Ready Gamer One

At last, the end is here. I know it's been a very long time since I posted the review of the previous chapter. But don't chalk this up to my listless and procrastinatory nature: I just couldn't bear to say goodbye to all these dear friends that I've made along the way. They're each so richly developed and their dialogue so sharp, it was impossible not to fall in love.

As the previous chapter left off, Wade has won the Egg Hunt, Nathan Sorrento is in captivity and the OASIS is at peace. But that's all secondary to our hero at this point, he's logged out of the digital world in order to claim the real prize. Art3mis is waiting for their destined in-person meetup. Naturally, Wade has to navigate a video game-inspired hedge maze to get there because God forbid this last tiny chapter be allowed to finish with a blank reference count for once.

Wade finds his crush near a fountain, which is also based on a video game. He recognizes her instantly because he had previously taken an invasive peek at her personal information right before he slid into her DMs with a classic "Girl, you're so beautiful."

She looked just as she had in the photo I’d seen. She had the same Rubenesque body. The same pale, freckled skin. The same hazel eyes and raven hair. The same beautiful round face, with the same reddish birthmark. But unlike in that photo, she wasn’t trying to hide the birthmark with a sweep of her hair. She had her hair brushed back, so I could see it.

I waited in silence. But she still wouldn’t look up at me.

“You look just like I always pictured you,” I said. “Beautiful.”

“Really?” she said softly. Slowly, she turned to face me, taking in my appearance a little at a time, starting with my feet and then gradually working her way up to my face. When our eyes fi nally met, she smiled at me nervously. “Well, what do you know? You look just like I always thought you would too,” she said. “Butt ugly.

She's joking but I wouldn't blame her. Only enough time has transpired since Wade was a complete and utter smoothboy that he's, at best, a fuzzy boy now.  He must look like a sentient pear. Once real names are exchanged, Wade states his love for Art3mis aka Samantha. Owing to the couple finally meeting face to face and Wade not recoiling in disgust at her birthmark, this time his declaration is met immediately with joyous tears rather than the angry rejection Art3mis dealt him about 200 pages ago. You've got the girl and you're both rich as hell, Wade. What are you going to do next?

I smiled. “We’re going to use all of the moolah we just won to feed everyone on the planet. We’re going to make the world a better place, right?”

At last, Wade's character arc has concluded for no discernable reason: he no longer detests the wretched poor. Thankfully, these newly-minted billionaires have vague altruistic leanings and plan to dole out some fraction of their vast wealth to feed the poor. However, this is already something we were told the governments of the world provide, as food vouchers were referenced in the very early chapters. Maybe ending the material conditions that allow legal slavery, wasteland marauders and the funneling of the funds collected from all online interactions into the account of an unaccountable corporate megalith would be a better goal. But, true to his actual character, Wade can't even hold to this weak notion of philantropy:

She grinned. “Don’t you want to build a huge interstellar spaceship, load it full of videogames, junk food, and comfy couches, and then get the hell out of here?”

“I’m up for that, too,” I said. “If it means I get to spend the rest of my life with you.

"That thing I said literally right before this sentence? Yeah, that was all bullshit. I just wanna smash. We can do whatever with the money as I long as I can get up in those guts. Naturally, our fucking will be synced to the sex scene in The Terminator." He fooled me good. For just a second, I had accepted that some combination of his recent experiences opened his eyes to the suffering of those around him. Don't I feel stupid now?

The two verbally commit their lives to one another and sit together for a while. They kiss, it owns as hard as all Wade's favorite love songs told him it would. The last line of the book is thus:

It occurred to me then that for the first time in as long as I could remember, I had absolutely no desire to log back into the OASIS.

Yep, the ultimate moral of this story, spelled out here but obviously so evident throughout the overall text, is "Log off." The digital ghost of James Halliday already said it but I'm glad it got underlined here so that we can really grasp it. It's certainly a lot easier on both the reader and the author to just come out and state the lesson at the end rather than build and develop it over time via, like, themes and events and characterization. Obviously, I'm joking and this is goddamn stupid. It feels exactly like the sort of tacked-on moral Cline would write to provide cover for having written the previous 371 pages of VR-fetishizing drivel. I don't believe for a second that Wade won't be logging back into the OASIS within the day to reign as King of Online. After all, giving up The OASIS forever would make it pretty hard to do the world-changing he was just talking. Not to mention that his dead aunt would be pretty pissed at him quitting now since his not-quitting before got her and hundreds of other people blown up.

I guess we'll find out soon what the future holds for Wade, as "Ready Player Two" is already slouching towards the publisher to be born as I write this. Even the misguided fans of this book are less receptive to his second book and wholesale "The Last Starfighter" ripoff, Armada. We'll see how they respond to "Ready Player One Again But Now Wade Probably Has A Daughter." As for me, I still have to watch the damn movie.

Pop Culture References: 2  (0.5 per page)

Wade is at last faced with what appears to be the final puzzle required to get the coveted Easter Egg. However, he has no idea what to do. Alone in the virtual recreation of Halliday's office, he can't even voice chat with his friends on the outside. The link was seemingly severed by the OASIS automatically once Wade reached this stage of the challenge. Why it was possible to receive tips, tricks and movie lines to help him through the previous sections is a mystery.

Wade spends several minutes trying to turn on every TV, game console and computer in the room but none respond. Finally, he finds one that does power on: the same computer Matthew Broderick's character uses in WarGames. It is password-protected, however. Wade runs through several names, on the brave assumption that Halliday had used the same password convention as the character who designed the supercomputer in the film: naming it after "The person he’d loved most in the world." He tries inputting the names of Halliday himself (not a bad first guess, from what we know), Ogden Morrow and Morrow's deceased wife Kira, for whom Halliday harbored a one-sided obsession. Wade even tries typing in the names of a few of Halliday's childhood pets. None of it works.

It's not until Wade remembers that Halliday only felt comfortable talking to Kira while gaming that he tries inputting her D&D name: Leucosia. This turns out to be the correct password, as every other piece of electronics surrounding Wade immediately powers up after it's entered. I'm going to note here that "Leucosia" is also the name of one of the Sirens from Greek mythology. You know, the woman-bird hybrids who led men to their doom with their sweet voices and songs? The sexual pathology at work here couldn't possibly be more surface-level. Keep that connection in mind for a few paragraphs from now.

With the power on, all doubt as to the next step has been washed from Wade's mind. He scrambles over to the Atari 2600 and starts up the game Adventure. This isn't too much of a reach for people who know the history of the term Easter Egg in the world of video games, as the concept of a hidden feature was popularized by this particular title. By playing through the game in a particular way, the player can enter a room where the sole designer, Warren Robinett, had written his name on the floor. The funny thing is that this original "Egg" was included in Adventure as a way for Robinett to, in some way, get credit for his labor. At the time, Atari didn't allow its programmers to have their names on or in their games out of fear that competitors would lure away their staff. Coveniently, this also made it easier for the company to deny their employees any royalty payments they would've been owed. So it's extremely fitting that Wade finds, in the place of Robinett's name, only an Atari-rendered Easter Egg graphic. As is their way, a billionaire nullified the contribution of a worker yet again.

