This was another moment Og had described in his autobiography. Something that had occurred in April of 1990, after Kira told her family she intended to move back to the States that summer, to help Og and Halliday found Gregarious Games, instead of going to university like they wanted her to. Hearing this, her abusive stepfather had become enraged and slapped her. (I could still feel the dull ache of pain around her/my left eye at that very moment.) When she called Og and told him, he jumped on the first flight to London to get Kira and bring her back home. And I was experiencing Kira’s memory of that rescue. Or a few seconds of it anyway…
Og glanced back over his shoulder, locked eyes with me/Kira, and gave her a warm smile that let her know everything was going to be all right, that she was safe, and that he would protect her. In that instant, I also felt her intense physical reaction to Og’s glance and his smile, and it gave me a sense of just how profoundly Kira had loved him. Samantha’s smile still gave me the exact same sensation—a sensation best described as devastation.
* * *
…Then, in a blink, the flashback was over. I found myself back on the dance floor with Art3mis. And when I looked down, I saw the Third Shard in my right hand.
I turned it over to read the clue. But instead of words, I saw an image engraved there. It was an ornate shield adorned with stylized math symbols for addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. I recognized it immediately as the coat of arms of Queen Itsalot, sovereign ruler of the magical kingdom of Itsalot on the planet Halcydonia.
I felt a sudden surge of optimism, immediately followed by an overwhelming sense of dread. On one hand, this was a huge stroke of luck. I’d spent a huge chunk of my childhood on Halcydonia, and my knowledge of it was encyclopedic, even by gunter standards. But I hadn’t set foot on the planet in over ten years. And after my last visit, I’d vowed never to return.
Art3mis and I—along with Aech and Shoto, both looking shaken but eager to rejoin the quest—materialized on Halcydonia. Specifically, within my personal Be-Free Treehouse, located deep within the Friendship Forest of Faraway, which was where any Halcydonian was automatically transported when they returned to the planet. Any kid in the OASIS under the age of thirteen could earn a Be-Free Treehouse by completing the free educational quests spread across the planet. Once you earned your treehouse, it belonged to you for the rest of your life, and no one could come inside it without your permission. It was just a tiny virtual space, but growing up in the stacks, it was also the first space that I was able to call my own—and the only one, until I discovered my hideout.
When Kira and Og founded Halcydonia Interactive and created this planet, they’d cooked up the Be-Free Treehouses as a way to give kids around the world a free, happy, virtual home inside the OASIS that they could always escape to, and find themselves surrounded by an endless assortment of furry friends and anthropomorphic animal teachers who were always overjoyed to see them, and who just wanted to teach them how to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic, all while staying physically fit and being kind to others.
Being able to put on my OASIS visor and be transported to the magical kingdom of Halcydonia was one of the things that kept me sane, and it made my life in the Portland Avenue Stacks bearable. And it did the same thing for millions of other kids around the world.
If you were under age thirteen, you could teleport to Halcydonia for free from Incipio, or from any public transport terminal anywhere else in the OASIS. And once you got there, all the quests and learning games were free too. I never wanted to leave. And for a few years, I almost never did. Those were the last few years of my mother’s life, when she was slipping deeper into depression and the addiction that would end up killing her.
During those last years, as our tiny, grim trailer in the stacks became an increasingly unpleasant place to be, I spent more and more time hanging out inside my treehouse on Halcydonia, and sometimes after she got off work, my mom would log back in to the OASIS and join me there, so I could tell her about my day, or show her the artwork I’d made, or introduce her to one of my new virtual animal friends.
The inside of my Be-Free Treehouse was one large circular room, with a continuous band of windows all the way around the outside wall, giving us a panoramic view of the surrounding forest, which was filled with millions and millions of identical trees, each with an identical treehouse built into it. This dense forest of treehouses appeared to stretch on forever, in every direction.
