Then there was Middle-earth. All three versions of it…
Kira Morrow had been a well-known Tolkien fanatic. She famously reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings every year from the time she was sixteen onward. And after they married, Og built Kira a real-world replica of Rivendell in the mountains of Oregon, where they lived together happily until her death. Og still lived there now, and Kira was buried on the property. I’d visited her grave myself, during the week we’d all spent there.
According to Kira’s access logs, one of her favorite OASIS destinations had been Arda, the three-planet system in Sector Seven that re-created J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy world in the First, Second, and Third Ages of its fictional history. Created with an almost fanatical devotion by millions of Tolkien fans, many of whom were still revising and improving the simulations to this day, the Ardas drew largely on Tolkien’s original writings on Middle-earth, but they took inspiration from the many films, television shows, and videogames set there as well.
So far, I’d spent most of my time on Arda III. It depicted the Third Age of Middle-earth, which was when all of the events described in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took place, and Kira had visited it far more frequently than Arda I or Arda II—though she spent a great deal of time on each of them as well.
I wish I could say that I’d scoured every inch of all three versions of Middle-earth. But I hadn’t. Not by a long shot. I’d completed all the major quests on Arda II and III, and about half of the most popular quests on Arda I, but they were three of the most detailed worlds in the whole simulation, and at my current pace, completing every quest they contained could take me several more years.
Chthonia was the last planet on my list, and the one I was most confident belonged there. It was Halliday’s re-creation of the fantasy world he’d created for his epic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign back in high school, in which both Kira and Og had participated. Chthonia would later serve as the setting for many of Halliday’s earliest videogames, including Anorak’s Quest and its many sequels.
Chthonia was the very first planet Halliday had created, making it the oldest world in the simulation. And when he, Ogden, and Kira had created their OASIS avatars, they’d each named them after the characters they’d played in their Chthonia campaign. Halliday’s character had been a dark-robed magic user named Anorak, whom he’d played as an NPC while serving as Dungeon Master. Ogden Morrow had played a wisecracking wizard named “the Great and Powerful Og.” And Kira’s character had been a powerful druid called Leucosia, named after one of the Sirens of Greek mythology.
Of course, Chthonia was also where Halliday had hidden the Third Gate in his Easter-egg hunt, inside Castle Anorak. Because of this, many gunters believed it was unlikely he would’ve chosen to hide one of the Seven Shards there too. But I wasn’t so sure. Chthonia was clearly a world where the “Siren once played a role.” A very important role, from Halliday’s perspective. So I kept Chthonia on my list and searched the planet from top to bottom.
I hadn’t limited my search to just these nine planets, of course. I’d looked for the Seven Shards on dozens of other OASIS worlds as well, to no avail.
I let out a sigh and rubbed my temples, wishing for the thousandth time that I hadn’t sabotaged my friendship with Og, so that I could call him and ask for his help. Of course, asking for his help was precisely what had ended our friendship. Og had never been comfortable talking about Kira, and he’d communicated this to me in every way possible. But I’d been too fixated to hear him.
Thinking back on my behavior made me wince with shame now. Why would a retired billionaire want to spend his twilight years being hounded for information about his dead wife? It was no wonder he’d stopped speaking to me. I’d given him no real choice.
I realized that Og’s birthday was coming up again soon. If I patched things up with him, maybe he would start inviting me to his yearly birthday party at the Distracted Globe again.
I’d spent the past year trying to work up the nerve to call Og and apologize. Promise never to ask him about Kira or Halliday again. He might listen. If I just swallowed my pride, I could probably mend our friendship. But to do so, I’d also have to obey his wishes and abandon my search for the Seven Shards.
I closed my grail diary and stood up. Just seven more days, I promised myself. Another week. If I hadn’t made any progress by then, I’d hang it up for good and make my amends with Og.
I had made this promise to myself many times before, but this time I intended to keep it.
I pulled up my bookmarked destinations to teleport back to the Third Age of Middle-earth and get back to work. But as I went to select it, I noticed a small shard icon blinking at the edge of my heads-up display. I tapped it and my email client opened in a window in front of me. There was a single message waiting in my SSoSS Tip Submission account, stamped with a long system-generated ID number. Some gunter out there had just submitted a potential lead about the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul—one that had made it past all the filters and reached my inbox. This hadn’t happened in months.
I tapped the message to open it and began to read:
Dear Mr. Watts,
After three years of searching, I’ve finally discovered where one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul is hidden and how to reach it. It’s located on the planet Middletown, inside the guest bedroom at the Barnett residence, where Kira Underwood lived during her year as an exchange student at Middletown High School.
I can make the shard appear, but I can’t pick it up. Probably because I’m not you—Halliday’s “heir.” If you’d like me to show you what I mean, I can.
I know you probably receive a lot of bogus leads, but I promise this isn’t one of them.
Your Fan,
L0hengrin
I did a double-take when I read the sender’s name. L0hengrin was the host of a popular gunter-themed YouTube show called The L0w-Down. She had about fifty million subscribers, and I’d recently become one of them. For me, this was a huge endorsement.
Most gunter shows were hosted by clueless fame-seekers spouting a steady stream of complete nonsense about the Seven Shards, when they weren’t waging epic flame wars with viewers or rival hosts, or posting tearful apology videos in another desperate bid to win back followers.
But The L0w-Down was different. L0hengrin had an incredibly upbeat personality, and an infectious brand of enthusiasm that reminded me of how I’d felt in the early days of the contest. The brief voice over that opened her show seemed to sum up her life’s philosophy: “Some people define themselves by railing against all of the things they hate, while explaining why everyone else should hate it too. But not me. I prefer to lead with my love—to define myself through joyous yawps of admiration, instead of cynical declarations of disdain.”
L0hengrin also possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of James Halliday’s life and his work. And she appeared to know just as much about Og and Kira Morrow.
My appreciation for L0hengrin and her show may have been slightly colored by the fact that I’d developed a mild crush on her. She was cute, smart, funny, and fearless. She was also a vocal High Five superfan. Her own gunter clan called themselves “The L0w Five.” Most flattering of all, her avatar’s name was a not-so-subtle tribute to my own, because in several German versions of the King Arthur legend, Lohengrin was the name of Parzival’s son.