“I’m done negotiating, Anorak,” I replied. “If you don’t release Aech, Shoto, and everyone else you’re holding hostage, I press the Big Red Button. You can’t blackmail a guy with nothing left to lose.”
“We appear to be at an impasse,” he said. “I’m not going to release them, or you, until after I have the shards. And you’re not going to give me the shards until after I release them. Whatever shall we do?”
“Why don’t we just stand here and wait until I’ve got one minute left?” I said. “Then I’ll press it. My last act as a living being will be to erase the OASIS forever. Pretty poetic, don’t you think? Or maybe I’ll chicken out, and I won’t press it before I die. Either way, you end up empty-handed. Is that what you want?”
Anorak was about to reply when I saw a blur of movement behind him. I let out a sigh of relief and put the shards back in my inventory.
“Hold on,” I said. “I just thought of another option. Remember when you said you were Halliday’s rightful heir—the only one worthy of inheriting his power?”
“I do.”
“Why don’t you prove it?” I said. “In a duel to the death. Mano a mano. Winner takes all. If you win, you take the shards. But if you lose, all of your hostages go free.”
Anorak grinned as he looked me over. He could probably tell that I was already suffering the effects of Synaptic Overload Syndrome, as a result of being logged in for nearly twelve straight hours.
“All right, Parzival,” Anorak said. “I accept your proposal. A duel to the death. Winner takes all.” He grinned wide, then he held up a remote control with a single large green button on it. “If you manage to kill me, my infirmware will be deactivated and all of my ONI hostages will be released immediately.”
“Good to know,” I said.
Anorak laughed.
“You’re not gonna win, doofus,” he said, flying back from the window to make room for me to emerge from it. “Synaptic Overload Syndrome is already starting to fry your neurons.”
He motioned for me to come forward. But I didn’t emerge from the window to fight him. Instead, I folded my arms and remained inside the safety of the study.
“I never said who you had to fight to the death,” I muttered, smiling weakly. Then I pointed over Anorak’s shoulder. He turned around to see the Great and Powerful Og hovering in the air behind him.
“Hey, nerd,” Og said. “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?”
Anorak looked genuinely surprised that Og was still alive. He looked even more surprised a second later, when tines of blue lightning erupted from Og’s fingertips and blasted him backward several hundred yards before he collided with a mountain, creating a large impact crater that immediately started an avalanche. Anorak was buried under tons of rock in a matter of seconds. But moments later, he exploded up out of the rubble looking completely unharmed.
Og flew after him like a rocket, and then the two of them faced off in the sky directly in front of me, hovering over the same field where the Battle of Castle Anorak had taken place over three years earlier.
Og wasn’t behaving like someone who was at death’s door from a gunshot wound. He looked completely fine—and he didn’t even appear to be in any pain. How was this possible?
Then I realized how—for the first time in his life, Og had donned an ONI headset, so that he could log back in and face Anorak.
“It’s funny,” Og said. “Back when we first built this place, schoolkids all over the world would argue about who would win in a battle between Anorak and the Great and Powerful Og. And I have to admit, I always used to wonder too.” He smiled at Anorak. “Of course, when Jim died, I didn’t think we’d ever know the answer. But life continues to be full of surprises—right up until the bitter end.”
With that, Og launched his avatar forward, flying toward Anorak as Anorak hurtled forward to meet him.
And that was how I ended up having a front-row seat for what was undoubtedly the most epic player-versus-NPC battle in the history of the OASIS, as the avatars of its two creators locked horns for the biggest prizefight in history—the Great and Powerful Og versus Anorak the All-Knowing, the digital ghost of his old partner, James Halliday. And since I had such a great view, I decided to air everything I was seeing on my POV channel, so the whole world could tune in.
The two mighty avatars collided with a thunderclap, and the sky overhead suddenly filled with dark thunderclouds that rolled in and spread from one end of the horizon to the other, like a dark cloak being unfurled.