Like all of the treehouses, mine had a large hollow tree trunk at the center, containing a spiral staircase leading to the ground. I’d decorated the interior so that it resembled the treehouse where Chewbacca’s family lived on Kashyyyk in the Star Wars Holiday Special. Aech noticed this a few seconds after we arrived and chuckled, then she let out a long Wookiee growl of recognition. I didn’t laugh. I was too busy teetering on the verge of an emotional breakdown, as I took a long look around the room.
There was a giant console television on one side of the room, positioned directly in front of an even more enormous blue couch. The TV was still running through a playlist of some of eleven-year-old Wade’s favorite shows. There was currently a green Muppet newscaster on the screen, and after a few seconds I placed him as Gary Gnu, the host of The Gary Gnu Show. He had orange hair and an orange goatee, and he was in the midst of uttering a phrase that I must’ve heard hundreds of times when I was growing up here: “No g’news is good g’news with Gary Gnu!”
By turning the treehouse TV’s giant channel knobs, you could watch shows from a huge free library of old children’s educational programming from the late twentieth century. Shows like 3-2-1 Contact, The Big Comfy Couch, Captain Kangaroo, The Electric Company, The Great Space Coaster, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Romper Room, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, Zoobilee Zoo, and many, many more. Kira and Og had used their vast fortunes to purchase the rights to these long-forgotten shows, then uploaded all of them to the free video archive here on Halcydonia, where future generations of kids could keep enjoying and learning from them forever.
But the Morrows didn’t stop there. They also re-created the sets from all of these old educational shows as virtual OASIS environments, and all of their characters as lifelike NPCs. Then they scattered these characters and environments all over the surface of Halcydonia, mixed in with the Morrows’ own educational quests and minigames. That was one of the many reasons Halcydonia had felt like such a magical place to spend my time as a lonely kid in the stacks. As I wandered across its magical landscape (which was completely devoid of advertising and microtransactions), I might see Elmo from Sesame Street talking to Chairy from Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Then they would both run over and invite me to play a game of Sorry! or Trouble on a nearby picnic table. That sort of thing happened everywhere on Halcydonia. For a kid like me, it hadn’t just been an escape. It had been a life preserver, a lone place of joy and belonging for a little boy desperate for both.
I’d always thought of the Morrows as two of my very first teachers. But now, I realized they had also served as my surrogate parents. That was why it had been so thrilling to meet Og in person and become his friend—and why it had been so devastating when he’d turned his back on me. Now I knew I’d given him no other choice.
The walls of my treehouse were covered with old drawings and artwork that my mother and I had created together. Lots of knights and wizards. And Ninja Turtles. And Transformers. There were also a bunch of framed selfies of our avatars posing together, taken in this very room. And just a few feet away, sitting atop a bookshelf, was a real photograph of me and my mother, taken in our trailer, just a few months before she died. In it, we were both making silly faces as we posed for a selfie.
I’d forgotten that photo was here, and seeing it again for the first time in a decade felt like having an old wound ripped open, right there in front of my friends.
Art3mis saw the photo, too, along wit
h my reaction to it, and she immediately went over and placed it facedown on the bookshelf. Then she walked back over to me and gave my shoulder a comforting squeeze.
“You need a minute?” she asked. “We could wait outside.”
“You guys should know something,” I said. “I had a nervous breakdown the last time I visited this planet. That’s why I haven’t been back in so long.”
They all studied my face to see if I was kidding, and saw that I wasn’t.
“I was eleven years old at the time,” I said. “And my mother had just died of a drug overdose a few days earlier. I went back to Halcydonia because my mom and I had spent so much time here together. I thought it might bring me some comfort, but it didn’t. It just pushed me over the edge.”
“I’m so sorry, Z,” Art3mis said. “But this time you aren’t alone. Your friends are with you. And we are going to stay with you, the whole time. OK?”
I nodded. Then I bit my lower lip to keep it from trembling.
