all seven shards. If you do, our deal will be nullified. ”

She gave me an anxious look.

“It’s all right, ” I said. “I know you probably already told some of your friends that you found the shard, and that you were planning to contact me about it. That’s not a big deal…. ”

“Hey, ” she said, leveling a finger at me. “Were you eavesdropping on us in our chatroom? You were, weren’t you? Like Og did to you and your friends during the contest! ”

I ignored the accusation.

“Just make sure no one else knows where or how to find the shard, OK? ” I said. “Not until after I’ve found all seven of them. Then you can each write a memoir for all I care. ”

She nodded slowly, biting her lower lip.

“Understood, ” she said finally. “But please, do all of your die-hard fans—like me—a favor and don’t do anything else to embarrass us, OK? ”

Before I could respond, she held up both hands, gave me a sheepish grin, and kept right on talking at a rapid-fire pace.

“I say that with all due respect, of course. Because I do respect you, and everything you’ve accomplished. You just lost your way a little bit. Which makes perfect sense—you suddenly became rich and famous! You know what Bill Murray said about that? ‘When you become famous, you’ve got, like, a year or two where you act like a real asshole. You can’t help yourself. It happens to everybody. You’ve got, like, two years to pull it together—or it’s permanent. ’ ”

I frowned at her. “I’ve been famous for well over three years now. ”

“I know! ” she replied cheerfully. “But it’s never too late to turn things around. ”

I nodded, trying not to show how much her words had wounded my pride.

She dropped her hands and exhaled. “Sorry. Had to be said. Has been said. Time to shut up now, Lo. ”

She mimed zipping her lips. Way too late, in my opinion. I wasn’t sure if I was touched, hurt, or angered by everything she’d just said. Maybe all three at once.

“You want to know my favorite Bill Murray quote? ” I asked.

She nodded.

“I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘Try being rich first. See if that doesn’t cover most of it. ’ ”

She laughed and shook her head. “I have no idea how to be a millionaire, much less a billionaire. It’s pretty nuts…. ”

She gave me an anxious smile. I recognized the overwhelmed look on her face. I’d seen it in the mirror the morning after I won Halliday’s contest.

“Listen, Lo, ” I said as I typed a brief text message on my HUD. “I’m gonna have one of my assistants at GSS get in touch with you. A guy named Marvin. He’s a good dude. He’ll be your assistant over the next few weeks, OK? He can help you relocate to Columbus. Hire a good lawyer and an accountant. Find a realtor and movers for you and your friends. Whatever you need. And I’d also like to arrange for you to have a GSS security escort until you’ve safely relocated. I promise they won’t bother you. Does that all sound all right with you? ”

She nodded, and the tears that had accumulated around her eyes streamed down her cheeks.

“Thank you, Mr. Watts, ” she said. “Wade. ”

“Thank you, Lo, ” I replied.

I handed her one of my contact cards, which were still designed to look like an old Adventure cartridge for the Atari 2600.

“Give me a call if there’s ever anything you need, ” I said. “Anything at all. ”

She stared down at the card. Then she snapped it out of my hands and rushed to give me one of her own contact cards. It was designed to look like a VHS copy of The Legend of Billie Jean. I immediately added it to my inventory.

“Thanks again for your help, ” I said, giving her a tiny salute. “Take care of yourself, OK? ”

Before she could respond, I teleported away, back to my stronghold on Falco.

I suddenly felt exhausted. And my daily twelve-hour ONI usage limit had nearly elapsed. I only had about forty-five minutes remaining. Some users could do a full twelve hours every day with no ill effects, but I wasn’t one of them. I always tried to log out before I hit the half-hour-remaining mark, to avoid the risk of giving myself the shakes or a migraine. I decided to wait until tomorrow to start looking for the Second Shard.

I saw that I had missed several calls from both Aech and Shoto, but I was too beat to call either of them back. I vowed to do so first thing in the morning.

When I logged out of the OASIS, my ONI headset woke me from the sleeplike state it induced and reconnected my mind with my physical body. As always, this process took a few minutes. It felt a bit like waking up from an incredibly vivid dream. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself back in my immersion vault, nestled in its gel-foam auto-recliner.

I pressed a button on the control panel and the armored canopy slid open with a pneumatic hiss. I pulled myself out, ritually humming the opening line of an old ’80s tune by Soul II Soul. Back to life. Back to re-al-it-y.

Feeling heavy in my own skin, I trudged back to the other end of the house, climbed the stairs, and collapsed into bed. A few minutes after my head hit the pillow, I drifted off to sleep.

Most daily ONI users lost the ability to remember their dreams, even though they still went into REM sleep each night. Unfortunately, I could still remember my dreams—or rather, one recurring dream that had been haunting me once or twice a week for several years now.

And despite my excitement over obtaining one of the shards, I had it again that night.

The details were always the same….

I found myself standing in Anorak’s study, next to the Big Red Button. Sometimes my right hand was poised above it and sometimes, like tonight, I was actually touching it. As always, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the button’s mirrored plastic surface. It was my face—Wade’s face—that I saw there, instead of that of my avatar, Parzival, though I was wearing the Robes of Anorak.

