Art3mis and I—along with Aech and Shoto, both looking shaken but eager to rejoin the quest—materialized on Halcydonia. Specifically, within my personal Be-Free Treehouse, located deep within the Friendship Forest of Faraway, which was where any Halcydonian was automatically transported when they returned to the planet. Any kid in the OASIS under the age of thirteen could earn a Be-Free Treehouse by completing the free educational quests spread across the planet. Once you earned your treehouse, it belonged to you for the rest of your life, and no one could come inside it without your permission. It was just a tiny virtual space, but growing up in the stacks, it was also the first space that I was able to call my own—and the only one, until I discovered my hideout.
When Kira and Og founded Halcydonia Interactive and created this planet, they’d cooked up the Be-Free Treehouses as a way to give kids around the world a free, happy, virtual home inside the OASIS that they could always escape to, and find themselves surrounded by an endless assortment of furry friends and anthropomorphic animal teachers who were always overjoyed to see them, and who just wanted to teach them how to read, write, spell, and do arithmetic, all while staying physically fit and being kind to others.
Being able to put on my OASIS visor and be transported to the magical kingdom of Halcydonia was one of the things that kept me sane, and it made my life in the Portland Avenue Stacks bearable. And it did the same thing for millions of other kids around the world.
If you were under age thirteen, you could teleport to Halcydonia for free from Incipio, or from any public transport terminal anywhere else in the OASIS. And once you got there, all the quests and learning games were free too. I never wanted to leave. And for a few years, I almost never did. Those were the last few years of my mother’s life, when she was slipping deeper into depression and the addiction that would end up killing her.
During those last years, as our tiny, grim trailer in the stacks became an increasingly unpleasant place to be, I spent more and more time hanging out inside my treehouse on Halcydonia, and sometimes after she got off work, my mom would log back in to the OASIS and join me there, so I could tell her about my day, or show her the artwork I’d made, or introduce her to one of my new virtual animal friends.
The inside of my Be-Free Treehouse was one large circular room, with a continuous band of windows all the way around the outside wall, giving us a panoramic view of the surrounding forest, which was filled with millions and millions of identical trees, each with an identical treehouse built into it. This dense forest of treehouses appeared to stretch on forever, in every direction.
Like all of the treehouses, mine had a large hollow tree trunk at the center, containing a spiral staircase leading to the ground. I’d decorated the interior so that it resembled the treehouse where Chewbacca’s family lived on Kashyyyk in the Star Wars Holiday Special. Aech noticed this a few seconds after we arrived and chuckled, then she let out a long Wookiee growl of recognition. I didn’t laugh. I was too busy teetering on the verge of an emotional breakdown, as I took a long look around the room.
There was a giant console television on one side of the room, positioned directly in front of an even more enormous blue couch. The TV was still running through a playlist of some of eleven-year-old Wade’s favorite shows. There was currently a green Muppet newscaster on the screen, and after a few seconds I placed him as Gary Gnu, the host of The Gary Gnu Show. He had orange hair and an orange goatee, and he was in the midst of uttering a phrase that I must’ve heard hundreds of times when I was growing up here: “No g’news is good g’news with Gary Gnu!”
By turning the treehouse TV’s giant channel knobs, you could watch shows from a huge free library of old children’s educational programming
from the late twentieth century. Shows like 3-2-1 Contact, The Big Comfy Couch, Captain Kangaroo, The Electric Company, The Great Space Coaster, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Romper Room, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, Zoobilee Zoo, and many, many more. Kira and Og had used their vast fortunes to purchase the rights to these long-forgotten shows, then uploaded all of them to the free video archive here on Halcydonia, where future generations of kids could keep enjoying and learning from them forever.
But the Morrows didn’t stop there. They also re-created the sets from all of these old educational shows as virtual OASIS environments, and all of their characters as lifelike NPCs. Then they scattered these characters and environments all over the surface of Halcydonia, mixed in with the Morrows’ own educational quests and minigames. That was one of the many reasons Halcydonia had felt like such a magical place to spend my time as a lonely kid in the stacks. As I wandered across its magical landscape (which was completely devoid of advertising and microtransactions), I might see Elmo from Sesame Street talking to Chairy from Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Then they would both run over and invite me to play a game of Sorry! or Trouble on a nearby picnic table. That sort of thing happened everywhere on Halcydonia. For a kid like me, it hadn’t just been an escape. It had been a life preserver, a lone place of joy and belonging for a little boy desperate for both.
