But you can only blow the whistle

Once the trophies are all collected

I still hadn't deciphered the meaning of that last line, either. What trophies did I have to collect? Or was that some kind of half-assed metaphor? There had to be a simple connection I wasn't making, a sly reference that I still wasn't clever or knowledgeable enough to catch.

Since then, I'd failed to make any more progress. Every time I revisited the Quatrain, my ongoing infatuation with Art3mis would undermine my ability to focus, and before long I would close my grail diary and call her up to see if she wanted to hang out. She almost always did.

I convinced myself that it was all right to slack off a bit, because no one else seemed to be making any progress in their search for the Jade Key. The Scoreboard remained unchanged. Everyone else seemed to be just as stumped as I was.

As the weeks continued to pass, Art3mis and I spent more and more time together. Even when our avatars were doing other things, we were sending e-mails and instant messages to each other. A river of words flowed between us.

I wanted more than anything to meet her in the real world. Face-to-face. But I didn't tell her this. I was certain she had strong feelings for me, but she also kept me at a distance. No matter how much I revealed about myself to her-and I wound up revealing just about everything, including my real name-she always adamantly refused to reveal any details about her own life. All I knew was that she was nineteen and that she lived somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. That was all she would tell me.

The image of her that formed in my mind was the most obvious one. I pictured her as a physical manifestation of her avatar. I imagined her with the same face, eyes, hair, and body. Even though she told me repeatedly that in reality she looked almost nothing like her avatar and that she wasn't nearly as attractive in person.

When I began to spend most of my time with Art3mis, Aech and I began to grow apart. Instead of hanging out several times a week, we chatted a few times a month. Aech knew I was falling for Art3mis, but he never gave me too much grief about it, even when I would bail on him at the last minute to hang out with her instead. He would just shrug, tell me to be careful, and say, "I sure hope you know what you're doing, Z."

I didn't, of course. My whole relationship with Art3mis was in defiance of all common sense. But I couldn't help falling for her. Somehow, without my realizing it, my obsession with finding Halliday's Easter egg was gradually being supplanted by my obsession with Art3mis.

Eventually, she and I began to go out on "dates," taking day trips to exotic OASIS locales and exclusive night spots. At first, Art3mis protested. She thought I should keep a low profile, because as soon as my avatar was spotted in public, the Sixers would know that their attempt to kill me had failed, and I'd be back on their hit list. But I told her I no longer cared. I was already hiding from the Sixers in the real world, and I refused to continue hiding from them in the OASIS, too. Besides, I had a ninety-ninth-level avatar now. I felt nigh invincible.

Maybe I was just trying to impress Art3mis by acting fearless. If so, I think it worked.

We still disguised our avatars before we went out, because we knew there would be tabloid headlines galore if Parzival and Art3mis started showing up in public together on a regular basis. But there was one exception. One night, she took me to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a huge stadium-sized movie theater on the planet Transsexual, where they held the most highly attended and longest-running weekly screening of the movie in the OASIS. Thousands of avatars came to every show, to sit in the stands and revel in the audience participation. Normally, only longstanding members of the Rocky Horror Fan Club were permitted to get up onstage and help act out the film in front of the giant movie screen, and only after they'd passed a grueling audition process. But Art3mis used her fame to pull a few strings, and she and I were both allowed to join the cast for that night's show. The whole planet was in a no-PvP zone, so I wasn't worried about getting ambushed by the Sixers. But I did have a serious case of stage fright when the show began.

Art3mis played a note-perfect Columbia, and I had the honor of playing her undead love interest, Eddie. I altered my avatar's appearance so that I looked exactly like Meat Loaf did in the role, but my performance and lip-synching still kinda sucked. Luckily, the audience cut me a lot of slack, because I was the famous gunter Parzival, and I was clearly having a blast.

That night was easily the most fun I'd ever had in my life up to that point. I told Art3mis so afterward, and that was when she leaned over and kissed me for the first time. I couldn't feel it, of course. But it still set my heart racing.

I'd heard all the cliched warnings about the perils of falling for someone you only knew online, but I ignored them. I decided that whoever Art3mis really was, I was in love with her. I could feel it, deep in the soft, chewy caramel center of my being.

And then one night, like a complete idiot, I told her how I felt.

It was a Friday night, and I was spending another solitary evening doing research, working my way through every episode of Whiz Kids, an early-'80s TV show about a teenage hacker who uses his computer skills to solve mysteries. I'd just finished watching the episode "Deadly Access" (a crossover with Simon & Simon) when an e-mail arrived in my inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read "We Can Dance If We Want To."