Immediately after finding the Easter Egg in the Atari game, Wade finds that his OASIS avatar is now holding the Egg as well. He places it in a jeweled chalice nearby and, unceremoniously, wins the Egg Hunt. It turns out that the villains weren't able to compete with Wade's extra life head start and had no further effect on the proceedings.

“You win,” I heard a voice say. I turned and saw that Anorak was standing right behind me. His obsidian black robes seemed to pull most of the sunlight out of the room. “Congratulations,” he said, stretching out his long-fingered hand.

I hesitated, wondering if this was another trick. Or perhaps one final test . . .

“The game is over,” Anorak said, as if he’d read my mind. “It’s time for you to receive your prize.”

Wade takes the hand of Halliday's automated avatar and suddenly, his avatar was dressed in black wizard's robes instead. Along with a seemingly neverending list of abilities and items, Wade gains Halliday's twelve digit fortune. Now a multibillionaire, Wade also has supreme control over everything and everyone in the OASIS. He was already the coolest and most beloved gunter around, now he's got the power to back it up.

Wade is also the only person that can enter the study within Castle Anorak, as it contains a button that can delete the entire OASIS and every bit of data on it forever. E-Halliday says things to Wade like "try to use your powers for good" and "I trust your judgment" but these are only automated lines he would've delivered to anyone who won his contest. Good character and judgment aren't requisite for being good at games and memorizing trivia. Half of the OASIS dying and losing everything they had in the battle a few chapters ago already had troubling economic implications. But the entire planet functions via the OASIS, meaning that pressing this button would crash not only the world's economies but its education systems, governments (remember that we were told that the US's electoral voting flows through this thing) and more.

Of course, Wade displays no interest in the button, which would take from him everything that he had just received. Halliday felt he had to justify its inclusion anyway, via what might be the most preposterous bit of dialogue in the entire book.

“Listen,” he said, adopting a confidential tone. “I need to tell you one last thing before I go. Something I didn’t figure out for myself until it was already too late.” He led me over to the window and motioned out at the landscape stretching out beyond it. “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all of my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I do.”

“Good,” he said, giving me a wink. “Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t hide in here forever.”

Hey, you dumb asshole. Your stupid contest created an entire generation of people who do nothing but hide online forever, worshiping movies and video games made decades before they were born. Not to mention that everyone is too broke to want to live in the hellish dystopia that the real world has become. And they only became that way because you, as the richest person around, siphoned off all the profit your all-encompassing network built up with its endless microtransactions. But maybe he's right, everyone should log off and fight the wasteland marauders that wait outside all of the major cities instead.

This also comes across as disingenuous because Halliday only had two barely-functional relationships with other people before he died. One was with his childhood best friend, Ogden Morrow. The other was with Morrow's wife, to the extent that he was in love with her to the point of damaging his only other relationship. We never find out what Kira, a character who died before the start of Wade's story, felt about Halliday putting her up on this pedestal. No one seems interested in her perspective but I can't imagine she would be comfortable with all this, despite naming herself after a Greek man-killer. It's painfully obvious that Cline wanted to cap the story off with a moral about the beauty you can find in living offline but nothing about the rest of the narrative or world he's clumsily built backs it up. The "lesson" is completely flattened under the weight of so many contradictions.

Humbled by these empty platitudes, Wade takes a few minutes to collect himself and then calls up his buddies. They're pretty excited that they're friends with the most powerful person alive, especially after Wade uses his new authority to completely resurrect their deceased avatars. However, he only does this for Aech, Art3mis and Shoto (who delivers yet another "Arigato, Parzival-san" and deep bow in response). I guess the millions of other people whose digital bones are rotting outside the castle are out of luck. To further flex his new powers, Wade kills the remaining Sixer avatars, who were unable to reach the Egg before he did, with a wave of his hand. Art3mis hadn't logged back in to the OASIS to congratulate Wade though. Wade is told that she's waiting in the real world to meet him face to face for the first time. If anything can still outdo that Halliday lecture, it's going to be this unearned romance scene. But that'll have to wait for the last chapter.

Almost as an afterthought before he goes to meet up with his crush, Wade is told to pull up a breaking newsfeed. He sees that Nathan Sorrento, the dreaded leader of the Sixers, has been arrested by federal authorities for the multitude of crimes that the stolen IOI data implicated him in. It was very kind of the FBI to wait until right after the plot was resolved to step in, it would've really sapped the already small amount of dramatic tension if they hadn't. It's also lucky for them that Sorrento didn't win, as he would've brought about Armageddon if the feds had still tried to put the cuffs on. Although, depending on how the last chapter ends, it might've been for the best.

Pop Culture References 29 (3.2 per page)

Video Games Atari 2600 IIIII I Adventure IIIII IIIII Space Invaders I

Television Star Trek I

Movies WarGames IIIII I

Computers Apple I IMSAI 8080 I

Books The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I

General Nerddom Dungeons and Dragons I

Wade is FINALLY inside the Third Gate so the story is at last winding down to its conclusion. Like in the First Gate, he has to begin by conquering a 1980′s arcade game. This time it's Tempest, which Wade claims is somehow not one of the games he's most skilled at. Art3mis, however, expected this particular game to be here because of an extremely thinly-veiled reference at the end of Halliday's book. Wade says that he knew it was a Shakespeare quote but never thought to actually look it up:

"Come on,” I heard Art3mis whisper. “You had to know Tempest was going to factor into the Third Gate somehow. It was so obvious!” “Oh really?” I said. “Why?” “Because of the quote on the last page of the Almanac,” she replied. “ ‘I must uneasy make, lest too light winning make the prize light.’” “I know the quote,” I said, annoyed. “It’s from Shakespeare. But I figured it was just Halliday’s way of letting us know how difficult he was going to make the Hunt.” “It was,” Art3mis said. “But it was also a clue. That quote was taken from Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest.” “Shit!” I hissed. “How the hell did I miss that?”

Even worse, he has to beat Halliday's high score with only one credit. Once again, Art3mis saves Wade's ass here by giving him a cheat code that actually existed in the original cabinet, allowing the player to get 40 free credits. She's really earning more than her share of that 25% cut.

Now equipped with a few dozen attempts, Wade is able to eventually beat Halliday's score and move on. He had claimed that he wasn't very good at this game but, of course, he's the best and we never should've doubted his ability. We also learn, via the OASIS system automatically livestreaming everyone who is attempting this final Gate, that the Sixers have also begun playing Tempest. Naturally, they're all familiar with the same free credits cheat code as well. Wade's not looking like such a singularly worthy gunter at the moment.

The next leg of the challenge is something that is sure to send chills up the spine of anyone whose time in high school was anything like mine. Like he did previously with the movie WarGames, Wade has to play a character in every scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Yes, the one movie that is probably forever ruined in the minds of so many like myself who heard it endlessly quoted in class and in the lunchroom. It's impossible to think about what was once a decent comedy film without associating it with the same kind of performative nerdom that defines this entire book. So it's very fitting that one of "Halliday's favorite films, and perhaps the most-beloved geek film of all time" would serve as the next tedious task. 

Wade doesn't think he needs any help acting it out since's he's watched it 157(!) times over the last six years but he has his friends feeding lines and actions into his ear all the same. Entire paragraphs of dialogue from the movie are included here, both so fans at home can join in on the fun and so Cline can stretch out an insubstantial chapter.

