Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

Lo was already running up the basement steps.

“Kira’s house is just a few blocks from here,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Follow me!”

When we reached the Barnetts’ house a few minutes later, L0hengrin halted at the end of the darkened sidewalk leading up to it. Then she pointed up to Kira’s bedroom window on the second floor. It was the only room in the house with a light on. In fact, glancing up and down the street, I saw that it was the only illuminated window on the entire block.

L0hengrin saw me noticing this and nodded her approval. But she didn’t say anything.

I thought for a moment, then took the copy of Leucosia’s Mix out of my inventory and examined the track list. There it was, the seventh song on side A. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths. One of Kira’s all-time favorites.

I turned to point this out to L0hengrin, but she was already sprinting into the house. I followed her inside.

L0hengrin was waiting for me inside the guest bedroom. On my previous visits, this room had been undecorated and empty, aside from a bed, a dresser, and a small wooden desk. Now sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks were piled everywhere, and posters adorned the walls. The Dark Crystal. The Last Unicorn. Purple Rain. The Smiths. Homemade collages hung there, too, made from magazine clippings of videogame characters and artwork.

Sheets of graph paper were tacked up everywhere, filled with Kira’s meticulous renderings of characters, objects, and landscapes from classic role-playing videogames, like Bard’s Tale and Might and Magic. I’d read about this. Kira had spent hundreds of hours copying pixels from the screen onto the graph paper, coloring them in by hand one square at a time, to figure out how different artists achieved their effects and improve on their techniques. When she worked at GSS later on, she became famous for creating artwork that pushed the boundaries of the computer hardware available at the time. Og was fond of saying that his wife had “always had a knack for bringing pixels to life.”

I turned around slowly, trying to absorb as many details as I could. There were no family photos displayed anywhere. But she did have several pictures taped around the edge of her mirror, showing Kira with her nerdy new circle of friends—Halliday, Og, and the other misfit members of the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild. Several of those boys would later write tell-all books about growing up with Halliday and Og, and like every other die-hard gunter I’d scoured them all for details that might help me unlock the puzzles and riddles Halliday left behind. I’d reread them all again a few years ago, this time absorbing the details they contained about Kira’s life, so I knew that not a single one of them described the interior of her room at the Barnett residence. She was never allowed to have male visitors up there, and none of the boys in the guild had ever seen Kira’s room, including Og and Halliday. But I would’ve been willing to bet they’d both spent plenty of time imagining what it looked like. Maybe that was what I was looking at now—a simulation of what Halliday imagined Kira’s room looked like back then.

A small color television sat on Kira’s desk, with a Dragon 64 home computer connected to it. Seeing this made me smile. The Dragon 64 was a British PC built with the same hardware as the TRS-80 Color Computer 2, the first computer Halliday ever owned. According to one of the old journal entries he included in Anorak’s Almanac, when he found out that he and Kira owned compatible computers, Halliday took it as a sign they were meant to be together. He was wrong, of course.

Kira had a color dot-matrix printer hooked up to her computer, and the giant cork bulletin board on the wall above her desk was filled with printouts of her early original ASCII and ANSI artwork. Lots of pixelated dragons and unicorns and elves and hobbits and castles. I’d seen them all reprinted in collections of Kira’s artwork, but looking at them again now, I was still amazed at the detail and nuance she had been able to create with so few pixels and such a limited color palette.

L0hengrin walked across the room, over to Kira’s dresser, which had a small Aiwa stereo system sitting on top of it. She pressed the Eject button on its cassette deck, then pointed at the empty tray.

“Go ahead,” she said. “You can do the honors….”

I walked over, put Leucosia’s Mix into the tape player, and fast-forwarded it until I reached the end of the sixth song on the first side (“Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield). When I hit the Play button, I heard a few seconds of analog tape hiss before the next song began, and Morrissey began to croon: Take me out tonight…

I glanced around the room. Nothing happened. I glanced over at L0hengrin. She held up a hand and mouthed the word wait.

So we waited. We waited until about three minutes into the song, when Morrissey starts to sing a riff on the title over and over again. There is a light and it never goes out…

As he sang “light” for the first time, the lid of a wooden jewelry box sitting next to the stereo flew open, and a necklace floated up out of it, as if lifted by an invisible hand. It was silver with a blue gemstone, and I recognized it as the one Kira was wearing in her 1989 Middletown High School yearbook photo. According to his autobiography, Og gave it to her the first time he told her he was in love with her.

When the Smiths song ended, there was a blinding flash of light. When it faded the floating necklace had transformed into a large blue teardrop-shaped crystal, spinning in front of us at eye-level.

There it was, at long last—one of the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul.

I stared at the shardin awe, feeling a strange combination of exhilaration and disappointment. I’d finally uncovered the First Shard’s hiding place. But after three years of trying, I hadn’t been able to do it on my own. No, I’d had to be led here, like a noob following a walkthrough. Buying victory like some clueless Sixer instead of earning it on my own, or with the help of my friends…

But my shame couldn’t drown out the rush of relief and validation. The shards were real. I still wasn’t sure what I was hunting for, or why it mattered, but now I knew this wasn’t just some meaningless riddle. It really was another hunt created by Halliday. And whatever the prize was, it had to be important.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blur of motion as L0hengrin reached for the spinning shard. Her hand passed right through it, as if it were a hologram.

“I’ve tried picking it up dozens of times, dozens of different ways,” she said. “No matter what I try, my hand passes right through it. I don’t think anyone can touch it—except you, Halliday’s heir. To get the shard, you have to pay some sort of toll…whatever that means.”

For each fragment my heir must pay a toll, to once again make the Siren whole.

“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, reaching out for the shard.

My fingers didn’t pass through it—they closed around it. And as they did…

…For a moment, I was somewhere else. I was in a school classroom filled with old BBC Microcomputers. There was no one else in the room. I was sitting at one of the computers, and I could see my reflection in its monitor. Except it wasn’t mine. It was Kira Underwood’s face staring back at me. She—or rather, I—looked about nine or ten years old. And I felt exhilarated! My skin and scalp were tingling, and I could feel my pulse racing and my heart thudding inside of my tiny chest. I was staring at the screen, admiring a piece of artwork I’d just finished creating—a pixelated unicorn rearing up on its hind legs, silhouetted against a crescent moon.