IOI required its egg hunters, which it referred to as "oologists," to use their employee numbers as their OASIS avatar names. These numbers were all six digits in length, and they also began with the numeral "6," so everyone began calling them the Sixers. These days, most gunters referred to them as "the Sux0rz." (Because they sucked.) To become a Sixer, you had to sign a contract stipulating, among other things, that if you found Halliday's egg, the prize would become the sole property of your employer. In return, IOI gave you a bimonthly paycheck, food, lodging, health-care benefits, and a retirement plan. The company also provided your avatar with high-end armor, vehicles, and weapons, and covered all of your teleportation fares. Joining the Sixers was a lot like joining the military.

Sixers weren't hard to spot, because they all looked identical. They were all required to use the same hulking male avatar (regardless of the operator's true gender), with close-cropped dark hair and facial features left at the system default settings. And they all wore the same navy blue uniform. The only way to tell these corporate drones apart was by checking the six-digit employee number stamped on their right breast, just beneath the IOI corporate logo.

Like most gunters, I loathed the Sixers and was disgusted by their very existence. By hiring an army of contract egg hunters, IOI was perverting the entire spirit of the contest. Of course, it could be argued that all the gunters who had joined clans were doing the same thing. There were now hundreds of gunter clans, some with thousands of members, all working together to find the egg. Each clan was bound by an ironclad legal agreement stating that if one clan member won the contest, all members would share the prize. Solos like me didn't care much for the clans, either, but we still respected them as fellow gunters-unlike the Sixers, whose goal was to hand the OASIS over to an evil multinational conglomerate intent on ruining it.

My generation had never known a world without the OASIS. To us, it was much more than a game or an entertainment platform. It had been an integral part of our lives for as far back as we could remember. We'd been born into an ugly world, and the OASIS was our one happy refuge. The thought of the simulation being privatized and homogenized by IOI horrified us in a way that those born before its introduction found difficult to understand. For us, it was like someone threatening to take away the sun, or charge a fee to look up at the sky.

The Sixers gave gunters a common enemy, and Sixer bashing was a favorite pastime in our forums and chat rooms. A lot of high-level gunters had a strict policy of killing (or trying to kill) every Sixer who crossed their path. Several websites were devoted to tracking Sixer activities and movements, and some gunters spent more time hunting the Sixers than they did searching for the egg. The bigger clans actually held a yearly competition called "Eighty-Six the Sux0rz," with a prize for the clan who managed to kill the largest number of them.

After checking a few other gunter forums, I tapped a bookmark icon for one of my favorite websites, Arty's Missives, the blog of a female gunter named Art3mis (pronounced "Artemis"). I'd discovered it about three years ago and had been a loyal reader ever since. She posted these great rambling essays about her search for Halliday's egg, which she called a "maddening MacGuffin hunt." She wrote with an endearing, intelligent voice, and her entries were filled with self-deprecating humor and witty, sardonic asides. In addition to posting her (often hysterical) interpretations of passages in the Almanac, she also linked to the books, movies, TV shows, and music she was currently studying as part of her Halliday research. I assumed that all of these posts were filled with misdirection and misinformation, but they were still highly entertaining.

It probably goes without saying that I had a massive cyber-crush on Art3mis.

She occasionally posted screenshots of her raven-haired avatar, and I sometimes (always) saved them to a folder on my hard drive. Her avatar had a pretty face, but it wasn't unnaturally perfect. In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone. But Art3mis's features didn't look as though they'd been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template. Her face had the distinctive look of a real person's, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar. Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk. I found her unbearably attractive.

Art3mis's body was also somewhat unusual. In the OASIS, you usually saw one of two body shapes on female avatars: the absurdly thin yet wildly popular supermodel frame, or the top-heavy, wasp-waisted porn starlet physique (which looked even less natural in the OASIS than it did in the real world). But Art3mis's frame was short and Rubenesque. All curves.

I knew the crush I had on Art3mis was both silly and ill-advised. What did I really know about her? She'd never revealed her true identity, of course. Or her age or location in the real world. There was no telling what she really looked like. She could be fifteen or fifty. A lot of gunters even questioned whether she was really female, but I wasn't one of them. Probably because I couldn't bear the idea that the girl with whom I was virtually smitten might actually be some middle-aged dude named Chuck, with back hair and male-pattern baldness.