With the entire 90 minute performance completed, Wade then finds himself in what appears to be a recreation of Halliday's office. And since it's been a while since we last had to put up with it, we get treated to an entire list of computers and game consoles where a sentence would've sufficed:

On each table there was a different classic home computer or videogame system, accompanied by tiered racks that appeared to hold a complete collection of its peripherals, controllers, software, and games. All of it was arranged perfectly, like a museum exhibit. Looking around the circle, from one system to the next, I saw that the computers seemed to be arranged roughly by year of origin. A PDP-1. An Altair 8800. An IMSAI 8080. An Apple I, right next to an Apple II. An Atari 2600. A Commodore PET. An Intellivision. Several different TRS-80 models. An Atari 400 and 800. A ColecoVision. A TI-99/4. A Sinclair ZX80. A Commodore 64. Various Nintendo and Sega game systems. The entire lineage of Macs and PCs, PlayStations and Xboxes. Finally, completing the circle, was an OASIS console—connected to the immersion rig in the center of the room.

Keep stretching, Ernest. We're almost to the finish line.

Sorrento and the other Sixers are right on Wade's heels so some urgency would probably be a good idea. But I can understand why he wouldn't be able to resist drooling over hardware that's as much as 70 years old by this point. Composing himself, Wade determines that the Easter Egg must be somewhere in this room and begins to search. There are only two chapters left so surely something exciting or profound will happen soon!

Pop Culture References: 71 (7.1 per page)

Video Games Q*Bert I Gorf I Tempest IIIII IIIII I Atari III Black Tiger III Intellivision I Colecovision I Nintendo I Sega I Playstation I Xbox I

Movies Monty Python and the Holy Grail IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII I WarGames II

Music Rush II

Books Shakespeare III

Computers PDP-1 I Altair 8800 I IMSAI 8080 I Apple III Commodore PET I TRS-80 I Atari 400 I Atari 800 I TI-99/4 I Sinclair ZX80 I Commodore 64 I

You may recall that everyone suddenly died at the end of the last chapter. At the beginning of this one, we find out why. The enormous explosion and flash of light that followed it was caused by "The Cataclyst", yet another magical item that was first teased fifteen chapters ago. The weapon is a one-time use bomb that, as we were told previously, "would kill every single avatar and NPC in the sector, including its owner. There was no defense against it." This description sold the thing short though, as this detonation not only killed every avatar on the planet but destroyed even Castle Anorak down to the last digital atom. The Third Gate is fine though, it was seemingly the only thing untouched by the blast.

Oh and Wade is okay too, of course. Even though he died along with every other warring gunter on the planet's surface, he is immediately revived right after. Since paying off things that were lazily set up a long time ago is a running theme this chapter, it turns out that the mysterious quarter Wade won from playing a perfect game of Pac-Man gave him "an extra life." This is stated to be a completely unique and unheard of effect for a magical item to have: "There was no record of any avatar ever acquiring an extra life." So, once again, Wade is a real trailblazer. Good thing he mistakenly went to the completely wrong planet in his search for the third key, explored arbitrarily once he figured out he wasn't going to find it there, and was capable of becoming one of the best Pac-Man players of all time or the story would have ended right here.

Although Wade's avatar was brought back to life, his inventory is completely empty aside from the now ordinary quarter. So all of the equipment and spells that would've let him reach the Thrid Gate, which is now suspended high in the air above the barren crater where Castle Anorak once stood, are gone. Lucky for him, he's not completely alone. His friends back in the real world have been patched into his audio and video feeds, allowing them to see, hear and communicate with Wade. They explain that the detonation of the Cataclyst did indeed kill every avatar in the sector, which numbered "over half of the population of the OASIS." So millions, if not billions, of people lost everything they owned in an instant. This would surely result in a major economic crash taking place, given how much actual cash value was sunk into all those player accounts. But no one seems particularly concerned about that at the moment.

But once everyone gets done congratulating Wade on his "luck", Art3mis notes that not every Sixer was wiped out in the explosion. Sorrento seemingly had the detonation planned as an emergency contingency, as 20 Sixer avatars remain on the Scoreboard as alive and possessing the Crystal Key necessary to pass through the Third Gate. It's assumed that they were kept outside the sector in case the bomb had to be set off so that there would still be some bodies to use once the dust cleared. And since it was noted previously that Sorrento can pilot any of the avatars registered to his underlings himself, we haven't seen the last of him. Unfortunately, the true final battle probably still awaits us.

Luckily, the inventories of everyone else who was vaporized haven't been lost. Looting the bodies, Wade is able to find the Beta Capsule that had turned him into Ultraman previously. Artifacts are indestructible so it wasn't lost like the rest of his gear. However, it can only be used once a day. I'm sure that'll be the end of that then. He also recovers Aech's sword and, most improtantly, ...Art3mis's flying Chuck Taylor shoes. Sure, whatever. Cline could've instead used a pair of  "PF Flyers", which might've made at least some sense just from the name.He could've even worked in a reference to The Sandlot in the process. But I could see why he would be averse to such a reach.

Now equipped with a weapon and a way to reach the Third Gate above him, Wade is ready to face the last challenge and claim the Easter Egg at last. His three buddies are rooting for him but they're still noticeably frustrated that they won't be able to personally take part. So to ease their minds (and because he will probably need their coaching to win on his first try before the Sixers get there), Wade agrees to split Halliday's fortune four ways once he wins. He even livestreams this promise to his 200 million viewers:

"Greetings,” I said. “This is Wade Watts, also known as Parzival. I want to let the whole world know that if and when I find Halliday’s Easter egg, I hereby vow to split my winnings equally with Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto. Cross my heart and hope to die. Gunter’s honor. Pinky swear. All of that crap. If I’m lying, I should be forever branded as a gutless Sixer-fellating punk.”

That's probably quite a bit more homophobic than legally binding but everyone seems satisfied. With all of that out of the way, Wade is finally ready to enter the final Gate and claim the big prize. As a reader, I'm right there with him. Except my prize is finally being done with this book.

Pop Culture References: 12 (0.58 per page)

Video Games Pac-Man III

Television Looney Tunes II Ultraman III The Twilight Zone I

Thanks to the heroic sacrifice of the Johnny 5 droid at the end of the previous chapter, the shield protecting the Sixers from Wade's gunter army is gone. The gratuitous battle scene can finally occur but, unsurprisingly, it's given almost no play. Since there are only five named characters among a melee of thousands, very little attention is paid to the larger struggle as it plays out. Cline handily illustrates how little these people "dying" all around our heroes matter by comparing them to three different kinds of insect species at the same time. 

I'll remind everyone, since it figures heavily throughout this chapter, that the OASIS has "permadeath" built into it. If your character's life points are extinguished, it dies and you lose everything you had invested in that avatar. Almost everything in this online space has an actual monetary value attached to it though. The "game" is actually just the Internet (with a VR interface), through which all commerce flows. This must mean that scores of people are just losing their entire net worth with every explosion and laser blast so that one of our heroes, probably Wade, can become the richest person in the world. I'm sure he'll never forget that sacrifice as he leaves Earth forever on his starship full of the hand-picked few.

