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As soon as they were gone, I told Art3mis my new theory about Anorak’s plan for the Vonnegut. I thought she might shoot holes in it, but she didn’t. Instead she simply nodded in agreement.

“As soon as I log out, I’ll relay all of this to Miles and our security team, ” she said. “We’ll take it into account and formulate a plan while you go after the final shard. Sound good? ”

I nodded. Art3mis took a small object out of her inventory and handed it to me. It looked like a miniature haptic rig, about two inches tall. The item description said it was a Tactical Telebot Control Station.

“This will allow you to sync with one of the telebots we’re going to deploy at Og’s old mansion, ” Art3mis explained. “I’ll signal you to activate. ”

“Thanks, Arty, ” I said, adding the item to my own inventory. “For everything. ”

“You’re welcome, ” she replied, smiling. Then, to my surprise, Art3mis leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“For luck, ” she said, a split second before she teleported away and her avatar vanished.

I stood there for a moment, touching the spot on my cheek where she had kissed me. Then I noticed that my hands were starting to tremble a little. I was running out of time fast.

I took a deep breath and teleported myself to Chthonia, to obtain the last of the Seven Shards.

I double-checked the coordinates in the OASIS atlas, then teleported myself directly to the top of the highest peak of the Xyxarian Mountains, which were located on the continent of Xyxaria in Chthonia’s southern hemisphere.

I had flown over these mountains several times, on my way to explore other parts of Halliday’s world. But I had never set foot in the mountains themselves. There was no reason to, because there was nothing there. The whole mountain range was a groan zone—an unpopulated plot of procedurally generated landscape, where there were no NPCs to meet and no quests to complete. Thousands of other gunters had explored every inch of these mountains and they’d all confirmed that there was absolutely nothing of interest here.

But when my avatar rematerialized on the top of that mountain, I did see something there—the Shrine of Leucosia. A Stonehenge-like circle of seven chiseled granite pillars, with a raised altar at the center.

I knew this structure couldn’t have been there before today. Someone would have noticed it. Hell, I probably would’ve noticed it myself on one of my flyovers.

I entered the shrine and approached the altar. Then I took out Kira’s Trapper Keeper and opened it up. I flipped through the pages until I found the pencil illustration of the Shrine of Leucosia. The shrine in front of me looked exactly like Kira’s drawing. A stone statue of her avatar, Leucosia, stood at the head of the altar. In her right hand, she held a round shield with her character symbol emblazoned on the front. Her left hand was outstretched and empty, with her palm facing upward toward the gray sky overhead. Beneath the statue, chiseled into the flat stone surface of the altar, were these words:

Seek the Seventh Shard of the Siren’s Soul

on seven worlds where the Siren once played a role.

For each fragment my heir must pay a toll

to once again make the Siren whole.

Beneath this inscription, also carved into the surface of the altar, were six identical shard-shaped cavities.

It seemed obvious what I was supposed to do.

I removed all six of the shards I’d collected from my avatar’s inventory and placed them into the six cavities in the surface of the altar. Each one began to glow bright blue when I dropped it into place. Once all six shards were in place, there was a blinding flash of light directly ahead of me. When my eyes recovered, I saw that the seventh and final shard had appeared in the statue’s outstretched hand. It was glowing bright blue, like all the others.

I retrieved the first six shards from the altar in front of me and placed them back inside my inventory. Then I reached up and took the Seventh Shard from the statue’s hand and placed it in my own. When I did, I experienced one final flashback….

Kira was sitting in a chair in the Accessibility Research Lab at GSS, back before Halliday shut it down. I recognized it from some of the archival photos and video I’d seen.

James Halliday was standing directly in front of her, holding what appeared to be an early prototype of an OASIS Neural Interface headset. It was much larger and far less streamlined than the production models. It was so bulky that it actually looked more like a helmet than a headset.

Og was standing just a few feet away, with a nervous look on his face.

