Minutes passed, but to me it felt as though time had completely stopped.‌

I stared at the images on the viewscreen in shock as an aching hollowness spread across my limbs and torso and slowly made its way to my heart.

My mind played a montage of every moment I’d ever spent with Samantha, both in the OASIS and in reality, while I tallied up the long list of stupid things I’d said and done to her in the years since our breakup. And all of the apologies I’d never made.

Aech was the first one to break the silence. “If anyone could figure out a way to survive that, it’d be Arty. We don’t know for sure…maybe she found cover before it hit….”

“There’s no way, Aech,” Shoto said, still in shock. “Did you see that fireball? There’s no way she had enough time to get clear of it….”

We had already rewatched the footage of the crash several times, frame-by-frame. We couldn’t see what had happened to Samantha. But I was still inclined to agree with Shoto. She’d only had a split second to get clear before Anorak crashed the jet and a giant ball of flame exploded across the landscape.

I didn’t want to believe she was dead. But I wasn’t going to delude myself either. Despite how Samantha Cook was often depicted in movies and cartoons, she wasn’t a superhero. Here in the real world, she was just a regular person—a geeky Canadian gamer girl from the suburbs of Vancouver. She couldn’t outrun giant explosions on foot like Rambo.

Still. My mind kept replaying that last moment of the jet’s descent. It had hit nearby, not on top of her. Maybe there was a chance.

“Why did she have to be so stupid?” Aech said, her tone shifting from shock to grief. “Why did she bail out? Why didn’t she just sit tight until we got Anorak to release her?”

“Samantha was never a big fan of waiting around for someone else to rescue her,” I said.

The others nodded. Then the silence was broken by the sound of another incoming call. Faisal rushed to answer it. When he did, Anorak’s face appeared on the conference room’s viewscreen, frowning down at us like some malevolent deity.

“I’m calling to express my condolences for the loss of your friend,” Anorak said. “I was genuinely surprised by Ms. Cook’s actions. I calculated a very low probability she would attempt to bail out of that autojet. Who knew she would be so foolish?” He shrugged. “I warned her, didn’t I? In fact, I warned all of you what would happen if you failed to cooperate with me. If she hadn’t tried to escape, she’d still be alive.”

“No!” Aech shouted. “If you hadn’t murdered her, she’d still be alive!” Her voice cracked, and she choked on each word as she spoke it. “You didn’t have to kill her! Or any of those other people…”

“Of course I did, dear,” Anorak replied softly. “I didn’t want to kill her. I liked her. She was an incredibly brave and intelligent young woman. But she gave me no choice. If I hadn’t punished her for disobeying me, what message would that have sent? It would’ve completely undermined my credibility and caused Parzival here to doubt my resolve. But now he knows I mean business. Don’t you, Z?”

I was too overcome with grief and rage to respond with words. But I managed to nod slowly.

“See?” Anorak said, nodding back at me from the viewscreen. “I assure you all, I don’t wish to harm anyone else if I don’t have to. And I’m sure that you don’t want any more blood on your hands either.”

“You’re nothing like James Halliday,” Aech told him. “You’re not human. You’re a fucking toaster! You don’t even care about those people you just killed….”

“Why should I, dear?” Anorak said, with what sounded like genuine curiosity in his voice. “To quote Sarah Connor: ‘You’re all dead already.’ You, your friends, your customers—all of you. You poisoned your own planet, destroyed its climate, defiled its ecosystem, and killed off all of its biodiversity.” He pointed at each of us. “You’re going to be extinct soon, too, by your hands. And you know it. That’s why most of you spend every second you can wired up to the OASIS. You’ve already given up, and now you’re all just waiting around to die.” He shrugged. “The people I killed today don’t have to wait around anymore. And if you continue to defy me, too, more people will meet the same fate. Now, get to work, kids.”

When he called us “kids,” I finally snapped and went into a total berserker rage, lunging at the viewscreen, as if I could crawl through it and throttle him.

