Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

  As the song continued to play, a half-empty train pulled into the station behind us. When its doors slid open, the mob of commuters waiting on the platform around us began to pour into it. Art3mis motioned for us to follow her and took off in the other direction, pushing through the oncoming crowd of NPCs to reach the platform exit with Aech, Shoto, and me in tow.

  As we cut through the adjacent parking lot, we passed two NPCs—a young man and woman—in the midst of a passionate kiss. When they came up for air, we could see that the young man was Kevin Bacon, dressed in a gray business suit, and that the young woman he’d been kissing was Elizabeth McGovern. I recognized them as Jake and Kristy Briggs, the two main characters in She’s Having a Baby, Hughes’s most autobiographical film. Jake kissed his wife goodbye one more time, then turned and sprinted off to make the train.

  Across the street from the station, we passed the church where the wedding from Sixteen Candles took place. Just beyond it, I spotted a familiar neon billboard that said WELCOME TO SHERMER, ILLINOIS—ONE OF AMERICA’S TOWNS! POPULATION 31,286. But Art3mis led us in the opposite direction, onto Shermer Road, which led farther into town.

  When the Shermer simulation was originally created in the early days of the OASIS, it had only incorporated locations and characters from four of John Hughes’s films: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Weird Science. Over the decades since, it had been updated and overhauled several times to include other Hughes classics like Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, She’s Having a Baby, Uncle Buck, Mr. Mom, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, The Great Outdoors, and the aforementioned Home Alone and Vacation flicks. And in recent years, fans had expanded it to cover even the most obscure corners of his filmography, with characters and locations reflecting everything from Curly Sue to Career Opportunities. So when you visited Shermer now, interactive re-creations of all of these movies were constantly playing all around you. And the events depicted in those films played out over and over again simultaneously, day after day and week after week, on an endless loop.

  I pulled up a map of the town, to pinpoint our location. Shermer had a set of railroad tracks running diagonally through its middle, dividing the town into two more-or-less equal halves, which were labeled RICH and POOR, and were color-coded red and blue respectively. The rich half of Shermer was the one that bordered the miniaturized version of Lake Michigan. The poor side was the one you had to drive through to get to the miniaturized version of downtown Chicago. The majority of Hughes’s films were shot in and around Chicago, and many of them were filmed on location in the suburb of Northbrook, where Hughes himself attended high school. (A few were shot in L.A., like Pretty in Pink, though its story was set in suburban Chicago.) The geographic continuity in Hughes’s films had made it possible for the planet’s designers to re-create all of them here, inside one contiguous, interconnected simulation.

  Judging by the proximity of the sun to the eastern horizon, it was still pretty early in the morning. But that was one of the many disorienting things about Shermer. Different parts of the town were set to different times of day, as well as to different seasons of the year. It was always daytime in the winter on some streets, but two blocks away it might be nighttime in the early spring.

  By now we’d walked a few blocks north of the tracks, into the rich side of town. Huge mansionlike homes lined both sides of the street, each with an immaculately manicured lawn and a circular driveway. Enormous oak and maple trees lined both sides of the street, their long, leafy branches stretching out over it, forming a green tunnel up ahead of us that seemed to go on forever. The sidewalks and side streets around us were deserted, except for a lonely paperboy making the morning rounds on his bike a few blocks farther down.

  I’d only been here once before, during that early “date” with Art3mis. She’d told me it was one of her favorite places to go when she needed to relax and unwind, and gave me a guided tour of the simulated suburb’s most popular sites. Unfortunately, I’d been too head-over-heels in love to retain much of what she’d told me, and too busy staring at her to take in the details of our surroundings. Since then, because of Kira’s well-documented affection for Hughes, I’d rewatched most (but not quite all) of his films a few years ago. Now I was hoping I’d retained enough Shermer trivia to avoid looking like a complete fool in front of Art3mis.