I’d always thought of the Morrows as two of my very first teachers. But now, I realized they had also served as my surrogate parents. That was why it had been so thrilling to meet Og in person and become his friend—and why it had been so devastating when he’d turned his back on me. Now I knew I’d given him no other choice.
The walls of my treehouse were covered with old drawings and artwork that my mother and I had created together. Lots of knights and wizards. And Ninja Turtles. And Transformers. There were also a bunch of framed selfies of our avatars posing together, taken in this very room. And just a few feet away, sitting atop a bookshelf, was a real photograph of me and my mother, taken in our trailer, just a few months before she died. In it, we were both making silly faces as we posed for a selfie.
I’d forgotten that photo was here, and seeing it again for the first time in a decade felt like having an old wound ripped open, right there in front of my friends.
Art3mis saw the photo, too, along with my reaction to it, and she immediately went over and placed it facedown on the bookshelf. Then she walked back over to me and gave my shoulder a comforting squeeze.
“You need a minute?” she asked. “We could wait outside.”
“You guys should know something,” I said. “I had a nervous breakdown the last time I visited this planet. That’s why I haven’t been back in so long.”
They all studied my face to see if I was kidding, and saw that I wasn’t.
“I was eleven years old at the time,” I said. “And my mother had just died of a drug overdose a few days earlier. I went back to Halcydonia because my mom and I had spent so much time here together. I thought it might bring me some comfort, but it didn’t. It just pushed me over the edge.”
“I’m so sorry, Z,” Art3mis said. “But this time you aren’t alone. Your friends are with you. And we are going to stay with you, the whole time. OK?”
I nodded. Then I bit my lower lip to keep it from trembling.
Shoto rested a hand on my shoulder. Then Aech did the same thing and said, “We got your back, Z.”
“Thanks, guys,” I said, once I found my voice again. Then I took out the Third Shard and pointed at the coat of arms etched into its surface. “This is the coat of arms of Queen Itsalot, the sovereign ruler of the kingdom of Itsalot, which is a small continent to the south, where most of the math-related quests are located.”
I opened a map of the planet and made it visible to everyone. It looked just like the Map from Dora the Explorer, but I quickly muted it before it could start singing its own name.
“We’re here,” I said, pointing to the Friendship Forest. “The queen lives in Castle Calculus, which lies to the south, beyond the MoreStuff Mountain Range and across the SeeSaw Sea. No teleportation is permitted on this
planet, and it would take us several hours to get there on foot. But I know a shortcut. That’s the exit, over there.”
I motioned to the spiral staircase inside the hollow tree trunk at the center of the room. Shoto ran over and began to descend it first, with Aech close behind. But she had to stop and shrink her avatar to half-size to make it onto the tiny staircase. As she was doing that, I went over to grab my tiny Halcydonia Adventurers’ Club backpack off its hook on the wall. These backpacks couldn’t be added to your avatar’s inventory, and the items inside were only useful on this planet, so everyone left them in storage lockers, or in their Be-Free Treehouse, like me.
My mother’s identical backpack was hanging right beside it. I tried to avoid looking at it, but then I went right ahead and looked at it anyway. Including the word stitched onto the back flap in cursive with pink yarn: Mama.
I hit the emotion-suppressing software on my HUD, so Art3mis wouldn’t see me start to sob. I managed to keep moving. I put my own backpack on my avatar’s back. As I did, it automatically enlarged itself to fit my twenty-one-year-old frame. I turned to follow the others down the staircase. But Art3mis was standing there, blocking my way. The emotion-suppressing software was working—there was no way she should have known I was crying, but somehow she did. I tried to go around her. But just like the first time we met, she refused to let me pass.
Instead, she opened her arms and wrapped them around me—something I had long ago accepted that she would never do again. She held me tight, until I finally got my sobbing under control.
