Her cheeks had turned a bright shade of red—an indication she hadn’t shut off her avatar’s blush response. She probably hadn’t switched off any of her avatar’s other involuntary emotional responses either. Younger ONI users did this intentionally. They referred to it as “rolling real.”
Poor Lo. Her nervousness at meeting an idol reminded me too much of myself for comfort. Hoping to rescue her—and impatient to learn what she knew—I tried to keep things moving. “I’m intrigued to see what you’ve found,” I said. “Would you like to show me?”
“Sure!” she replied. “You mean, like, right now?”
I nodded. “No time like the present.”
“Right,” she said. She cast a nervous glance toward the basement windows and lowered her voice. “But first I need to show you how I found it, so that you can repeat the same steps. That’s why I was waiting for you here, instead of at Kira’s house.”
“OK,” I said. “Go ahead.”
L0hengrin took a few hesitant steps toward the other end of the basement before halting and turning back to me. “Listen, Mr. Watts,” she said, keeping her eyes on the floor. “I don’t mean any disrespect, but would you mind verbally confirming that the reward is still one billion U.S. dollars?”
“Not at all,” I said. “If anything you tell me helps me locate one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul, then I will immediately transfer one billion dollars to your OASIS account. It’s all outlined in the contract you signed when you sent me your clue.”
Before anyone could try to claim the reward, they were required to sign a digital “Shard Clue Submission Contract” that my lawyers had drafted. I located the copy L0hengrin had signed and displayed it in a window in front of her. The print was too fine to read without squinting, and the text scrolled on for several pages.
“This contract states, among other things, that if the information you present to me proves to be valid, you agree not to share it with anyone else for a period of three years. You also agree not to discuss the details of our transaction with anyone, including the media. If you do, you forfeit the reward and I can take it all back—”
“Oh, I’ve read the contract,” she said, grinning, but still not meeting my gaze. “A few thousand times. Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just—that’s a lot of zenny for me.”
I laughed. “Don’t worry, Lo. If you can help me find one of the Seven Shards, then that money is all yours. I promise.”
She nodded and took a deep breath. The look of nervous anticipation on her face set my own heart racing. If this kid was lying about finding one of the shards, then she deserved an Academy Award for her performance.
L0hengrin turned and walked over to the bookshelves that lined the basement’s far wall. They were filled with sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, role-playing-game supplements, and back issues of various vintage gaming magazines, like Dragon and Space Gamer. Lo began to flip through the huge collection of old Dungeons & Dragons modules shelved there, apparently looking for one in particular.
I’d browsed through that very same bookshelf seven years ago, during the early days of Halliday’s contest. And I’d read or skimmed over most of those old modules and magazines—but not all of them. The remaining titles were still on my reading list when I won the contest, at which point I’d forgotten all about them. Now I was kicking myself, wondering what I’d missed.
“For the past few years, I’ve been scouring Middletown, looking for a way to alter the time period of the simulation,” Lo said. “You know, because of the couplet.”
“The couplet?”
She paused in her search and turned around to look at me. “On Kira’s headstone?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Of course.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and L0hengrin could obviously see it on my face. Her eyes widened in surprise.
“Oh my God. You don’t even know about the couplet. Do you?”
“No,” I replied, throwing up my hands. “I guess I don’t.”
She frowned at me and shook her head, as if to say, How far the mighty have fallen.
“You know how in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Two Towers, there’s a scene were King Théoden places a Simbelmynë on Théodred’s tomb?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Well, if you visit the re-creation of Kira’s grave on EEarth and place a Simbelmynë taken from Arda on it, a rhymed couplet appears on her headstone,” Lo said. “Other types of flowers indigenous to Middle-earth might work too. I’m not sure. I didn’t try any of them.”
I felt like a complete idiot. I’d visited Kira’s grave on EEarth several times to search for clues. But I’d never thought to try this. At least I could hide my embarrassment, since I wasn’t “rolling real.”
L0hengrin opened a browser window in front of her avatar, then spun it around so I could see it. It showed a screenshot of Kira’s headstone on EEarth. Below her name and the dates of her birth and death was an inscription: BELOVED WIFE, DAUGHTER & FRIEND. Below that were two additional lines of text, which did not appear on her headstone in the real world:
The First Shard lies in the Siren’s first den
So the question isn’t where, but when?
There it was. After all these years, a genuine clue. And it seemed likely that L0hengrin was the first and only person to discover it, because no one else had submitted it to me in an attempt to claim the reward.
“When I found that couplet,” Lo continued, “I thought the ‘Siren’s first den’ might be the place where Kira was living when she created Leucosia—her old guest bedroom here on Middletown. But the time period of this simulation is always set to 1986. Kira only lived in Middletown during her junior year of high school, from the fall of 1988 to the summer of 1989. So to reach the Siren’s Den, I figured I would need to alter the time period of the Middletown simulation, to a different ‘when.’ I tried everything I could think of, including time travel.” She held up an object that resembled an oversize pocket watch—a rare time-travel device called an Omni. “But no dice. Time machines don’t function here, the way they do on some other planets, like Zemeckis.”
This was something I already knew firsthand. I’d brought my own time machine, ECTO-88, to Middletown to try the same thing. I’d upgraded the car with a fully functional (and extremely expensive) Flux Capacitor, which allowed me to time travel on planets where doing so was an option. For example, on EEarth, I could travel as far back as 2012, when the OASIS was first launched, and GSS began backing up previous versions of the simulated Earth on their servers. But my flux capacitor wouldn’t function on Middletown, so I’d dismissed time travel as a possibility.
“But I knew from the riddle that changing the timeframe had to be part of the solution,” Lo continued. “So I kept on searching for another way…”
She turned around and continued to flip through the D&D modules on the bookshelf.
“Then, earlier this week, I was browsing through Og’s old gaming library here when I came across something strange.”
She finally located the item she was looking for and carried it back over to me. It was a shrink-wrapped wall calendar for the year 1989, featuring the work of a fantasy artist named Boris Vallejo. The painting on the cover depicted a pair of Valkyries riding into battle.
My eyes widened, then darted to the calendar already hanging on the basement wall. It, too, was a Boris Vallejo artwork calendar, for the year 1986. The month of October was currently displayed. It featured a painting of a bikini-clad female warrior astride a black steed, brandishing a magic ring at an incoming flight of dragons. Out of curiosity, I’d looked up the name of this painting once—it was called Magic Ring and it had also been used as the cover artwork for a 1985 fantasy novel called Warrior Witch of Hel.