“You’ll pay for this, you son of a bitch!” I shouted, because I’d obviously seen way too many movies, and because I was terrified and wanted desperately not to show it.

“That’s the spirit!” Anorak said, grinning. “You better get moving, Parzival.” He tapped his imaginary watch again and sang, “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future….”

With that, Anorak ended the call and the giant viewscreen went dark for a moment. Then it went back to displaying several live aerial and ground video feeds of Samantha’s crash site. The smoke had cleared enough so that we could see the firefighters who were finally starting to arrive on the scene.

“A medevac helicopter is en route to the crash site,” Faisal said. “But it’ll be a while before they’ll be able to get that blaze under control.”

“How could anyone survive an explosion like that?” Aech muttered.

“You have to hit the ground running,” we heard a familiar female voice say.

We all turned to see Samantha’s avatar, just as it finished rematerializing in the corner of the conference room.

“Then I kept on running,” she continued. “And I hit the deck just before the jet made impact. There was a little stone footbridge over a stream and I

dove under it.” She winced. “I’ve got a few first- and second-degree burns, and I’m gonna need a few stitches. But I’m OK.”

Aech and Shoto ran over and threw their arms around her avatar. I resisted the urge to join them, but just barely. Instead I just stood there next to Faisal, who couldn’t resist hugging me instead. And I was so happy, I hugged him back.

Samantha was still alive. I still had a chance to make things right with her. To tell her how wrong I’d been, about everything. To apologize for not listening to her. And to tell her how much I’d missed her…

But she didn’t stick around that long.

“I only jumped online for a few seconds, to let you all know I was OK,” she said, gently pulling free of Aech’s bearlike embrace. “Now I need to go let the medics clean me up. There are also a few things I need to do, and I can’t do them while Halliday-9000 is watching.”

Her deadpan 2001 joke caused me to involuntarily snort-laugh. Samantha was the only person who had ever been able to make me do this, and she knew it. I glanced over at her in embarrassment and she smiled at me again. And this time, with great effort, I managed not to look away.

“Z, you, Aech, and Shoto need to start searching for the Second Shard

now,” she said. “Hurry! I’ll rejoin you as soon as I can.”

And then she vanished without waiting for me to reply.

I stood there for a minute, staring at the spot where her avatar had been, attempting to rein in my stampeding thoughts.

“Zero in, buddy,” Shoto said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Arty’s right. We need to find the Second Shard. And fast.”

I nodded and removed the First Shard from my inventory. When I held it aloft in my hand, it filled the conference room with its incandescent blue glow as each of its facets caught the light and refracted it onto the walls and the floor in a kaleidoscopic pattern.

I held the shard out to Aech, but when she attempted to take it, her hand passed right through it, as if it were an illusion. Shoto tried the same thing and got the same result.

“Halliday coded this shard so that anyone could find its hiding place and trigger its appearance,” I said. “But it can only be picked up by one of

Halliday’s two heirs. Me or Ogden Morrow. Halliday gave Og his old arcade-game collection, remember?”

I told them how I’d used the Boris Vallejo calendar in Og’s basement to change the year of the Middletown simulation, and how I’d obtained the First Shard in Kira’s bedroom. I didn’t mention that I’d paid a girl named L0hengrin a billion dollars to figure all of this out for me. I was ashamed to admit that I’d needed her help. And I was determined not to call on her for more assistance unless I had no choice.

“The First Shard has a clue etched into its surface,” I said, turning it over in my hands so they could see it. “A hint about the next shard’s hiding place.”

Aech cleared her throat and read the clue out loud.

“ ‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero,’ ” she recited. “ ‘The very first heroine, demoted to hero.’ ” She raised her eyes to meet mine. “Any ideas?”

I shook my head.