Samantha knew all about my mother, and how I found her dead of a drug overdose on our couch when I was eleven. It was heroin mixed with some other stuff, I think. That was the reason I’d avoided all ONI recordings made by heroin users for the entire first year the ONI-net was online. Then curiosity finally got the best of me, and I went all the way down the ONI-net heroin-addict-high rabbit hole. I wanted to experience what my mother had experienced firsthand. To find out exactly the sort of high my mother had been chasing when she’d unwittingly overdosed. I’d always assumed that it must be a pretty great feeling, if my mother thought it was worth losing her life for it. Doing a drug via ONI playback wasn’t the
same as shooting it into your own bloodstream. It felt the same, but it didn’t cause the same long-term damage or physical addiction symptoms. And it removed the risk of accidental death. So ONI recordings allowed me to experience the same high my mother had, without destroying my brain and my body in the process. I didn’t find it all that enlightening.
I wiped my eyes and took several deep breaths until I got myself back under control. Then I gave Art3mis a forced smile and a thumbs up. She nodded and took me by the hand, then she led me down the spiral staircase. Once we reached the bottom, I pushed open the heavy wooden door, and together, we stepped outside, into the Friendship Forest, where Aech and Shoto were waiting for us. The two of them were standing side by side in a beam of sunlight breaking through the treetops, illuminating tiny insects and motes of dust floating in the air around them.
I thought Art3mis would let go of my hand before Aech and Shoto saw her holding it, but she didn’t. She let them see. And Aech and Shoto pretended not to notice.
I pointed to a path leading south, through the dense forest of treehouses all around us.
“The MoreStuff Mountains are that way,” I said. “Just follow me closely, single-file, and only step where I step. Don’t stop to talk to anyone
—avatars or NPCs. Also, don’t touch anything, and if you can help it, try not to look at anything either—not for longer than a second or two. Otherwise you might trigger some educational minigame or side quest that you’ll be forced to complete, and we’ll have to go on without you. We don’t have time to stop and play Blue’s Clues. Understood?”
They all nodded, and the four of us took off, running north along the path at top speed.
 |
Once we reached the edge of the Be-Free Forest, we entered Holden’s Field
—a large, flat, open field of rye, perched precariously on the edge of the Cliffs of Salinger, a place where I had completed several different book-
report quests at several different grade levels. I had also played countless games of tag in this field, with other kids from around the world. Kids I had never met and would never meet in the real world, with usernames that they had probably changed long ago.
Art3mis rested a hand on my shoulder, bringing me back to the present. “We need to keep moving,” she said.
I led them along the edge of the rye field, onto a narrow paved road that snaked to the north, through a rolling countryside and toward the MoreStuff Mountains in the distance. My surroundings seemed even more vibrant and realistic than I remembered—then I realized it was because this was the first time I had experienced this place with an ONI headset.
I heard a gleeful shriek and glanced overhead. There were a few kids flying around in their spellicopters. I had one in my inventory, but they only had room for one person, and that person had to keep spelling new words to stay airborne. We had to find other transportation.
We followed the road until it led us to a small farmhouse with a red barn behind it. There was a wooden wheelbarrow out by the road, with a rake leaning against it. I led Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis to the wheelbarrow and stood on a specific spot on the road beside it, then began to sing at the sky, as loudly as I could.
“It’s the Great Space Coaster!” I yelled. “Get on board! On the Great Space Coaster! We’ll explore!”
As I continued to sing, accompanying music began to play out of nowhere. Art3mis laughed and nodded with recognition, then she began to sing along with me. I displayed the lyrics in a browser window, so that Aech and Shoto could join in too.
As we sang, a flying yellow aircar swooped down out of the sky and flew under us, scooping our avatars up and into its fine Corinthian-leather seats.
“Welcome aboard the Great Space Coaster,” I said, placing my hands on the coaster’s flight stick. “Free transportation to Castle Calculus! Everyone buckle up, otherwise you’ll fall out.”
