Ready Player One (19 page)

I climbed up on top of Halliday’s desk so I could reach the lock, then slid the Copper Key into the keyhole and turned it. The entire gate began to glow, as if the metal had become superheated, and its double doors swung inward, revealing a field of stars. It appeared to be a portal into deep space.

“My God, it’s full of stars,”
I heard a disembodied voice say. I recognized it as a sound bite from the film
2010
. Then I heard a low, ominous hum, followed by a piece of music from that film’s score: “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss.

I leaned forward and looked through the portal. Left and right, up and down. Nothing but an endless field of stars in all directions. Squinting, I could also make out a few tiny nebulae and galaxies in the distance.

I didn’t hesitate. I jumped into the open gate. It seemed to pull me in, and I began to fall. But I fell forward instead of down, and the stars seemed to fall with me.

I found myself standing in an old video arcade, playing Galaga
.

The game was already in progress. I had double ships and a score of 41,780 points. I glanced down and saw that my hands were on the controls. After a second or two of disorientation, I reflexively began to play, moving the joystick left just in time to avoid losing one of my ships.

Keeping one eye on the game, I tried to make sense of my surroundings. In my peripheral vision I was able to make out a Dig Dug game on my left and a Zaxxon machine to my right. Behind me, I could hear a cacophony of digital combat coming from dozens of other vintage arcade games. Then, as I finished clearing the wave on Galaga, I noticed my reflection in the game’s screen. It wasn’t my avatar’s face I saw there. It was Matthew Broderick’s face. A young pre–
Ferris Bueller
and pre-
Ladyhawke
Matthew Broderick.

Then I knew where I was. And
who
I was.

I was David Lightman, Matthew Broderick’s character in the movie
WarGames
. And this was his first scene in the film.

I was
in the movie
.

I took a quick glance around and saw a detailed replica of 20 Grand Palace, the combination arcade/pizza joint featured in the film. Kids with feathered ’80s hairstyles were clustered around each of the games. Others sat in booths, eating pizza and drinking sodas. “Video Fever” by the Beepers blasted out of a jukebox in the corner. Everything looked and sounded exactly as it did in the movie. Halliday had copied every last detail from the film and re-created it as an interactive simulation.

Holy shit.

I’d spent years wondering what challenges awaited me inside the First Gate. Never once had I imagined
this
. But I probably should have.
WarGames
had been one of Halliday’s all-time favorite movies. Which was why I had watched it over three dozen times. Well, that, and also because it was completely awesome, with an old-school teenage computer hacker as the protagonist. And it looked like all of that research was about to pay off.

Now I heard a repetitive electronic beeping. It seemed to be coming from the right pocket of the jeans I was wearing. Keeping my left hand on the joystick, I reached in my pocket and pulled out a digital watch. The readout said 7:45 a.m. When I pushed one of the buttons to silence the alarm, a warning flashed in the center of my display:
DAVID, YOU’RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL!

I used a voice command to pull up my OASIS map, hoping to learn where the gate had transported me. But it turned out that not only was I no longer on Middletown, I was no longer in the OASIS at all. My locator icon was in the middle of a blank screen, which meant I was OTM—off the map. When I’d stepped into the gate, it had transported my avatar into a stand-alone simulation, a virtual location separate from the OASIS. It seemed that the only way I could get back would be to clear the gate by completing the quest. But if this was a videogame, how was I supposed to play it? If this was a quest, what was my goal? I continued to play Galaga while pondering these questions. A second later, a young boy walked into the arcade and came over to me.

“Hi, David!” he said, his eyes on my game.

I recognized this kid from the movie. His name was Howie. In the film, Matthew Broderick’s character hands his Galaga game off to Howie when he rushes off to school.

“Hi, David!” the boy repeated, in the same exact tone. As he spoke this time, his words also appeared as text, superimposed across the bottom of my display, like subtitles. Below this, flashing red, were the words
FINAL DIALOGUE WARNING!

I began to understand. The simulation was warning me that this was my final chance to deliver the next line of dialogue from the movie. If I didn’t say the line, I could guess what would probably happen next.
GAME OVER
.

But I didn’t panic, because I
knew
the next line. I’d seen
WarGames
so many times that I knew the entire film by heart.

“Hi, Howie!” I said. But the voice I heard in my earphones was not my own. It was Matthew Broderick’s voice. And as I spoke the line, the warning on my display vanished and a score of 100 points appeared, superimposed at the top of my display.

I racked my brain, trying to mentally replay the rest of the scene. The next line came to me. “How’s it going?” I said, and my score jumped to 200 points.

“Pretty good,” Howie replied.

I started to feel giddy. This was incredible. I was totally
inside the movie
. Halliday had transformed a fifty-year-old film into a real-time interactive videogame. I wondered how long it had taken him to program this thing.

Another warning flashed on my display:
YOU’RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL, DAVID! HURRY!

I stepped away from the Galaga machine. “Hey, you wanna take this over?” I asked Howie.

