A chime sounded and a message appeared on my HUD, congratulating me on completing the Princess Bride quest with a perfect score of one million points. Then the message disappeared and…that was it.
I waited for a full minute, but nothing else happened.
I sat down on the beach and let out a sigh.
This wasn’t my first visit to the planet Florin. I had already completed this quest with a perfect score three times before, each time playing as a different character—first as Westley, then as Buttercup, then as Fezzik. The Princess Bride had been one of Kira Underwood’s all-time favorite films, and she’d helped create all of the interactive OASIS quests based on it. (Including the controversial gender-swapped The Prince Groom, in which Buttercup is the swashbuckling heroine and Westley serves as the damsel in distress.) I’d thought that solving one of these quests with a perfect score might yield some clue related to the Seven Shards. But I’d come up empty-handed each and every time. Today was my final attempt. Inigo had been the only other playable character, and the most difficult one with which to obtain a perfect score. Now, after nearly a dozen attempts, I’d finally done it. And once again I had nothing to show for my efforts.
I got to my feet and took a deep breath. Then I teleported back to my command center on Falco.
Once my avatar finished rematerializing, I settled into the comfy TNG-era captain’s chair I’d installed there. I stared out at the cratered landscape in silent frustration for a moment. Then I opened up my grail diary, and once again I began scanning the vast mountain of data I’d collected over the past eight years, about James Halliday and his life, work, associates, and interests—although for the past three years, nearly all of the new material I’d added pertained to one associate in particular. The Siren herself, Kira Morrow, née Underwood.
I’d started my grail diary in an old spiral notebook when I was thirteen and still living in the stacks outside Oklahoma City. I’d been forced to burn the original the night before I infiltrated IOI headquarters, to prevent it from falling into the Sixers’ hands. But I’d made hi-res scans of the notebook’s pages beforehand and stored them in my OASIS account. Those scans were all still there, in the digital version of my grail diary, which appeared as a jumble of cascading windows floating in front of me. It contained countless documents, diagrams, photos, maps, and media files, all indexed and cross-referenced for easy browsing.
The four-line Shard Riddle was displayed in a window that always remained on top:
Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul
On the 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
When the riddle had first appeared shortly after the ONI’s launch, I’d gone back and re-analyzed the free digital copy of Anorak’s Almanac available on Halliday’s old website, just to make sure it hadn’t been updated with any new information or clues. It hadn’t. Every word of the Almanac was still the same. The famous series of notched letters I’d found scattered throughout its text during Halliday’s contest were still there, but no new ones had been added.
One of the superuser abilities the Robes of Anorak gave me was the ability to simply wish for things out loud. If it could, the system would almost always grant my wish. But whenever I tried wishing for information about the Seven Shards, a message would flash across my HUD:
NICE TRY, CHEATER!
So I had no choice but to keep on searching for the shards myself. And once I committed to that quest, I gave it my absolute all. I did my due diligence.
I studied every reference to the number 7 in Anorak’s Almanac. I also played and solved every videogame in his collection that was related to the number 7. The Seven Cities of Gold (1984), The Seven Spirits of Ra (1987), Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs (1988), The Seven Gates of Jambala (1989), Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity (1994), Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996). Then I went overboard and also played any game that had the number 7 in its title, like Sigma 7, Stellar 7, Lucky 7, Force 7, Pitman 7, and Escape from Pulsar 7.
I even subjected myself to Keeper of the Seven Keys, a four-part concept album by Helloween, a German power-metal band from Hamburg, founded in 1984. I was not a fan of mid-’80s German power metal, but Halliday used to listen to it for hours when he was programming his first games, so I knew there was a chance he’d drawn inspiration from it.
If Halliday had left behind any additional clues about the location of the Seven Shards, I wasn’t able to find them. It was frustrating. And more than a little humiliating.
I considered calling it quits and giving up on the shards altogether. I mean, why was I wasting my time trying to solve Halliday’s insipid side quest anyway? What was I hoping would happen when I completed it? I had already achieved wealth and fame in reality, and in the OASIS my avatar was already all-powerful and invulnerable. I had nothing more to prove to anyone. I had already beaten the odds and accomplished the impossible once. I didn’t need to do it again.
There was nothing else I needed—except more time. I had a finite amount of it left, and when it was gone, I wouldn’t be able to buy any more of it. Time was precious. And yet here I was, wasting whole years of it on another one of Halliday’s glorified videogames…
Still, I’d never shaken my curiosity about the Siren’s Soul, or the nagging suspicion that something terrible would happen if I failed to obtain it. That was what ultimately prompted me to offer a billion-dollar reward for any information that would help me locate one of the Seven Shards. But I’d posted that reward two years ago, and it had yet to be claimed.
When I’d offered the reward, I’d set up a separate email address where people could send in any potential leads. It still received hundreds of submissions every day, but so far every last one had proven to be a dead end. I’d had to set up an elaborate series of email filters to sort out all the duplicate and obviously bogus submissions. These days very few emails got past these filters and made it to my inbox.
I often wondered if the whole idea of the reward was hopeless to begin with. The answer was right there, in the third line of the Shard Riddle: “For each fragment my heir must pay a toll….”
If I, Wade Watts, the sole heir to Halliday’s fortune, was the “heir” the riddle was referring to, then I would be the only person in the world who could find the Seven Shards, since I would be the only one who could “once again make the Siren whole.”
For all I knew, the shards and their locations might be invisible to everyone else. That would explain why the millions of gunters out there who were scouring the OASIS night and day for any trace of the shards had all come up empty-handed for three years running now.
On the other hand, if I alone had the ability to obtain the Siren’s Soul, why had Halliday posted the Shard Riddle on his website, for the whole world to see? He could’ve just emailed it to my OASIS account. Or mentioned it in his video message about the ONI. It was entirely possible that anyone could find the shards, and Halliday had simply hidden them fiendishly well—just as he’d done with his “three hidden keys” and “three secret gates.” And the first two lines of the Shard Riddle were infuriatingly vague: “Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul on the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role.”