  We kept jogging down Shermer Road, Art3mis in the lead, until we triggered another needle drop—“It’s All in the Game” by Carmel, another track off the She’s Having a Baby soundtrack. Upon hearing it, Art3mis skidded to an abrupt halt. Then she turned around and startled all of us, by singing along with the song’s opening lyrics in perfect harmony.

  “Many a tear has to fall, it’s all…a game,” she sang. “Life is a wonderful game, we play and play….”

  I’d heard Samantha sing once before, during the week we spent together at Og’s estate, so I knew she wasn’t using an autotuning app. Yet somehow I’d forgotten what an unusually beautiful singing voice she possessed, on top of all her other talents. Hearing it again now, under these circumstances, made my heart ache with a sudden ferocity that caught me completely off guard.

  Art3mis glanced over and caught me staring at her like a slack-jawed goon. To my surprise, she didn’t look away. She gave me what can only be described as a warm smile. Then she stopped singing and checked her Swatch.

  “Excellent,” she said. “We’re right on time. It’s the start of another day in paradise.”

  She pointed across the street. Aech, Shoto, and I all turned around, just in time to see the front doors of seven of the houses across the street swing open at once. In choreographed unison, seven different bathrobe-clad men emerged from their individual homes to retrieve their morning papers. I recognized six of these men as actors—Chevy Chase, Paul Dooley, Michael Keaton, Steve Martin, John Heard, and Lyman Ward—the men who portrayed Clark W. Griswold, Jim Baker, Jack Butler, Neal Page, Peter McCallister, and Tom Bueller respectively. All suburban dad characters in various Hughes films.

  The seventh man wore large clear-framed eyeglasses and had spiky hair that was short on the side and in front, but long in the back—the sort of power mullet worn by rock stars throughout the ’80s. His face looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I was on the verge of running a facial-recognition app on him when it dawned on me—the man in question was John Hughes himself!

  Hughes made a brief cameo in The Breakfast Club, playing the father of Brian Johnson, Anthony Michael Hall’s character. Which meant that the house he’d emerged from was where Brian and his family must live in Shermer. (And since Anthony Michael Hall had also portrayed Rusty Griswold in Vacation, it occurred to me that there must be at least two different Anthony Michael Halls living on this street—possibly three, if Farmer Ted’s house was around here too. And on top of that there was Gary Wallace, Anthony Michael Hall’s character in Weird Science. But it was a safe bet that he lived on the other side of the tracks, because his father, Al, was a plumber.)

  As I watched Mr. Johnson/John Hughes scoop up his morning paper and then shuffle back into his house, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Anorak—the digital ghost of a dead creator, left behind to forever haunt his own creation.

  “Hey, Z!” Art3mis said, snapping me out of my daze. “Let me see that clue again.”

  I removed the Second Shard from my inventory and held it out. She read the inscription aloud: “ ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending.’ ”

  “So that’s gotta be it, right?” I asked. “Restore the original ending, the one where Andie ended up with Duckie instead of with Blane.”

  Art3mis didn’t respond. She just stared at the inscription, lost in thought.

  “That rich pretty boy, Blane,” Aech said, glancing at the large, opulent homes lining both sides of the street. “He must live around here, right? I
say we find him and lock his ass in the trunk of his daddy’s BMW. Then he won’t be able to attend the prom tonight. When he doesn’t show, Andie will have no choice but to spend the evening with Duckie. That would ‘restore his ending,’ wouldn’t it?”

  That idea didn’t sound half bad to me, but I waited for Art3mis to answer.

  “As fun as it sounds, I don’t think that will do the trick,” she said, pointing at the inscription on the shard. “ ‘Recast the foul,’ ” she repeated. “ ‘Andie’s fate…’ ”

  “What about that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?” I asked. “When he catches that foul ball during the Cubs game at Wrigley Field?”

  Art3mis seemed mildly impressed by my suggestion. At least enough to consider it for all of two seconds. Then she shook her head dismissively.

  “I don’t think so….Recast the foul. Recast the foul.”

  Her eyes went wide, and her scowl of concentration transformed into a huge grin.

