“This contract states, among other things, that if the information you present to me proves to be valid, you agree not to share it with anyone else for a period of three years. You also agree not to discuss the details of our transaction with anyone, including the media. If you do, you forfeit the reward and I can take it all back—”
“Oh, I’ve read the contract,” she said, grinning, but still not meeting my gaze. “A few thousand times. Sorry, I didn’t mean to insult you. It’s just—that’s a lot of zenny for me.”
I laughed. “Don’t worry, Lo. If you can help me find one of the Seven Shards, then that money is all yours. I promise.”
She nodded and took a deep breath. The look of nervous anticipation on her face set my own heart racing. If this kid was lying about finding one of the shards, then she deserved an Academy Award for her performance.
L0hengrin turned and walked over to the bookshelves that lined the basement’s far wall. They were filled with sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks, role-playing-game supplements, and back issues of various vintage gaming magazines, like Dragon and Space Gamer. Lo began to flip through the huge collection of old Dungeons & Dragons modules shelved there, apparently looking for one in particular.
I’d browsed through that very same bookshelf seven years ago, during the early days of Halliday’s contest. And I’d read or skimmed over most of those old modules and magazines—but not all of them. The remaining titles were still on my reading list when I won the contest, at which point I’d forgotten all about them. Now I was kicking myself, wondering what I’d missed.
“For the past few years, I’ve been scouring Middletown, looking for a way to alter the time period of the simulation,” Lo said. “You know, because of the couplet.”
“The couplet?”
She paused in her search and turned around to look at me. “On Kira’s headstone?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Of course.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and L0hengrin could obviously see it on my face. Her eyes widened in surprise.
“Oh my God. You don’t even know about the couplet. Do you?”
“No,” I replied, throwing up my hands. “I guess I don’t.”
She frowned at me and shook her head, as if to say, How far the mighty have fallen.
“You know how in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Two Towers, there’s a scene were King Théoden places a Simbelmyn? on Théodred’s tomb?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Well, if you visit the recreation of Kira’s grave on EEarth and place a Simbelmyn? taken from Arda on it, a rhymed couplet appears on her headstone,” Lo said. “Other types of flowers indigenous to Middle-earth might work too. I’m not sure. I didn’t try any of them.”
I felt like a complete idiot. I’d visited Kira’s grave on EEarth several times to search for clues. But I’d never thought to try this. At least I could hide my embarrassment, since I wasn’t “rolling real.”
L0hengrin opened a browser window in front of her avatar, then spun it around so I could see it. It showed a screenshot of Kira’s headstone on EEarth. Below her name and the dates of her birth and death was an inscription: BELOVED WIFE, DAUGHTER & FRIEND. Below that were two additional lines of text, which did not appear on her headstone in the real world:
The First Shard lies in the Siren’s first den
So the question isn’t where, but when?
There it was. After all these years, a genuine clue. And it seemed likely that L0hengrin was the first and only person to discover it, because no one else had submitted it to me in an attempt to claim the reward.
“When I found that couplet,” Lo continued, “I thought the ‘Siren’s first den’ might be the place where Kira was living when she created Leucosia—her old guest bedroom here on Middletown. But the time period of this simulation is always set to 1986. Kira only lived in Middletown during her junior year of high school, from the fall of 1988 to the summer of 1989. So to reach the Siren’s Den, I figured I would need to alter the time period of the Middletown simulation, to a different ‘when.’ I tried everything I could think of, including time travel.” She held up an object that resembled an oversize pocket watch—a rare time-travel device called an Omni. “But no dice. Time machines don’t function here, the way they do on some other planets, like Zemeckis.”
This was something I already knew firsthand. I’d brought my own time machine, ECTO-88, to Middletown to try the same thing. I’d upgraded the car with a fully functional （and extremely expensive） Flux Capacitor, which allowed me to time travel on planets where doing so was an option. For example, on EEarth, I could travel as far back as 2012, when the OASIS was first launched, and GSS began backing up previous versions of the simulated Earth on their servers. But my flux capacitor wouldn’t function on Middletown, so I’d dismissed time travel as a possibility.