Ready Player Two (9781524761356)

by Cline, Ernest

  “Not cool, Arty.”

  Art3mis laughed and then put on her own shades. As she did, her own avatar’s outfit changed once again, this time into the threads that Ferris Bueller wore on his day off. Black-and-white leather jacket. Leopard vest. The whole shebang. She gave her Ferris cosplay the finishing touch by pulling out a black beret and putting it on her head. Then she grinned at us and rubbed her hands together excitedly.

  “OK, gang,” she said. “This place is a lot more dangerous than it looks. Don’t touch anything, don’t talk to anyone. Just follow my lead.”

  We each removed our sunglasses and resumed our normal appearance. Then we followed Art3mis up the steps that led to the front entrance. Once Art3mis reached it, she threw open the front doors, and another needle drop kicked in: “Eighties” by Killing Joke.

  Hearing the song, she grinned and popped her collar as she led us inside.

  As Art3mis led us through the hallowed halls of Shermer High School, we began to see a lot of strange things.

  Just inside the entrance, we passed a gaggle of jocks wearing identical blue-and-gray letterman jackets featuring the school mascot, a bulldog. I recognized Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez’s character in The Breakfast Club) among them, along with Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling’s character from Sixteen Candles). They were both admiring a pep-rally banner that read GO BULLDOGS GO!

  We also saw several posters urging students to attend the senior prom, which was scheduled for later tonight, in the main ballroom at the Shermer Hotel. Every night of the week was prom night here on Shermer. All year long.

  “Hey guys,” Shoto called out, keeping his voice down to a loud whisper. “Over there! That’s her, isn’t it? Andie?”

  He pointed out a familiar-looking girl with red hair who was walking toward us. It was Molly Ringwald again, but not the one from Sixteen Candles we’d spotted earlier on the bus. This was a slightly older Molly, with hair that was a much lighter shade of red.

  “Wrong Ringwald,” Art3mis said, shaking her head. “That’s Claire Standish—the Molly from The Breakfast Club. We’re looking for the Molly from Pretty in Pink….And at this time of the morning, she should be right…over…there!”

  She pointed down the hall, where we saw yet another Molly Ringwald walking to class. This incarnation wore a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, her bright-red hair peeking out from beneath a black hat with a flower-print scarf wrapped around it. She was dressed in a pink sweater, over a pink blouse, and she did, in fact, look quite pretty in both of them.

  “I hate this place,” Aech said, shaking her head as she took in our surroundings. “It’s like being stuck in the Matrix. With the Brat Pack.”

  “That why I love it!” Art3mis replied. “Don’t yuck my yum, Aech. Don’t do it.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “Andie Walsh didn’t attend this school in Pretty in Pink, did she?”

  Art3mis shook her head.

  “No,” she replied. “She attended another fictional school—Meadowbrook High in Elgin, Illinois. But Pretty in Pink’s characters and filming locations were amalgamated into Shermer, along with the rest of Hughes’s filmography. Keeps you on your toes….”

  We continued to follow Andie at a distance, until she stopped to greet her friend Jena, who was retrieving some textbooks from her locker. Shoto took a few tentative steps toward Andie, but Art3mis grabbed him by the arm.

  “Not yet,” she said. “We need to wait until she leads us to another NPC. Until he shows up, we have to keep our distance….”

  I started to ask who she meant, but I was drowned out by an approaching male voice that was repeatedly shouting the phrase “Save Ferris!”

  We turned and saw that the voice belonged to a tall blond boy making his way through the crowd. He was holding out an empty Pepsi can to passing students, many of whom were eagerly dropping money into it.

  “Thank you!” he said, bowing slightly after each donation. “God bless you! Save Ferris?”

  The current of the crowd quickly carried him over to us, and he held his Pepsi can out to Aech before repeating his desperate plea: “Save Ferris?”

  Aech stared back at him stoically, then said, “Excuse me?”

  “Well, see, we’re collecting money to buy Ferris Bueller a new kidney,” the blond guy explained. “And those run about fifty G’s or so. So if you could help out—”

  Aech slapped the can out of his hands, sending it flying. Art3mis hurried over and pulled Aech away, laughing, while the flustered blond boy accused her of being a heartless wench.

  “Don’t get distracted,” Art3mis said. “We need to keep track of Andie!” She pointed up ahead of us. “I think she went that way. NPC behavior is somewhat randomized here. Andie usually visits her locker first, but sometimes she wanders into one of these classrooms and sits down instead. So keep moving, and keep an eye out for her. We’ll sweep the classrooms on both sides of the hall as we go!”

  Art3mis took off down the hall again, pushing and weaving through the oncoming torrent of NPC high school kids. Aech, Shoto, and I hurried after her.

  The school bell rang a few seconds later, and the hallway began to clear as NPC students filtered into their individual classrooms. One of them bumped into me as she went by, and when she turned to say, “Excuse me,” I saw that it was a young Juliette Lewis, with her hair done up in a frizzy blond ’80s perm. I knew her best from her starring roles in Strange Days and From Dusk Till Dawn, so it took me a moment to remember that she’d portrayed Audrey Griswold in Christmas Vacation.

  Art3mis was right—for someone who had trained themselves to identify pop-culture icons from the ’70s and ’80s, this world was one huge distraction.

  As we continued to follow Art3mis, she instructed us to split up and look inside each classroom we passed, to see if we could locate Andie Walsh.

  I ran to the nearest door and glanced inside, then retreated as soon as I saw that it was an economics class being taught by Ben Stein, who was, of course, currently calling the roll.

  “Adams, Adamly, Adamowsky, Adamson, Adler, Anderson?” he said. “Anderson?”

  “Here!” I heard Anderson shout as I turned away and hurried on to the next classroom.

  It was the school’s computer room, and it was currently filled with student NPCs typing out their term papers on rows of ancient desktop computers. A sign posted above the chalkboard said HACKERS WILL BE EXPELLED, and that was one of the reasons I did a double-take a few seconds later, when I spotted the greatest fictional hacker of the ’80s, Bryce Lynch, sitting at one of the computers. Then I noticed that Bryce looked older than I remembered, and he wasn’t wearing his glasses. That finally made me realize that I was looking at Buck Ripley, a character in The Great Outdoors portrayed by Chris Young, the same actor who had played Bryce Lynch on Max Headroom a few years earlier. Even so, before I turned to leave, I silently saluted him, recalling the dark time during Halliday’s contest when I’d used the name Bryce Lynch as my fake identity, to avoid detection by IOI and the Sixers.

  A bit farther down the hall, I peeked into the open door of an art classroom. At first I thought it was empty, but then I spotted Keith Nelson (Eric Stoltz’s character from Some Kind of Wonderful) standing at an easel near the back of the room, painting a portrait of Lea Thompson, aka Miss Amanda Jones, with the song “Brilliant Mind” by Furniture playing out of a jambox on the desk beside him. I stood there transfixed for a moment, after it occurred to me that I was watching the original Marty McFly paint a portrait of his mother. Then Art3mis shouted for me to keep up, so I hurried to catch up with her. We passed by the open doors of the school gym, and inside we could see a bunch of girls in blue leotards doing various gymnastics exercises. On the wall, I noticed a large banner that said GO MULES GO! I pointed it out to Art3mis.

  “I thought it was the Shermer Bulldogs,” I said.

  “The footb
all and wrestling teams are the Shermer Bulldogs,” she said. “The basketball team is the Shermer Mules. See?”

  She pointed to a poster, announcing an upcoming away game, between the Shermer Mules and the Beacon Town Beavers.

  Ahead of us, we found Shoto looking through another open doorway, into some sort of shop class, where dozens of male students were making identical ceramic elephant lamps. They lit up when the elephant’s trunk was pulled. But one of the boys couldn’t get his lamp to turn on, despite repeated attempts. When he turned around, we saw that it was Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall’s character in The Breakfast Club). Aech turned away to continue on to the next classroom, and I reluctantly followed her. Just before I lost sight of him, I saw Brian frown and cast a terrified glance toward his gruff-looking shop teacher.

  We rounded another corner and Art3mis suddenly threw her arms out as she skidded to an abrupt halt, causing the rest of us to collide with her and one another. Once we’d regained our balance, Art3mis pointed up ahead. There was Andie Walsh, standing beside her open locker with an oddly dressed and extremely young Jon Cryer.

  “There he is,” she said. “Philip F. Dale. Better known as Duckie, aka the Duck Man. One of the most divisive and controversial characters ever to spring forth from John Hughes’s imagination.”

  “Oh, that dude,” Aech said, rolling her eyes. “What do we want from him? Fashion advice?”

  Art3mis laughed and shook her head.

  “Just trust me, OK?” she replied. “I used to come to this place a lot. I’ve completed every single documented quest anchored here. A bunch of the older quests don’t have any developer credits in their colophon, so no one knows who created them. But there were always rumors that some of these quests were created by Kira and Ogden Morrow, including several of the Pretty in Pink quests. I never took them seriously, but now I’m thinking those rumors may have been true….”

  We watched as Andie closed her locker and began to walk down the hall, Duckie buzzing around her like an insect.

  I recited the clue printed on the Second Shard again in my head, trying to figure out why Art3mis had brought us here. Then I groaned and rolled my eyes.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” I said. “The first line of the clue is a goddamn pun? ‘Recast the foul’? Meaning a ‘fowl,’ like a waterfowl?”

  “Correct,” Art3mis said, smiling at me. “More specifically…a duck!”

  She nodded toward Duckie, then drew her curved Elven sword from the scabbard on her back. Its blade sang like a giant tuning fork as she pulled it free.

  “Arty,” Aech said, “what the hell are you doing?”

  “Wait for it,” she said, gripping the hilt of her sword with both hands. She stood there waiting as another warning bell rang. Andie bid Duckie a hasty farewell and scurried away from him. Duckie raised his voice and continued to shout at her, asking if he should make lunch reservations for them in the cafeteria, perhaps at a table by the window. Andie covered her face in embarrassment, then turned and continued to walk in the other direction.

  “Um, listen, may I admire you again today?” he shouted as Andie disappeared into one of the classrooms down the hall.

  “Poor Duckie,” Shoto whispered as we watched all of this go down.

  “Poor Duckie?” Art3mis repeated, aghast. “Don’t you mean poor Andie? She takes pity on the guy because she knows he’s struggling with his own sexual identity, and that he doesn’t have any other friends. And how does Duckie repay her sympathy and kindness? By ignoring her boundaries, hounding her twenty-four-seven, and humiliating her in public every chance he gets. And check out how he treats other women when Andie isn’t around….”

  She turned and motioned back over at Duckie, who had just walked over to a pair of preppy-looking girls standing a few yards away from us.

  “Ladies, ladies,” we heard him say. “Listen, I may be able to work out a deal where either one or the both of you could be pregnant by the holidays. What do you—”

  Before the Duck Man was able to finish his sentence, Art3mis ran over to him and swung her sword, lopping his head completely off at the neck.

  “There can be only one!” she shouted as Duckie’s head went flying, taking his blow-dried pompadour along with it. It bounced off a nearby locker with a loud metal clang before coming to rest on the waxed marble floor of the hallway, not far from his now-decapitated body. The preppy girls he’d been addressing a split second earlier screamed and scattered, along with the other student NPCs who had been lingering in the vicinity.

  “Jesus Christ, Arty!” Aech shouted. “You could’ve warned us first!”

  “Yeah,” Shoto added, chuckling to himself. “Next time give us a heads-up!”

  Aech cut his laughter short by shoving his avatar into a wall.

  I watched as Duckie’s head and body faded away, leaving behind the loot he’d been carrying—a few gold coins, his vintage thrift-store clothing, a bolo tie, and a pair of battered white wingtip shoes with buckles instead of laces.

  Art3mis scooped up the shoes and the tie but didn’t bother with the clothes or the coins.

  “Annoying dipshit,” she said as she wiped Duckie’s blood off her blade and slid it back into its scabbard. “I never liked him. Or the generations of spineless tool bags who’ve rooted for Andie to end up with him.”

  “Hold the phone,” Shoto said. “Are you telling me you’re on Team Blane?”

  “Of course not,” Art3mis replied, looking mildly revolted. “Blane is even worse than Duckie. I never thought either one of them was a good match for Andie. And Kira Morrow held the same opinion….”

  “OK…” Shoto said slowly. “But I still don’t understand why you decapitated Duckie.”

  “To ‘recast the foul,’ ” she said. “And ‘restore his ending.’ ”

  “How are we supposed to restore the ending where Andie winds up with Duckie, when you just killed Duckie?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you,” she said. “But we need to make one more stop first.”

  She took off running again, and since we really had no choice, Aech, Shoto, and I followed. After several more identical-looking hallways, Art3mis finally slid to a halt in front of a long row of orange lockers. One of these lockers had a warning scrawled across its door in black magic marker: TOUCH THIS LOCKER AND YOU DIE, FAG!

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Bender’s locker!”

  Aech nodded and folded her arms. “I always questioned his reasoning here,” she said. “Don’t you think this homophobic graffiti would encourage people to mess with his locker rather than discourage them? Bender didn’t think things through!”

  “Yeah,” Art3mis replied. “Lucky for us…”

  She turned and grabbed a fire ax off the wall. She used it to smash open Bender’s combination lock, then gingerly opened the locker door and quickly yanked her hand clear. When the door popped open, a small guillotine slid down the length of its frame, chopping off the toe of a sneaker that was poking out of the bottom of the locker.

  Art3mis dug through the locker’s bizarre contents until she finally found a crumpled brown paper bag. She opened it and pulled out another, even smaller paper bag, stained with what appeared to be French-fry grease. From inside that bag, she then withdrew a clear plastic sandwich bag, filled with a copious amount of marijuana.

  Arty held up the bag of weed in her left hand and Duckie’s shoes in her right.

  “We’ve got the magic herb and the magic slippers,” Art3mis said. “Now it’s time for us to hit the city, baby. Dead-on. We have some drinks. A little nightlife. Some dancing…Let’s go!”

  She took off running again. We ran after her.

  Once we made it back outside, Art3mis took us on a shortcut across the football field, and as we walked past one of the goal posts, we triggered another needle drop on the simulation’s soundtrack. It
happened to be one of Aech’s all-time least-favorite songs—“Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds. She already looked as if her nerves were hanging by a thread, and this nearly pushed her over the edge.

  “Oh, give me a fucking break!” she cried, shouting to be heard over the opening of the song. “Seriously? Do all of us need to be here for this shit right now?”

  I gave her a playful shove forward, and we ran to catch up with Art3mis and Shoto. As we did, the song continued to play, and when it reached its crescendo, Aech mockingly raised her right fist to the sky. It made the rest of us crack up.

  A few seconds later, Aech’s smile vanished.

  “I’m getting a call,” she said. “It’s Endira. I promised to check in. I gotta take this. Gimme one second.”

  Aech walked several yards away and turned her back to us before she answered the call. I caught a glimpse of the worried face of her fiancée, Endira, in a vidfeed window in front of her. She was calling from their home in L.A., where she was still holding a vigil beside Aech’s sabotaged immersion vault. Aech muted their conversation, so we couldn’t hear what they were saying. But we didn’t need to. It was obvious that Endira was distraught and Aech was trying to calm her down.

  Shoto sighed. “I know we don’t have time for this. But I’ve been dying to talk to Kiki too.”

  Art3mis looked thoughtful for a moment. Then she turned to me. “It won’t take all four of us to collect this shard,” she said. “How about you and I keep moving and give Aech and Shoto a few minutes with their ladies? We can call them once we have it.”

  The prospect of being alone with Art3mis for the first time in years rendered me momentarily speechless. After a few seconds of awkward silence I finally blurted out a response.

  “Sure,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could. “That’s a great idea. And very thoughtful of you.”

  Art3mis nodded to Shoto, then tilted her head at me and gave me an odd grin. “OK, Z. Let’s go snag this thing.”