There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment-an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow's birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event.

The invitation featured a photo of Morrow's world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON'T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo-a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read Ogden Morrow's '80s Dance Party

in celebration of his 73rd birthday!

Tonight-10pm OST at the Distracted Globe

ADMIT ONE.

I was flabbergasted. Ogden Morrow had actually taken the time to invite me to his birthday party. It felt like the greatest honor I'd ever received.

I called Art3mis, and she confirmed that she'd received the same e-mail. She said she couldn't pass up an invitation from Og himself, despite the obvious risks. So, naturally, I told her I would meet her there at the club. It was the only way I could avoid looking like a total wuss.

I knew that if Og had invited the two of us, he'd probably also invited the other members of the High Five. But Aech probably wouldn't show up, because he competed in a globally televised arena deathmatch every Friday night. And Shoto and Daito never entered a PvP zone unless it was absolutely necessary.

The Distracted Globe was a famous zero-gravity dance club on the planet Neonoir in Sector Sixteen. Ogden Morrow had coded the place himself decades ago and was still its sole owner. I'd never visited the Globe before. I wasn't much for dancing, or for socializing with the twinked-out wannabe-gunter uberdorks who were known to frequent the place. But Og's birthday party was a special event, and so the usual clientele would be banished for the evening. Tonight, the club would be packed with celebrities-movie stars, musicians, and at least two members of the High Five.

I spent over an hour tweaking my avatar's hair and trying on different skins to wear to the club. I finally settled on some classic '80s-era attire: a light gray suit, exactly like the one Peter Weller wore in Buckaroo Banzai, complete with a red bow tie, along with a pair of vintage white Adidas high-tops. I also loaded my inventory with my best suit of body armor and a large amount of weaponry. One of the reasons the Globe was such a hip, exclusive club was because it was located in a PvP zone, one where both magic and technology functioned. So it was extremely dangerous to go there. Especially for a famous gunter like me.

There were hundreds of cyberpunk-themed worlds spread throughout the OASIS, but Neonoir was one of the largest and oldest. Seen from orbit, the planet was a shiny onyx marble covered in overlapping spider-webs of pulsating light. It was always night on Neonoir, the world over, and its surface was an uninterrupted grid of interconnected cities packed with impossibly large skyscrapers. Its skies were filled with a continuous stream of flying vehicles whirring through the vertical cityscapes, and the streets below teemed with leather-clad NPCs and mirror-shaded avatars, all sporting high-tech weaponry and subcutaneous implants as they spouted city-speak straight out of Neuromancer.

The Distracted Globe was located at the western-hemisphere intersection of the Boulevard and the Avenue, two brightly lit streets that stretched completely around the planet along its equator and prime meridian. The club itself was a massive cobalt blue sphere, three kilometers in diameter, floating thirty meters off the ground. A floating crystal staircase led up to the club's only entrance, a circular opening at the bottom of the sphere.

I made a big entrance when I arrived in my flying DeLorean, which I'd obtained by completing a Back to the Future quest on the planet Zemeckis. The DeLorean came outfitted with a (nonfunctioning) flux capacitor, but I'd made several additions to its equipment and appearance. First, I'd installed an artificially intelligent onboard computer named KITT (purchased in an online auction) into the dashboard, along with a matching red Knight Rider scanner just above the DeLorean's grill. Then I'd outfitted the car with an oscillation overthruster, a device that allowed it to travel through solid matter. Finally, to complete my '80s super-vehicle theme, I'd slapped a Ghostbusters logo on each of the DeLorean's gull-wing doors, then added personalized plates that read ECTO-88.

I'd had it only a few weeks now, but my time-traveling, Ghost Busting, Knight Riding, matter-penetrating DeLorean had already become my avatar's trademark.

I knew that leaving my sweet ride parked in a PvP zone was an open invitation for some moron to try to boost it. The DeLorean had several antitheft systems installed, and the ignition system was booby-trapped Max Rockatanskystyle so that if any other avatar tried to start the car, the plutonium chamber would detonate in a small thermonuclear explosion. But keeping my car safe wouldn't be a problem here on Neonoir. As soon as I climbed out of the DeLorean I cast a Shrink spell on it, instantly reducing it to the size of a Matchbox car. Then I put the DeLorean in my pocket. Magic zones had their advantages.