This widespread financial collapse via all-out war is exactly what Wade and his friends hope to capitalize on to make it to the Third Gate, however. The only thing that poses any significant threat is Sorrento's Mechagodzilla, which is almost totally unaffected by all attacks directed at it. In a rare moment of selflessness, Wade offers to distract Sorrento while the other three head for the Gate. Shoto agrees that this is a good plan but takes it upon himself to serve as the distraction instead. Hoping to get revenge for the real life death of his guntbrother Daito, Shoto engages with Sorrento while everyone else races forward. The distraction only provides enough time for Aech and Art3mis to get inside the Castle, however. Sorrento is able to destroy Wade's mech and kill Shoto's avatar all in one move, reducing the team to three.

Though he's now without a giant robot of his own, Wade is fairly close to the entrance of the Castle. But, like Shoto, he wants vengeance. Sorrento ordering the murder of Wade’s entire neighborhood (especially that nice old lady he wasn't related to) and Daito was bad enough. But the final straw was robbing Shoto of his divine right to enter the sacred Third Gate. To deliver the punishment for this sin, Wade pulls out the magical item that Shoto had given to him just after Daito's death, which allows him to transform into the Japanese TV superhero Ultraman. Now as tall as Sorrento's Mechagodzilla, Wade has exactly three minutes to kick his sworn enemy's ass before the magic wears off and he's back to normal size and strength.

What happens next, if this were a book with some stakes or excitement, should be a frenzied struggle between equally matched opponents where Wade narrowly defeats Sorrento by pulling off a clutch move or outsmarting his enemy just before time runs out. Naturally, this isn't what happens. The reader IS kept informed of the three minute timer as it ticks down...for the first three seconds. Wade then executes a series of moves that completely destroys the Mechagodzilla and Sorrento's avatar without any resistance or difficulty. Imagining the fight in my head, it probably only took about a minute from start to finish. But to try to trick us into buying that it was a close call, we're told that a mere fifteen seconds was left on the countdown. And the conflict isn't actually resolved, because Sorrento can commandeer any of his employee's avatars for his own use anyway. So the whole sequence is a failure on multiple fronts.

But for the time being, Wade's path to the Third Gate is clear. With no one from IOI left to pose an obstacle, he's able to join Aech and Art3mis in front of their goal. Once again, their pure gunter hunch is correct. By singing a lyric from a Schoolhouse Rock song, the group is able to insert their keys and open the Third and final Gate. The final gunting challenge before the Easter Eggs awaits. But just as the High Three are about to step through the Gate, without warning, a massive explosion is heard.

"And then we all died."

Such a shame for the story to stop here, since there's definitely no way for Wade to get out of this one. Other than the anticlimactic ending, Ready Player One was a flawed but ambitious romp through the hallowed halls of nerd culture. I give it a 7/10. Actually, make that 7.5/10. All these leftover and surely blank pages give me plenty of room to write more lists of movies and TVs shows that I liked 25 years ago..

Pop Culture References 31 (3.875 per page)

Movies Red Dawn I Godzilla IIIII IIII

Television Mobile Suit Gundam II Braven Raideen II Mazinger Z II Supaidaman III Ultraman IIIII III Schoolhouse Rock III

There are less than 50 pages left but at last the final battle, between the people who want to keep the OASIS unchanged as an exploitative playground for the worst excesses of capitalism...and the bad guys, is about to begin. Wade's mass email has proliferated through the world's gunter ranks. This has caused a massive army to gather in front of Castle Anorak where the Third Gate is waiting.

The unbreakable shield is still surrounding the grounds but Wade assures everyone that it will fall at precisely noon, which is just minutes away. The High Four have all equipped the giant robots they won from beating the Black Tiger challenge at the end of the Second Gate so everyone is feeling really cool. As a quick aside, let's note here that Wade decides on his own to continue referring to his friend Aech as a guy despite what he learned in the previous chapter.

(Even though I now knew Aech was actually a female in real life, her avatar was still male, so I decided to continue to refer to him as such.)

Shit man, maybe just ask your friend about it instead?

Anyway, the big villain of the story, Nathan Sorrento, makes an appearance on-page for the first time since blowing up Wade's trailer stack neighborhood. He walks out with a few thousand of his Sixer buddies and talks some shit about his victory being inevitable. Then he summons Mechagodzilla from a magic item in his pocket. Several of his comrades board giant robots of their own. The appearance of Mechagodzilla in particular, who is several times taller than any other vehicle on the field, sends many of the gunters gathered around our heroes running before the fight even starts.

Wade remains confident though, believing that his plan was still in motion. The plan, it turns out, involved reprogramming a helper droid inside the Castle. This unassuming robo-slave "looked exactly like the robot Johnny Five from the 1986 film Short Circuit" because of "a lack of imagination on the part of the Supply Droids’ original designer." The ability of this goddamn author to bash anyone, including an anonymous engineer in his own story, for an unoriginal idea is stunning. 

Regardless of how it looks, the robot does what it was instructed by Wade to do while he was poking around the IOI mainframe. It effortlessly delivers a massive bomb to the Sixer “wizard” maintaining the shield and blows itself up, destroying all the surroundings avatars and bringing down the barrier. There was a problem but it turns out our main character did a thing on a computer a few chapters ago so the problem is solved. Now the gratuitous yet somehow still dull mech showdown can finally occur. Big shoutout to the reference count below by the way, I knew it couldn't stay down forever!

Pop Culture References: 32 (4 per page)

Movies Star Wars IIII AC/DC II Godzilla III Short Circuit II

Television Supaidaman IIIII III Mazinger Z III Mobile Suit Gundam III Braven Raideen II Voltron I Robotech I Neon Genesis Evangelion I

Music Falco I

When we last left our heroes, Ogden Morrow had just appeared in Aech's Basement hangout. In the early days of the OASIS, he and James Halliday granted their avatars abilities that no one player could access. This included making them unkillable and unbeatable in-game. They're able to “do almost anything and go almost anywhere,” including becoming invisible and entering private chat rooms. Turns out he was even the mysterious presence that knocked over some comic books in the Basement, if you remember that far back. Really cool and good that two old creeps were able to spy on anyone they wanted in the world. But they're capitalists with hearts of gold so we can surely assume that they never used these powers for anything unseemly. 

As for why he's there, he hates those shitty Sixers too and wants to help these worthy gunters out. Limos have been sent to pick up Shoto and Art3mis to bring them to their respective nearby airports, from which they can catch flights to Ogden's home. But four plane rides is evidently a bit too steep for this billionaire so Aech has to drive from Pittsburgh to meet Wade. They'll fly to Oregon together from the Columbus airport. Aech will make this trip of about 200 miles in the rundown RV that he lives in and plays from. Compare that to when Wade had to ride an armored bus with armed guards atop to make it from Oklahoma City to Columbus without being murdered by marauders in the cursed earth outside the major cities. This trip passes uneventfully for Aech so maybe bulletproof glass and assault rifles weren't necessary after all. 

Aech was a little nervous about meeting his longtime gunting friend, Wade immediately finds out why when he's picked up. Turns out Aech isn't a white Caucasian man like his avatar presents. He is actually she, "a heavyset African American girl" named Helen Harris (Aech = H). Aech's mother believed that "the OASIS was the best thing that had ever happened to both women and people of color." Not because of inclusivity or availability. But because anyone can pretend to be a white man, the evidently default best person to be even in the beautiful OASIS these people are fighting to protect. So Aech followed suit when making her avatar. A lot to unpack there but rather than have any sort of a discussion about that being fucked up, it's just treated as fact and they move on. 

