Ready Player One (40 page)

I turned on the lamp. As I descended the staircase, my sword began to glow.

I continued to refer to the Zork notes in my grail diary, which reminded me exactly how to make my way through the game’s labyrinth of rooms, passageways, and puzzles. I collected all nineteen of the game’s treasures as I went, returning repeatedly to the living room in the white house to place them in the trophy case, a few at a time. Along the way, I had to do battle with several NPCs: a troll, a Cyclops, and a really annoying thief. As for the legendary grue, lurking in the dark, waiting to dine on my flesh—I simply avoided him.

Aside from the Cap’n Crunch whistle hidden in the kitchen, I found no surprises or deviations from the original game. To solve this immersive three-dimensional version of Zork, I simply had to perform the exact same actions required to solve the original text-based game. By running at top speed and by never stopping to sightsee or second-guess myself, I managed to complete the game in twenty-two minutes.

Shortly after I collected the last of the game’s nineteen treasures, a tiny brass bauble, a notice flashed in my display informing me that the
Vonnegut
had arrived outside. The autopilot had just landed the ship in the field to the west of the white house. Its cloaking device was still engaged
and its shields were up. If the Sixers were already here, in orbit around the planet, I was hoping they hadn’t spotted my ship.

I ran back to the living room of the white house one last time and placed the final treasure inside the trophy case. Just as in the original game, a map appeared inside the case, directing me to a hidden barrow that marked the end of the game. But I wasn’t concerned with the map or with finishing the game. All of the “trophies” were now “collected” in the case, so I took out the Cap’n Crunch whistle. It had three holes across the top, and I covered the third one to generate the 2600-hertz tone that had made this whistle famous in the annals of hacker history. Then I blew one clear, shrill note.

The whistle transformed into a small key, and my score on the scoreboard increased by 18,000 points.

I was back in second place, a mere 1,000 points ahead of Aech.

A second later, the entire Zork simulation reset itself. The nineteen items in the trophy case vanished, returning to their original locations, and the rest of the house and the game’s playing field returned to the same state in which I’d found them.

As I stared at the key in the palm of my hand, I felt a brief jolt of panic. The key was silver, not the milky green color of jade. But when I turned the key over and examined it more closely, I saw that it actually appeared to be wrapped in silver foil, like a stick of gum or a bar of chocolate. I carefully peeled the wrapper away, and a key made of polished green stone was revealed inside.

The Jade Key.

And just like the Copper Key, I saw that it had a clue etched into its surface:

I reread it several times, but had no immediate revelations as to its meaning, so I placed the key in my inventory, then examined the wrapper. It was silver foil on one side and white paper on the other. I didn’t see any markings on either side.

Just then, I heard the muffled roar of approaching spacecraft and knew it must be the Sixers. It sounded like they were here in force.

I pocketed the wrapper and ran out of the house. Overhead, thousands
of Sixer gunships filled the sky like an angry swarm of metal wasps. The ships were separating into small groups as they descended, heading off in different directions, as if to blanket the entire surface of the planet.

I didn’t think the Sixers would be foolish enough to try to barricade all 512 instances of the white house. That strategy had worked for them on Ludus, but only for a few hours, and they’d only had one location to barricade. The entire planet of Frobozz was in a PvP zone, and both magic and technology functioned here, which meant that all bets were off. There would be hordes of gunters arriving here soon, armed to the teeth, and if the Sixers tried to keep all of them at bay, it would mean war on a scale never before seen in the history of the OASIS.

As I continued running across the field and up the ramp of my ship, I spotted a large squadron of gunships, about a hundred or so, descending from the sky directly above my location. They appeared to be headed straight for me.

Max had already powered up the
Vonnegut
’s engines, so I shouted for him to lift off as soon as I was aboard. When I reached the cockpit controls, I threw the throttle wide open, and the descending swarm of Sixer gunships banked hard to follow me. As my ship blasted its way skyward, I began to take heavy fire from several directions. But I was lucky. My ship was fast, and my shields were top-of-the-line, so they managed to hold up long enough for me to reach orbit. But they failed a few seconds later, and the
Vonnegut
’s hull suffered an alarming amount of damage in the handful of seconds it took me to make the jump to light speed.

It was a close call. The bastards almost got me.