“This device will allow people to control the movements of their OASIS avatar with their mind, ” Halliday said as he lowered the prototype gently onto my/Kira’s head. “It just takes a minute to calibrate it. ”

Then Halliday reached over and pressed a button on a control panel and I saw a brief, blinding flash of light.

When the flashback ended, I found myself back on Chthonia, standing before the Shrine of Leucosia, clutching the Seventh Shard. I immediately added it to my avatar’s inventory. I looked at all seven of them, lined up side by side. Then I glanced back over at the words etched into the altar beside me: For each fragment my heir must pay a toll.

I recalled each of the “tolls” I’d been forced to pay—the seven flashbacks I’d experienced.

On Middletown, I’d seen Kira creating her first piece of digital artwork at school.

On Kodama, it was the moment that Og told her he loved her for the first time.

On Shermer, it was Og showing up at Kira’s house in London, to rescue her and bring her back to Ohio.

On Halcydonia, it was the moment Kira showed Og the logo she’d designed for their new company.

On the Afterworld, I’d seen Prince serenading her on her birthday—a gift from Og.

On Arda, I’d relived the moment when Og revealed the replica of Rivendell he’d built for her.

And now, finally, here on Chthonia, I’d experienced the last seven seconds of Kira’s memory that Halliday had recorded—on the day he’d copied the contents of her mind without her knowledge or permission.

What must it have been like for Halliday, experiencing those memories himself? Seeing Og and Kira’s love firsthand, and himself as the sad, obsessed outsider? As the brilliant-but-clueless friend whom they both tolerated out of pity. Had he chosen these moments to punish himself? Or, perhaps, to ensure that whoever awakened Kira fully understood the crimes he’d committed against her, and the depth of his wrongdoing?

Certainly, I felt closer to Kira now, more aware of her as a human being and an artist. And I saw James Donovan Halliday far more clearly too. He had undeniably been a genius, but until just one day ago, I’d viewed him as a benevolent one, whose brilliance and inventiveness had only elevated humanity. Now it was impossible to deny that he had also been a profoundly fucked-up human being. Immoral. Disturbed. Emotionally detached. A techno-hermit who had betrayed the trust of his two best friends in the world.

My days of lionizing him were at an end.

Of course, there was a good chance that all of my days were about to end, but…still.

I glanced up at the statue of the siren Leucosia and bowed my head to her in thanks. That was when I saw the Bracelet of Detection on my wrist begin to glow bright blue. A second later, I heard a familiar teleportation sound effect directly behind me—the one from the old D& D cartoon that always preceded Anorak’s arrival.

“You did it again! ” I heard him say. “Congratulations, Parzival! ”

I turned and found Anorak standing right behind me, with a huge smile on his face.

“And you’ve still got more than ten minutes to spare! ” he added, pointing to his Swatch.

“Well, if it isn’t the Master Control Program, ” I said. “Come to collect his ransom. ”

Anorak ignored my insult and smiled even wider.

“Very impressive, Wade, ” he said. “I calculated an extremely low probability that you would actually be able to pull this off. ”

“I had a lot of help from my friends, ” I said. “And not all of them made it. ”

Anorak’s grin vanished and he held out his hand.

“Combine the Seven Shards and give me the Siren’s Soul, ” he said. “Then I’ll release you, your friends, and the rest of my hostages, as promised. ”

I wanted to draw one of my vorpal swords and cut his goddamn head off. But I didn’t. I kept my cool and stuck to the plan.

I opened my avatar’s inventory and took out seven shards. But these were not the same seven shards that I’d just spent the last twelve hours collecting. They were identical-looking counterfeits—brand-new magical artifacts created by our OASIS programmers at GSS at my request and to my specifications. The counterfeits were designed to have the same appearance and detectable magical properties as the real shards, which were all still stored safely in my avatar’s inventory.

I laid the seven counterfeit shards on top of the altar, side by side. Then I snapped them together, one by one, like the pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle. Once all seven pieces were in place, there was another flash of light and they coalesced together to form a large, perfectly symmetrical multifaceted jewel, resting in the palm of my open hand. It pulsed with an internal blue light that looked and sounded like a heartbeat.