Shoto rested a hand on my shoulder. Then Aech did the same thing and said, “We got your back, Z.”
“Thanks, guys,” I said, once I found my voice again. Then I took out the Third Shard and pointed at the coat of arms etched into its surface. “This is the coat of arms of Queen Itsalot, the sovereign ruler of the kingdom of Itsalot, which is a small continent to the south, where most of the math-related quests are located.”
I opened a map of the planet and made it visible to everyone. It looked just like the Map from Dora the Explorer, but I quickly muted it before it could start singing its own name.
“We’re here,” I said, pointing to the Friendship Forest. “The queen lives in Castle Calculus, which lies to the south, beyond the MoreStuff Mountain Range and across the SeeSaw Sea. No teleportation is permitted on this planet, and it would take us several hours to get there on foot. But I know a shortcut. That’s the exit, over there.”
I motioned to the spiral staircase inside the hollow tree trunk at the center of the room. Shoto ran over and began to descend it first, with Aech close behind. But she had to stop and shrink her avatar to half-size to make it onto the tiny staircase. As she was doing that, I went over to grab my tiny Halcydonia Adventurers’ Club backpack off its hook on the wall. These backpacks couldn’t be added to your avatar’s inventory, and the items inside were only useful on this planet, so everyone left them in storage lockers, or in their Be-Free Treehouse, like me.
My mother’s identical backpack was hanging right beside it. I tried to avoid looking at it, but then I went right ahead and looked at it anyway. Including the word stitched onto the back flap in cursive with pink yarn: Mama.
I hit the emotion-suppressing software on my HUD, so Art3mis wouldn’t see me start to sob. I managed to keep moving. I put my own backpack on my avatar’s back. As I did, it automatically enlarged itself to fit my twenty-one-year-old frame. I turned to follow the others down the staircase. But Art3mis was standing there, blocking my way. The emotion-suppressing software was working—there was no way she should have known I was crying, but somehow she did. I tried to go around her. But just like the first time we met, she refused to let me pass.
Instead, she opened her arms and wrapped them around me—something I had long ago accepted that she would never do again. She held me tight, until I finally got my sobbing under control.
Samantha knew all about my mother, and how I found her dead of a drug overdose on our couch when I was eleven. It was heroin mixed with some other stuff, I think. That was the reason I’d avoided all ONI recordings made by heroin users for the entire first year the ONI-net was online. Then curiosity finally got the best of me, and I went all the way down the ONI-net heroin-addict-high rabbit hole. I wanted to experience what my mother had experienced firsthand. To find out exactly the sort of high my mother had been chasing when she’d unwittingly overdosed. I’d always assumed that it must be a pretty great feeling, if my mother thought it was worth losing her life for it. Doing a drug via ONI playback wasn’t the same as shooting it into your own bloodstream. It felt the same, but it didn’t cause the same long-term damage or physical addiction symptoms. And it removed the risk of accidental death. So ONI recordings allowed me to experience the same high my mother had, without destroying my brain and my body in the process. I didn’t find it all that enlightening.
I wiped my eyes and took several deep breaths until I got myself back under control. Then I gave Art3mis a forced smile and a thumbs up. She nodded and took me by the hand, then she led me down the spiral staircase. Once we reached the bottom, I pushed open the heavy wooden door, and together, we stepped outside, into the Friendship Forest, where Aech and Shoto were waiting for us. The two of them were standing side by side in a beam of sunlight breaking through the treetops, illuminating tiny insects and motes of dust floating in the air around them.
I thought Art3mis would let go of my hand before Aech and Shoto saw her holding it, but she didn’t. She let them see. And Aech and Shoto pretended not to notice.
I pointed to a path leading south, through the dense forest of treehouses all around us.
“The MoreStuff Mountains are that way,” I said. “Just follow me closely, single-file, and only step where I step. Don’t stop to talk to anyone—avatars or NPCs. Also, don’t touch anything, and if you can help it, try not to look at anything either—not for longer than a second or two. Otherwise you might trigger some educational minigame or side quest that you’ll be forced to complete, and we’ll have to go on without you. We don’t have time to stop and play Blue’s Clues. Understood?”
