Ready Player One - Ernest Cline [89]
I didn’t spend all of my time goofing off. I tried to keep my head in the game. Really I did. At least once a day, I would pull up the Quatrain and try once again to decipher its meaning.
The captain conceals the Jade Key
in a dwelling long neglected
But you can only blow the whistle
once the trophies are all collected
For a while, I thought that the whistle in the third line might be a reference to a late-’60s Japanese TV show called The Space Giants, which had been dubbed in English and rebroadcast in the United States in the ’70s and ’80s. The Space Giants (called Maguma Taishi in Japan) featured a family of transforming robots who lived in a volcano and battled an evil alien villain named Rodak. Halliday referred to this show several times in Anorak’s Almanac, citing it as one of his childhood favorites. One of the show’s main characters was a boy named Miko, who would blow a special whistle to summon the robots to his aid. I watched all fifty-two ultra-cheesy episodes of The Space Giants, back-to-back, while wolfing down corn chips and taking notes. But when the viewing marathon was over, I still wasn’t any closer to understanding the Quatrain’s meaning. I’d hit another dead end. I decided that Halliday must be referring to some other whistle.
Then, one Saturday morning, I finally made a small breakthrough. I was watching a collection of vintage ’80s cereal commercials when I paused to wonder why cereal manufacturers no longer included toy prizes inside every box. It was a tragedy, in my opinion. Another sign that civilization was going straight down the tubes. I was still pondering this when an old Cap’n Crunch commercial came on, and that was when I made a connection between the first and third lines of the Quatrain: The captain conceals the Jade Key … But you can only blow the whistle …
Halliday was alluding to a famous ’70s hacker named John Draper, better known by the alias Captain Crunch. Draper was one of the first phone phreaks, and he was famous for discovering that the toy plastic whistles found as prizes in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal could be used to make free long-distance phone calls, because they emitted a 2600-hertz tone that tricked the old analog phone system into giving you free access to the line.
The captain conceals the Jade Key
That had to be it. “The captain” was Cap’n Crunch, and “the whistle” was the famous toy plastic whistle of phone phreak lore.
Maybe the Jade Key was disguised as one of those toy plastic whistles, and it was hidden in a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal.… But where was that cereal box hidden?
In a dwelling long neglected
I still didn’t know what long-neglected dwelling that line referred to, or where to look for it. I visited every neglected dwelling I could think of. Re-creations of the Addams Family house, the abandoned shack in the Evil Dead trilogy, Tyler Durden’s flophouse in Fight Club, and the Lars Homestead on Tattooine. No luck finding the Jade Key inside any of them. Dead end after dead end.
But you can only blow the whistle
Once the trophies are all collected
I still hadn’t deciphered the meaning of that last line, either. What trophies did I have to collect? Or was that some kind of half-assed metaphor? There had to be a simple connection I wasn’t making, a sly reference that I still wasn’t clever or knowledgeable enough to catch.
Since then, I’d failed to make any more progress. Every time I revisited the Quatrain, my ongoing infatuation with Art3mis would undermine my ability to focus, and before long I would close my grail diary and call her up to see if she wanted to hang out. She almost always did.
I convinced myself that it was all right to slack off a bit, because no one else seemed to be making any progress in their search for the Jade Key. The Scoreboard remained unchanged. Everyone