I aimed the Great Space Coaster at the MoreStuff Mountains on the horizon and floored the accelerator. Then I kept the hammer down until we
were soaring over them. We passed over the starting point for the legendary Oregon Trail quest. A moment later, we flew over Mister Rogers’ neighborhood. Then we continued south, down along the coast of the SeeSaw Sea, and a few minutes later we passed over Gullah Gullah Island.
When I pointed the island out to Aech, it put a huge smile on her face, and as she began to talk about how much she loved that show as a kid, I caught myself smiling too. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed this place. Why had I spent so much time running away? It felt genuinely good to be back here, despite the circumstances.
Once we cleared the mountain range, I set the coaster down just outside the golden front gate of Halcydonia City. It was the only entrance, and it was guarded by the Subtraction Sentinel, a stoic stone giant who would only open the gates for you after you solved a series of simple subtraction problems for him. Once I did this, the Subtraction Sentinel gave me a solemn nod, then he let me enter the city. Then Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis all had to do the same thing. Once we were all inside the gate, I took off at a run, leading my friends through the city’s tangled maze of streets.
As we were making our way down a cobblestone side street, I spotted something strange and completely out of place: a gorgeous cream-colored 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible that I instantly recognized from Rain Man. Inside it was a young Tom Cruise—or rather, his character from the movie, Charlie Babbitt. He was just sitting there behind the steering wheel, tapping it with his right hand, almost like he was drumming along to music. But there was no music, and his drumming had an odd rhythm to it. Steady, like a metronome, except that every few taps, it seemed like he was pressing on the wheel for an extra moment. The pattern reminded me of a scene in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, for some reason it took me a moment to place, but then it clicked—was he tapping out a message in Morse code?
I opened my Mandarax translation software and used it to translate the Morse code into letters, only to discover that he was spelling out M-O-R-S-E.
I’d never seen a Tom Cruise NPC of any kind on Halcydonia. Content from R-rated movies was expressly forbidden here. So what was going on?
Less than a minute later, I spotted another out-of-place NPC—Raymond “Rain Man” Babbitt, Dustin Hoffman’s character from the same film. He was staring off into space, while rocking slowly back and forth, shifting his weight from his left foot to his right foot. But I could see right away that he was making these movements in a pattern—a mix of short hops and long hops, like Morse code. According to my Mandarax translator software, his feet were tapping out the same word his brother had been tapping out on his steering wheel: M-O-R-S-E.
I didn’t have time to ponder it now, because we’d arrived at Castle Calculus, which was located at the city center. We mounted the ornate marble steps out front, which had a bunch of different math proofs and equations carved into them, and passed through the castle’s grand entranceway, then continued on into Queen Itsalot’s throne room.
Normally, she wouldn’t have granted us an audience so quickly. But I’d already met the queen once before, back when she awarded me the Silver Abacus of Itsalot for completing every math quest on the planet before my twelfth birthday. When I presented the abacus to the Itsalot master-at-arms, he bowed and stepped out of my way, allowing my friends and me to pass.
We walked up the long velvet carpet leading to the queen, who waved to me from her throne. She wore a gold crown with a large jewel-encrusted plus sign as its headpiece, and mathematical proofs and equations adorned her robes, stitched into their gold fabric with bright red thread. Her family’s coat of arms—the same coat of arms etched into the Third Shard—hung on the wall behind her.
She was currently reading a large storybook to a group of baby animals gathered around her feet. But when she saw me approaching, she closed the book and sent them away.
When I reached her throne, I knelt before her and bowed my head, and motioned for Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis to do the same.
“Rise, Sir Parzival!” cried Queen Itsalot. “My noble subject and dear friend! How good to see you again, after so many years. What brings you back to my kingdom?”
I rose to my feet, then took out the Third Shard and showed her the coat of arms engraved upon it.
“I’m on a quest to find the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul,” I said. “And I think one of them might be hidden here in your kingdom. Can you help me find it, Your Majesty?”
Her eyes widened in surprise. She looked utterly delighted.
“Indeed I can, dear boy!” she replied. “The shard was given to me for safekeeping, a long time ago. I wondered if anyone would ever show up here looking for it, and now here you are, at long last. But before I can give it to you, you’ll need to earn all fifty Halcydonia Wearit-Merit Badges.”
