Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

Thankfully, the mechanics of ONI-based combat were more or less identical to old-school haptic-rig combat. You didn’t have to physically perform any of your avatar’s complex special moves and powered attacks yourself unless you wanted to. Instead, you could use a simple hand gesture or voice command to make your avatar execute a move or an attack. The only difference was, when you were using an ONI, you could feel your avatar’s body movements as it automatically carried out these actions, so for a few seconds, it felt like you were moving on autopilot.

  I was prepared for a brutal fight, but whoever had programmed this challenge had made Princess Kurumi a lot tougher than her knockoff male counterpart, who barely put up a fight. He only managed to land one or two hits before I knocked his life-meter down to nothing, with a steady barrage of throwing knives.

  When I reduced his life bar to just 1 percent, the words FINISH HIM appeared floating in the air between us for a moment. When they vanished, I dispatched Kazamaru with one final roundhouse kick to the head. The last sliver of his life bar turned red—but he didn’t die. Instead, the manly, black-clad ninja master abruptly fell to his knees and began to cry, then vanished in a cloud of smoke a few seconds later.

  When it dissipated, I saw the Second Shard floating there in front of me.

  I reached for it, wondering if I was about to experience another “flashback.” And as my fingers wrapped around it…

  * * *

  I was back inside the body of seventeen-year-old Kira Underwood, and now teenage Ogden Morrow was standing in front of me, holding my hands in his. It was dark, and we were standing on a grassy hill bathed in moonlight, overlooking the tiny Middletown skyline in the distance. Og was placing a silver necklace in my hands—the same necklace from Kira’s jewelry box that had transformed into the First Shard—just as he whispered the words “I love you,” for what I knew must be the very first time.

  Og had written about this moment in his autobiography, too, I realized. But he hadn’t described it in any detail, or given the time and place it occurred.

  I felt my body starting to tremble as Kira reacted to what her future husband had just told her….

  * * *

  …And then I was back inside my own avatar’s skin. I was back on Kodama, standing next to Aech and Shoto in front of the Ninja Princess portal. It looked as though my avatar had just been ejected from it. When I looked down, I saw the Second Shard lying in my open palm. It was another multifaceted blue crystal, nearly identical to the first one in size and appearance.

  Shoto and Aech both threw their arms around me. “You did it!”

  “No,” I said. “We did it. I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

  I held out both of my fists and they each bumped one of them and silently nodded.

  “That final challenge was insane, right?” Shoto said. “I mean, why would Halliday want you to kill the teenage version of himself?”

  “That’s gotta be some serious self-hatred happening there,” Aech said. “Maybe he finally realized what a dick he was to Kira, and to Og?”

  I couldn’t focus on what they were saying. I was still reeling from the flashback I’d just experienced. Another of Kira Underwood’s private memories, rendered with a detail and intensity that should’ve been impossible. Just what in the name of Crom was going on here?

  I didn’t have time to stop and ponder the possibilities. We had shards to collect and absolutely no time to spare.

  I glanced down at the Second Shard in my hand, then held it out to Aech and Shoto, so we could examine it together. When I turned it over in my palm, we saw that this shard had an inscription carved into its glassy surface just like the first one. Aech read it aloud.

  “ ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending.’ ”

  “ ‘Andie’s first fate,’ ” Shoto repeated. “Wasn’t Andie the name of Kerri Green’s character in The Goonies?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Her name was spelled with a y at the end. Not an i-e.”

  “A-N-D-I-E,” Aech said, shutting her eyes, as if to better picture the name. “Like Andie MacDowell?” She turned to Shoto and gripped his shoulder. “Oh shit! Maybe the next shard is on the Planet Punxsutawney? I used to go there every Groundhog Day to—”

  “Hold on!” Shoto said, cutting her off. He’d opened a browser window in front of his avatar and was reading from it. “Andie MacDowell also starred in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984. But the director hired Glenn Close to loop all of her dialogue, because he didn’t like her Southern accent! Do you think that could be what ‘recast the foul, restore his ending’ is a reference to? Maybe that film had an alternate ending….”