As soon as I got my bearings, two stacks of golden Marshall amplifiers magically appeared on either side of Halliday’s golden Easter egg and a hauntingly familiar song blasted out of them at earsplitting volume—“Push It” by Salt-N-Pepa.

Then the emcees themselves, Salt and Pepa, stepped out from behind the golden Marshall stacks, both singing into golden microphones, looking like they just stepped out of their music video in 1986. While DJ Spinderella rose up from behind Halliday’s egg, scratching a pair of solid gold records on a set of solid gold turntables.

Then, while I continued to stand there frozen, with my hand on the Big Red Button, Salt-N-Pepa performed the song’s chorus continuously, for what felt like several straight hours:

Ah, push it, push it good

Ah, push it, push it real good

Oooh, baby, baby! Baby, baby!

As recurring nightmares go, I could’ve done a hell of a lot worse. But to say that those lyrics had gotten stuck in my head would’ve been the understatement of the century. They were permanently welded to every neuron in my brain. Whether I was online or offline, dreaming or awake, the image of my face reflected in the surface of the Big Red Button was always lurking at the back of my mind and those lyrics were playing on an endless loop, telling me over and over again that I should not only push it!, but that the sensible thing would be for me to go the extra mile and push it real good!

Normally, that was where the dream ended. But tonight, I actually worked up the courage to take Salt-N-Pepa’s advice….

Big money, no Whammies, I remember thinking, just before I hit the Big Red Button with the open palm of my right hand. It lit up, and a Death Star klaxon began to sound in the distance. Then the button began to pulse off and on rapidly, growing brighter each time as its color changed from red to white.

When I turned around, Salt-N-Pepa had vanished, and the guys from Men at Work were standing in their place, singing the chorus of their 1983 hit single “It’s a Mistake. ”

I ran outside, onto the balcony. But I was no longer surrounded by the simulated landscape of Chthonia. Now I was in the Portland Avenue Stacks in Oklahoma City, where I’d grown up. And my aunt Alice’s trailer was right in front of me, perched precariously at the top of its stack. My aunt Alice was standing at her bedroom window, staring back at me with a look of bitter resignation on her face.

My gaze dropped to Mrs. Gilmore’s trailer, and I saw her, too, leaning out the window to feed some of her cats. She saw me and smiled. As she started to raise her hand to wave at me, the bombs IOI had planted outside detonated, and the entire stack exploded into an apocalyptic pillar of flame….

And this time, I couldn’t pretend Sorrento was to blame for their deaths. I was the one who had pushed the button. I had done this….

But I wasn’t going to have to live with the soul-crushing guilt I felt for more than a few seconds. Because the framework at the base of the flaming stack of trailers had just buckled, and now it was tilting and collapsing straight toward me.

I didn’t try to run. I didn’t even move. I just stood there and let justice take its course.

I woke up to the pleasant electronic chirp of the vintage analog phone beside my bed. It was an Anova Electronics Communications Center Model 7000, manufactured in 1982—the very same sleek, silver, retro-futuristic telephone that Ferris Bueller’s best pal, Cameron Frye, had beside his bed. When Cameron was in Egypt’s land, let my Cameron go…

When I got woken up by my phone, it was usually a bad sign. Max was programmed to hold my calls if I was sleeping, unless Samantha, Aech, Shoto, Og, or Faisal called with the priority level set to emergency. If I didn’t get a solid eight hours of sleep every night, it threw off my daily ONI routine. Faisal knew that.

Then I realized: my avatar’s name had appeared on Halliday’s old Scoreboard last night with a blue shard icon beside it. That was trending at number one on the newsfeeds worldwide, no doubt. And the GSS PR department was probably getting inundated with questions for me.

I crawled out of bed, wincing at the sunlight that flooded into the room as the wraparound window shades retracted. When my vision returned, I cleared my throat and took Faisal’s call on the wallscreen. He looked worried, which usually meant I was about to be worried too.

“Hey, Faisal, ” I muttered. “Good morning. ”

“Good morning, sir, ” he said. His video feed was shaky, because he was holding up his phone while running down an office corridor at GSS. The image stabilized as he boarded an elevator. “I apologize for waking you, but I wanted to—”

“To talk to me about finding the shard, ” I said. “And making a public statement, et cetera—but can we do it in a few hours? ”

“No, sir, ” Faisal said. “I was calling to make sure you’d seen the news. About Mr. Morrow. ”

I felt my heart rise into my throat. Og was in his mid-seventies. He’d appeared in good health the last time I’d seen him being interviewed, but that was months ago. Had he fallen ill? Or been in an accident? Had I waited too long to make amends with him and missed my chance?

“He’s missing, ” Faisal said. “Possibly abducted. The police aren’t sure yet. The story is all over the newsfeeds. ”

Max pulled all of the top video newsfeed channels up on my wallscreen, next to Faisal’s video-call window. My discovery wasn’t the day’s top news story after all. Photos or video clips of Og flashed in front of me, accompanied by headlines like OGDEN MORROW MISSING and OASIS CO-CREATOR MORROW VANISHES HOURS AFTER PARZIVAL FINDS FIRST SHARD.

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