In the years since I'd first started reading Arty's Missives, it had become one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, now logging several million hits a day. And Art3mis was now something of a celebrity, at least in gunter circles. But fame hadn't gone to her head. Her writing was still as funny and self-deprecating as ever. Her newest blog post was titled "The John Hughes Blues," and it was an in-depth treatise on her six favorite John Hughes teen movies, which she divided into two separate trilogies: The "Dorky Girl Fantasies" trilogy (Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, and Some Kind of Wonderful) and the "Dorky Boy Fantasies" trilogy (The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off).

Just as I'd finished reading it, an instant message window popped up on my display. It was my best friend, Aech. (OK, if you want to split hairs, he was my only friend, not counting Mrs. Gilmore.) Aech: Top o' the morning, amigo.

Parzival: Hola, compadre.

Aech: What are you up to?

Parzival: Just surfing the turf. You?

Aech: Got the Basement online. Come and hang out before school, fool.

Parzival: Sweet! I'll be there in a sec.

I closed the IM window and checked the time. I still had about half an hour until class started. I grinned and tapped a small door icon at the edge of my display, then selected Aech's chat room from my list of favorites.

The system verified that I was on the chat room's access list and allowed me to enter. My view of the classroom shrank from the limits of my peripheral vision to a small thumbnail window in the lower right of my display, allowing me to monitor what was in front of my avatar. The rest of my field of vision was now filled with the interior of Aech's chat room. My avatar appeared just inside the "entrance," a door at the top of a carpeted staircase. The door didn't lead anywhere. It didn't even open. This was because the Basement and its contents didn't exist as a part of the OASIS. Chat rooms were stand-alone simulations-temporary virtual spaces that avatars could access from anywhere in OASIS. My avatar wasn't actually "in" the chat room. It only appeared that way. Wade3/Parzival was still sitting in my World History classroom with his eyes closed. Logging into a chat room was a little like being in two places at once.

Aech had named his chat room the Basement. He'd programmed it to look like a large suburban rec room, circa the late 1980s. Old movie and comic book posters covered the wood-paneled walls. A vintage RCA television stood in the center of the room, hooked up to a Betamax VCR, a LaserDisc player, and several vintage videogame consoles. Bookshelves lined the far wall, filled with role-playing game supplements and back issues of Dragon magazine.

Hosting a chat room this large wasn't cheap, but Aech could afford it. He made quite a bit of dough competing in televised PvP arena games after school and on the weekends. Aech was one of the highest-ranked combatants in the OASIS, in both the Deathmatch and Capture the Flag leagues. He was even more famous than Art3mis.

Over the past few years, the Basement had become a highly exclusive hangout for elite gunters. Aech granted access only to people he deemed worthy, so being invited to hang out in the Basement was a big honor, especially for a third-level nobody like me.

As I descended the staircase, I saw a few dozen other gunters milling around, with avatars that varied wildly in appearance. There were humans, cyborgs, demons, dark elves, Vulcans, and vampires. Most of them were gathered around the row of old arcade games against the wall. A few others stood by the ancient stereo (currently blasting "The Wild Boys" by Duran Duran), browsing through Aech's giant rack of vintage cassette tapes.

Aech himself was sprawled on one of the chat room's three couches, which were arrayed in a U-shape in front of the TV. Aech's avatar was a tall, broad-shouldered Caucasian male with dark hair and brown eyes. I'd asked him once if he looked anything like his avatar in real life, and he'd jokingly replied, "Yes. But in real life, I'm even more handsome."

As I walked over, he glanced up from the Intellivision game he was playing. His distinctive Cheshire grin stretched from ear to ear. "Z!" he shouted. "What is up, amigo?" He stretched out his right hand and gave me five as I dropped onto the couch opposite him. Aech had started calling me "Z" shortly after I met him. He liked to give people single-letter nicknames. Aech pronounced his own avatar's name just like the letter "H."

"What up, Humperdinck?" I said. This was a game we played. I always called him by some random H name, like Harry, Hubert, Henry, or Hogan. I was making guesses at his real first name, which, he'd once confided to me, began with the letter "H."