“Sure,” he replied, grabbing the controls. “Thanks!”

A green path appeared on the floor of the arcade, leading from where I stood to the exit. I started to follow it, then remembered to run back and grab my notebook off of the Dig Dug game, just like David had in the movie. As I did this, my score jumped another 100 points, and
ACTION BONUS!
appeared on my display.

“Bye, David!” Howie shouted.

“Bye!” I shouted back. Another 100 points. This was easy!

I followed the green path out of 20 Grand Palace and up the busy street a few blocks. I was now running along a tree-lined suburban street. I rounded a corner and saw that the path led directly to a large brick building. The sign over the door said Snohomish High School—David’s school, and the setting of the next few scenes in the movie.

My mind was racing as I ran inside. If all I had to do was rattle off lines of dialogue from
WarGames
on cue for the next two hours, this was going to be a breeze. Without even knowing it, I’d totally overprepared. I probably knew
WarGames
even better than I knew
Real Genius
and
Better Off Dead
.

As I ran down the empty school hallway, another warning flashed in front of me:
YOU’RE LATE FOR YOUR BIOLOGY CLASS!

I continued to sprint at top speed, following the green path, which was now pulsing brightly. It eventually led me to the door of a classroom on
the second floor. Through the window, I could see that class was already in session. The teacher was up at the board. I saw my seat—the only empty one in the room.

It was right behind Ally Sheedy.

I opened the door and tiptoed inside, but the teacher spotted me right away.

“Ah, David! Nice of you to join us!”

Making it all the way to the end of the movie wound up being a lot harder than I anticipated. It only took me about fifteen minutes to figure out the “rules” of the game and to sort out how the scoring system worked. I was actually required to do a lot more than simply recite dialogue. I also had to perform all the actions that Broderick’s character performed in the film, in the correct way and at the correct moment. It was like being forced to act the leading role in a play you’d watched many times but had never actually rehearsed.

For most of the movie’s first hour, I was on edge, constantly trying to think ahead to have my next line of dialogue ready. Whenever I flubbed a line or didn’t perform an action at the right moment, my score decreased and a warning flashed on my display. When I made two mistakes in a row, a
FINAL WARNING
message appeared. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I got three strikes in a row, but my guess was that I’d either be expelled from the gate or that my avatar would simply be killed. I wasn’t eager to find out which it would be.

Whenever I correctly performed seven actions or recited seven lines of dialogue in a row, the game would award me a “Cue Card Power-Up.” The next time I blanked on what to do or say, I could select the Cue Card icon and the correct action or line of dialogue would appear on my display, sort of like a teleprompter.

During scenes that didn’t involve my character, the simulation cut to a passive third-person perspective, and all I had to do was sit back and watch things play out, sort of like watching a cut scene in an old videogame. During these scenes, I could relax until my character came on-screen again. During one of these breaks, I tried to access a copy of the movie from my OASIS console’s hard drive, with the intention of playing it in a window on my display so I could refer to it. But the system wouldn’t
let me. In fact, I found that I couldn’t open any windows at all while inside the gate. When I tried, I got a warning:
NO CHEATING. TRY TO CHEAT AGAIN AND IT’S
GAME OVER
!

Luckily, it turned out that I didn’t need any help. Once I’d collected the maximum of five Cue Card Power-Ups I began to relax, and the game actually started to be fun. It wasn’t hard to enjoy being
inside
one of my favorite flicks. After a while, I even discovered that I could earn bonus points by delivering a line in the exact tone and with the same inflection as in the film.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d just become the first person to play an entirely new type of videogame. When GSS got wind of the
WarGames
simulation inside the First Gate (and they did a short time later), the company quickly patented the idea and began to buy up the rights to old movies and TV shows and convert them into immersive interactive games that they dubbed
Flicksyncs
. Flicksyncs became wildly popular. There turned out to be a huge market for games that allowed people to play a leading role in one of their favorite old movies or TV series.

By the time I reached the final scenes of the movie, I was starting to get twitchy from exhaustion. I’d now been up for over twenty-four hours straight, jacked in the entire time. The last action I had to perform was instructing the WOPR supercomputer to “play itself” at tic-tac-toe. Since every game the WOPR played ended in a tie, this had the improbable effect of teaching the artificially intelligent computer that global thermonuclear war, too, was a game in which “the only winning move is not to play.” This prevented the WOPR from launching all of the United States’ ICBMs at the Soviet Union.

I, David Lightman, a teenage computer geek from suburban Seattle, had single-handedly prevented the end of human civilization.

The NORAD command center erupted in celebration, and I waited for the movie’s end credits to roll. But they didn’t. Instead, all the characters around me vanished, leaving me alone in the giant war room. When I checked my avatar’s reflection in a computer monitor, I saw that I no longer looked like Matthew Broderick. I’d changed back into Parzival.

I glanced around the empty NORAD command center, wondering what I was supposed to do next. Then all of the giant video display screens in front of me went blank, and four lines of glowing green text appeared on them. It was another riddle: