Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

She didn’t notice my arrival, because my avatar was invisible. Her eyes were also closed, but that just meant she was “engaged” and currently had her attention focused elsewhere, like on a phone call or a private chatroom. L0hengrin would most likely still be monitoring her avatar’s view of this room via a small video-feed window in the corner of her HUD. Middletown was located in a PvP zone, making it a risky place to leave your avatar unattended.

I looked around and saw that we weren’t in Kira’s old bedroom at the Barnett residence. We were three blocks north of that location, in the world famous wood-paneled basement of Ogden Morrow’s childhood home. This was where Morrow, Halliday, and their close-knit group of friends spent most of their free time. They gathered here after school and on the weekends to escape to other worlds, via dozens of tabletop role-playing games. Og’s basement would also later serve as the first office of Gregarious Games, the company that Halliday and Morrow co-founded after high school, which evolved into Gregarious Simulation Systems a few decades later when they launched the OASIS.

In the real Middletown, Ohio, Og’s childhood home had been demolished decades ago to make room for a block of condominiums. But here in the OASIS, Halliday had re-created his best friend’s childhood home in loving detail, along with his own home and the rest of their hometown, using old maps, photographs, and video footage for reference.

Like everything else in the Middletown simulation, Og’s basement looked just like the real thing had back in the late 1980s. Vintage movie and comic-book posters covered the walls. Three beat-up couches were arranged in a U-shape in front of an old RCA television, which was half-buried by a Betamax VCR, a Pioneer Laserdisc player, and several different classic home videogame consoles.

On the other side of the room, a bunch of folding chairs were clustered around a scarred wooden table covered with multicolored polyhedral dice. A row of bookshelves lined the far wall, each crammed to capacity with role-playing-game supplements and back issues of Dragon magazine. Two ground-level windows looked out onto the Morrows’ backyard, where a fat orange sun hovered above the horizon, silhouetting a rusting swing set in the neighbor’s yard.

Being in this room filled me with fond memories of my own teenage years, because in a strange way, I’d grown up here too. Back when we were in high school, Aech had modeled her private OASIS chatroom after Ogden Morrow’s basement, and the two of us spent countless hours there over the years. Talking, gaming, doing our homework, listening to old music, watching old movies. Daydreaming about the things we would do when we won Halliday’s fortune.

My life had been a lot harder back then, but in retrospect it now also seemed a hell of a lot simpler.

I glanced back over at L0hengrin. Her avatar’s eyes were still closed, and they were still darting around rapidly beneath her eyelids, as if she were in REM sleep. I was about to make my avatar visible and alert her to my presence, but then a better idea occurred to me. I selected L0hengrin’s avatar on my display and pulled up a list of her active communication processes. It told me that she was currently logged in to a private chatroom called Cyberdelia, which was hosted by a fifty-ninth-level avatar named Kastagir.

If L0hengrin really had found one of the shards, she might be in that private chatroom discussing it with her friends. Or, if she was bullshitting me, she might be in there discussing that instead. And my robes let me enter private chatrooms uninvited and undetected, allowing me to eavesdrop on their occupants. This was a trick I’d learned from the Great and Powerful Og himself, the only other avatar in the OASIS who had this ability.

I tapped the small door icon at the edge of my display to activate my chatroom interface, then searched for the one named Cyberdelia and tapped the Login button. My view of Og’s basement shrank from the limits of my peripheral vision to a small window in the corner of my display, and I suddenly found myself standing just inside the chatroom’s entrance.

Cyberdelia was a multilevel warehouse space filled with archaic late-twentieth-century technology and retro-futurist décor. Oddly adorned mannequins, pay phones, roller-blade ramps, and air-hockey tables were scattered around the club, and its walls were covered with graffiti urging its denizens to Hack the Planet! When I recognized the old techno song playing on the sound system—“Cowgirl” by Underworld—I made the connection, and smiled. This was a re-creation of the underground cyberpunk nightclub featured in the 1995 film Hackers .

From my position near the entrance, the chatroom looked deserted. But over the blaring music, I could hear several overlapping voices engaged in a heated conversation. I ventured further inside, following the noise, until I spotted five avatars gathered on one of the club’s upper-level catwalks. They were sitting and standing around a circular table made from an empty wooden cable spool. L0hengrin was among them, gesturing excitedly as she spoke to the others.

Being careful not to bump into any furniture, I moved closer, until I could make out what she was saying. From this distance, I was also able to read the name tags floating above the other four avatars’ heads: Kastagir, Rizzo, Lilith, and Wukong.

“You are so full of shit, Lo,” the one named Wukong said in a deep voice. “Even more than usual, which is saying something.” His avatar was a tall half-man, half-monkey creature, which explained the name—Sun Wukong was a character from Chinese mythology known as “the Monkey King.”

“Come on, Kong,” L0hengrin said, rolling her eyes. “Why would I lie about something like this?”

“To try and impress us?” Kastagir said. The chatroom’s enormous host was leaning against an iron girder with his massive arms folded across his chest. He was a human male with ebony skin and a giant fro-hawk that added at least a foot to his already-impressive height. He wore a brightly colored dashiki and a long, curved sword in an ornate scabbard, just like the character of the same name in the original Highlander film.

Lilith took a step forward. Her avatar was a young woman with shaggy turquoise-colored hair, dressed in torn black jeans, combat boots, and a dark blue hoodie. She appeared to be going for a turn-of-the-century edgy emo look.

“Of course the ignorant males doubt you,” she said. “But I believe you, sister!”

“So do I, Lo!” Rizzo added, popping her bubblegum. Her avatar’s inspiration made me grin again: the character of the same name in the movie version of Grease —a young Stockard Channing, wearing a black motorcycle jacket and a pair of oversize sunglasses. But this Rizzo had a touch of Columbia from Rocky Horror, with fishnet stockings and a glittery gold top hat.

“Thank you, ladies,” L0hengrin said, bowing to them.

Wukong snorted like an angry gorilla.

“OK,” he said. “If you really found one of the shards, then why don’t you show us some proof? A screenshot or simcap or something?”

“I will,” L0hengrin said, putting her boots up on the table and her hands behind her head. “As soon as I finish collecting my reward.”

“I bet Parzival gets thousands of emails about the shards every day,” Kastagir said. “He probably stopped reading them years ago.”

“He’ll read mine,” L0hengrin said. “Parzival knows I wouldn’t waste his time with a bogus lead. He’s one of my subscribers, remember?”

She mimed brushing dust off of her shoulder.

“Really?” Lilith said, feigning surprise. “Parzival is one of your subscribers? You’ve never mentioned this before!”