  “Wait, are we talking about the movie where Connor MacLeod plays Tarzan?” Aech said. “Directed by the cat who made Chariots of Fire?”

  “That’s the one!” he said. “There must be a Flicksync devoted to it somewhere….” He pulled up his OASIS atlas in another window. “Maybe on Lambert? Or one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs–themed planets in Sector Twenty? If we—”

  “Guys!” I shouted, signaling a time-out with my hands. “Come on. You’re really reaching. Do you seriously believe the Third Shard’s hiding place is somehow connected to Andie MacDowell? Or Tarzan? Neither one is mentioned in the Almanac. Or in any of the books I’ve read about Kira’s life.”

  Aech shrugged. “She could’ve been an Andie MacDowell fanatic, for all we know,” she replied. “I never did that much research into Kira’s interests. According to Og, Halliday never bothered to get to know who Kira really was.”

  “He must have known her a lot better than he let on,” I said, thinking about the shard flashbacks. They had both felt like Recs, not Sims. The differences were subtle, but no Sim—at least not as far as I’d experienced, and I’d tried thousands—had just the mix of strangeness, uncertainty, and intensity that came from a recording of a real-life moment.

  But they couldn’t be recordings. Because there definitely hadn’t been any ONI headsets lying around in Middletown, Ohio, in the fall of 1988.

  So what had I just experienced?

  I was still mulling that over when my brain produced a match for the name Andie in the jumbled recesses of my memory. I opened a browser window in the air in front of me and did a quick Web search to make sure my memory was correct.

  “Andie Walsh!” I shouted. “With an i-e! That was the name of Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink.”

  Aech and Shoto both groaned and rolled their eyes. Neither was the world’s biggest John Hughes fan, but they knew that Art3mis and I both adored his films. During Halliday’s contest, Art3mis had published dozens of essays about his movies on her blog, dissecting each of them in loving detail, scene by scene. None of her encyclopedic knowledge had proven useful in finding Halliday’s egg, but she might get her chance to put it to use now. Unless I managed to find the shard quickly, before she even got back online. That would save time—and probably also impress the hell out of her.

  “Pretty in Pink would make sense,” I said. “Kira and Og were both huge John Hughes fans. And they helped code some of the first quests on Shermer.”

  “You think we have to go to Shermer next?” Aech asked. “Arty will lose her mind!”

  “OK,” Shoto said, rereading the clue. “If it’s Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink, then what does ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending’ mean?”

  “Pretty in Pink originally had a different ending,” I replied. “One where Andie ended up with Duckie, instead of with Blane. Arty—Samantha—posted an essay about it on Arty’s Missives a long time ago.”

  “Of course she did,” Aech said. “She’s an even bigger dork than you.”

  I ignored her, trying to hold on to my train of thought. “I think they decided to change the ending of the movie after some poor test screenings—”

&
nbsp; As if on cue, Art3mis appeared next to us.

  “Speak of the devil and the devil appears!” Aech said, greeting her with a fist bump. “You make it somewhere safe, Arty?”

  Arty nodded, then pressed her index finger to her lips for a moment.

  “Sorry I was gone so long,” she said. “Looks like I missed a wardrobe change.”

  She grinned, admiring our old-school gunter attire. Then she snapped her fingers and spun around in a circle. Her avatar’s outfit was replaced by the scaled gunmetal-blue armor she’d worn during the contest, along with her twin blaster pistols in their low-slung quickdraw holsters, and a long, curved Elven sword in an ornate Mithril scabbard was now strapped to her back. She’d even donned her fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves.

  Seeing her dressed like that again brought back a flood of old feelings and long-suppressed memories. They left me feeling momentarily lightheaded. And weak-hearted.

  “There’s our girl, back in uniform!” Aech said as they gave each other a double high five.

