And then, as the text faded away, I found myself standing in a huge oak-paneled room as big as a warehouse, with a high vaulted ceiling and a polished hardwood floor. The room had no windows, and only one exit—large double doors set into one of the four bare walls. An older high-end OASIS immersion rig stood in the absolute center of the expansive room. Over a hundred glass tables surrounded the rig, arranged in a large oval around it. 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.
I realized that I was standing in a re-creation of James Halliday’s office, the room in his mansion where he’d spent most of the last fifteen years of his life. The place where he’d coded his last and greatest game. The one I was now playing.
I’d never seen any photos of this room, but its layout and contents had been described in great detail by the movers hired to clear the place out after Halliday’s death.
I looked down at my avatar and saw that I no longer appeared as one of the Monty Python knights. I was Parzival once again.
First, I did the obvious and tried the exit. The doors wouldn’t budge.
I turned back and took another long look around the room, surveying the long line of monuments to the history of computing and videogames.
That was when I realized that the oval-shaped ring in which they were arranged actually formed the outline of an egg.
In my head, I recited the words of Halliday’s first riddle, the one in Anorak’s Invitation:
Three hidden keys open three secret gates
Wherein the errant will be tested for worthy traits
And those with the skill to survive these straits
Will reach The End where the prize awaits
I’d reached the end. This was it. Halliday’s Easter egg must be hidden somewhere in this room.
“Do you guys see this?” I whispered.
There was no reply.
“Hello? Aech? Art3mis? Shoto? Are you guys still there?”
Still no reply. Either Og had cut their voice links to me, or Halliday had coded this final stage of the gate so that no outside communication was possible. I was pretty sure it was the latter.
I stood there in silence for a minute, unsure of what to do. Then I followed my first instinct and walked over to the Atari 2600. It was hooked up to a 1977 Zenith Color TV. I turned on the TV, but nothing happened. Then I switched on the Atari. Still nothing. There was no power, even though both the TV and the Atari were plugged into electrical outlets set into the floor.
I tried the Apple II on the table beside it. It wouldn’t switch on either.
After a few minutes of experimentation, I discovered that the only computer that would power on was one of the oldest, the IMSAI 8080, the same model of computer Matthew Broderick owned in WarGames.
When I booted it up, the screen was completely blank, save for one word.
LOGIN:
I typed in ANORAK and hit Enter.
IDENTIFICATION NOT RECOGNIZED—CONNECTION TERMINATED.
Then the computer shut itself off and I had to power it back on to get the LOGIN prompt again.
I tried HALLIDAY. No dice.
In WarGames, the backdoor password that had granted access to the WOPR supercomputer was “Joshua.” Professor Falken, the creator of the WOPR, had used the name of his son for the password. The person he’d loved most in the world.
I typed in OG. It didn’t work. OGDEN didn’t work either.
I typed in KIRA and hit the Enter key.
IDENTIFICATION NOT RECOGNIZED—CONNECTION TERMINATED.
I tried each of his parents’ first names. I tried ZAPHOD, the name of his pet fish. Then TIBERIUS, the name of a ferret he’d once owned.
None of them worked.
I checked the time. I’d been in this room for over ten minutes now. Which meant that Sorrento had caught up with me. So he would now be inside his own separate copy of this room, probably with a team of Halliday scholars whispering suggestions in his ear, thanks to his hacked immersion rig. They were probably already working from a prioritized list of possibilities, entering them as fast as Sorrento could type.
I was out of time.