My ship was in bad shape, so instead of returning directly to my stronghold, I headed to Joe’s Garage, an orbital starship repair shop over in Sector Ten. Joe’s was an honest NPC-operated establishment, with reasonable rates and lightning-fast service. I used them whenever the
Vonnegut
needed repairs or upgrades.

While Joe and his boys worked on my ship, I sent Aech a brief e-mail to say thanks. I told him that whatever debt he felt he owed me was now most definitely paid in full. I also copped to being a colossally insensitive, self-centered asshole and begged him to forgive me.

As soon as the repairs to my ship were finished, I headed back to my
stronghold. Then I spent the rest of the day glued to the newsfeeds. The word about Frobozz was out, and every gunter with the means had already teleported there. Thousands of others were arriving by spacecraft every minute, to do battle with the Sixers and secure their own copy of the Jade Key.

The newsfeeds were airing live coverage of the hundreds of large-scale battles breaking out on Frobozz, around nearly every instance of the “dwelling long neglected.” The big gunter clans had once again banded together to launch a coordinated attack on the Sixers’ forces. It was the beginning of what would come to be known as the Battle of Frobozz, and casualties were already mounting on both sides.

I also kept a close eye on the Scoreboard, waiting to see evidence that the Sixers had begun to collect copies of the Jade Key while their forces held the opposition at bay. As I feared, the next score to increase was the one beside Sorrento’s IOI employee number. It jumped 17,000 points, moving him into fourth place.

Now that the Sixers knew exactly where and how to obtain the Jade Key, I expected to see their other avatars’ scores begin to jump as Sorrento’s underlings followed his lead. But to my surprise, the next avatar to snag the Jade Key was none other than Shoto. He did it less than twenty minutes after Sorrento.

Somehow, Shoto had managed to evade the hordes of Sixers currently swarming all over the planet, enter an instance of the white house, collect all nineteen of the required treasures, and obtain his copy of the key.

I continued to watch the Scoreboard, expecting to see his brother Daito’s score increase as well. But that never happened.

Instead, a few minutes after Shoto obtained his copy of the key, Daito’s name disappeared from the Scoreboard entirely. There was only one possible explanation: Daito had just been killed.

Over the next twelve hours, chaos continued to reign on
Frobozz as every gunter in the OASIS scrambled to reach the planet and join the fray.

The Sixers had dispersed their grand army across the globe in a bold attempt to blockade all 512 copies of the Zork playing field. But their forces, as vast and well-equipped as they were, were spread far too thin this time. Only seven more of their avatars managed to obtain the Jade Key that day. And when the gunter clans began their coordinated attack on the Sixers’ forces, the “boobs in blue” began to suffer heavy casualties and were forced to pull back.

Within a matter of hours, the Sixer high command decided to deploy a new strategy. It had quickly become obvious that they wouldn’t be able to maintain over five hundred different blockades or fend off the massive influx of gunters. So they regrouped all of their forces around ten adjacent instances of the Zork playing field near the planet’s south pole. They installed powerful force shields over each of them and stationed armored battalions outside the shield walls.

This scaled-down strategy worked, and the Sixers’ forces proved sufficient to hold those ten locations and prevent any other gunters from getting inside (and there wasn’t much reason for other gunters to try, since over five hundred other instances of Zork now stood wide open and unprotected). Now that the Sixers could operate undisturbed, they basically formed ten lines of avatars outside each white house and began to run them
through the process of obtaining the Jade Key, one after another. Everyone could plainly see what they were doing, because the digits beside each IOI employee number on the Scoreboard began to increase by 15,000 points.

At the same time, hundreds of gunter scores were increasing as well. Now that the location of the Jade Key was public knowledge, deciphering the Quatrain and figuring out how to obtain the key was relatively easy. It was there for the taking to anyone who had already cleared the First Gate.

As the Battle of Frobozz drew to a close, the rankings on the Scoreboard stood like this:

HIGH SCORES:

1. Art3mis	129,000
2. Parzival	128,000
3. Aech	127,000
4. IOI-655321	122,000
5. Shoto	122,000
6. IOI-643187	120,000
7. IOI-621671	120,000
8. IOI-678324	120,000
9. IOI-637330	120,000
10. IOI-699423	120,000