  “Bravo, team!” she said. “I can’t believe you guys already found the Second Shard. That was wicked fast!”

  “Yes, it was,” Shoto said. “Because I held Z’s hand, all the way through it—”

  “While I held his other hand,” Aech added, laughing. “And now that Arty has rejoined our posse, too, we will be un-fucking-stoppable. The Siren’s Soul shall be ours, my friends!”

  Art3mis and Shoto both let out a cheer in agreement. I raised my right fist halfheartedly, then cleared my throat.

  “Not to cut the celebration short,” I said. “But I think I may have figured out what the Siren’s Soul is, and why Og refused to give it to Anorak.”

  Their smiles faded as all three of them turned to look at me expectantly.

  “OK,” I said. “First, let me ask you a question. Why do you think Halliday called it the ‘Siren’s Soul’?”

  “Because Kira named her D&D character Leucosia,” Shoto replied. “After one of the Sirens in Greek mythology.”

  “Correct,” I said. “So if Kira is the ‘Siren,’ and the Seven Shards are ‘fragments’ of her ‘Soul,’ what does Anorak assume will happen when we put those pieces back together? When we ‘once again make the Siren whole’?”

  Art3mis looked back over at me.

  “Holy shit, Wade,” she muttered. “You don’t think…?”

  I nodded.

  “Anorak doesn’t think that the Siren’s Soul is a magical artifact named after Kira,” I said. “He believes it is her. An AI copy of Kira. Just like Anorak is a copy of Halliday.”

  Art3mis didn’t respond, but she looked horrified by the thought.

  “Come on, Z,” Aech said. “That’s impossible.”

  “I thought so too,” I replied. “But there’s no other explanation for what I’ve been experiencing.”

  Art3mis furrowed her brow.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, leaning forward. “What, exactly, have you ‘been experiencing’?”

  I told them about the flashbacks, and filled Art3mis in on the battle she’d just missed.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Art3mis muttered, shaking her head. “The first two challenges required you to possess detailed knowledge of the Smiths and Ninja Princess?”

  I nodded. “Neither of those things was ever mentioned once in Anorak’s Almanac,” I said. “And those two flashbacks I experienced? They felt like ONI recordings of real moments. They were way too detailed to be simulations.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” Art3mis asked. “Anything could be simulated convincingly for a few seconds.”

  Aech shook her head.

  “No way, Arty,” she said. “You don’t know what ONI playback is like. You can almost always tell the difference. Besides, James Donovan Halliday was a brilliant videogame designer and programmer. But he didn’t know anything about women—especially Kira. There’s no way he could’ve convincingly re-created one of her memories, from her perspective. He was a self-obsessed sociopath, incapable of feeling empathy for anyone else. Especially Kira…”

  I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from leaping to Halliday’s defense. The man had been far from perfect, but he’d given us our entire world. “Sociopath” didn’t just seem harsh, but downright blasphemous.

  “But what you’re suggesting can’t be possible, Z,” Shoto said. “The OASIS Neural Interface didn’t exist back in the ’80s, when Kira was a teenager. GSS didn’t build the first fully functional ONI prototype headset until 2036—two years after Kira Morrow’s death.”

  “I know,” I replied. “It doesn’t jibe with the official timeline. But no one was better at keeping secrets than Halliday….” I took a deep breath. “I think we need to consider the possibility that somehow, before Kira Morrow died, Halliday made a copy of her consciousness. Using the same technology he used to copy his own mind and create Anorak.”

  All three of them stared at me in horrified silence. Then Art3mis shook her head.

  “Kira never would’ve allowed Halliday to do that,” she said. “Og wouldn’t have either.”

  “So maybe Halliday figured out a way to scan Kira without her or Og realizing it.” I swallowed as I realized what I was about to say. “Halliday was obsessed. He knew he could never have the real Kira, so he decided to make a copy of her for himself.”