“Not yet,” I said. “But this is the first opportunity I’ve had to try to decipher it.” I pointed to the first line of the clue. “But I think the first line must be a reference to Kira, and her career as a videogame artist. ‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero.’ ”

Aech nodded. But Shoto didn’t respond—he was already lost in thought. “I’ll buy that,” Aech replied. “But what about ‘The very first heroine,

demoted to hero’?”

I recited the line in my head a few times, trying to parse the meaning. But my brain wouldn’t cooperate. It had been a mistake to obsessively rewatch that crash footage for some sign of Samantha. Now all I could think about were all of those charred human corpses I’d seen littering the park where her jet had made impact. The bodies of at least a dozen people

—people that Anorak had already killed, without hesitation.

“Come on, Z,” Aech said when I failed to respond. “You must have some ideas….”

“I don’t know,” I muttered, vigorously scratching my scalp in an attempt to jumpstart my brain. “I suppose it could be a reference to Ranma 1/2? A heroine demoted to hero?”

I was grasping at straws and Aech knew it.

“Come on, Z,” she said. “Ranma was a boy who changed into a girl, not the other way around. And besides, the clue reads ‘the very first heroine.’ ”

“Right,” I said. “You’re right. Sorry.”

We stared at the inscription on the shard in silence while Faisal watched anxiously from across the room, his eyes wide with fascination.

As precious seconds continued to tick away, I began to wonder if I was going to have to swallow my rapidly dwindling pride and call L0hengrin.

“Come on!” Aech whispered. “It can’t be that hard. Og found the Second Shard ten minutes after he found the first one!”

“Gee, I wonder why?” I said. “Do you think maybe Og knows a little more about his ex-wife than we do? He was only married to her for eighteen years!”

Aech was about to reply when Shoto spoke up, cutting her off.

“I don’t think the first line is about Kira,” Shoto said. “ ‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero.’ I think that’s a reference to Rieko Kodama, who was one of the very first women videogame designers. In one of her early interviews, Kira said that Kodama was one of the women who inspired her to work in the videogame industry, along with Dona Bailey and Carol Shaw.”

I felt like kicking myself. In the head. Repeatedly. I knew all about Rieko Kodama. She was one of the co-creators of the Phantasy Star game series. And she’d also worked on the very first Sonic the Hedgehog game, one of Kira’s all-time favorite videogames—a game that also just happened to put the player on a quest to collect seven Chaos Emeralds.

But I still didn’t see a connection between Rieko Kodama and the second line of the clue. Probably because I didn’t have her entire credits memorized, when I clearly should have.

“OK,” I said. “Then what about ‘the very first heroine, demoted to hero’?”

“Rieko Kodama co-created the first arcade game with a woman as its hero!” Shoto said. “Back in 1985.”

I searched my memory, but the only woman hero of a Rieko Kodama game I could think of was Alis Lansdale, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Phantasy Star I—and that was a home console game. Released for the Sega Master System in Japan in 1987, and in the United States in 1988.

“I’m talking about the first human female protagonist in an action videogame.” Shoto cupped his right ear. “Anyone?”

“Wasn’t that Samus from Metroid?” Aech asked as she opened her own browser window to look up the answer. “No wait—Toby from Baraduke!”

Shoto shook his head again, then he closed his eyes and raised his right fist to the sky in victory.

“Princess Kurumi!” he shouted. “Released by Sega in March of 1985! Rieko Kodama designed all the characters and environments. But when they released the game in the United States, they didn’t think American boys would put quarters in a game with the word princess on its marquee, so they changed its title to Sega Ninja!” He smiled at me, then shrugged. “It was one of my grandpa Hiro’s favorite games. We used to play together when I was very little. When he passed away, he left me his whole Sega game collection. I spent a lot of my time playing it, back when I was a hikikomori.”