Behind me, I heard all three of my friends inhale sharply. I glanced back at them.
“Oh my God,” Aech said. “Fifty? How long is that going to take?”
“Relax,” I said. “I spent years here, earning all those badges. With a lot of help from my mom…”
I opened my avatar’s inventory and dug around until I found my old Halcydonia Wearit-Merit Badge sash. Then I presented it to the queen with both hands.
She took the sash from me and looked it over, running her wrinkled fingers down the rows of embroidered patches, each one bearing a different symbol or icon. She counted them one by one, and when she reached fifty, she smiled and nodded to herself. Then she snapped her fingers and there was a blinding flash of light.
When my eyes recovered, I saw that my sash had vanished from the queen’s hand. Now she was holding the Fourth Shard. It sparkled in the bright sunlight pouring into the throne room, through the thousands of stained-glass windows that made up its domed ceiling. (Each one of these windows paid tribute to a different public school teacher, and had been placed here by one of their students.)
Queen Itsalot tilted the shard so that it reflected the different-colored shafts of light, turning the throne room into a giant kaleidoscope for a few seconds. Then she lowered it and held it out, offering it to me.
I knelt before her, then I reached up and took the shard from the queen’s hands, being careful not to meet her gaze. (If I did, there was a good chance she would send me off on a mandatory math quest to rescue one of her royal relatives—usually her husband, the clueless King Itsalot, who was
constantly being taken prisoner by the evil wizard Multiplikatar, who tossed him into the Long Division Dungeons beneath Protractor Peak, located high in the MoreStuff Mountains.) As I wrapped my fingers around the shard, once again I tried to prepare myself for the jolt of what I knew was coming, from the toll I had to pay….
|
I—or rather Kira—rushed into a cluttered office to find Og sitting at his desk, hard at work on his computer. He turned and Kira held out her sketchpad, and I saw that she’d drawn the Halcydonia Interactive company logo on it.
This was another moment I’d heard Ogden Morrow talk about in interviews and in his biography. Kira had just designed the logo in a fit of inspiration in her own office, down in the GSS Art Department, and then she’d run here to Og’s office to show it to him.
Og looked at the sketch, cried out, “It’s perfect!,” and rose to throw his arms around Kira.
 |
Then I found myself back in Queen Itsalot’s throne room on Halcydonia, clutching the Fourth Shard. I didn’t even have to turn it over to see the clue engraved into it this time, because it already happened to be facing me when I held the shard up to look at it.
It was another symbol, created from a combination of symbols. It looked like the Mars and Venus gender symbols aligned and placed on top of each other, as if they were having intercourse, with a backward number 7, the top of which curled into a spiral, laid on top of that. Together, these shapes formed a symbol that was still instantly recognizable to any student of late-twentieth-century popular culture, and to any true fan of rock or funk music:
 |
When I saw it, I began to chuckle in disbelief. Then I closed my eyes and shook my head, bracing myself for the unprecedented amount of grief that I knew Aech would be giving me in just a few seconds.
I bowed and thanked the queen, then backed away from her until I was able to step off the dais. When I turned around on the top step, I saw Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto studying my face anxiously, trying to read my expression. Art3mis had all of her fingers crossed and was holding them up to show me.
“Well?” Aech said.
I lowered my head in defeat and held out the shard so they could all see the symbol engraved on it. Then I closed my eyes and silently began to count to three. I only made it to one….
“Oh-my-fucking-God!” Aech cried. “No way! It can’t be!” She started to do a funky dance toward me, then she started to dance around me. “That’s Love Symbol #2, Z! It’s Prince!”
“Prince who?” Shoto asked.
“The Prince,” Aech said. “As in ‘the Artist Formerly Known as’? The Prince of Funk! The High Priest of Pop! His Royal Badness. The Purple One!”
“Oh yeah,” Shoto said. “He’s the dude who changed his name to a Glyph of Warding back in the ’90s, right?”
Aech pointed a finger of warning at him, then smiled wide.