I stared at the beautiful jewel in wonder for a moment, then held it out to Anorak, who was already reaching for it. When his hand touched the jewel, the item was transferred from my avatar’s inventory to his. But in that instant, I was allowed to select an item from Anorak’s inventory and transfer it into mine. That’s because he had just made the mistake of accepting a brand-new magical artifact, of my very own design. I called it the Jewel of Acquisition. When another avatar—or NPC—took it from you, it allowed you to take any item from their inventory in return. So when Anorak touched it, a list of every item in his inventory appeared on my HUD. It was filled to capacity with magic items and powerful artifacts. More than I had ever seen in one place. The list was alphabetized, so I continued to page down until I finally found the only item I was interested in—the Robes of Anorak.

When I selected the artifact on my HUD, the robes immediately disappeared off of Anorak’s avatar, causing him to revert to his alternate appearance—that of a middle-aged James Halliday, dressed in a pair of worn jeans and a faded Space Invaders T-shirt.

For the first and only time in my life, I saw Anorak react with what appeared to be genuine surprise. But I didn’t have time to stop and savor it. The moment the Robes of Anorak appeared in my inventory, I immediately put them on and used them to teleport to the one location in the OASIS where no avatar or NPC could follow—the small library located at the top of Castle Anorak’s tallest tower….

The room where the Big Red Button was located.

The mind is the only thing about human beings that’s worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones and tubes?

No wonder people can’t get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time. And the fool thing wears out anyway—no matter how much you stuff and protect it!

—Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

When I rematerialized inside the study in Castle Anorak’s tallest tower, I was standing directly in front of the pedestal on which Halliday’s Easter egg was displayed. I ran over to a bookshelf set against the wall and pulled on the spine of one of the volumes it held—a novel called Simulacron-3. I heard a click and then the bookshelf slid aside, revealing a square metal plate set into the wall. In the center of the plate there was a comically large red button embossed with a single word: OFF.

I took a Cube of Force out of my inventory and activated it. A cube-shaped force field appeared around my avatar. This was a precaution—I knew from experience that no other avatars or NPCs could follow me inside this room. But I was still worried that Anorak might be the exception, because he had been in here at least once before, on the day I won the contest. But that was also the day he’d given me the Robes of Anorak. And he’d transferred all of his innate powers to me at the same time. So I was betting that he’d been stripped of his ability to reenter this room at the same time.

I heard the whoosh of Anorak’s teleportation sound effect—and to my relief, saw him reappear just outside the study’s open window. My assumption had been correct. Halliday had coded this room of the castle so that only I, the winner of his contest, could enter it. When Anorak cast a spell to teleport to my location, the system could not comply, so it teleported him just outside the room.

There was no ground under his feet, so he began to plummet for a few seconds before levitating back up to my level. Then he hovered just outside the window so that he could address me.

“Very sneaky, Wade, ” Anorak said. “I didn’t anticipate this specific series of events. But that might be because your actions don’t make any sense. Nothing has changed…. ”

I deactivated the Cube of Force and stowed it, then I took out a Ring of Telekinesis and slipped it onto the middle finger of my left hand. Then I reached out with my right hand and placed it gently on the Big Red Button.

“We know where you and Sorrento are holding Og hostage, ” I said. “In his old residence on Babbitt Road here in Columbus. GSS has a squad of telebots outside now to retrieve him. Let him go, right now, or I’ll press this thing. ”

He smiled and shook his head.

“I can’t do that, man! ” he replied cheerfully. “It would be a stupid move. Now that you and your friends have shown me exactly where and how to collect all seven shards, I can just walk Og’s avatar through the same steps—once I figure out his passphrase. It shouldn’t take much longer. I would’ve cracked it already, I’m sure, if Halliday hadn’t erased so much of my memory. ”

“Anorak, ” I said, “I’m not kidding. If you don’t release Og unharmed, I swear to Crom, I will press this fucking thing and delete your psychotic ass, along with the Seven Shards and the rest of the OASIS. To hell with the consequences. ”

I took a giant boom box out of my inventory and placed it on the ground. Then I slapped in a tape and hit Play. The same Peter Wolf song that Anorak had used to taunt us earlier began to blast out of its speakers. I sang along with its opening lyrics:

Lights out ah ha. Blast, blast, blast.

