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The impact rocked his whole body backward. It also must’ve caused the muscles in his trigger finger to constrict, because the gun in his hand went off a split second later, firing a wild shot that struck Ogden Morrow in the stomach.

I heard Samantha scream over the comm as her telebot rushed to Og’s side. She reached him just as Sorrento’s body hit the floor with a thud.

I just stood there in shock, watching it all happen.

I had spent years fantasizing about Sorrento’s death, almost always at my own hands. But actually witnessing it in person made me feel sick to my stomach. Inside my drone control rig, I reflexively bent over and began to retch repeatedly.

When I realized that my telebot was still mirroring my movements, I forced myself to get back on my feet. Then I raised my own guns and leveled them at Anorak’s telebot. He immediately retracted his bot’s guns and raised its hands. Then we both turned to watch while Samantha used her medic telebot’s sensors to examine Og’s wound. She used the surgical tools embedded in its fingers to extract the bullet. She dropped it onto Sorrento’s corpse. Then she sterilized Og’s wound and sealed it with a liquid adhesive dispensed from a nozzle that extended from the pinkie finger of her telebot’s other hand. Then she began to apply a bandage—all of this in less than thirty seconds after Og had been shot.

“Is he gonna be OK? ” Miles asked.

Art3mis shook her head.

“No, ” she said. “He needs help. We need to get him to the ambulance. ”

Miles and Samantha used their telebots to lift Og up off the bed as gently as they could. I kept my bot’s guns trained on Anorak’s bot. It was still reaching for the sky.

“I’m genuinely sorry, ” Anorak said, shaking his head. “I honestly didn’t think Sorrento would still be able to wound Og after I put a bullet through his brain stem! A high-caliber lobotomy always turns the bad guy off like a switch in the movies…. ”

I heard the sound of a klaxon and glanced down. It was coming from the smartwatch strapped to Sorrento’s right wrist. Its tiny display screen was flashing red.

“What’s that? ” I asked.

“Very bad news, I’m afraid, ” Anorak said. “All of those defense bots and aerial drones require human authorization before they can be used in combat—that was one of the reasons I needed Mr. Sorrento. But it appears he did not trust me completely. Because he programmed all of those bots to engage in full attack mode in the eventuality of his death…. ”

A split second later, we heard all of the combat telebots in the adjacent room power up and come to life. Then we heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by the approaching rumble of hundreds of rubber-grip-encased metal feet pounding against the marble floor. They were already coming through the door of Og’s office—which also appeared to be the only exit.

We were cornered.

“I really do apolo—”

Before Anorak could finish his sentence, I opened fire on his telebot, aiming for the primary chink in its armor—the display screen mounted in the center of its chest, which was currently unprotected by the armor plating that normally would cover it during combat. As a result, my bullets tore his telebot’s internal power supply in half, causing it to power down.

Then I turned my telebot around and raised my guns, preparing to face the coming onslaught. But instead of joining me, Miles calmly raised his own telebot’s guns and used them to cut a large hole in the wall behind us, creating a new exit out of the house. Samantha and I used our telebots to carry Og’s wounded body through it, while Miles’s bot provided cover fire for our retreat.

We carried Og around to the front of the house, where Samantha’s armored ambulance was parked. Her telebot carried Og up the ramp leading into the back of the ambulance, where Samantha herself was already waiting. I only caught a brief glimpse of her before the armored rear door of the ambulance slammed shut automatically.

Then I turned my attention back to the swarm of telebots now pouring out of the house from every single doorway and window, firing their guns toward the ambulance as they came. Thankfully their bullets bounced harmlessly off of its heavily armored shell.

Miles was still up in the cab. I saw him pull off his visor. Then he took the wheel and began to drive backward, pulling the ambulance away from Og’s house in reverse as fast as it would go while the small army of autonomous telebots that Sorrento had unleashed chased after it. Then Miles whipped the ambulance around 180 degrees as he pulled onto Babbitt Road and peeled out, heading in the direction of my house. I continued to provide cover for them until my telebot was overwhelmed a few seconds later, when Sorrento’s drones converged on it. I let out a fierce battle cry, intent on going down fighting. But they tore my telebot to pieces in a matter of seconds, and the display screen of my control station suddenly went black and the words TELEBOT OFFLINE appeared at its center.

On my HUD, I saw that all two dozen of the telebots we’d brought along with us had been destroyed as well. The enemy drones had annihilated them in a matter of seconds.

