One of the locations that showed up most frequently in Kira’s OASIS account logs was the planet Miyazaki in Sector Twenty-Seven. It was a bizarre and beautiful world that paid tribute to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator behind anime masterpieces like Nausica? of the Valley of the Wind and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Visiting Miyazaki was like plunging your senses into a surreal mash-up of all of the different animated realities created inside Studio Ghibli’s films. （An experience that became substantially more intense with an ONI headset.） Kira had visited Miyazaki on a weekly basis for several years. And now I was able to say the same thing. But like Bono before me, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.
Then there was Middle-earth. All three versions of it…
Kira Morrow had been a well-known Tolkien fanatic. She famously reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings every year from the time she was sixteen onward. And after they married, Og built Kira a real-world replica of Rivendell in the mountains of Oregon, where they lived together happily until her death. Og still lived there now, and Kira was buried on the property. I’d visited her grave myself, during the week we’d all spent there.
According to Kira’s access logs, one of her favorite OASIS destinations had been Arda, the three-planet system in Sector Seven that recreated J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy world in the First, Second, and Third Ages of its fictional history. Created with an almost fanatical devotion by millions of Tolkien fans, many of whom were still revising and improving the simulations to this day, the Ardas drew largely on Tolkien’s original writings on Middle-earth, but they took inspiration from the many films, television shows, and videogames set there as well.
So far, I’d spent most of my time on Arda III. It depicted the Third Age of Middle-earth, which was when all of the events described in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings took place, and Kira had visited it far more frequently than Arda I or Arda II—though she spent a great deal of time on each of them as well.
I wish I could say that I’d scoured every inch of all three versions of Middle-earth. But I hadn’t. Not by a long shot. I’d completed all the major quests on Arda II and III, and about half of the most popular quests on Arda I, but they were three of the most detailed worlds in the whole simulation, and at my current pace, completing every quest they contained could take me several more years.
Chthonia was the last planet on my list, and the one I was most confident belonged there. It was Halliday’s recreation of the fantasy world he’d created for his epic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign back in high school, in which both Kira and Og had participated. Chthonia would later serve as the setting for many of Halliday’s earliest videogames, including Anorak’s Quest and its many sequels.
Chthonia was the very first planet Halliday had created, making it the oldest world in the simulation. And when he, Ogden, and Kira had created their OASIS avatars, they’d each named them after the characters they’d played in their Chthonia campaign. Halliday’s character had been a dark-robed magic user named Anorak, whom he’d played as an NPC while serving as Dungeon Master. Ogden Morrow had played a wisecracking wizard named “the Great and Powerful Og.” And Kira’s character had been a powerful druid called Leucosia, named after one of the Sirens of Greek mythology.
Of course, Chthonia was also where Halliday had hidden the Third Gate in his Easter-egg hunt, inside Castle Anorak. Because of this, many gunters believed it was unlikely he would’ve chosen to hide one of the Seven Shards there too. But I wasn’t so sure. Chthonia was clearly a world where the “Siren once played a role.” A very important role, from Halliday’s perspective. So I kept Chthonia on my list and searched the planet from top to bottom.
I hadn’t limited my search to just these nine planets, of course. I’d looked for the Seven Shards on dozens of other OASIS worlds as well, to no avail.
I let out a sigh and rubbed my temples, wishing for the thousandth time that I hadn’t sabotaged my friendship with Og, so that I could call him and ask for his help. Of course, asking for his help was precisely what had ended our friendship. Og had never been comfortable talking about Kira, and he’d communicated this to me in every way possible. But I’d been too fixated to hear him.
Thinking back on my behavior made me wince with shame now. Why would a retired billionaire want to spend his twilight years being hounded for information about his dead wife? It was no wonder he’d stopped speaking to me. I’d given him no real choice.