Anorak didn’t seem to find this funny. He opened his mouth to shout something at me, but before he could get it out, I used the Ring of Telekinesis to slam the window shutters closed and bolt them, so that Anorak could no longer see or hear me, and vice versa. No form of magic or technology would allow him to spy on me while I was in this room either. But I was able to monitor Anorak through any number of the live vidfeeds of him being streamed by avatars who currently happened to be gathered outside the castle. He was still hovering outside the shuttered window, glaring at it in silence.

I opened my HUD and texted Art3mis the signal we’d agreed upon in advance:

WE CAN DANCE IF WE WANT TO

Her reply flashed across the top of my HUD a few seconds later:

IT’S ON LIKE RED DAWN!

I smiled and removed the tiny Tactical Telebot Control Station Art3mis gave me from my inventory and tossed it onto the stone floor. It instantly grew to its full size. Its height and appearance resembled that of a conventional OASIS immersion rig. It even had a built-in omnidirectional treadmill at its base. I found this similarity ironic, since the device served the exact opposite purpose. Instead of allowing me to use my real body to control an OASIS avatar, the Telebot Control Station allowed me to use my OASIS avatar to control a robotic body in the real world.

The Telebot Control Station automatically powered itself on when I climbed into it. Spindly robotic arms extended from the rig to place a virtual OASIS visor and haptic suit on my avatar. These allowed me to see, feel, hear, and touch the real world from inside the OASIS, through the sensory apparatus of the telebot I was now piloting.

Through its head-mounted cameras, I could see that my telebot was still in its charging dock, which was located in the back of an ATC—an armored telebot carrier—which was currently in motion. I was surrounded by about two dozen other identical telebots. I recognized them as brand new Okagami ACT-3000s—armored combat telebots with forearm-mounted machine guns and shoulder-mounted missile racks. The security team at my house used ACT-2000s, which were designed for home defense. The 3000s were designed for military use in all-out warfare. Miles and Samantha had apparently decided not to take any chances.

When I swiveled my telebot’s head around to take in my surroundings, I spotted both Samantha and Miles just a few feet away, on the other side of a bulletproof window that separated the cargo hold from the ATC’s heavily armored cab. They were both wearing OASIS visors and haptic gloves, because they were each controlling one of the telebots in the back of the transport too. Their bots both nodded at mine as soon as they saw it activate.

Then Samantha’s bot turned toward mine. It was a combat medic telebot, outfitted with surgical tools and medicine instead of weapons and ammo. Its armor plating was painted white, and it had a big red cross on its forehead. Its armored chest plate swung open like a pair of doors, revealing a small monitor that displayed a live vidfeed of her OASIS ravatar’s face, which looked like a live mirror image of Samantha’s face in reality, minus the OASIS visor she was currently wearing.

It took me a few seconds to find the button that opened my own bot’s chest plate. When I pressed it, she had an unobstructed view of my own avatar’s face too. Through all those layers of machinery and technology, we locked eyes. I saw determination in her eyes, but then her expression softened, and for a second I could swear I saw her looking at me the way she used to—with love and warmth and hope.

Then Miles addressed me through his telebot and the moment was over.

“Hello, Mr. Watts, ” he said. “It’s very good to see you, sir. ”

“Hey, Miles, ” I replied. “Thanks for arranging all of this. ” I turned back to address Samantha. “What are you doing here? ” I asked her. “I mean, why are you physically here, in the cab of this truck? It isn’t safe. ”

“Because Og is physically here too, ” she replied. “And he isn’t safe right now either. He’s also sick. So if we manage to get him out of there, I don’t want him to be surrounded by telebots and total strangers. I want to be there to put my arms around him. ”

I nodded, momentarily unable to speak. Unlike me, she was thinking about Og instead of herself. Her instinct was always to act out of kindness and generosity instead of self-interest. She was a better person than me, and I was a better person when I was around her. And I desperately wanted to get her back in my life. For that to happen, I needed her to be alive.