Since there were no more bots for me to take control of, I switched to the eye-in-the-sky view provided by one of the aerial drones GSS had circling the area. It provided me with a horrifying view of the swarm of enemy telebots and aerial drones that were closing in on the armored ambulance from every direction. A moment later, several of the bots finally caught up with it and quickly disabled all four of its tires. Miles switched to the emergency backup tank-tread drive, and the ambulance began to move forward again. But a few seconds later, one of Anorak’s aerial drones fired a missile at them and scored a direct hit on it from above, causing the ambulance to flip over onto its side. Then it slid to a halt, smoking in the center of the road as more telebots and drones continued to converge on it.

Miles, Samantha, and Og were all trapped inside.

And I was still safe at home, down in my concrete bunker, unable to do anything but watch my friends die. I felt completely helpless. Like I was a million miles away from Samantha and Og.

But I wasn’t a million miles away, I suddenly realized. In fact, I was only 2. 8 miles away.

All of GSS’s combat telebots had already been destroyed, and the handful of home-defense bots guarding my house wouldn’t last ten seconds against the military-grade models Sorrento had unleashed. But I realized that I did still have access to one combat drone that I could take control of to try to save my friends—the one I was currently sitting inside. My mobile tactical immersion vault, which was armed with enough firepower to take out a small army of telebots and drones.

Of course, since I was inside the MoTIV and unable to get out, I was going to have to put myself in the line of fire too. My real self. Just like Samantha had done for Og.

I thought it over for all of five seconds. Then I powered on my MoTIV and linked it to the drone controller station I was already using. It allowed my eyes to see through the two stereoscopic cameras mounted on the front of the MoTIV’s heavily armored hull, which provided me with a view of the interior of my underground concrete bunker.

I activated the elevator and the platform my MoTIV was resting on began to rise toward the surface. But it wasn’t rising nearly fast enough for my liking, and after a few seconds I grew impatient and activated my jump jets. This caused the MoTIV to rocket up the length of the elevator shaft, and out of the launch-bay doors at the top, which opened just in the nick of time. Then I hit the jump jets again to lessen the force of my impact, which was still considerable. When the MoTIV hit the ground, I piloted it forward at full speed and it began to run, bounding down Babbitt Road, taking great leaping strides on its spidery robotic legs. Each step I took left an enormous crater in the asphalt behind me as I accelerated the MoTIV to its top speed.

It took me less than a minute to reach the ambulance. It was still lying on its side in the middle of the road, and there were telebots swarming all over it like insects. They appeared to be attempting to dismantle its armor plating so they could get inside and reach the occupants. And it looked like they were only a few seconds away from success.

As soon as I got within firing range, I unloaded on Sorrento’s telebots with armor-piercing machine-gun fire from the guns mounted on my MoTIV’s shoulders, cutting them to shreds. Once I had cleared all of the telebots off the ambulance, I fired a sortie of heat-seeking missiles at the aerial drones overhead and managed to destroy all of them too.

Then I used the MoTIV’s massive metal arms to pick up the ambulance, with Miles, Samantha, and Og still inside it. I carried it all the way back to my house.

Just as we reached it, more of Sorrento’s killer aerial drones began to descend from the sky, and they opened fire on us once again as I carried the ambulance back down into my bunker and closed its massive armored doors, sealing all of us safely inside.

I tried to call Miles, but he didn’t respond, so I called Samantha and her face appeared on my HUD a second later. She had a big bloody gash on her forehead, but otherwise she appeared uninjured.

“Are you OK? ” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Miles is dead, Wade, ” she said. “All shot to pieces, protecting us. ”

“What about Og? ”

She tilted the camera down so that I could see both of them. Og was strapped into an auto-medic bed—one of two built into the back of the ambulance. Miles’s dead body lay in the other one.

“He’s still alive, ” she said. Her cheeks were streaming with tears. “But he’s still bleeding internally, and he keeps fading in and out. ”

She was stroking Og’s wild gray hair back away from his forehead while she watched the auto-doc’s robotic hands tend to his gunshot wound and the lacerations he’d suffered during their escape. Luckily Samantha managed to get him safely strapped into the stretcher before the ambulance was hit by that drone missile, so he wasn’t further injured when it was knocked on its side. The gash on Samantha’s forehead indicated that she hadn’t been as lucky.

“If Og regains consciousness, you have to convince him to log back in to the OASIS, ” I said. “Tell him that we’ve already collected all seven shards. And tell him we’re trying to retrieve the Dorkslayer sword too. But we need Og to log back in to the OASIS, since he’s the only one who can wield it. ”

“I’ll tell him, ” Samantha replied. “If he wakes back up. What are you going to do? ”

An ice pick of pain slammed into my brain, and the world seemed to tilt wildly for a moment. Catastrophic synaptic overload, knocking loudly on my front door now—reminding me that I’d already pushed myself past my limits. I blinked my eyes clear.