I was so happy to hear this that I felt like hugging Shoto. So I did, and he was so overjoyed at that moment he tolerated it. He’d always been our Sega scholar, and our resident expert on pretty much any videogame ever made in Japan. And in recent years, he’d become a well-known ninja nut. After the contest, when he abandoned his avatar’s samurai attire out of respect for his late brother, he’d changed his avatar to a ninja and became a ninja addict. He live-streamed himself playing ninja videogames all day, every day, for a month. And he aired ninja movies on his POV channel every night. So this riddle was a bull’s-eye in his gunter knowledge sweet spot.

“Sega Ninja?” Aech repeated as her eyes slowly lit up with recognition. “Oh shit! I remember this game now! I was addicted to it. You play this badass princess named Kurumi, who has to take back her castle from the punks who usurped it.”

Shoto activated a hologram projector and a rotating three-dimensional image of an original Sega Ninja arcade cabinet appeared. Then he grinned and presented it to us, as if it were the grand prize on a game show.

“And guess what?” Shoto continued. “When Sega ported Ninja Princess to their Master System home console, they retitled the game once again, this time as ‘The Ninja.’ And because Sega thought it would improve sales, they changed the main character from a woman, the badass ninja princess Kurumi, to a man—a generic male ninja named Kazamaru.”

“Yeah, I remember this shit now,” Aech said. “In the console version, they also turned the princess from a kunoichi into a damsel in distress that Kazamaru rescues at the end of the game.” She shook her head. “That still pisses me off.”

“Seriously?” I said, with genuine surprise. “They did that?” Shoto and Aech both nodded.

“So…” I said. “That’s got to be it, right? The Ninja Princess, Kurumi, was the ‘very first heroine, demoted to hero’!”

“Oh! Yo! I said God damn, Shoto!” Aech suddenly began to sing, as she half hunched over and began to dance sideways toward him. Shoto moved toward her in the same fashion, and they launched into an elaborate five-part high-five ritual.

“Let’s wait until we have the shard to celebrate, OK?” I said.

Shoto nodded and opened his OASIS atlas. I saw him do a quick search for Rieko Kodama’s name. He got several hits in the Console Cluster, a group of worlds in Sector Eight where the landscape of each planet resembled the distinctive graphics of different classic game consoles.

“There’s a planet near the center of the Sega quadrant called Phoenix-Rie,” he said, reading off his display. “It’s the most popular shrine to Rieko Kodama’s life and work, and it dates back to the early days of the OASIS. And Kira Morrow is listed as one of its original creators in the planet’s colophon.”

“Phoenix-Rie was Kodama’s alias,” Shoto said. “I visited that planet a few times during the contest. It contains quest portals that lead to OASIS ports of every game Kodama ever worked on, including Ninja Princess. That must be where we need to go.”

“Boom!” Aech said. “Then let’s make like a tree and get outta here.”

I selected Aech and Shoto’s avatars on my HUD and prepared to teleport all three of us to the planet Phoenix-Rie in Sector Eight. But of course, I couldn’t take us anywhere. Anorak had taken my teleportation powers away from me, along with my other superuser abilities, when he stole the Robes of Anorak from my inventory. My avatar was still maxed out at ninety-ninth-level, but now I was mortal once again, just like any other avatar. And I wasn’t properly equipped. I’d collected plenty of new weapons, magic items, and vehicles over the past three years, but I didn’t lug all of that stuff around with me. Everything was in my old stronghold on Falco, and we didn’t have time to waste making a detour back there so that I could gear up.

“Hey, Faisal,” I said, trying to conceal my embarrassment. “Can you hook me up with one of those Admin rings you gave to everyone else during our first co-owners meeting?”

Faisal smiled and removed a small silver ring from his inventory and then tossed it to me. I caught it and slipped it onto the pinky of my right hand. It appeared in my avatar’s inventory as a Ring of OASIS Administration. It gave me the ability to teleport anywhere in the OASIS for free, and enclosed my avatar in a shield that made me immune to attacks from other OASIS avatars, even in PvP zones. Faisal had offered me one of these Admin rings when he’d given them to Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto, but I’d declined because the Robes of Anorak already gave me those abilities and many more—and I was also showing off for Art3mis.

