Ready Player One

’s cockpit, an e-mail from Aech arrived in my inbox. I felt my pulse quicken when I saw its subject line:
Payback Time
.
Holding my breath, I opened the message and read it:
Dear Parzival,
You and I are officially even now, got that? I consider my debt to you hereby paid in full.
Better hurry. The Sixers must already be on their way there.
Good luck,
Aech

Below his signature was an image file he’d attached to the message. It was a high-resolution scan of the instruction manual cover for the text adventure game Zork—the version released in 1980 by Personal Software for the TRS-80 Model III.

I’d played and solved Zork once, a long time ago, back during the first year of the Hunt. But I’d also played hundreds of other classic text adventure games that year, including all of Zork’s sequels, and so most of the details of the game had now faded in my memory. Most old text adventure games were pretty self-explanatory, so I’d never actually bothered to read the Zork instruction manual. I now knew that this had a been a colossal mistake.

On the manual’s cover was a painting depicting a scene from the game. A swashbuckling adventurer wearing armor and a winged helmet stood with a glowing blue sword raised over his head, preparing to strike a troll cowering before him. The adventurer clutched several treasures in his other hand, and more treasures lay at his feet, scattered among human bones. A dark, fanged creature lurked just behind the hero, glowering malevolently.

All of this was in the painting’s foreground, but my eyes had instantly locked on what was in the background: a large white house, with its front door and windows all boarded up.
A dwelling long neglected
.
I stared at the image a few more seconds, just long enough to curse myself for not making the connection on my own, months ago. Then I fired the
Vonnegut

’s engines and set a course for another planet in Sector Seven, not far from Archaide. It was small world called Frobozz that was home to a detailed re-creation of the game Zork.
It was also, I now knew, the hiding place of the Jade Key.

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