I'd known Aech for a little over three years. He was also a student on Ludus, a senior at OPS #1172, which was on the opposite side of the planet from my school. We'd met one weekend in a public gunter chat room and hit it off immediately, because we shared all of the same interests. Which is to say one interest: a total, all-consuming obsession with Halliday and his Easter egg. A few minutes into our first conversation, I knew Aech was the real deal, an elite gunter with some serious mental kung fu. He had his '80s trivia down cold, and not just the canon stuff, either. He was a true Halliday scholar. And he'd apparently seen the same qualities in me, because he'd given me his contact card and invited me to hang out in the Basement whenever I liked. He'd been my closest friend ever since.

Over the years, a friendly rivalry had gradually developed between us. We did a lot of trash-talking about which one of us would get his name up on the Scoreboard first. We were constantly trying to out-geek each other with our knowledge of obscure gunter trivia. Sometimes we even conducted our research together. This usually consisted of watching cheesy '80s movies and TV shows here in his chat room. We also played a lot of videogames, of course. Aech and I had wasted countless hours on two-player classics like Contra, Golden Axe, Heavy Barrel, Smash TV, and Ikari Warriors. Aside from yours truly, Aech was the best all-around gamer I'd ever encountered. We were evenly matched at most games, but he could trounce me at certain titles, especially anything in the first-person shooter genre. That was his area of expertise, after all.

I didn't know anything about who Aech was in the real world, but I got the sense his home life wasn't that great. Like me, he seemed to spend every waking moment logged into the OASIS. And even though we'd never actually met in person, he'd told me more than once that I was his best friend, so I assumed he was just as isolated and lonely as I was.

"So what did you do after you bailed last night?" he asked, tossing me the other Intellivision controller. We'd hung out here in his chat room for a few hours the previous evening, watching old Japanese monster movies.

"Nada," I said. "Went home and brushed up on a few classic coin-ops."

"Unnecessary."

"Yeah. But I was in the mood." I didn't ask him what he'd done the night before, and he didn't volunteer any details. I knew he'd probably gone to Gygax, or somewhere equally awesome, to speedrun through a few quests and rack up some XPs. He just didn't want to rub it in. Aech could afford to spend a fair amount of time off-world, following up leads and searching for the Copper Key. But he never lorded this over me, or ridiculed me for not having enough dough to teleport anywhere. And he never insulted me by offering to loan me a few credits. It was an unspoken rule among gunters: If you were a solo, you didn't want or need help, from anyone. Gunters who wanted help joined a clan, and Aech and I both agreed that clans were for suck-asses and poseurs. We'd both vowed to remain solos for life. We still occasionally had discussions about the egg, but these conversations were always guarded, and we were careful to avoid talking about specifics.

After I beat Aech at three rounds of Tron: Deadly Discs, he threw down his Intellivision controller in disgust and grabbed a magazine off the floor. It was an old issue of Starlog. I recognized Rutger Hauer on the cover, in a Ladyhawke promotional photo.

"Starlog, eh?" I said, nodding my approval.

"Yep. Downloaded every single issue from the Hatchery's archive. Still working my way through 'em. I was just reading this great piece on Ewoks: The Battle for Endor."

"Made for TV. Released in 1985," I recited. Star Wars trivia was one of my specialties. "Total garbage. A real low point in the history of the Wars."

"Says you, assface. It has some great moments."

"No," I said, shaking my head. "It doesn't. It's even worse than that first Ewok flick, Caravan of Courage. They shoulda called it Caravan of Suck."

Aech rolled his eyes and went back to reading. He wasn't going to take the bait. I eyed the magazine's cover. "Hey, can I have a look at that when you're done?"

He grinned. "Why? So you can read the article on Ladyhawke?"

"Maybe."

"Man, you just love that crapburger, don't you?"

"Blow me, Aech."

"How many times have you seen that sapfest? I know you've made me sit through it at least twice." He was baiting me now. He knew Ladyhawke was one of my guilty pleasures, and that I'd seen it over two dozen times.

"I was doing you a favor by making you watch it, noob," I said. I shoved a new cartridge into the Intellivision console and started up a single-player game of Astrosmash. "You'll thank me one day. Wait and see. Ladyhawke is canon."

"Canon" was the term we used to classify any movie, book, game, song, or TV show of which Halliday was known to have been a fan.

"Surely, you must be joking," Aech said.

"No, I am not joking. And don't call me Shirley."

He lowered the magazine and leaned forward. "There is no way Halliday was a fan of Ladyhawke. I guarantee it."

"Where's your proof, dipshit?" I asked.

"The man had taste. That's all the proof I need."

