Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

(pronounced “Artemis”). I’d discovered it about three years ago and had been a loyal reader ever since. She posted these great rambling essays about her search for Halliday’s egg, which she calleda “maddening MacGuffin hunt.” She wrote with an endearing, intelligent voice, and her entries were filled with self-deprecating humor and witty, sardonic asides. In addition to posting her (often hysterical) interpretations of passages in the
Almanac
, she also linked to the books, movies, TV shows, and music she was currently studying as part of her Halliday research. I assumed that all of these posts were filled with misdirection and misinformation, but they were still highly entertaining.
    It probably goes without saying that I had a massive cyber-crush on Art3mis.
    She occasionally posted screenshots of her raven-haired avatar, and I sometimes (always) saved them to a folder on my hard drive. Her avatar had a pretty face, but it wasn’t unnaturally perfect. In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone. But Art3mis’s features didn’t look as though they’d been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template. Her face had the distinctive look of a real person’s, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar. Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk. I found her unbearably attractive.
    Art3mis’s body was also somewhat unusual. In the OASIS, you usually saw one of two body shapes on female avatars: the absurdly thin yet wildly popular supermodel frame, or the top-heavy, wasp-waisted porn starlet physique (which looked even less natural in the OASIS than it did in the real world). But Art3mis’s frame was short and Rubenesque. All curves.
    I knew the crush I had on Art3mis was both silly and ill-advised. What did I really know about her? She’d never revealed her true identity, of course. Or her age or location in the real world. There was no telling what she really looked like. She could be fifteen or fifty. A lot of gunters even questioned whether she was really female, but I wasn’t one of them. Probably because I couldn’t bear the idea that the girl with whom I was virtually smitten might actually be some middle-aged dude named Chuck, with back hair and male-pattern baldness.
    In the years since I’d first started reading Arty’s Missives, it had become one of the most popular blogs on the Internet, now logging several million hits a day. And Art3mis was now something of a celebrity, at least in gunter circles. But fame hadn’t gone to her head. Her writing was still as funny and self-deprecating as ever. Her newest blog post was titled “The John Hughes Blues,” and it was an in-depth treatise on her six favoriteJohn Hughes teen movies, which she divided into two separate trilogies: The “Dorky Girl Fantasies” trilogy (
Sixteen Candles
,
Pretty in Pink
, and
Some Kind of Wonderful
) and the “Dorky Boy Fantasies” trilogy (
The Breakfast Club
,
Weird Science
, and
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
).
    Just as I’d finished reading it, an instant message window popped up on my display. It was my best friend, Aech. (OK, if you want to split hairs, he was my only friend, not counting Mrs. Gilmore.)
    Aech: Top o’ the morning, amigo.
    Parzival: Hola, compadre.
    Aech: What are you up to?
    Parzival: Just surfing the turf. You?
    Aech: Got the Basement online. Come and hang out before school, fool.
    Parzival: Sweet! I’ll be there in a sec.
     
    I closed the IM window and checked the time. I still had about half an hour until class started. I grinned and tapped a small door icon at the edge of my display, then selected Aech’s chat room from my list of favorites.

 
    The system verified that I was on the chat room’s access list and allowed me to enter. My view of the classroom shrank from the limits of my peripheral vision to a small thumbnail window in the lower right of my display, allowing