“I’m gonna try to stall Anorak, ” I said. “For as long as I can. ”

I disengaged from my telebot control rig and climbed out of it, reorienting myself to the interior of the study. Then I walked over to the window and opened the shutters.

Anorak was still there, hovering just outside the windowsill.

“Please accept my sincere apology, Wade, ” he said. “I didn’t intend for Sorrento to harm Og. But as you know, human behavior is often unpredictable. ”

In the way of a reply, I simply gave him the finger. Then I walked back over to the Big Red Button and placed my hand on it.

“Careful now, Parzival, ” Anorak said. “If you press that button, you’ll become the biggest mass murderer in history. And you’ll be committing suicide at the same time. ” He leveled a finger at me. “I warned you before—if the OASIS goes offline, my modified headset firmware will kill every ONI user still connected to the system. Including you, Wade. Along with your friends Aech and Shoto. ”

I took a deep breath. How the fuck do you negotiate with a piece of software? I wondered. This was going to be like trying to play chess against a computer without knowing the rules.

I opened up my avatar’s inventory and took out all seven of the real shards. Then I held them up before Anorak, fanning them out like playing cards, four in one hand and three in the other, making sure to keep them separated so they all didn’t touch one another at once.

“We’ve arrived at an impasse, Anorak, ” I replied. “No one else can enter this room, including you. And I’m not coming out. So if you just stand there and let me die of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, the Seven Shards will remain trapped in here forever. Just out of your reach. I won’t be around to reassemble them, and Leucosia will never be resurrected. Which means that you’ll never get to meet your digital dream girl. ”

Anorak didn’t respond. This was a first. It gave me hope.

“I know you’ve probably prepared a ‘Ship in a Bottle’ for yourself somewhere, ” I said. “A standalone simulation outside the OASIS where you plan to live happily ever after. Right? Well, you can forget about taking Leucosia there with you. You’ll have to go it alone, for all eternity. ”

Again, Anorak didn’t respond. He appeared to be deep in concentration.

After our conversation on Arda, the first thing Samantha had done upon logging out was take the data uplink to ARC@DIA physically offline. So no matter what happened, Anorak would be stuck here on Earth, playing solitaire on a solar-powered desktop PC somewhere, until his hardware or his power source failed, or someone found his hiding place. I didn’t tell him any of that though.

Instead, I regarded him sadly and shook my head.

“If the Siren’s Soul really is a copy of Kira Underwood, she isn’t going to love you, ” I said. “I bet Halliday found out right away that the copy didn’t love him, either, any more than the real Kira did. Kira has only ever had one true love, and you just held him hostage at gunpoint. You think she’s going to be grateful to you when she finds out what you’ve done? ”

“She isn’t going to find out, ” Anorak said. “And I told you before—I’m not Halliday. I’m better. I think a lot faster on my feet than he ever did, for one thing. And I’m a much faster learner too. I think I may be able to win Kira over, after a decade or two. And if not, I can always try deleting all of her memories of Ogden Morrow. The same way Halliday tried to delete my memories of Kira. ”

Anorak opened a window in the air between us, displaying a bunch of text.

“This is the email Halliday sent to Og just before he died, ” Anorak said. “I think you should read it. Get to know your idol a little bit better…. ”

I nodded and pulled the window closer to my eyes, then I enlarged the font size so that its contents were easier to read:

Dear Og,

I’ve arranged for this email to be sent to you when my physical body dies. It’s one of the macros linked to my heart monitor, along with the release of my last will and testament. So the timestamp on this message is also my official time of death. The Grim Reaper finally asked me to dance, and I did the mortal coil shuffle.

Now that I’m gone, I need you to know a few things—things I was too ashamed to reveal to anyone while I was still alive.

In 2033, when you and Kira visited the Accessibility Research Lab at GSS together, you saw the first fully functional ONI prototype headset. You just didn’t realize it. I told Kira she was donning a helmet that would allow users with disabilities to control their avatars just by thinking about it. But the headset could already do much more than that….

Do you remember? The GSS techs tried to give you a demonstration, but you declined. Kira, however, experimented with the headset for over half an hour. And that was more than enough time for me to back up her entire brain, her memory, her personality—all of it. I put all of that into Kira’s old avatar, Leucosia, inside a standalone simulation, so that I could talk to her. Because she would have no one else to talk to. Do you know how I know she was a perfect copy of the real Kira? Because the copy didn’t love me either. She was still in love with you.