They all nodded, and the four of us took off, running north along the path at top speed.
* * *
Once we reached the edge of the Be-Free Forest, we entered Holden’s Field—a large, flat, open field of rye, perched precariously on the edge of the Cliffs of Salinger, a place where I had completed several different book-report quests at several different grade levels. I had also played countless games of tag in this field, with other kids from around the world. Kids I had never met and would never meet in the real world, with usernames that they had probably changed long ago.
Art3mis rested a hand on my shoulder, bringing me back to the present.
“We need to keep moving,” she said.
I led them along the edge of the rye field, onto a narrow paved road that snaked to the north, through a rolling countryside and toward the MoreStuff Mountains in the distance. My surroundings seemed even more vibrant and realistic than I remembered—then I realized it was because this was the first time I had experienced this place with an ONI headset.
I heard a gleeful shriek and glanced overhead. There were a few kids flying around in their spellicopters. I had one in my inventory, but they only had room for one person, and that person had to keep spelling new words to stay airborne. We had to find other transportation.
We followed the road until it led us to a small farmhouse with a red barn behind it. There was a wooden wheelbarrow out by the road, with a rake leaning against it. I led Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis to the wheelbarrow and stood on a specific spot on the road beside it, then began to sing at the sky, as loudly as I could.
“It’s the Great Space Coaster!” I yelled. “Get on board! On the Great Space Coaster! We’ll explore!”
As I continued to sing, accompanying music began to play out of nowhere. Art3mis laughed and nodded with recognition, then she began to sing along with me. I displayed the lyrics in a browser window, so that Aech and Shoto could join in too.
As we sang, a flying yellow aircar swooped down out of the sky and flew under us, scooping our avatars up and into its fine Corinthian-leather seats.
“Welcome aboard the Great Space Coaster,” I said, placing my hands on the coaster’s flight stick. “Free transportation to Castle Calculus! Everyone buckle up, otherwise you’ll fall out.”
I aimed the Great Space C
oaster at the MoreStuff Mountains on the horizon and floored the accelerator. Then I kept the hammer down until we were soaring over them. We passed over the starting point for the legendary Oregon Trail quest. A moment later, we flew over Mister Rogers’ neighborhood. Then we continued south, down along the coast of the SeeSaw Sea, and a few minutes later we passed over Gullah Gullah Island.
When I pointed the island out to Aech, it put a huge smile on her face, and as she began to talk about how much she loved that show as a kid, I caught myself smiling too. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed this place. Why had I spent so much time running away? It felt genuinely good to be back here, despite the circumstances.
Once we cleared the mountain range, I set the coaster down just outside the golden front gate of Halcydonia City. It was the only entrance, and it was guarded by the Subtraction Sentinel, a stoic stone giant who would only open the gates for you after you solved a series of simple subtraction problems for him. Once I did this, the Subtraction Sentinel gave me a solemn nod, then he let me enter the city. Then Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis all had to do the same thing. Once we were all inside the gate, I took off at a run, leading my friends through the city’s tangled maze of streets.
As we were making our way down a cobblestone side street, I spotted something strange and completely out of place: a gorgeous cream-colored 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible that I instantly recognized from Rain Man. Inside it was a young Tom Cruise—or rather, his character from the movie, Charlie Babbitt. He was just sitting there behind the steering wheel, tapping it with his right hand, almost like he was drumming along to music. But there was no music, and his drumming had an odd rhythm to it. Steady, like a metronome, except that every few taps, it seemed like he was pressing on the wheel for an extra moment. The pattern reminded me of a scene in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, for some reason it took me a moment to place, but then it clicked—was he tapping out a message in Morse code?
Ready Player Two (9781524761356) Page 26