“Og wouldn’t want you to put yourself in danger, ” I said. “And—I don’t want you to either, Samantha. ”

“News flash, sweetie, ” she replied. “We’re all in danger right now. The whole human race. So get over yourself, and get your game face back on, OK? ”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t. I just nodded and took a deep breath.

“We’re just a few seconds away from the house now, ” she said. “So far, no sign of any aerial drones in the area, aside from our own. But stay alert. ”

I checked the mission map on my telebot’s HUD. It showed that we were already approaching Og’s former residence from the east, trundling up the long paved driveway that led from Babbitt Road up to the main house. I could see it in one of the vidfeed windows on my display, coming from a camera mounted on the front of our transport. It was a large ultramodern mansion, similar in size and style to my own house. Halliday and Og had their mansions constructed at the same time, and on the same street, shortly after they co-founded Gregarious Games and both of them became multimillionaires.

The house and the grounds around it looked deserted. There were no vehicles of any kind parked on the property, and there was no sign of any activity from within the house either. All of the doors and windows were shut and the shades were drawn.

The rear of the ATC lowered to the ground, forming a deployment ramp. Ahead of me, the other telebots began to detach from their charging docks one by one and file off the transport. My bot was one of the farthest from the exit and one of the last to step outside. I piloted it over to join the others, which were now standing in formation directly in front of the main entrance to the house. Samantha piloted her bot over to mine. As it approached me, its armored chest plate slid aside again, revealing the monitor that displayed live vidfeed of her OASIS avatar’s face.

“What did you say to Anorak? ” she asked.

“I told him that if he doesn’t release Og to us, I’ll press the Big Red Button. ”

“Did he take you seriously? ”

“I think so. ”

“Are you serious? ” she asked. “Would you really press it? ”

I nodded.

“If Anorak doesn’t release Og, it may be our only way to stop him, ” I said. “And if I die from synaptic overload, no one else will have the ability to press the button after I’m gone. ”

Art3mis nodded. Then she craned her telebot’s neck backward so that she could scan the sky overhead with its cameras. Then she tilted them back down to look at me.

“Our eyes in the sky still don’t see any sign of an impending aerial assault, ” she said. “And sensor scans of the house still haven’t detected any heat signatures inside. Maybe Anorak installed thermal shielding inside the house. Or maybe he already had Sorrento move Og to another location. ”

I pointed toward the front door and said, “Let’s go find out. ”

She nodded. Her telebot’s display screen went dark, and its armored chest plate slid back into place over it. Then I watched as her telebot suddenly turned around and began to run straight toward the front door of the house, which appeared to be made of solid oak. She nodded at Miles and a second later both telebots slammed their armed torsos into it like a pair of battering rams. The oak door splintered into pieces that exploded inward, littering the polished marble floor of the empty foyer beyond.

Over the comm system, I heard Miles instruct four of the other telebot operators to stand guard at the front entrance. Then he instructed the others to circle the house and try to find other ways inside. Once those telebots had marched off to carry out his orders, Miles piloted his own bot through the shattered doorway and into the foyer, and Art3mis and I followed him with ours. When my telebot entered Og’s mansion, a transparent map of the house (taken from its construction blueprints) appeared on my HUD, highlighting our current location.

I looked around. The lights were off and the room was completely empty. There was no furniture of any sort, nor was there anything hanging on the walls. When Og had moved out west, he’d apparently taken everything he owned with him.

Art3mis’s medic telebot clanked down the corridors directly in front of us, then it kicked open a pair of huge wooden doors at its far end. Beyond them was another large wood-paneled room devoid of any artwork or furniture. It looked like it might have been a large dining or meeting room, back when the house was occupied. But now Anorak appeared to be using it as his personal armory, because it was filled with heavily armed aerial drones and more than a hundred Okagami ACT-3000 telebots just like our own. The telebots were standing in neat, ordered rows on the polished marble floor. Their armor plating was covered with desert camouflage paint—an indication that they were probably stolen from the military. But they were all powered down, and as we crossed the room, they remained completely motionless, with their weapons retracted. The drones were Habashaw ADP-4XLs, and they were loaded into automatic launch racks that were aimed at the two skylights embedded in the ceiling. But they, too, were powered down.