"Then please explain to me why he owned Ladyhawke on both VHS and LaserDisc?" A list of all the films in Halliday's collection at the time of his death was included in the appendices of Anorak's Almanac. We both had the list memorized.

"The guy was a billionaire! He owned millions of movies, most of which he probably never even watched! He had DVDs of Howard the Duck and Krull, too. That doesn't mean he liked them, asshat. And it sure as hell doesn't make them canon."

"It's not really up for debate, Homer," I said. "Ladyhawke is an eighties classic."

"It's fucking lame, is what it is! The swords look like they were made out of tinfoil. And that soundtrack is epically lame. Full of synthesizers and shit. By the motherfucking Alan Parsons Project! Lame-o-rama! Beyond lame. Highlander II lame."

"Hey!" I feigned hurling my Intellivision controller at him. "Now you're just being insulting! Ladyhawke's cast alone makes the film canon! Roy Batty! Ferris Bueller! And the dude who played Professor Falken in WarGames!" I searched my memory for the actor's name. "John Wood! Reunited with Matthew Broderick!"

"A real low point in both of their careers," he said, laughing. He loved arguing about old movies, even more than I did. The other gunters in the chat room were now starting to form a small crowd around us to listen in. Our arguments were often high in entertainment value.

"You must be stoned!" I shouted. "Ladyhawke was directed by Richard fucking Donner! The Goonies? Superman: The Movie? You're saying that guy sucks?"

"I don't care if Spielberg directed it. It's a chick flick disguised as a sword-and-sorcery picture. The only genre film with less balls is probably ... freakin' Legend. Anyone who actually enjoys Ladyhawke is a bona fide USDA-choice pussy!"

Laughter from the peanut gallery. I was actually getting a little pissed off now. I was a big fan of Legend too, and Aech knew it.

"Oh, so I'm a pussy? You're the one with the Ewok fetish!" I snatched the Starlog out of his hands and threw it against a Revenge of the Jedi poster on the wall. "I suppose you think your extensive knowledge of Ewok culture is gonna help you find the egg?"

"Don't start on the Endorians again, man," he said, holding up an index finger. "I've warned you. I will ban your ass. I swear." I knew this was a hollow threat, so I was about to push the Ewok thing even further, maybe give him some crap for referring to them as "Endorians." But just then, a new arrival materialized on the staircase. A total lamer by the name of I-r0k. I let out a groan. I-r0k and Aech attended the same school and had a few classes together, but I still couldn't figure out why Aech had granted him access to the Basement. I-r0k fancied himself an elite gunter, but he was nothing but an obnoxious poseur. Sure, he did a lot of teleporting around the OASIS, completing quests and leveling up his avatar, but he didn't actually know anything. And he was always brandishing an oversize plasma rifle the size of a snowmobile. Even in chat rooms, where it was totally pointless. The guy had no sense of decorum.

"Are you cocks arguing about Star Wars again?" he said, descending the steps and walking over to join the crowd around us. "That shit is so played out, yo."

I turned to Aech. "If you want to ban someone, why don't you start with this clown?" I hit Reset on the Intellivision and started another game.

"Shut your hole, Penis-ville!" I-r0k replied, using his favorite mispronunciation of my avatar's name. "He doesn't ban me 'cause he knows I'm elite! Ain't that right, Aech?"

"No," Aech said, rolling his eyes. "That ain't right. You're about as elite as my great-grandmother. And she's dead."

"Screw you, Aech! And your dead grandma!"

"Gee, I-r0k," I muttered. "You always manage to elevate the intelligence level of the conversation. The whole room just lights up the moment you arrive."

"So sorry to upset you, Captain No-Credits," I-r0k said. "Hey, shouldn't you be on Incipio panhandling for change right now?" He reached for the second Intellivision controller, but I snatched it up and tossed it to Aech.

He scowled at me. "Prick."

"Poseur."

"Poseur? Penis-ville is calling me a poseur?" He turned to address the small crowd. "This chump is so broke that he has to bum rides to Greyhawk, just so he can kill kobolds for copper pieces! And he's calling me a poseur!"