Thousands of avatars were packed up against the velvet rope force fields that kept everyone without an invitation at bay. As I walked toward the entrance, the crowd bombarded me with a mix of insults, autograph requests, death threats, and tearful declarations of undying love. I had my body shield activated, but surprisingly, no one took a shot at me. I flashed the cyborg doorman my invitation, then mounted the long crystal staircase leading up into the club.

Entering the Distracted Globe was more than a little disorienting. The inside of the giant sphere was completely hollow, and its curved interior surface served as the club's bar and lounge area. The moment you passed through the entrance, the laws of gravity changed. No matter where you walked, your avatar's feet always adhered to the interior of the sphere, so you could walk in a straight line, up to the "top" of the club, then back down the other side, ending up right back where you started. The huge open space in the center of the sphere served as the club's zero-gravity "dance floor." You reached it simply by jumping off the ground, like Superman taking flight, and then swimming through the air, into the spherical zero-g "groove zone."

As I stepped through the entrance, I glanced up-or in the direction that was currently "up" to me at the moment-and took a long look around. The place was packed. Hundreds of avatars milled around like ants crawling around the inside of a giant balloon. Others were already out on the dance floor-spinning, flying, twisting, and tumbling in time with the music, which thumped out of floating spherical speakers that drifted throughout the club.

In the middle of all the dancers, a large clear bubble was suspended in space, at the absolute center of the club. This was the "booth" where the DJ stood, surrounded by turntables, mixers, decks, and dials. At the center of all that gear was the opening DJ, R2-D2, hard at work, using his various robotic arms to work the turntables. I recognized the tune he was playing: the '88 remix of New Order's "Blue Monday," with a lot of Star Wars droid sound samples mixed in.

As I made my way to the nearest bar, the avatars I passed all stopped to stare and point in my direction. I didn't pay them much notice, because I was busy scanning the club for Art3mis.

When I reached the bar, I ordered a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from the female Klingon bartender and downed half of it. Then I grinned as R2 cued up another classic '80s tune. " 'Union of the Snake,' " I recited, mostly out of habit. "Duran Duran. Nineteen eighty-three."

"Not bad, ace," said a familiar voice, speaking just loud enough to be heard over the music. I turned to see Art3mis standing behind me. She was wearing evening attire: a gunmetal blue dress that looked like it was spray-painted on. Her avatar's dark hair was styled in a pageboy cut, perfectly framing her gorgeous face. She looked devastating.

She shouted at the barkeep. "Glenmorangie. On the rocks."

I smiled to myself. Connor MacLeod's favorite drink. Man, did I love this girl.

She winked at me as her drink appeared. Then she clinked her glass against mine and downed its contents in one swallow. The chattering of the avatars around us grew in volume. Word that Parzival and Art3mis were here, chatting each other up at the bar, was already spreading through the entire club.

Art3mis glanced up at the dance floor, then back at me. "So how about it, Percy?" she said. "Feel like cutting a rug?"

I scowled. "Not if you keep calling me 'Percy.' "

She laughed. Just then, the current song ended, and the club grew silent. All eyes turned upward, toward the DJ booth, where R2-D2 was currently dissolving in a shower of light, like someone "beaming out" in an original Star Trek episode. Then a huge cheer went up as a familiar gray-haired avatar beamed in, appearing behind the turntables. It was Og.

Hundreds of vidfeed windows materialized in the air, all over the club. Each displayed a live close-up image of Og in the booth, so that everyone could see his avatar clearly. The old wizard was wearing baggy jeans, sandals, and a faded Star Trek: The Next Generation T-shirt. He waved to the assembled, then cued up his first track, a dance remix of "Rebel Yell" by Billy Idol.

A cheer swept across the dance floor.

"I love this song!" Art3mis shouted. Her eyes darted up to the dance floor. I looked at her uncertainly. "What's wrong?" she said with mock sympathy. "Can't the boy dance?"

She abruptly locked into the beat, bobbing her head, gyrating her hips. Then she pushed off from the floor with both feet and began to float upward, drifting toward the groove zone. I stared up at her, temporarily frozen, mustering my courage.

"All right," I muttered to myself. "What the hell."

I bent my knees and pushed off hard from the floor. My avatar took flight, drifting upward and sliding alongside Art3mis. The avatars who were already on the dance floor moved aside to clear a path for us, a tunnel leading to the center of the dance floor. I could see Og hovering in his bubble, just a short distance above us. He was spinning around like a dervish, remixing the song on the fly while simultaneously adjusting the gravity vortex of the dance floor, so that he was actually spinning the club itself, like an ancient vinyl disc.