  “Hold up,” Aech interjected. “Kira was madly in love with Og. So why would he want to make a copy of her? If it was a true copy, it wouldn’t love him either.”

  “I know,” I said. “But the copy would also never grow old or die,” I added. “Maybe Halliday thought he could convince it—her—to fall in love with him, over time….”

  “Jesus,” Aech muttered, shaking her head. “If you’re right…this is some extremely twisted shit we’ve gotten ourselves mixed up in, fam.”

  I nodded. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach too. Like I’d just learned that my childhood idol and hero had been a serial killer in his spare time.

  Which was all the more reason why we couldn’t just give Anorak the Siren’s Soul and trust him to keep his word.

  But the Siren’s Soul appeared to be his one weakness. Once we had it, maybe we could use it to barter with him. Or lure him into a trap.

  “We’ve still got five more shards to find,” I said. “We gotta keep moving.”

  “Do we know where we’re heading?” Art3mis asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, beaming with pride. “We sure do.”

  “And it’s a good thing you’re here, Arty,” Shoto added. “Because we’re gonna need your help with this one.”

  Art3mis’s smile vanished. She replaced it with a fiercely competitive scowl that I recognized from the days of Halliday’s contest. She called this “putting her game face on.”

  “So,” she said, turning to face me. “Lay it on me, ace. Where are we headed?”

  “Your old stomping grounds,” I replied. “Shermer, Illinois.”

  Shermer was a medium-size planet near the center of Sector Sixteen. It was home to a lovingly detailed, decades-in-the-making OASIS re-creation of Shermer, Illinois, the fictional Chicago suburb where the filmmaker John Hughes set many of the movies he wrote and/or directed over the course of his celebrated career. Samantha used to say that Shermer was Hughes’s “post-adolescent paracosm.” A private fantasy world that he created and populated with his imagination, adding to it throughout his life—his own suburban, Midwest equivalent of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

  Using Hughes’s films as a reference, legions of fans had labored for decades to translate that private universe into an immersive interactive simulation here inside the OASIS. There was only one copy of the Shermer simulation, and it completely covered the planet’s vast surface area. The simulated suburb had a scaled-down replica of Lake Michigan a
long its northern and eastern borders, and a shrunken version of downtown Chicago bordering it to the west and the south, so all the ’80s Windy City landmarks featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could be incorporated in the simulation, too, including the Sears Tower, the stock exchange, Wrigley Field, and the Art Institute of Chicago. And out beyond the lake and the Chicago city limits, there was a ridiculously abbreviated version of the United States, so that the simulation could incorporate cities and locations from Hughes’s scripted Vacation and Home Alone films.

  It tended to ruin the atmosphere and continuity of a simulation when avatars were teleporting in and out of it at random all the time. That was why some planets, like Shermer, had been created with a limited number of designated arrival and departure points. Outside those locations, no teleportation was permitted. So when I selected Shermer as my teleportation destination on my HUD, I was presented with a map of the planet’s designated arrival locations. Per Art3mis’s instruction, I selected a railroad stop on the western edge of town.

  When we finished rematerializing on the planet surface, we found ourselves standing on a small train platform in front of a circular redbrick station house. There was a crowd of several dozen NPCs standing around us, all ’80s-era business-suit-clad men and women who were waiting for the morning train.

  As we arrived, a song I recognized from my Hughes research began playing—the opening of Kirsty MacColl’s cover of “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” from the She’s Having a Baby soundtrack. The music seemed to emanate from nowhere, as if there were invisible speakers floating in the air all around us. This was an indication that we’d triggered a needle drop. These were music cues hard-coded into specific areas of the simulation. They began to play whenever an avatar walked over or passed through a predetermined location—sort of like stepping on a soundtrack landmine. On our previous visit here together, Art3mis had told me that Shermer had more needle drops per square kilometer than any other planet in the OASIS. (That time, we’d arrived inside the Shermer simulation’s replica of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, which was almost always snowed-in, year-round.)