Ready Player One (39 page)

If the quarter had any magical properties, they weren’t revealed in its item description, which was completely empty. To learn anything more about the quarter, I would have to cast a series of high-level divination spells on it. That would take days and require a lot of expensive spell components, and even then there was no guarantee the spells would tell me anything.

But at the moment, I was having a hard time caring all that much about the mystery of the undroppable quarter. All I could think about was that Aech and Art3mis had now both beaten me to the Jade Key. And getting the high score on this Pac-Man game on Archaide obviously hadn’t gotten me any closer to finding it myself. I really had been wasting my time here.

I headed back up to the planet’s surface. Just as I was sitting down in the
Vonnegut
’s cockpit, an e-mail from Aech arrived in my inbox. I felt my pulse quicken when I saw its subject line:
Payback Time
.

Holding my breath, I opened the message and read it:

Below his signature was an image file he’d attached to the message. It was a high-resolution scan of the instruction manual cover for the text adventure game Zork—the version released in 1980 by Personal Software for the TRS-80 Model III.

I’d played and solved Zork once, a long time ago, back during the first year of the Hunt. But I’d also played hundreds of other classic text adventure games that year, including all of Zork’s sequels, and so most of the details of the game had now faded in my memory. Most old text adventure games were pretty self-explanatory, so I’d never actually bothered to read the Zork instruction manual. I now knew that this had a been a colossal mistake.

On the manual’s cover was a painting depicting a scene from the game. A swashbuckling adventurer wearing armor and a winged helmet stood with a glowing blue sword raised over his head, preparing to strike a troll cowering before him. The adventurer clutched several treasures in his other hand, and more treasures lay at his feet, scattered among human bones. A dark, fanged creature lurked just behind the hero, glowering malevolently.

All of this was in the painting’s foreground, but my eyes had instantly locked on what was in the background: a large white house, with its front door and windows all boarded up.

A dwelling long neglected
.

I stared at the image a few more seconds, just long enough to curse myself for not making the connection on my own, months ago. Then I fired the
Vonnegut
’s engines and set a course for another planet in Sector Seven, not far from Archaide. It was small world called Frobozz that was home to a detailed re-creation of the game Zork.

It was also, I now knew, the hiding place of the Jade Key.

Frobozz was located in a group of several hundred rarely
visited worlds known as the XYZZY Cluster. These planets all dated back to the early days of the OASIS, and each one re-created the environment of some classic text adventure game or MUD (multi-user dungeon). Each of these worlds was a kind of shrine—an interactive tribute to the OASIS’s earliest ancestors.

Text adventure games (often referred to as “interactive fiction” by modern scholars) used text to create the virtual environment the player inhabited. The game program provided you with a simple written description of your surroundings, then asked what you wanted to do next. To move around or interact with your virtual surroundings, you keyed in text commands telling the game what you wanted your avatar to do. These instructions had to be very simple, usually composed of just two or three words, such as “go south” or “get sword.” If a command was too complex, the game’s simple parsing engine wouldn’t be able to understand it. By reading and typing text, you made your way through the virtual world, collecting treasure, fighting monsters, avoiding traps, and solving puzzles until you finally reached the end of the game.

The first text adventure game I’d ever played was called Colossal Cave, and initially the text-only interface had seemed incredibly simple and crude to me. But after playing for a few minutes, I quickly became immersed in the reality created by the words on the screen. Somehow, the game’s simple two-sentence room descriptions were able to conjure up vivid images in my mind’s eye.

Zork was one of the earliest and most famous text adventure games. According to my grail diary, I’d played the game through to the end just once, all in one day, over four years ago. Since then, in a shocking display of unforgivable ignorance, I’d somehow forgotten two very important details about the game:

To complete the game, every treasure you collected had to be returned to the living room and placed inside the trophy case.

Finally, the rest of the Quatrain made sense.

Decades ago, Zork and its sequels had all been licensed and re-created inside the OASIS as stunning three-dimensional immersive simulations all located on the planet Frobozz, which was named after a character in the Zork universe. So the
dwelling long neglected
—the one I’d been trying to locate for the past six months—had been sitting right out in the open on Frobozz this entire time. Hiding in plain sight.

I checked the ship’s navigational computer. Traveling at light speed, it would take me just over fifteen minutes to reach Frobozz. There was a good chance the Sixers would beat me there. If they did, there would probably already be a small armada of Sixer gunships waiting in orbit around the planet when I dropped out of light speed. I would have to fight my way through them to reach the surface, and then either lose them, or try to find the Jade Key with them still breathing down my neck. Not a good scenario.

