The moment I saw it, I knew I was looking at the Third Gate.
I fast-forwarded through several other recent simcap files. From what I could tell, the Sixers still hadn’t figured out how to open the gate. Simply inserting the Crystal Key into the keyhole had no effect. They’d had their entire team trying to figure out why for several days now, but still hadn’t made any progress.
While the data and video on the Third Gate was copying over to my flash drive, I continued to delve deeper into the Sixer database. Eventually, I uncovered a restricted area called the Star Chamber. It was the only area of the database I couldn’t seem to access. So I used my admin ID to create a new “test account,” then gave that account superuser access and full administrator privileges. It worked and I was granted access. The information inside the restricted area was divided into two folders: Mission Status and Threat Assessments. I opened the Threat Assessments folder first, and when I saw what was inside, I felt the blood drain from my face. There were five file folders, labeled Parzival, Art3mis, Aech, Shoto, and Daito. Daito’s folder had a large red “X” over it.
I opened the Parzival folder first. A detailed dossier appeared, containing all of the information the Sixers had collected on me over the past few years. My birth certificate. My school transcripts. At the bottom there was a link to a simcap of my entire chatlink session with Sorrento, ending with the bomb detonating in my aunt’s trailer. After I’d gone into hiding, they’d lost track of me. They had collected thousands of screenshots and vidcaps of my avatar over the past year, and loads of data on my stronghold on Falco, but they didn’t know anything about my location in the real world. My current whereabouts were listed as “unknown.”
I closed the window, took a deep breath, and opened the file on Art3mis.
At the very top was a school photo of a young girl with a distinctly sad smile. To my surprise, she looked almost identical to her avatar. The same dark hair, the same hazel eyes, and the same beautiful face I knew so well—with one small difference. Most of the left half of her face was covered with a reddish-purple birthmark. I would later learn that these types of birthmark were sometimes referred to as “port wine stains.” In the photo, she wore a sweep of her dark hair down over her left eye to try to conceal the mark as much as possible.
Art3mis had led me to believe that in reality she was somehow hideous, but now I saw that nothing could have been further from the truth. To my eyes, the birthmark did absolutely nothing to diminish her beauty. If anything, the face I saw in the photo seemed even more beautiful to me than that of her avatar, because I knew this one was real.
The data below the photo said that her real name was Samantha Evelyn Cook, that she was a twenty-year-old Canadian citizen, five feet and seven inches tall, and that she weighed one hundred and sixty-eight pounds. The file also contained her home address—2206 Greenleaf Lane, Vancouver, British Columbia—along with a lot of other information, including her blood type and her school transcripts going all the way back to kindergarten.
I found an unlabeled video link at the bottom of her dossier, and when I selected it, a live vidfeed of a small suburban house appeared on my display. After a few seconds, I realized I was looking at the house where Art3mis lived.
As I dug further into her file, I learned that they’d had her under surveillance for the past five months. They had her house bugged too, because I found hundreds of hours of audio recordings made while she was logged into the OASIS. They had complete text transcripts of every audible word she’d spoken while clearing the first two gates.
I opened Shoto’s file next. They knew his real name, Akihide Karatsu, and they also appeared to have his home address, an apartment building in Osaka, Japan. His file also contained a school photo, showing a thin, stoic boy with a shaved head. Like Daito, he looked nothing like his avatar.