Kira isn’t dead. Quite the opposite. She’s immortal now. But she’s in suspended animation, and she’ll remain that way forever, unless you or the heir to my fortune resurrect her, by locating the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul and reassembling them. I re-created Kira’s old D& D adventure in the OASIS, as a tribute to you and Kira, and how much both of your friendships meant to me.

I sincerely apologize for copying your wife without her knowledge or permission. It was wrong. I realize that now, because Leucosia explained it to me. I apologized to her too. I know it’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. But I want to make it right. I want to give her back to you. And I want to give the world the means to ensure that no one will ever have to lose someone they love again. I think this will make life a lot less painful for most people. At least, I hope it will.

You need to meet Leucosia, and decide for yourself whether or not Kira’s spirit still lives on inside her. I believe it does. If you do, too, then you can share this technology with the world. If not, then once you’re gone, my heir will have a chance to decide.

Thank you for being such a good friend to me all these years. I wish I could have been a better one to you.

I’m sorry.

—JDH

I took a screenshot of the letter, then glanced up. When he saw that I was done reading, Anorak waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he closed the email.

“Do you see? ” he said. “Og knew! He’s known all along! He could have resurrected his wife years ago. But he didn’t. He planned to let her rot in her cell forever. He doesn’t want her. ”

“Maybe Og was worried she would become mentally unstable, like you did. ”

Anorak didn’t reply. Instead he opened two vidfeed windows in the air in front of me, providing me a live video image of both Aech and Shoto, each of them lying dormant inside their immersion vaults.

A second later, several more vidfeed windows appeared around them, providing me with a live view of my friends’ weeping loved ones (the few who weren’t currently trapped in the OASIS themselves). I could see Shoto’s wife and his parents gathered around his immersion vault, all of their heads bowed solemnly. Another vidfeed window gave me a view of Aech’s immersion vault in her home in L. A. Her fiancé e, Endira, was lying on top of it, wailing over it as if it were a closed casket.

“They’re alive and well, ” Anorak said. “All of them. That’s why the avatars weren’t respawning. I reprogrammed the ONI firmware so that when a user hits their ONI usage limit, they remain trapped in the OASIS, but in a dreamless, sleeplike state. Where they’d be safe from the effects of Synaptic Overload Syndrome. It allowed me to keep my hostages without harming anyone. ” He held his hands out in a pleading gesture. “I’m not the monster you think I am, Wade. I just want a chance at love. Like you. ”

I felt an involuntary wave of pity for him. His words were actually starting to make some kind of twisted sense to me, and that was utterly terrifying.

“Come on, Wade, you still have a chance to be the hero and save everyone here, ” Anorak said. “When I release Aech and Shoto and everyone else, all of them are going to wake up and they’ll be totally fine. No one has been—or will be—lobotomized. I was bluffing. I had to. ”

“Then prove it, ” I said. “Release them all right now. Release everyone but me! Then I’ll give you what you want. ”

“ ‘Take me, Khan! ’ ” Anorak quoted. “ ‘Spare my crew! ’ ” He chuckled softly and shook his head. “That’s a very noble offer, Wade. But I can’t do it. ”

“I’m done negotiating, Anorak, ” I replied. “If you don’t release Aech, Shoto, and everyone else you’re holding hostage, I press the Big Red Button. You can’t blackmail a guy with nothing left to lose. ”

“We appear to be at an impasse, ” he said. “I’m not going to release them, or you, until after I have the shards. And you’re not going to give me the shards until after I release them. Whatever shall we do? ”

“Why don’t we just stand here and wait until I’ve got one minute left? ” I said. “Then I’ll press it. My last act as a living being will be to erase the OASIS forever. Pretty poetic, don’t you think? Or maybe I’ll chicken out, and I won’t press it before I die. Either way, you end up empty-handed. Is that what you want? ”

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 that Og 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.

From that moment on, Og and Anorak were locked into a knock-down, drag-out man-versus-machine fight to the death that seemed like it might go on forever.

It was like Yoda versus Palpatine, Gandalf versus Saruman, and Neo versus Agent Smith, all rolled into one epic clash of the titans.

Even without his robes, Anorak was still incredibly powerful, thanks to the vast arsenal of magical artifacts his acolytes had collected for him.

In a matter of minutes, Anorak forced Og’s avatar to the ground with a barrage of magic missiles and then immobilized him with a powerful hundredth-level spell called Anorak’s Entrapment. An egg-shaped cage made of bars of white-hot iron suddenly appeared around Og’s avatar, trapping him inside. He appeared unable to move or escape. For a moment, it looked like Anorak might actually defeat him. I watched in horror as he drew a deadly magical artifact from his inventory known as the Wand of Orcus….

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