“Thanks, Faisal,” I said.

“Here,” Aech said impatiently. She flashed her own admin ring at me, then selected Phoenix-Rie on her own OASIS atlas. “Let me do the honors.”

She placed her right hand on Shoto’s shoulder and her left one on mine, then she uttered the brief incantation required to activate her teleportation spell, and our avatars vanished.

A split second later, we rematerialized on the surface of the planet Phoenix-Rie. It was a bright and beautiful little world, rendered in colorful 8-bit graphics, and its pixelated landscape was a patchwork of different environments that Rieko Kodama had created for a variety of games. The area where Aech, Shoto, and I arrived was modeled after the game Alex Kidd in the Miracle World. But as we began to traverse the planet’s surface, we found ourselves running through the Green Hill Zone from the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Then the landscape quickly changed to resemble environments from the very first Phantasy Star game. I recognized graphical elements from all three planets in the Algol system—in just a few minutes, we sprinted through the forests of Palma, the deserts of Motavia, and the icy plains of Dezoris.

We also saw dozens of different nonplayer characters from Kodama’s games roaming around aimlessly, but like most OASIS NPCs, they wouldn’t attack or talk to you unless you attacked or talked to them first, so we just stayed out of their way.

Eventually we reached the planet’s equator, where we found a line of game portals positioned along it, stretching to the pixelated horizon in each direction. The portals were arranged in chronological order by the games’ year of release.

We found the Ninja Princess portal in less than a minute, positioned between the portals leading to OASIS re-creations of the games Championship Boxing and Black Onyx.

Each glowing circular portal had an icon denoting the corresponding videogame’s original packaging hovering just above it, so the Ninja Princess portal had an arcade cabinet icon above it, while the portals to either side of it had Sega MyCards above them.

As we approached the Ninja Princess portal, I began to notice a ringing in my ears, which began to increase steadily in volume the closer I got to it. Aech and Shoto didn’t seem to hear it at all, so I decided to check my inventory. That was when I realized the sound was emanating from the First Shard. The icon denoting it on my item list was pulsing in time with the ringing in my ears—as if the shard were calling out to me. Just like that green Kryptonian crystal that called to young Kal-El in Superman: The

Movie. In fact, I was pretty sure Halliday had lifted the sound effect I was hearing directly from that film.

When I took the shard out of my inventory to examine it, the ringing stopped, and the inscription on the shard changed before my eyes. Now it read:

Ninniku and Zaemon aren’t alone on her roster Once you reclaim her castle, you must face her imposter

I showed the new couplet to Shoto and Aech and their eyes lit up.

“Ninniku and Zaemon are the two main bad guys in Ninja Princess,” Aech said. “Kurumi has to defeat both of them to win the game and ‘reclaim her castle.’ ”

“Then ‘face her imposter,’ ” I recited. “That must be Kazamaru, the male ninja they replaced her with in the Master System port. I guess I’ll have to fight him too.” I cracked my knuckles. “Couldn’t be too difficult, right?”

“Share your POV feed with us so we can monitor your progress,” Shoto said. “I’m calling you now audio-only, so Aech and I can feed you tips as you go. Just like old times. Oh, and that reminds me…”

Shoto changed out of his formal ninja attire and put on his ornate gold armor and then strapped on his swords. This prompted Aech and me to change into our old gunter attire too. Then Aech threw up a mirror so that the three of us could admire ourselves.

“Look at those handsome devils,” she said, before blasting the mirror to smithereens with a shot from her assault rifle. “Now, let’s do this.”

“OK, amigos,” I said, accepting Shoto’s audio call on my HUD. “Here goes nothing.”

I bumped fists with both of them at once, then turned around, took a deep breath, and jumped into the Ninja Princess portal.