“We’re in luck, guys,” she said, still dancing in place. “My dad left me his entire collection of Prince’s music and films when he moved out. I grew up listening to them and watching them. I probably know more about Prince and his artistic output than any other human being in history.”
“I know,” I said. “Do you have any idea how many times you tried to make me watch Purple Rain with you?”
She stopped dancing and pointed an accusing finger at me. “And do you remember how many times you actually sat through the entire film with me? Nada. Never. Not once. And we both know why, don’t we? It was
because Prince always made you feel a little sexually confused and uncomfortable, didn’t he?”
The old Wade would have denied this. But like I said, the ONI had broadened my horizons. Enough, at least, for me to recognize the truth about my adolescent self.
“OK, maybe that’s a little true,” I said, smiling. “Whenever I was watching old episodes of Friday Night Videos and ‘When Doves Cry’ came on, I always averted my eyes when he was getting up out of that bathtub. Every single time.” I placed my right hand over my heart. “Please accept my sincere apologies, Aech. I’m sorry I never let myself appreciate Prince’s genius.”
Aech closed her eyes and raised one palm to the sky like a gospel singer and shouted, “Finally! The truth!”
“So where do we need to go?” Shoto said. “I take it there’s a Prince planet somewhere?”
Aech scowled at him.
“Yes, fool,” Aech said. “There is an entire OASIS planet devoted to Prince, his life, his art, and his music. But we don’t call it ‘the Prince planet.’ Its name is an unpronounceable symbol. The symbol on that shard. But you can refer to it by its nickname, ‘The Afterworld.’ It began as a shrine created shortly after the Purple One’s death, during the first decade the OASIS was online. Kira Morrow was one of the fans who helped build it.”
Aech threw up a 3-D hologram of the Afterworld. It wasn’t a sphere, like most other OASIS planets. It was shaped exactly like the symbol etched into the Fourth Shard—what Aech had referred to as Love Symbol #2.
“It’s in Sector Seven, located right next to Beyoncé, Madonna, and Springsteen, in the superstar cluster,” Aech said. “The Afterworld’s surface is covered with a stylized re-creation of downtown Minneapolis in the late 1980s, along with locations from Prince’s other movies and music videos. You can walk into a simulation of every club gig and concert he ever performed during his career. It’s a big place….It’s easy to get lost and
wander around in circles there. And we don’t even know where to start looking for the shard….”
“Hopefully the shard will give us another clue once we get there,” I said. Aech nodded.
“There’s no time like the present,” she said. “Ready to roll?”
I nodded and turned around to wave farewell to Queen Itsalot, who was once again reading to her baby-animal subjects. She waved back at me, and it occurred to me that I should ask her if she’d seen Ogden Morrow here earlier today. But no—Og had only collected the first three shards before he’d called it quits. Which was pretty strange, now that I thought about it. Og was one of Halcydonia’s creators. This should have been the easiest shard for him to obtain. And this also would have been an extremely easy place for him to hide clues about his location, since he had admin permissions on the whole planet, and total control of its NPCs, so he could’ve changed anything he wanted….
That was when it hit me. Maybe Og had left more clues for me here. I’d already seen them—the unauthorized, R-rated Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman NPCs. But what the hell was he trying to say? Like his high score on Ninja Princess, I just needed to figure out why he…
Just then, a flashing alert icon appeared on all of our HUDs. I reached out and tapped the one flashing on mine.
“We just got a group text from Faisal,” I said. “Saying he needs to see us right away. He wants us back at the conference room on Gregarious, so Anorak can’t eavesdrop.”
“Sorry, Aech,” Art3mis said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “It looks like we need to make a quick pit stop before we head to the Afterworld.”
“OK,” she said. “But Faisal better make it quick!”
“Yeah,” Shoto said. “And this time he better have some good news for us.”
Before I could say how unlikely I thought that was, Aech used her admin ring to teleport us directly back to the conference room on Gregarious.
Sure enough, as soon as we took our seats, Faisal told us he had “even more bad news to share.” But as he began to relay it, it quickly became
clear that “bad” wasn’t a strong enough adjective, and that “downright apocalyptic” would have been far more accurate.