  “I’ve got it!” she cried. “I know what we need to do!”

  “You do?” Aech replied. “Are you sure?”

  She checked her Swatch again, then turned to glance up and down the empty street. “There’s only one way to find out. We need to catch a ride over to the high school. The bus should be coming by any second now.”

  Just as she finished saying this, a long yellow school bus rounded the corner at the end of the street. When it rolled to a stop at the curb in front of us, we could see the words SHERMER HIGH SCHOOL stenciled across its side.

  The bus doors swung open and Art3mis jumped on board, then motioned for us to follow her. Another needle drop triggered, and the song “Oh Yeah” by Yello kicked in as the four of us filed onto the bus. Art3mis led us to a pair of empty seats near the middle. Aech sat next to her and I sat beside Shoto. The seats around us were occupied by high school kid NPCs, all wearing 1980s clothing and hairstyles. Each one was modeled after a teenage actor from a school-bus scene in one of John Hughes’s films. I thought I spotted extras from Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

  The bus began to move again, and I turned to glance out the window beside me. The sun was rising above the lake to the east. A beautiful spring morning in an upscale Midwestern suburb at the height of Reagan’s America. Period-appropriate cars and trucks—1989 or earlier—filled the tree-lined streets.

  “Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?”

  “Sure,” Art3mis replied. “But most of them hang out at a place called the Kandy Bar over in Chicago. This planet does have a serious diversity problem—like the whole of ’80s cinema….”

  Aech nodded. “Well, maybe the next shard will be hidden in the kingdom of Zamunda.”

  “Oh shit!” Shoto replied. “That would be dope!”

  Just then, two freshman nerds in the seat directly in front of me and Shoto turned around to face us. At first I thought they were wearing bras on their heads, but they were rocking athletic supporters as headbands instead. In unison, these two space cadets raised their toy laser pistols and fired them at us, and then one of them shouted, “Score! A direct hit!” before they both cracked up and turned back around.

  “This place is a nuthouse,” Shoto observed.

  I nodded. “With some weird fashion trends.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Art3mis whispered.

  A second later, someone across the aisle loudly cleared their throat. We all turned to see a girl with obscenely thick eyeglasses staring at us. She slowly held her closed fist out to Shoto, then opened it to reveal a moist red gummy bear resting in the center of her palm.

  “Want one?” she asked. “It’s been in my pocket. They’re real warm and soft.”

  “No,” Shoto replied, shaking his head vigorously. “No, thank you.”

  “I’ll pass too,” I said.

  “Hey, look,” Aech whispered, pointing to a redheaded girl seated near the front of the bus. I recognized her as Samantha Baker—Molly Ringwald’s character in Sixteen Candles.

  “Maybe one of us should go wish her a happy birthday?” Aech said, chuckling softly.

  “Every day is her birthday,” Art3mis said. “And the morning after it. All the movie simulations on Shermer operate on an accelerated concurrent timeline, with the events depicted in each film repeating over and over in a continuous loop. All these NPCs are stuck in their own private Groundhog Day. Including that poor sweetheart of a girl…”

  She pointed to a tall girl who was sitting directly across the aisle from Sam. When she turned in profile, I saw that it was a young Joan Cusack. She was wearing an elaborate neck brace, probably to indicate that her character was an awkward dork. But even in traction, she still looked cute as hell.

  “She’s my namesake, you know,” Art3mis said. I turned back and saw that she was nodding toward Samantha Baker. “I can’t watch it without ragequitting now, but Sixteen Candles was one of my mom’s favorite movies. She loved all of Hughes’s films.”

  “I remember,” I said. “After she died, you would rewatch those movies, to feel closer to her, and to try and better understand who she was. I remember telling you that I did the same thing with my dad’s comic-book collection, after he died.”

  Art3mis locked eyes with me. Then she nodded.

  “I know,” she said. “I remember that too.”

  She smiled at me again, and this time I smiled back. We continued to grin at each other for a few more seconds—then we remembered Aech and Shoto and turned to see them both watching us intently. Caught, they both quickly averted their eyes.

