When the song ended, so did the quest. The horses and the other characters vanished and my avatar’s appearance returned to normal. I found myself standing alone outside the quest portal I’d originally entered, on the eastern shore of the kingdom of Guilder.
A chime sounded and a message appeared on my HUD, congratulating me on completing the Princess Bride quest with a perfect score of one million points. Then the message disappeared and…that was it.
I waited for a full minute, but nothing else happened.
I sat down on the beach and let out a sigh.
This wasn’t my first visit to the planet Florin. I had already completed this quest with a perfect score three times before, each time playing as a different character—first as Westley, then as Buttercup, then as Fezzik. The Princess Bride had been one of Kira Underwood’s all-time favorite films, and she’d helped create all of the interactive OASIS quests based on it. （Including the controversial gender-swapped The Prince Groom, in which Buttercup is the swashbuckling heroine and Westley serves as the damsel in distress.） I’d thought that solving one of these quests with a perfect score might yield some clue related to the Seven Shards. But I’d come up empty-handed each and every time. Today was my final attempt. Inigo had been the only other playable character, and the most difficult one with which to obtain a perfect score. Now, after nearly a dozen attempts, I’d finally done it. And once again I had nothing to show for my efforts.
I got to my feet and took a deep breath. Then I teleported back to my command center on Falco.
Once my avatar finished rematerializing, I settled into the comfy TNG-era captain’s chair I’d installed there. I stared out at the cratered landscape in silent frustration for a moment. Then I opened up my grail diary, and once again I began scanning the vast mountain of data I’d collected over the past eight years, about James Halliday and his life, work, associates, and interests—although for the past three years, nearly all of the new material I’d added pertained to one associate in particular. The Siren herself, Kira Morrow, née Underwood.
I’d started my grail diary in an old spiral notebook when I was thirteen and still living in the stacks outside Oklahoma City. I’d been forced to burn the original the night before I infiltrated IOI headquarters, to prevent it from falling into the Sixers’ hands. But I’d made hi-res scans of the notebook’s pages beforehand and stored them in my OASIS account. Those scans were all still there, in the digital version of my grail diary, which appeared as a jumble of cascading windows floating in front of me. It contained countless documents, diagrams, photos, maps, and media files, all indexed and cross-referenced for easy browsing.
The four-line Shard Riddle was displayed in a window that always remained on top:
Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul
On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role
For each fragment my heir must pay a toll
To once again make the Siren whole
When the riddle had first appeared shortly after the ONI’s launch, I’d gone back and re-analyzed the free digital copy of Anorak’s Almanac available on Halliday’s old website, just to make sure it hadn’t been updated with any new information or clues. It hadn’t. Every word of the Almanac was still the same. The famous series of notched letters I’d found scattered throughout its text during Halliday’s contest were still there, but no new ones had been added.
One of the superuser abilities the Robes of Anorak gave me was the ability to simply wish for things out loud. If it could, the system would almost always grant my wish. But whenever I tried wishing for information about the Seven Shards, a message would flash across my HUD:
NICE TRY, CHEATER!
So I had no choice but to keep on searching for the shards myself. And once I committed to that quest, I gave it my absolute all. I did my due diligence.
I studied every reference to the number 7 in Anorak’s Almanac. I also played and solved every videogame in his collection that was related to the number 7. The Seven Cities of Gold （1984）， The Seven Spirits of Ra （1987）， Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs （1988）， The Seven Gates of Jambala （1989）， Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity （1994）， Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars （1996）。 Then I went overboard and also played any game that had the number 7 in its title, like Sigma 7, Stellar 7, Lucky 7, Force 7, Pitman 7, and Escape from Pulsar 7.
I even subjected myself to Keeper of the Seven Keys, a four-part concept album by Helloween, a German power-metal band from Hamburg, founded in 1984. I was not a fan of mid-’80s German power metal, but Halliday used to listen to it for hours when he was programming his first games, so I knew there was a chance he’d drawn inspiration from it.