This elicited a few snickers from the crowd, and I felt my face turn red under my visor. Once, about a year ago, I'd made the mistake of hitching a ride off-world with I-r0k to try to gain a few experience points. After dropping me in a low-level quest area on Greyhawk, the jerk had followed me. I'd spent the next few hours slaying a small band of kobolds, waiting for them to respawn, and then slaying them again, over and over. My avatar was still only first level at the time, and it was one of the only safe ways for me to level up. I-r0k had taken several screenshots of my avatar that night and labeled them "Penis-ville the Mighty Kobold Slayer." Then he'd posted them to the Hatchery. He still brought it up every chance he got. He was never going to let me live it down.

"That's right, I called you a poseur, poseur." I stood and got up in his grille. "You're an ignorant know-nothing twink. Just because you're fourteenth-level, it doesn't make you a gunter. You actually have to possess some knowledge."

"Word," Aech said, nodding his agreement. We bumped fists. More snickering from the crowd, now directed at I-r0k.

I-r0k glared at us a moment. "OK. Let's see who the real poseur is," he said. "Check this out, girls." Grinning, he produced an item from his inventory and held it up. It was an old Atari 2600 game, still in the box. He purposefully covered the game's title with his hand, but I recognized the cover artwork anyway. It was a painting of a young man and woman in ancient Greek attire, both brandishing swords. Lurking behind them were a minotaur and a bearded guy with an eye patch. "Know what this is, hotshot?" I-r0k said, challenging me. "I'll even give you a clue.... It's an Atari game, released as part of a contest. It contained several puzzles, and if you solved them, you could win a prize. Sound familiar?"

I-r0k was always trying to impress us with some clue or piece of Halliday lore he foolishly believed he'd been the first to uncover. Gunters loved to play the game of one-upmanship and were constantly trying to prove they had acquired more obscure knowledge than everyone else. But I-r0k totally sucked at it.

"You're joking, right?" I said. "You just now discovered the Swordquest series?"

I-r0k deflated.

"You're holding Swordquest: Earthworld," I continued. "The first game in the Swordquest series. Released in 1982." I smiled wide. "Can you name the next three games in the series?"

His eyes narrowed. He was, of course, stumped. Like I said, he was a total poseur.

"Anyone else?" I said, opening the question up to the floor. The gunters in the crowd eyed each other, but no one spoke up.

"Fireworld, Waterworld, and Airworld," Aech answered.

"Bingo!" I said, and we bumped fists again. "Although Airworld was never actually finished, because Atari fell on hard times and canceled the contest before it was completed."

I-r0k quietly put the game box back in his inventory.

"You should join up with the Sux0rz, I-r0k," Aech said, laughing. "They could really use someone with your vast stores of knowledge."

I-r0k flipped him the bird. "If you two fags already knew about the Swordquest contest, how come I've never once heard you mention it?"

"Come on, I-r0k," Aech said, shaking his head. "Swordquest: Earthworld was Atari's unofficial sequel to Adventure. Every gunter worth their salt knows about that contest. How much more obvious can you get?"

I-r0k tried to save some face. "OK, if you're both such experts, who programmed all of the Swordquest games?"

"Dan Hitchens and Tod Frye," I recited. "Try asking me something difficult."

"I got one for you," Aech interjected. "What were the prizes Atari gave out to the winner of each contest?"

"Ah," I said. "Good one. Let's see.... The prize for the Earthworld contest was the Talisman of Penultimate Truth. It was solid gold and encrusted with diamonds. The kid who won it melted it down to pay for college, as I recall."

"Yeah, yeah," Aech prodded. "Quit stalling. What about the other two?"

"I'm not stalling. The Fireworld prize was the Chalice of Light, and the Waterworld prize was supposed to be the Crown of Life, but it was never awarded, due to the cancellation of the contest. Same goes for the Airworld prize, which was supposed to be a Philosopher's Stone."

Aech grinned and gave me a double high five, then added, "And if the contest hadn't been canceled, the winners of the first four rounds would have competed for the grand prize, the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery."

I nodded. "The prizes were all mentioned in the Swordquest comic books that came with the games. Comic books which happen to be visible in the treasure room in the final scene of Anorak's Invitation, by the way."

The crowd burst into applause. I-r0k lowered his head in shame.

Since I'd become a gunter, it had been obvious to me that Halliday had drawn inspiration for his contest from the Swordquest contest. I had no idea if he'd borrowed any of the puzzles from them too, but I'd studied the games and their solutions thoroughly, just to be safe.

"Fine. You win," I-r0k said. "But you both obviously need to get a life."