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 recreated 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.