If I was interpreting these lines correctly, the Seven Shards were hidden on seven planets inside the OASIS—seven worlds where the Siren, aka Leucosia, aka Kira Morrow, “once played a role.”
Unfortunately, that didn’t narrow things down too much. As GSS’s chief art director during the development of the OASIS and its first three years of operation, Kira had played a key role in the design and construction of every single planet added to the simulation during that time. (In interviews, Ogden Morrow had always gone out of his way to stress the importance of his wife’s contribution to the creation of the OASIS, while Halliday rarely even acknowledged it. Which was no surprise, since he had a history of doing the same thing to Og, and everyone else who worked for them at GSS.) Even after Kira left the company, the GSS artists who had worked under her continued to use the world-builder templates she’d created, so in a way, she’d “played a role” in creating nearly every planet in the OASIS.
However, by conducting extensive research into Kira’s life and interests, and by studying her GSS employee file and OASIS work account activity logs, I’d narrowed my search area down to a list of the nine most likely candidates and concentrated my efforts there.
Florin, the planet I’d just returned from, was Kira’s re-creation of the fictional Renaissance-era kingdom featured in The Princess Bride, one of her favorite films. There wasn’t much to do there, aside from visiting the various locations from the movie and completing the Flicksyncs.
The planet Thra was a meticulous re-creation of the fantasy world depicted in The Dark Crystal, another of her favorite films. Her parents had named her Karen, but after she saw The Dark Crystal for the first time at age eleven, she’d insisted that her friends and family call her Kira, the name of the film’s Gelfling heroine. (She’d also renamed the family dog Fizzgig.) And when Karen turned eighteen, she’d legally changed her first name to Kira. Decades later, when Kira helped launch the OASIS, Thra was the first planet she’d created inside the simulation, entirely on her own. And since the plot of The Dark Crystal concerned a quest to find a missing “crystal shard,” it seemed like an extremely likely candidate.
But I’d now played through every quest anchored there, and explored the entire kingdom, and done everything I could think of that might loosely be defined as “paying a toll.” I’d visited every instance of Aughra’s observatory I could find. I’d played the proper tune on Jen’s flute. But her basket was always empty, and there were never any shards to be found there.
Mobius Prime was another OASIS world created solely by Kira Morrow, as a tribute to her favorite videogame character, Sonic the Hedgehog. The planet was a re-creation of the fictional future Earth where most of Sonic’s adventures took place, and it featured reproductions of all of the different levels featured in early 2-D and 3-D Sonic games, along with environments and characters from the cartoons and comic books based on them.
Several Sonic the Hedgehog games involved a quest to collect seven “Chaos Emeralds” that could be harnessed to obtain special powers. Inside the OASIS, dozens of different quests on Mobius Prime allowed you to collect the seven Chaos Emeralds, and I’d completed all of them. But if there was a way to trade the emeralds for one of the shards, I still hadn’t discovered it.
I’d had a similarly frustrating experience on the planet Usagi, which was Kira’s tribute to Sailor Moon, her favorite anime series. One of the most difficult quests on Usagi involved collecting seven “Rainbow Crystals,” which could then be combined to form an incredibly powerful artifact known as the “Legendary Silver Crystal.” After a frustrating number of attempts, I’d finally managed to complete this quest, in the hope that once I obtained the Legendary Silver Crystal it would transform into one of the Seven Shards. But all I had to show for my efforts was an impressive familiarity with obscure Sailor Moon trivia and an inexplicable desire to cosplay as Tuxedo Mask (which I may or may not have acted upon in the solitude and privacy of my own home).
I’d also spent several months scouring the planet Gallifrey in Sector Seven. It was Kira’s re-creation of the Time Lord’s home world in the long-running Doctor Who television series, which now comprised over a thousand individual episodes. In the decades since she’d first constructed it, thousands of other OASIS users had made their own contributions to Gallifrey, making it one of the most densely packed worlds in the simulation—and one of the most difficult places in which to conduct a thorough search.
Halcydonia was the planet on the list that I probably knew the best, because I’d practically grown up there. It was also the only OASIS planet that Ogden and Kira Morrow had co-created, without any outside assistance. When Og and Kira got married and sold all of their GSS shares to Halliday, they moved to Oregon and founded a nonprofit educational software company, Halcydonia Interactive, which produced a series of award-winning educational OASIS adventure games that anyone could download and play for free. I’d played these games throughout my childhood, and they had transported me out of my bleak existence in the stacks and whisked me off to the magical faraway kingdom of Halcydonia, where learning was “an endless adventure!”
Halcydonia Interactive’s games were still archived as free standalone quest portals on the planet Halcydonia in Sector One, located in prime surreal estate a short distance from Incipio, making it extremely cheap and easy for newly spawned and/or perpetually broke avatars to reach it. According to the planet’s colophon, Halcydonia hadn’t been altered or updated since Kira’s death in a car accident in 2034. But I still thought there was a chance Halliday had hidden one of the shards there.
Even though Kira Morrow wasn’t directly involved in the creation of the last few planets on my list, the private usage logs on her long-dormant OASIS account indicated she’d spent a great deal of time on each of them.
(I’d attempted to access Halliday and Morrow’s private OASIS account logs, too, only to find them both blank. Unlike all other OASIS users, their avatars’ movements and interactions within the simulation weren’t logged. And, as I mentioned earlier, once I inherited the Robes of Anorak, the same became true of my own usage log. There were no new entries after that. Plenty of subpoenas had verified this fact. Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis didn’t have the ability to conceal their usage logs from the feds, our high-level OASIS admins, or from me. So unbeknownst to them, I was able to see how much time they spent inside the OASIS each day, as well as where they went and what they did while they were there. I’d stopped checking Aech and Shoto’s logs years ago—partly out of respect for their privacy, but mostly because I quickly discovered that I didn’t want or need to know when they were ducking me to spend time hanging out with other people. But I still checked Art3mis’s usage logs at least once a week. I couldn’t resist. But they never told me much of anything about her life—aside from the fact that she still had a weakness for Flicksyncs based on old Whit Stillman movies. She still reenacted the film Metropolitan once or twice a month, usually in the middle of the night. Probably because she couldn’t sleep. And she didn’t have anyone to talk to….)
One of the locations that showed up most frequently in Kira’s OASIS account logs was the planet Miyazaki in Sector Twenty-Seven. It was a bizarre and beautiful world that paid tribute to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the famous Japanese animator behind anime masterpieces like Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Visiting Miyazaki was like plunging your senses into a surreal mash-up of all of the different animated realities created inside Studio Ghibli’s films. (An experience that became substantially more intense with an ONI headset.) Kira had visited Miyazaki on a weekly basis for several years. And now I was able to say the same thing. But like Bono before me, I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.