Luckily, I had a backup plan. My Ring of Teleportation. It was one of the most valuable magic items in my inventory, looted from the hoard of a red dragon I’d slain on Gygax. The ring allowed my avatar to teleport
once a month, to any location in the OASIS. I only used it in dire emergencies as a last-ditch means of escape, or when I needed to get somewhere in a big hurry. Like right now.

I quickly programmed the
Vonnegut
’s onboard computer to autopilot the ship to Frobozz. I instructed it to activate its cloaking device as soon as it dropped out of hyperspace, then locate me on the planet’s surface and land somewhere nearby. If I was lucky, the Sixers wouldn’t detect my ship and blast it out of the sky before it could reach me. If they did, I’d be stuck on Frobozz with no way to leave, while the entire Sixer army closed in on me.

I engaged the
Vonnegut
’s autopilot, then activated my Ring of Teleportation by speaking the command word, “Brundell.” When the ring began to glow, I said the name of the planet where I wished to teleport. A world map of Frobozz appeared on my display. It was a large world, and like the planet Middletown, its surface was covered with hundreds of identical copies of the same simulation—in this case, re-creations of the Zork playing field. There were 512 copies of it, to be exact, which meant there were 512 white houses, spaced out evenly across the planet’s surface. I should be able to obtain the Jade Key at any one of them, so I selected one of the copies at random on the map. My ring emitted a blinding flash of light, and a split second later my avatar was there, standing on the surface of Frobozz.

I opened my grail diary and located my original notes on how to solve Zork. Then I pulled up a map of the game’s playing field and placed it in the corner of my display.

Surveying the skies, I didn’t see any sign of the Sixers, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t already arrived. Sorrento and his underlings had probably just teleported to one of the other playing fields. Everybody knew that the Sixers had already been camped out in Sector Seven, waiting for this moment. As soon as they saw Aech’s score increase, they would have used Fyndoro’s Tablet of Finding and learned that he was currently on Frobozz. Which meant the entire Sixer armada would already be on its way here. So I needed to get to the key as quickly as possible, then get the hell of out Dodge.

I took a look around. My surroundings were eerily familiar.

The opening text description in the game Zork read as follows:

My avatar now stood in that open field, just west of the white house. The front door of the old Victorian mansion was boarded up, and there was a mailbox just a few yards away from me, at the end of the walkway leading to the house. The house was surrounded by a dense forest, and beyond it I saw a range of jagged mountain peaks. Glancing off to my left, I spotted a path leading to the north, right where I knew it should be.

I ran around to the back of the house. I found a small window there, slightly ajar, and I forced it open and climbed inside. As expected, I found myself in the kitchen. A wooden table sat in the center of the room, and on it rested a long brown sack and a bottle of water. A chimney stood nearby, and a staircase led up to the attic. A hallway off to my left led to the living room. Just like the game.

But the kitchen also contained things that weren’t mentioned in the game’s text description of this room. A stove, a refrigerator, several wooden chairs, a sink, and a few rows of kitchen cabinets. I opened the fridge. It was full of junk food. Fossilized pizza, snack puddings, lunch meat, and a wide array of condiment packets. I checked the cupboards. They were filled with canned and dry goods. Rice, pasta, soup.

And cereal.

One entire cupboard was crammed with boxes of vintage breakfast cereals, most of which had been discontinued before I’d been born. Fruit Loops, Honeycombs, Lucky Charms, Count Chocula, Quisp, Frosted Flakes. And hidden way at the back was a lone box of Cap’n Crunch. Printed clearly on the front of it were the words
FREE TOY WHISTLE INSIDE!

The captain conceals the Jade Key
.

I dumped the contents of the box out on the counter, scattering golden cereal nuggets everywhere. Then I spotted it—a small plastic whistle encased in a clear cellophane envelope. I tore off the cellophane and held the whistle in my hand. It was yellow in color, with the cartoon face of Cap’n Crunch molded on one side and a small dog on the other. The words
CAP’N CRUNCH BO’SUN WHISTLE
were embossed on either side.

I raised the whistle to my avatar’s lips and blew into it. But the whistle emitted no sound, and nothing happened.

You can only blow the whistle once the trophies are all collected
.

I pocketed the whistle and opened the sack on the kitchen table. I saw a clove of garlic inside, and I added it to my inventory. Then I ran west, into the living room. The floor was covered with a large Oriental rug. Antique furniture, the kind I’d seen in films from the 1940s, was positioned around the room. A wooden door with odd characters carved into its surface was set into the west wall. And against the opposite wall there was a beautiful glass trophy case. It was empty. A battery-powered lantern sat on top of the case, and a shining sword was mounted on the wall directly above it.

I took the sword and the lantern, then rolled up the Oriental rug, uncovering the trapdoor I already knew was hidden underneath. I opened it, revealing a staircase that led down into a darkened cellar.