Art3mis winked at me, and then her legs melted together to form a mermaid's tail. She flapped her new tail fin once and shot ahead of me, her body undulating and thrusting in time with the machine-gun beat as she swam through the air. Then she spun back around to face me, suspended and floating, smiling and holding out her hand, beckoning me to join her. Her hair floated in a halo around her head, like she was underwater.

When I reached her, she took my hand. As she did, her mermaid tail vanished and her legs reappeared, whirling and scissoring to the beat.

Not trusting my instincts any further, I loaded up a piece of high-end avatar dance software called Travoltra, which I'd downloaded and tested earlier that evening. The program took control of Parzival's movements, synching them up with the music, and all four of my limbs were transformed into undulating cosine waves. Just like that, I became a dancing fool.

Art3mis's eyes lit up in surprise and delight, and she began to mirror my movements, the two of us orbiting each other like accelerated electrons. Then Art3mis began shape-shifting.

Her avatar lost its human form and dissolved into a pulsing amorphous blob that changed its size and color in synch with the music. I selected the mirror partner option on my dance software and began to do the same. My avatar's limbs and torso began to flow and spin like taffy, encircling Art3mis, while strange color patterns flowed and shifted across my skin. I looked like Plastic Man, if he were tripping out of his mind on LSD. Then everyone else on the dance floor also began to shape-shift, melting into prismatic blobs of light. Soon, the center of the club looked like some otherworldly lava lamp.

When the song ended, Og took a bow, then queued up a slow song. "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper. All around us, avatars began to pair up.

I gave Art3mis a courtly bow and stretched out my hand. She smiled and took it. I pulled her close and we began to drift together. Og set the dance floor's gravity on a counterclockwise spin, making all of our avatars slowly rotate around the club's invisible central axis, like motes of dust floating inside a snow globe.

And then, before I could stop myself, the words just came out.

"I'm in love with you, Arty."

She didn't respond at first. She just looked at me in shock as our avatars continued to drift in orbit around each other, moving on autopilot. Then she switched to a private voice channel, so no one could eavesdrop on our conversation.

"You aren't in love with me, Z," she said. "You don't even know me."

"Yes I do," I insisted. "I know you better than I've ever known anyone in my entire life."

"You only know what I want you to know. You only see what I want you to see." She placed a hand on her chest. "This isn't my real body, Wade. Or my real face."

"I don't care! I'm in love with your mind-with the person you are. I couldn't care less about the packaging."

"You're just saying that," she said. There was an unsteadiness in her voice. "Trust me. If I ever let you see me in person, you would be repulsed."

"Why do you always say that?"

"Because I'm hideously deformed. Or I'm a paraplegic. Or I'm actually sixty-three years old. Take your pick."

"I don't care if you're all three of those things. Tell me where to meet you and I'll prove it. I'll get on a plane right now and fly to wherever you are. You know I will."

She shook her head. "You don't live in the real world, Z. From what you've told me, I don't think you ever have. You're like me. You live inside this illusion." She motioned to our virtual surroundings. "You can't possibly know what real love is."

"Don't say that!" I was starting to cry and didn't bother hiding it from her. "Is it because I told you I've never had a real girlfriend? And that I'm a virgin? Because-"

"Of course not," she said. "That isn't what this is about. At all."

"Then what is it about? Tell me. Please."

"The Hunt. You know that. We've both been neglecting our quests to hang out with each other. We should be focused on finding the Jade Key right now. You can bet that's what Sorrento and the Sixers are doing. And everyone else."

"To hell with our competition! And the egg!" I shouted. "Didn't you hear what I just said? I'm in love with you! And I want to be with you. More than anything."

She just stared at me. Or rather, her avatar stared blankly back at my avatar. Then she said, "I'm sorry, Z. This is all my fault. I let this get way out of hand. It has to stop."

"What do you mean? What has to stop?"

"I think we should take a break. Stop spending so much time together."

I felt like I'd been punched in the throat. "Are you breaking up with me?"

"No, Z," she said firmly. "I am not breaking up with you. That would be impossible, because we are not together." There was suddenly venom in her voice. "We've never even met!"

"So then ... you're just going to ... stop talking to me?"

"Yes. I think that would be for the best."

"For how long?"

"Until the Hunt is over."

"But, Arty ... That could take years."

"I realize that. And I'm sorry. But this is how it has to be."

"So winning that money is more important to you than me?"