Ready Player One - Ernest Cline [174]
When I reached the opposite end of the huge foyer, I found Aech and Art3mis standing in front of the crystal door, waiting for me. The smoking, bloodied bodies of over a dozen recently slain Sixer avatars lay scattered on the stone floor around them, slowly fading out of existence. Apparently, there had been a brief and decisive skirmish and I’d just missed it.
“No fair,” I said, cutting my jet boots and dropping to the floor beside Aech. “You could have saved at least one of them for me.”
Art3mis didn’t reply. She just gave me the finger.
“Congrats on wasting Sorrento,” Aech said. “It was an epic throwdown, for sure. But you’re still a complete idiot. You know that, right?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I know.”
“You’re such a selfish asshole!” Art3mis shouted. “What if you’d gotten yourself killed too?”
“I didn’t, though. Did I?” I said, stepping around her to examine the crystal door. “So chill out and let’s open this thing.”
I examined the keyhole in the center of the door, then looked at the words printed directly above it, etched into the door’s faceted surface. Charity. Hope. Faith.
I took out my copy of the Crystal Key and held it up. Aech and Art3mis followed suit and held up their keys too.
Nothing happened.
We all exchanged concerned looks. Then an idea occurred to me, and I cleared my throat. “ ‘Three is a magic number,’ ” I said, reciting the first line of the Schoolhouse Rock! song. As soon as I spoke the words, the crystal door began to glow, and two additional keyholes appeared, on either side of the first.
“That did it!” Aech whispered. “Holy shit. I can’t believe this. We’re really here. Standing in front of the Third Gate.”
Art3mis nodded. “Finally.”
I inserted my key in the center keyhole. Aech inserted his into the keyhole on the left, and Art3mis placed hers in the keyhole on the right.
“Clockwise?” Art3mis said. “On the count of three?”
Aech and I nodded. Art3mis counted to three, and we turned our keys in unison. There was a brief flash of blue light, during which all of our keys and the crystal door itself vanished. And then the Third Gate stood open in front of us, a crystal doorway leading into a spinning whirlpool of stars.
“Wow,” I heard Art3mis whisper beside me. “Here we go.”
As the three of us stepped forward, preparing to enter the gate, I heard an earsplitting boom. It sounded like the entire universe was cracking in half.
And then we all died.
When your avatar gets killed, your screen doesn’t fade to black right away. Instead, your point of view automatically shifts to a third-person perspective, treating you to a brief out-of-body replay of your avatar’s final fate.
A split second after we heard the thunderous boom, my perspective shifted, and I found myself looking at our three avatars, standing there frozen in front of the open gate. Then an incinerating white light filled the world, accompanied by an earsplitting wall of sound. It was what I’d always pictured being fried in a nuclear blast would be like.
For a brief moment, I saw our avatars’ skeletons suspended inside the transparent outlines of our motionless bodies. Then my avatar’s hit-point counter dropped to zero.
The blast wave arrived a second later, disintegrating everything in its path—our avatars, the floor, the walls, the castle itself, and the thousands of avatars gathered around it. Everything was turned to a fine, atomized dust that hung suspended in the air for a second before slowly settling to earth.
The entire surface of the planet had been wiped clean. The area around Castle Anorak, which had been crowded with warring avatars a split second before, was now a desolate and barren wasteland. Everyone and everything had been destroyed. Only the Third Gate remained, a crystal doorway floating in the air above the crater where the castle had stood a moment before.
My initial shock quickly turned to dread as I realized what had just happened.
The Sixers had detonated the Cataclyst.
It was the only explanation. Only that incredibly powerful