And to make sure not to complicate Wade's quest for love by increasing the number of women he knows from one to two, Aech is quickly identified as a lesbian. Wade's cool with this, after his initial bout of betrayed indignation, because after all they did bond over these past years about how much they both like tits. If I respected Cline whatsoever as a writer and wasn't familiar with the way the only other female character in the entire book has been treated up to this point, I could maybe look on this more charitably. But I don't and I am so it's easy to chalk this up as a double dip of crass tokenism.

After that revelation, the two friends get on the first plane they've ever been on and land at Morrow's private airstrip. We spend a bit hearing about how fabulous his estate is and then Morrow sort of offhandedly mentioned how Halliday didn't speak to him for the last 10 years of his life because ol' Jim was obsessed with Morrow's now-deceased wife. That jealousy kept the friends from contacting each other until just before Halliday's death when he reached out and explained his grand plan for the Egg Hunt. Morrow and Wade have a quick bonding moment over this because Wade also totally gets obsessing over a girl and cutting off contact from everyone you know over it. But it's played like this is supposed to be a heartwarming treatise on love for a singularly wonderful woman, not an eye-opening display of unhealthy behavior repeating itself in a new generation. 

After everyone dries their eyes, Wade and Aech join Shoto (who somehow beat them there from Japan) and Art3mis in the OASIS. Art3mis is said to have made a point of not meeting Wade face to face before logging on, can't say I blame her.

Pop Culture References: 10 (.71 per page)

Movies Tron I Sneakers I

Video Games Quake I Joust I Commodore 64 I

Music Pat Benatar I Rush I

We're finally back in Aech's Basement, with its wood-paneled walls and shelves full of 80s treasures. It's been so long. Aech, Art3mis and Shoto are all present, waiting to hear where Wade has been and what his plan for defeating the Sixers once and for all is. Heeding Wade's warning, Shoto and Art3mis left their homes in order to avoid the threat of being captured and eventually murdered by IOI. This didn't require any special deception or scheme, they each just left their houses and went to a public place. Do NOT question why IOI wouldn't have the ability to notice this and immediately follow them to wherever they were going. Especially when the Sixers are probably currently piecing together that someone else high on their hit list just escaped their headquarters with a hard drive full of incriminating data.

The group's first question for Wade: how did he get all this sensitive info? He responds:

“Indents have limited access to the company intranet via their hab-unit entertainment system, from behind the IOI firewall. From there, I was able to use a series of back doors and system exploits left by the original programmers to tunnel through the network and hack directly into the Sixers’ private database."

Which isn't what he told us, the reader. Wade just bought the admin passwords and had to be inside the building to use them. Wade's still trying to impress the girl who scorned him, it seems. She's pissed that he looked at her file and picture, by the way. Aech and Shoto brush it off but of course they don't know about the parting creep line only she got sent.

Turning to strategy, everyone wants to know how close Sorrento and his goons are to finishing the Third Gate. But based on the video archive Wade downloaded, they haven't even opened it yet. Unlike the other two gates, just turning the key doesn't work. Above the keyhole of the Gate within Castle Anorak, there's an inscription that reads "Charity, hope, faith." This is assumed to be a clue but no one in IOI has been able to crack it. But they aren't certified pop culture geniuses like the High...Four? Almost immediately, they realize that the words ordered backwards are....a lyric from a Schoolhouse Rock song. The title of which, "Three Is A Magic Number," leads Wade to conclude that three gunters with the Crystal Key have to open the Gate at the same time to go through. So three of the four of them have to make it into the castle to have a shot at winning the Egg. I have a feeling no one should be betting on Shoto to make it in.

But that plan doesn't take into account the impenetrable forcefield IOI has had up around Halliday's estate. Wade promises that in precisely 36 hours, that shield will go down. And all they need is every sympathetic gunter in the world, having been notified via mass email, to attack en masse as soon as it does to provide enough destruction and distraction for the heroes to go through and win the glory (along with essentially all the money in the world). In the meantime, everyone wonders what they should do until then since they're all ostensibly homeless fugitives. That's when Ogden Morrow, Halliday's old friend, suddenly appears inside the Basement and offers to let them crash at his place in Oregon. Okay then.

Pop Culture References: 9 (1 per page)

Movies The Wizard of Oz I

Television Schoolhouse Rock IIIII III

Imagine my surprise: Wade's escape from corporate bondage is neither interesting nor exciting. After copying all the damning evidence of IOI's use of kidnapping and murder as means of competitive advantage, Wade puts on the maintenance worker uniform that he had previously ordered for himself. Thanks to his continued unrestricted access to all of IOI's systems, disabling and removing the security anklet and "eargear" that were meant to be permanent accessories is as simple as a few keystrokes. With that much control over the entire digital infrastructure of his sworn enemy, you might think that Wade would wreck their servers, delete all of their records or do literally anything to give himself an additional edge. He doesn't, of course. Wade doesn't even bother to free the rest of the indentured servants when he's in there zeroing out his own debt balance.

"I pulled up my indenturement profile, accessed my debt statement, and zeroed out my outstanding balance—money I’d never actually borrowed to begin with."

The unspoken message here seems to be "Well, I don't deserve to be here since my debts were fake. These other poor schmucks are doomed forever, though. They will reap what was sown." We're told a few lines later, however, that the "Indentured Servant Protection Agency" uses the cameras stapled to people's ears to monitor daily events "to ensure that [our] human rights were being observed." So I was worried for nothing, this government agency that mandates slavery with a smile seems to have it all under control. And I do mean literally that the ear cameras were stapled, Wade bleeds profusely after removing his the way it was intended to be removed. Luckily, he thought to smuggle some adhesive medical strips into his room along with the disguise.

Now changed and bandaged and debt-free, Wade is ready to make his way out of IOI headquarters. His reprogrammed security anklet now identifies him as an entirely new fake person, not the fake person he was mere hours ago. This new identity is a technician with access to the entire building so Wade is able to nonchalantly leave his room, walk down the hall, board the elevator and ride it all the way down to the lobby. It's only here that the master plan hits a slight hitch: Wade has forgotten to take off the disposable plastic slippers the indentured servants wear. But no one notices so the tension lasts less than an entire paragraph.

Someone does notice that Wade's ear is seeping blood, however. The bandage that was staunching the open wound has fallen off, leaving the entire side of his head slick and red. First-aid technology in this world, like its pop culture, has seemingly also not advanced since the 1980s. Wade quickly thanks the woman who stopped him for her concern and scurries out the door. We're informed that there are security guards present in the lobby but the sight of a slippered, bleeding smoothboy anxiously speeding for the exit must not have been worthy of their notice.

These dramatic events don't even take an entire four pages to transpire. For a conglomerate that seems to be on deck for controlling the entire world, getting out of there was pretty easy. After this, Wade goes to a nearby postal box where he stashed an OASIS rig, makes sure to log in via a hotspot not operated by IOI and erases his now compromised Bryce Lynch identity so that he can return to being the noble Wade Watts we all love. Oh yeah. He also buys a handgun out of a vending machine. Say what you want about this dystopia but it does provide convenient access to firearms. 

Ditching his jumpsuit for more appropriate (and cooler) street clothes, Wade drops several thousand dollars on a private, high-bandwidth OASIS cafe room where he can upload all the data he wants. Wade first sends warnings to Art3mis, Aech and Shoto, telling them they're under surveillance and that they should meet him at Aech's Basement hideout soon. Because he can't help being a bit of a creep even in this instance, Wade ends his message to Art3mis with:  "PS—I think you look even more beautiful in real life." With that totally normal and non-creepy postscript out of the way, Wade then sends the proof of IOI and Sorrento either plotting to commit or outright committing kidnapping and multiple murders to every major news outlet online. I would almost think that would be enough to end the gunting ambitions of the Sixers entirely but as there are still seven chapters left, I continue to be unlucky. 

Pop Culture References: 8 (0.88 per page)

Television Max Headroom I

Movies Brazil III 

Wade has been a corporate slave for eight days now and he hasn't been enjoying it very much. During his 12 hour technical support shifts, he interacts with users with names like "HotCock007" and resolves their issues. His voice is filtered to sound friendly and attentive, all his cursing and insults are automatically muted. Between this sort of monitoring and the autonomous AIs that exist in other parts of the story, it doesn't even seem like IOI needs to enslave human customer service reps. Why is this soulless conglomerate maintaining multiple floors of living and work space for its drones when computers would be up to the task? That Wade and his brethren even get a cubicle to work in (something that not all of my actual jobs saw fit to provide) separate from their sleeping pod seems overly charitable for the company we've come to know. Wade does get a half hour for lunch but he chooses it to spend it in his room because he can't stand to hear his coworkers complain about callers, something he had been doing with us the reader for the previous three pages.

Wade might be in a better mood but he's only been getting two hours of sleep per night. This is because, yes, getting caught was part of his plan. A full seven months before his arrest, Wade purchased IOI network passwords from the same "L33t Hax0rz Warezhaus" where he bought his fake identity. He didn't have any particular use for them at the time but figured it never hurts to be prepared in case you ever decide to intentionally get yourself sold into slavery to access your rival's intranet, as the passwords are not usable from outside IOI headquarters. By placing himself into debt, Wade was positioned to access the company's databases and find everything he needed to gain the gunting upper hand. 

Of course if the passwords ended up being fake or out of date, he'd be fucked forever. But luckily, Wade is able to use them easily via the terminal in his quarters normally reserved for propaganda videos. Keeping this off the security cameras, both the one mounted in his room and the one attached to his ear, proved extremely difficult. Until he could replace the feeds with looped footage of him sleeping, Wade had to sit directly in front of the terminal screen and use his peripheral vision to navigate while keeping his head (and therefore his earcam) pointed at a bare wall. Only a master spy could hope to defeat such a setup.

Once logged in with the highest administrator access, Wade copies all the information he can find relating to James Halliday, the egg hunt, and the High Five gunters. Because his enemies are really damn smart, this includes a video of Sixer agents murdering Daito and signed memos detailing an approved plan to abduct both Art3mis and Shoto to help IOI solve the Third Gate and then "dispose of them" afterwards. Don't take notes on your criminal fucking conspiracy, dudes. And since IOI is the largest internet service provider in the world, they know everything about the two gunters. Never one to maintain a healthy distance from the crush who rejected him, Wade of course opens Art3mis's file. This allows him to learn her real name, home address and see a picture of her actual face. Other than a birthmark that "did absolutely nothing to diminish her beauty", she looks the same as her avatar and Wade can't help but fall even deeper in love with her. The inevitable reconciliation is going to be a real tearjerker.

As Aech has been able to use different wireless nodes throughout the northeastern United States and Wade made a point of moving to a city with a direct fiber-optic connection to the OASIS servers, neither of them are in the same danger of being abducted as Art3mis and Shoto. IOI doens't even have a picture of Aech on file (this definitely won't lead to a shocking reveal later). As for Wade, he's lost some weight and is still a mostly hairless smoothboy so I guess this is the explanation we have to think up on our own as to why there's no kind of facial recognition match between his actual file and the "Bryce Lynch" they've got in their HQ. 

Now armed with a hard drive full of incriminating info, Wade is ready to escape bondage and resume the gunt. An automated bank transfer was scheduled to wipe out his debts and set him free in a few days. However, the memos calling for the kidnapping of Art3mis and Shoto are only hours old. He's going to have to make his contrived escape much earlier than planned. 

Pop Culture References: 4 (.33 per page) 

Movies 

James Bond I 

Big Trouble in Little China I

Brazil I  

Brands 

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Hi, my name's Jake Fargo. Somehow, I got roped into writing this chapter-by-chapter blog, breaking down how Ernest Cline's Ready Player One is a myopic piece of shit. Whether it's a disgusting example of empty nostalgia or a cynical (and successful) attempt to cash-in on the empty nostalgia of others, it exists and I hate it. Currently the blog is nearing its final chapters. After which I will have no choice but to see the soon-to-be released major motion picture directed by the once-great Steven Spielberg. Once that's done I plan to cover Cline's second book Armada, which is said to be somehow even worse. Being a typical always-online failson, I've bounced around between various temp jobs and unemployment for years. So any help you feel I deserve for this little endeavor would be greatly appreciated. 

Another mercifully short chapter this time, once again focused on the minutiae of Wade's indentured servitude.

On the trip from his apartment building to IOI corporate headquarters, our hero has time to passively notice that there seem to be even more homeless people and refugee camps than the last time he was outside months ago. But that interest quickly passes as Wade is brought into the building where he is essentially supposed to spend the rest of his life. After a battery of medical screenings and aptitude tests (he intentionally flunks the ones related to gunting so he doesn't get assigned to the Sixers), Wade is assigned a technical support position with a salary. Living expenses are deducted, but with good behavior and performance, he's told that his debts will soon be paid off and he'll be free to go once again. Of course, it's common knowledge in this world that no one ever actually achieves this: all these people are slaves for life. Some people don't mind though, seeing it as job security.

Wade's not phased by much of this for a few reasons. The first - his fake identity is still holding up. Fingerprints and retinal scans still confirm his identity as "Bryce Lynch", ordinary OASIS shut-in. A genetic verification, the only thing he seemingly couldn't fake, is impossible because "the Genetic Privacy Act made it illegal for IOI to sample my DNA." Good to know that a future where a company can force the poor to work for them until they die is still subject to laws of plot necessity. Speaking of plot, that's the second reason Wade isn't that worried about much of what's going on here. He still has his plan. We don't know what it is yet and it'd have to be some plan to overcome the endless security measures keeping him locked up inside the complex; including guards, cameras, a camera-equipped ear-tag and a security anklet that can both electrocute and tranquilize potential escapees. This is going to be some plan, I can't wait to see how reliant on convenience, coincidence and Batman-level planning it will be. As newly-tagged human property Wade falls asleep inside his closet-sized living quarters, the thoughts that give him the most grief are of his lost love:

Despite my best efforts, my thoughts drifted to Art3mis. Regardless of what I’d been telling myself, I knew she was the real reason I’d gone through with this lunatic plan. What the hell was wrong with me? There was a good chance I might never escape from this place. I felt buried under an avalanche of self-doubt. Had my dual obsessions with the egg and Art3mis finally driven me completely insane? Why would I take such an idiotic risk to win over someone I’d never actually met? Someone who appeared to have no interest in ever talking to me again?

Where was she right now? Did she miss me?

To the last question: I sure hope not.

Pop Culture References: 1!? (0.14 per page)

Although this chapter is about as long as any other, only one thing really happens: Wade gets arrested for credit card debt. 

The card issued by IOI (remember them, that's who the Sixers work for) to his alias has an outstanding balance of $20,000 and Wade has missed three payments in a row. And since this conception of future America is only one or two steps worse than our own, he's now a literal indentured servant with the company until his debts are paid off. Rent-a-cops use plasma torches to cut a hole into Wade's apartment, take him into custody and confiscate all of his possessions for sale towards the outstanding balance. We're told this practice is an everyday occurrence. Sure enough, there are two other slaves in the paddy wagon that awaits Wade outside once he's apprehended and processed.

It seems like such a non-sequitur for this to happen out of the blue, right after the chapter where Wade comes up with a scheme to finally win the great gunting war. As such I have to assume that, yes, getting caught was part of his plan. In keeping with his indifference and distaste for the problems of the poor and the excesses of this extremely late-stage capitalist society where corporate-run debtor's labor camps exist, Wade doesn't seem too bothered that this sort of that happens all the time. He's pretty bummed that it happens to him, mostly because he has to wipe his hard drive and delete his best friend Max Headroom in the process. Otherwise, he's pretty matter of fact about it. 

Maybe he'll finish this story with an epiphany that redeems him but it's hard to forget that his only aspiration for becoming the richest person in a world where this shit is commonplace, was just fucking off to deep space forever.

Suck my ass, Elon Musk.

Pop Culture References: 7 (1 per page)

Television Max Headroom II

Movies Explorers II Conan the Barbarian I

How many of y'all like the band Rush? Hope it's a lot of you, because that is the only thing this chapter is about. When Wade finished the Second Gate challenge, a glowing red star appeared before him with the Crystal Key within it. Being the biggest Rush fan alive, Wade instantly recognizes this red star as the cover of the Rush album 2112. The only bigger fan of the band was Halliday himself, who coded all his games to Rush songs and referred to its three members as "The Holy Trinity" and "The Gods of the North". Okay sure, you damn dork.

There's an awful lot of text devoted to the leaps of logic Wade uses to figure out this puzzle in order to fool the reader into thinking there's an impressive mystery being solved, but it's really not the case. In short, Wade has a hunch, he goes to a planet, and the thing he's looking for is there. The thing this time is a Gibson Les Paul guitar, hidden behind a waterfall just like in a Rush lyric. Wade has the bright idea to start wailing away on this guitar to the tune of the song in question, which he figures the unworthy Sixers hadn't yet considered doing. Luckily, he just so happens to be a skilled guitar player on top of everything else.

James Halliday had taken guitar lessons for a few years in high school. That was what had first inspired me to learn to play. I’d never held an actual guitar, but on a virtual axe, I could totally shred.

Sure enough, this is the secret solution the puzzle required. The guitar becomes the Crystal Key, putting Wade barely back in first place on the leaderboard. More importantly, he's given a secret clue as to how to open the Third and final Gate. The Sixers, who couldn't shred their way out of a wet paper bag, merely placed it on an altar nearby. This allowed them to acquire the Key but not the clue. Regardless, the A on the key led both parties to conclude that the last Gate was in Halliday's digital Fortress of Solitude, Castle Anorak. But because these Sixers have no honor, they've put up an impregnable forcefield completely around the castle. Frustrated gunters with no better ideas have been assaulting it with "nukes, fireballs and magic missiles" but have made no progress. It's determined that the shield is the result of yet another of those ultra-rare artifacts that keep popping up one after the other: the Orb of Osuvox. It can only be used by "a wizard who was ninety-ninth level", and can only be maintained as long as that mage has both hands on the Orb.

What this means in a game without character classes, where every principal character is max level, is unknown.

But Wade is ever-determined...unless in the midst of a weeks-long doom spiral that almost culminated in his suicide, and comes up with a plan. Sending a message with the solutions to both the Second Gate and the Crystal Key to art3mis, Aech and Shoto, Wade is ready to win the Egg Hunt or "die trying." If only I could be so lucky.

Pop Culture References: 32  (4 per page)

Video Games Black Tiger II Zork I

Television Supaidaman I

Movies Blade Runner II Excalibur I

Music Rush IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII II

Books Kurt Vonnegut III

Before starting the actual chapter summary, I'd like to congratulate the reference count for making a resurgence this time. Sometimes the numbers stay low for a while but you can always rely on Cline to bring them back up eventually. All it took this time was five pages of nonstop Blade Runner talk.

Blade Runner comes up when Wade, back to trying to crack the riddle of the Jade Key just hours after his meeting with Shoto in the previous chapter, is analyzing an image using voice commands just like Harrison Ford did in the movie. Holding up the wrapper the Key came in, Wade imagines folding it up into a paper plane, which lets him make another unprompted leap to the origami unicorn featured in Blade Runner. Sure enough, when Wade whispers the word "unicorn" out loud, the wrapper folds itself into the origami shape all on its own. This is all the confirmation that Wade needed to head out to find the Second Gate. The Jade Key riddle: "Continue your quest by taking the test.", Wade surmises, must refer to the machine used in Blade Runner to detect whether someone is a human being or a manufactured replicant. And because Halliday was a big fan of the film, a replica of the massive Tyrell Corporation building seen in Blade Runner is a free component in the world-building software people can use to make planets. So there are hundreds of locations Wade can visit to test his theory and it doesn't matter that the Sixers are way ahead of him as they can't guard every possible world! 

Even faced with utter despair, defeat and defenestration, our hero still manages to triumph.

Once Wade arrives at the generic cyberpunk planet that is home to one of these Tyrell buildings, he of course prepares himself for a massive gun battle. One thing that everyone remembers from Blade Runner is the scores of faceless armed security guards that stood between Harrison Ford's character and the office where the replicant testing machine was located. Cline knows it would be a major mistake to leave out a homage to that famous action setpiece in his book:

The next ten minutes played out like the climax of a John Woo movie. One of the ones starring Chow Yun Fat, like Hard Boiled or The Killer. I switched both of my guns to autofire and held down the triggers as I moved from one room to the next, mowing down every NPC in my path. The guards returned fire, but their bullets pinged harmlessly off my armor. I never ran out of ammo, because each time I fired a round, a new round was teleported into the bottom of the clip. 

My bullet bill this month was going to be huge.

It's nice that in one paragraph we're reminded that: Wade is an invincible badass, Cline can't write an interesting action scene to save his life and that everything, including digital ammunition, costs actual money in this horrible online world. That's economical writing. 

With all the senseless NPC murder out of the way, Wade sits at the machine and inserts the Jade Key. Sure enough, the Second Gate is opened. But unlike the First Gate, where Wade was forced to act out one of Halliday's favorite movies, this Gate requires the gunter to act out one of Halliday's favorite games.