  Just then, I got a glimpse of something strange out the bus windows behind them. We’d just crested a steep hill, and for a few seconds the Chicago skyline was visible in the distance, beyond a sea of suburban trees bursting with bright orange and red fall colors. And I also caught a glimpse of the Hollywood Bowl. The giant amphitheater had been incongruously cut-and-pasted into Shermer’s suburban landscape. Aech noticed it, too, and pointed it out to Art3mis.

  “What the hell is that doing here?” she asked. “Doesn’t the Hollywood Bowl belong in Hollywood?”

  “Indeed it does,” Art3mis replied. “But the Hollywood Bowl is where one of the date scenes in Some Kind of Wonderful takes place. It was one of the rare John Hughes teen films not set in the suburbs of Chicago. The designers decided to shoehorn it into the Shermer simulation anyway, along with Career Opportunities, which is set in Missouri.”

  We all fell silent for a moment and gazed out the windows, taking in the strangely familiar sites that dotted the landscape around us.

  “We’re getting close to the school,” Art3mis said. “Listen.”

  The opening of the song “Kajagoogoo” (the instrumental version, by the band of the same name) began to fade in on the Sim soundtrack. This needle drop had apparently been triggered by our proximity to the high school, which was now visible in the distance, through the bus’s front window. We were approaching the school from the south, so the building’s exterior looked identical to the Shermer High School seen in The Breakfast Club. On my previous visit, I’d learned that when the school was viewed from the west, the building’s façade matched the version of Shermer High seen in Sixteen Candles. And the redbrick façade on the north and east sides matched the school’s appearance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But all three entrances led into the same building, which was filled with painstakingly detailed re-creations of the various sets and practical locations used to create Shermer High’s interior in the various cinematic incarnations of the school.

  “Kajagoogoo” continued to play, increasing in volume as our bus rolled up to the curb in front of the school, and Art3mis, Aech, Shoto, and I filed off of it and attempted to blend in with the swell of NPC Shermer students surrounding us.
>
  We followed Art3mis as she led us up the broad concrete sidewalk leading to the south entrance of the school. Hundreds of NPC teenagers sat in long rows on the stone benches that flanked either side of the walkway, all dressed in colorful mid-’80s attire. As we made our way down this Day-Glo gauntlet, the kids all began to clap and stomp their sneaker-clad feet in time with the song, while chanting along with its only lyric, which spelled out its title: K-A-J-A-G-Double-O-G-Double-O!

  “Welcome to Shermer High School,” Art3mis said, stretching her arms out wide as she continued to walk backward, toward the school building. “Shermer, Illinois. 6-0-0-6-2.”

  Art3mis snapped her fingers and her avatar’s attire changed once again. Now she wore Annie Potts’s black latex outfit from her first scene in Pretty in Pink, along with her punk-rock porcupine hairdo, dangling earrings, and dinner-fork bracelet.

  “Applause, applause, applause,” she said, doing a slow spin so that we could admire the attention to detail she’d put into her Iona cosplay.

  Aech, Shoto, and I all gave her an enthusiastic golf clap. She scowled at us, then reached into her inventory and pulled out a pair of retro sunglasses—the same pair of Risky Business Ray-Bans she’d been wearing when we first met. Then she produced three identical pairs from her inventory and tossed them to me, Aech, and Shoto.

  “For better hallway vision,” she said.

  We all eyed her warily, then shook our heads.

  “Come on, you wimps!” Art3mis said. “Those are Hoffman lenses. You’re gonna need them.”

  She motioned for us to put them on. When we complied, the clothing on each of our avatars abruptly changed, so that the three of us were dressed like the “Dork Squad” in Sixteen Candles. I was now “The Geek,” played by Anthony Michael Hall; Aech was John Cusack’s character, Bryce; and Shoto was their pal Cliff.

  Aech took a look at us and then glanced down at herself. She turned to glare at Art3mis.