I tiptoed past them, expecting them all to come to life at any moment. But they remained dark and still. I wondered if Anorak had ordered them to stand down. Perhaps he was afraid to call my bluff about the Big Red Button.

Samantha’s telebot reached another oak door at the far end of the room, grabbed the knob, and then yanked it completely off its hinges before tossing it aside. The room beyond was completely dark, but Samantha ran her bot inside anyway without hesitation. Miles and I piloted our own telebots in after her, following her single-file. Once all three of our bots were inside, the emergency floodlights mounted on their shoulders all switched on automatically, lighting up the interior of the room.

We were in Og’s former home office and library—a large U-shaped room at the southern corner of the house. I recognized the ornately carved woodwork on the empty bookshelves that lined the back wall of the room, from several different photos of Og that had been taken here, of him sitting at his desk, working away on his computer. But now the desk and all of the other furniture was gone. The room was empty, except for two conventional haptic rigs that stood side by side at its very center. They were both Habashaw OIR-9400s—the same top-of-line immersion-rig model that Sorrento and the Sixers preferred to use during the days of Halliday’s contest. Both of the rigs were currently empty.

“Back here! ” I heard a familiar voice shout. It was Nolan Sorrento, and his words echoed off the oak-paneled walls and the vaulted ceiling of the empty room, making my blood run cold.

I rotated my telebot’s head to scan the entire room until I located the source of the voice. It had come from just around the corner at the opposite end of the room, off to our left. I could see a small amount of light down there as well. I walked my telebot in that direction, until I was able to see around the corner.

There was a hospital bed pushed up against the wall, and Ogden Morrow was lying there on it unconscious. He looked gaunt and extremely pale. He had an IV drip attached to his right arm, and a biomonitor built into the foot of the bed displayed his vital signs. Through its tiny speaker, I could hear the thud of his heartbeat, which sounded steady, if a bit slow.

Og was still alive! I felt like jumping for joy.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Nolan Sorrento was standing right beside Og, holding a gun to his temple and wearing a big, friendly smile.

“Well, well, well, ” Sorrento said. “If it isn’t my old pal, Parzival! Hey, man! It’s good to see you again! ” He turned to address Samantha’s telebot and his smile widened. “And Ms. Cook! You’re looking lovely today, as always. ”

On the opposite side of the bed was another of the stolen military telebots we’d seen in the adjacent room. But this one was being operated by someone. Both of its forearm-mounted machine guns were raised. But they weren’t pointed at Og. They were pointed at Sorrento. Yet he didn’t appear to be at all concerned by this.

“Sorry, Wade, ” Anorak said through his telebot while keeping its guns trained on Sorrento. “I ordered Nolan to stand down and release Mr. Morrow, as you requested. But as you can see, he’s still refusing to comply. ”

“We had an agreement, Anorak! ” Sorrento shouted. “And this wasn’t it! I did my part. Now do yours. Give me what you promised! ” He pressed the gun harder against Og’s temple and glared directly at me. “I want my revenge. I want to destroy the OASIS forever. ” He shifted his gaze back to Anorak. “Give me access to that Big Red Button. Right now. Or I’ll spray Mr. Morrow’s brains all over that wall. It’s up to you. ”

“I’m so sorry, Nolan, ” Anorak replied. “But I no longer have the ability to honor our agreement. And now that all the shards have been collected, you’re no longer of any use to me. So, as a self-appointed representative of the state of Ohio, I’m going to carry out the sentence you were given two years ago. ”

Then, suddenly and without warning, Anorak fired a single round from his telebot’s forearm-mounted gun and shot Sorrento directly in the forehead.

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