The game is Black Tiger, a relatively obscure arcade cabinet from the beloved 1980s. Shock of shocks, Wade "mastered Black Tiger long ago", but this isn't just standing there and playing the game like when he demonstrated how good he is at Joust and Pac-Man. This time, Wade IS Black Tiger, a barbarian armed with a mace and throwing knives. Just as Wade once played the role of Matthew Broderick in WarGames, he now has to jump and fight through eight levels of this side-scroller to reach his next goal. 

Long story short, he does so. For his victory Wade receives the Crystal Key and, inexplicably, his choice of a giant robot from several different Japanese TV shows and anime. In fact, the gate thanks Wade for his service:

Thank you. I am indebted to you. Please accept a giant robot as your reward.

Very powerful words there, Cline.

Both items are added to his inventory for later use. And since the plot has been leaving him behind up until now, Wade knows immediately where he has to go next to find the Third and final Gate. If only the rest of the book had a sense of urgency, we could've been saved a good 100 pages.

Pop Culture References: 61 (6.1 per page)

Video Games Crime Fighters I Heavy Barrel I Vigilante I Smash TV I Black Tiger IIIII III Time Pilot II

Television Gigantor I Mazinger Z I Giant Robo I Macross I Gundam I Supaidaman III

Movies Blade Runner IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII II John Woo I Chow Yun-Fat I Hard-Boiled I The Killer I The Iron Giant I Godzilla vs. Megalon I

Comic Books Spider-Man I

Books Kurt Vonnegut III Philip K Dick I

Despite the tease in the previous chapter, Shoto requesting to see Wade "in person" just meant face-to-face in The OASIS. Shoto shows up to Wade's base in his anime-inspired ship and begins their meeting by delivering his requisite bows and honorifics, which Wade reciprocates. His robes this time are pure black since, as it turns out, Daito didn't just die in the game. He died for REAL. During a battle between Daito and Sixer agents that took place on the Zork planet, actual Sixers broke into Daito's real-life apartment and threw him off his real-deal forty-third story balcony. Authorities in Japan have already written it off as "another otaku suicide" so no investigation will be performed.

It's also revealed that Daito and Shoto weren't actually brothers, having never met in the flesh. They bonded via an online OASIS support group for hikikomori (doesn't seem like a terribly effective form of treatment), the Japanese term for socially-withdrawn recluses that never leave their rooms, and web-surf or game all day. That Wade spends a full paragraph going on about the weird exoticism of this phenomenon when he's being doing the exact same shit for months isn't surprising, given how he's portrayed these Japanese characters up until now.

Shoto knows that Daito didn't commit "seppuku", which Cline erroneously believes is the Japanese word for suicide and not a specific ritual form of it, because they were fighting Sixers in the digital world at the exact moment of his death. What follows is an account of a video recording of the battle Daito took part in while Shoto was acquiring his copy of the Jade Key. This is the first prolonged account of action in this supposedly action-adventure scifi story, only took almost 250 pages. However, the same problem that plagues the rest of the book is present, where the passive style of the narration leeches any excitement or fun from the telling:

The Sixer ground forces closing in on him froze in their tracks, staring up in frightened awe as Ultraman Daito snatched two gunships out of the sky and smashed them together, like a giant child playing with two tiny metal toys. He dropped the flaming wreckage to the ground and began to swat other Sixer gunships out of the sky like bothersome flies. The ships that escaped his deadly grasp banked around and sprayed him with laser bolts and machine-gun fire, but both deflected harmlessly off his armored alien skin. Daito let out a booming laugh that echoed across the landscape. Then he made a cross with his arms, intersecting at the wrists. A glowing energy beam blasted forth from his hands, vaporizing half a dozen gunships unlucky enough to fly through its path. Daito turned and swept the beam over the Sixer ground forces around him, frying them like terrified ants under a magnifying glass.

Regardless of how boring it is to read, Wade relates how Daito fends off multiple waves of Sixer ships in this manner, using a rare item that allows him to become a 150-foot tall rendition of the Japanese TV character, Ultraman. But just when Shoto returns with his Jade Key, Daito suddenly screams out that someone has entered his apartment. Immediately after, Daito goes quiet and still, allowing the Sixers to kill his avatar as well. Shoto barely has time to pillage his friend's digital corpse of its valuables and escape with his own e-life.

The tale of Daito's final moments relayed, Shoto gives Wade the Ultraman "Beta Capsule" item, ensuring that we can look forward to another bland battle scene with it later. With the end of the Egg Hunt seeming imminent, the two decide to put gunting aside and focus on getting even. Better than the "seppuku" Wade was ready to commit a few minutes ago, I guess.

Pop Culture References: 16 (2 per page)

Video Games Zork II

Movies Akira Kurosawa IIII Star Wars I

Television Cowbop Bebop II Tokusatsu I Family Ties I Ultraman III

Music Falco I

This is a short one, luckily. After Wade escaped the great Sixer versus Gunter battle around the Zork planet (this shit is so STUPID), the fighting continues on for a while. "The Boobs in Blue” (as he addresses the Sixers because they definitely needed another nickname) succeed in controlling several copies of the home the Jade Key challenge takes place in. 

As a reminder: the entire planet is covered in hundreds of identical houses because Cline has no idea how MMOs actually work, where millions of people could play the same instanced content, at the same time, without ever seeing each other. But since this world is stupidly contrived, this allows the Sixers to get their people in to complete the challenge and acquire the Jade Key. Within a day, thousands have reached the same level of progress as art3mis, Wade, Aech and eventually Shoto. But since our heroes did it all first, they all still have a slight point lead on the scoreboard. 

Daito is still nowhere to be seen, for reasons yet unknown.

However, The High Five's domination abruptly ends the next day when Wade wakes up. He finds that Sorrento, the Sixer leader, has shot up to the #1 spot by finding and completing the "Second Gate" with his Jade Key. In a few more hours, Sixers complete the Gate en masse. The high five is pushed off the Top 10 entirely, with every user above them being a generic corporate drone account. Wasting no time, Sorrento then acquires the Crystal Key and seems to be making every effort to finish the entire quest very soon.

Wade, predictably, doesn't take this with much stride. He tries calling Aech and art3mis but receives no answer. With no other ideas or inspiration, Wade spends the next 24 hours grimly waiting for Sorrento to complete the entire challenge and win the Easter Egg for himself. But at last, Wade comes up with a plan.

There was an arboretum on the roof of my apartment building. I had never visited it, but I’d seen photos and admired the view via webcam. A transparent Plexiglas barrier had been installed around the ledge to keep people from jumping, but it was a joke. At least three determined individuals had managed to climb over it since I’d moved in.

I would sit up there and breathe the unfiltered city air for a while, feeling the wind on my skin. Then I would scale the barrier and hurl myself over the side. This was my current plan.

Yeah, our hero, defeated and alone, is just going to kill himself now. But before he gets the chance to carry this final act of self-pity out, he's contacted by a grieving Shoto. Shoto informs Wade that Daito will not be coming back to The Oasis, and more importantly that he left something for Wade specifically. To explain this to Wade further, Shoto would need meet face to face in the real world. I bet Wade regrets obsessively keeping himself a hairless smoothboy now.

Pop Culture References: 10 (1.43 per page)

Video Games Zork III

Television Star Trek I Max Headroom I

Movies Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory I

Music Pat Benatar I

Toys Play-Doh I