The image of her that formed in my mind was the most obvious one. I pictured her as a physical manifestation of her avatar. I imagined her with the same face, eyes, hair, and body. Even though she told me repeatedly that in reality she looked almost nothing like her avatar and that she wasn’t nearly as attractive in person.
When I began to spend most of my time with Art3mis, Aech and I began to grow apart. Instead of hanging out several times a week, we chatted a few times a month. Aech knew I was falling for Art3mis, but he never gave me too much grief about it, even when I would bail on him at the last minute to hang out with her instead. He would just shrug, tell me to be careful, and say, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing, Z.”
I didn’t, of course. My whole relationship with Art3mis was in defiance of all common sense. But I couldn’t help falling for her. Somehow, without my realizing it, my obsession with finding Halliday’s Easter egg was gradually being supplanted by my obsession with Art3mis.
Eventually, she and I began to go out on “dates,” taking day trips to exotic OASIS locales and exclusive night spots. At first, Art3mis protested. She thought I should keep a low profile, because as soon as my avatar was spotted in public, the Sixers would know that their attempt to kill me had failed, and I’d be back on their hit list. But I told her I no longer cared. I was already hiding from the Sixers in the real world, and I refused to continue hiding from them in the OASIS, too. Besides, I had a ninety-ninth-level avatar now. I felt nigh invincible.
Maybe I was just trying to impress Art3mis by acting fearless. If so, I think it worked.
We still disguised our avatars before we went out, because we knew there would be tabloid headlines galore if Parzival and Art3mis started showing up in public together on a regular basis. But there was one exception. One night, she took me to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a huge stadium-sized movie theater on the planet Transsexual, where they held the most highly attended and longest-running weekly screening of the movie in the OASIS. Thousands of avatars came to every show, to sit in the stands and revel in the audience participation. Normally, only longstanding members of the Rocky Horror Fan Club were permitted to get up onstage and help act out the film in front of the giant movie screen, and only after they’d passed a grueling audition process. But Art3mis used her fame to pull a few strings, and she and I were both allowed to join the cast for that night’s show. The whole planet was in a no-PvP zone, so I wasn’t worried about getting ambushed by the Sixers. But I did have a serious case of stage fright when the show began.
Art3mis played a note-perfect Columbia, and I had the honor of playing her undead love interest, Eddie. I altered my avatar’s appearance so that I looked exactly like Meat Loaf did in the role, but my performance and lip-synching still kinda sucked. Luckily, the audience cut me a lot of slack, because I was the famous gunter Parzival, and I was clearly having a blast.
That night was easily the most fun I’d ever had in my life up to that point. I told Art3mis so afterward, and that was when she leaned over and kissed me for the first time. I couldn’t feel it, of course. But it still set my heart racing.
I’d heard all the clichéd warnings about the perils of falling for someone you only knew online, but I ignored them. I decided that whoever Art3mis really was, I was in love with her. I could feel it, deep in the soft, chewy caramel center of my being.
And then one night, like a complete idiot, I told her how I felt.
It was a Friday night, and I was spending another solitary evening doing research, working my way through every episode of Whiz Kids, an early-’80s TV show about a teenage hacker who uses his computer skills to solve mysteries. I’d just finished watching the episode “Deadly Access” (a crossover with Simon & Simon) when an e-mail arrived in my inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read “We Can Dance If We Want To.”
There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment—an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow’s birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event.
The invitation featured a photo of Morrow’s world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo—a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read
Ogden Morrow’s ’80s Dance Party
in celebration of his 73rd birthday!
Tonight—10pm OST at the Distracted Globe
ADMIT ONE