Ernest Cline by Ready Player One

Author:Ready Player One
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-08-16T00:31:42+00:00

Art3mis 129,000

Parzival 110,000

Aech 108,000

Daito 107,000

Shoto 106,000

IOI-655321 105,000

IOI-643187 105,000

IOI-621671 105,000

IOI-678324 105,000

. IOI-637330 105,000

You've got no-one but yourself to blame, I told myself. You let success go to your head. You slacked off on your research. What, did you think lightning would strike twice? That eventually you'd just stumble across the clue you needed to find the Jade Key? Sitting in first place all that time gave you a false sense of security.

But you don't have that problem now, do you, asshead? No, because instead of buckling down and focusing on your quest like you should have, you pissed away your lead. You wasted almost half a year screwing around and pining over some girl you've never even met in person. The girl who dumped you. The same girl who is going to end up beating you.

Now . . . get your head back in the game, moron. Find that key. Suddenly, I wanted to win the contest more than ever. Not just for the money. I wanted to prove myself to Art3mis. And I wanted the Hunt to be over, so that she would talk to me again. So that I could finally meet her in person, see her true face, and try to make sense of how I felt about her.

I cleared the Scoreboard off my display and opened up my grail diary, which had now grown into a vast mountain of data containing every scrap of information I'd collected since the contest began. It appeared as a jumble of cascading windows floating in front of me, displaying text, maps, photos, and audio and video files, all indexed, cross-referenced, and pulsing with life.

I kept the Quatrain open in a window that was always on top. Four lines of text. Twenty-four words. Thirty-four syllables. I'd stared at them so often and for so long that they'd nearly lost all meaning. Looking at them again now, I had to resist the urge to scream in rage and frustration.

The captain conceals the Jade Key

in a dwelling long neglected

But you can only blow the whistle

once the trophies are all collected

I knew the answer was right there in front of me. Art3mis had already figured it out.

I read over my notes about John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, and the toy plastic whistle that had made him famous in the annals of hacker lore. I still believed that these were the "captain" and "whistle" Halliday was referring to. But the rest of the Quatrain's meaning remained a mystery.

But now I possessed a new piece of information - the key was somewhere in Sector Seven. So I pulled up my OASIS atlas and began to search for planets with names I thought might somehow be related to the Quatrain. I found a few worlds named after famous hackers, like Woz and Mitnick, but none named after John Draper.

Sector Seven also contained hundreds of worlds named after old Usenet newsgroups, and on one of these, the planet alt.phreaking, there was a statue of Draper posing with an ancient rotary phone in one hand and a Cap'n Crunch whistle in the other.

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