Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

We sent the message out to every single ONI user who was currently logged in. Faisal also posted it to the official GSS media feeds, looking visibly relieved as soon as he had done so.

“OK,” Shoto said. “Now we can get to work.”

“Agreed,” Arty said as she stood up and moved to the corner of the conference room. “But you’re gonna have to start looking for the Second Shard without me.”

We exchanged confused looks.

“Where the hell are you going?” Aech asked.

“My jet just reduced its airspeed to link up with a midair refueling tanker,” Art3mis said. “So it’s time to rock and roll.”

She tapped a series of icons on her HUD, then placed her hands on her hips—a pose that made her look like Wonder Woman for a brief moment.

“I’m not gonna let some two-bit Gandalf wannabe take me hostage,” she said. “And I’m not going to sit on my ass and do nothing while Og is being held prisoner.” She raised her right hand and saluted all of us. “I’ll call you back!”

Then she did what none of the rest of us could—she logged out of the OASIS, and her avatar disappeared.

But then, a few seconds later, Faisal received two incoming vidfeeds from Samantha—one from her mobile phone, and another from her jet’s onboard phone line, which was tied to the plane’s internal and external cameras.

Displayed side by side on the conference-room viewscreen, we saw shaky footage of the cabin of Samantha’s private jet from two different angles. Samantha fumbled with her phone for a few seconds as she clipped it to the front of her jacket, leaving us with a POV shot from her perspective.

We all watched in shock as Samantha slipped both of her arms into the harness of an emergency parachute applicator mounted on the bulkhead and buckled its safety belt around her waist. The parachute’s straps tightened automatically and a computerized voice spoke from a strap-mounted speaker, announcing that both main and reserve chutes were ready to deploy.

By this point we had all started shouting at her to reconsider, as if she could hear us. Samantha stepped away from the applicator, now wearing the parachute on her back. She pulled on a pair of goggles. Then she went to the emergency exit and pulled down on the manual-release handle with all of her weight, briefly hanging from it before it finally gave. The door detached itself from the fuselage and flew off, depressurizing the cabin and sucking everything outside through the opening.

Including Samantha.

Her vidfeed became a spinning whorl of blue, then stabilized as she went into a back-first free fall. We caught a glimpse of the jet above her, and could just make out that it was still connected to the much larger refueling drone by its automated umbilical.

Faisal cycled through the cameras on board the jet itself, pulling up a downward-facing external camera mounted on its underside. It gave us a perfectly centered shot of Samantha, just in time to see her pull the ripcord. Her parachute unfurled and opened, revealing the Art3mis Foundation logo printed on top of it—the one where the adjacent letter t and number 3 in her name resembled an armored woman in profile, drawing back on a futuristic hunting bow.

“Holy shit, Arty!” Aech said, amid a fit of anxious laughter. “I can’t believe she just did that. Girl got a death wish!”

Faisal and Shoto burst into applause. I joined in, trying to ignore my fear. Was outsmarting Anorak really going to be so easy?

That was when the view from the autojet’s video feed veered off to the side. The plane was changing course. Its camera was now showing only empty sky. On the feed from Samantha’s phone, still clipped to her chest, we had a POV shot of her feet, which she appeared to be kicking up like a girl on an amusement park ride, as her parachute floated downward.

Her hands rose in front of her chest and she raised both middle fingers in the direction of the jet. Even through the wind, we could just make it out when she shouted, “Now you can hold that empty plane hostage, Anorak!”

She dropped her hands fast, though. Probably because like us, she had just noticed that her jet was still banking around and down into a dive—one that put it on a collision course with her falling parachute.

“Oh shit!” I shouted. “He’s going to ram her!”

We watched helplessly as the jet rapidly closed the distance between them. As the jet’s nose filled her POV, we saw a jolt on Samantha’s feed—she had cut her primary chute loose and was in free fall, just in time for the jet to soar by harmlessly above her. She continued to dive for several more seconds, even though the warning lights on her altimeter were already flashing red.

Finally, she pulled her reserve chute and slowed her rapid descent. She came in, still falling far too fast, landing in a small, heavily wooded park just a few miles east of downtown, and we watched as the chute dragged through the tree branches on its way to the ground.

Then she touched down with a jolt that made every bone in my body ache—and her phone’s vidfeed cut to black.

“Is she all right?” I asked Faisal with a shaky voice. “Did she make it to the ground safely?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to call her back, but she isn’t answering.”

My eyes shifted back to the viewscreen, which still displayed the live vidfeed from Samantha’s commandeered jet. It hadn’t pulled out of its dive. Instead it had increased its angle of descent, so that now it was hurtling straight toward the ground like a missile.

“Oh my God,” Faisal said. “He’s gonna crash into her landing site!”

By the time he’d finished saying it out loud, it was already happening.

But as the jet was about to crash, it pulled up sharply, so instead of hitting her landing site dead-on it made impact a few hundred feet away, in the middle of a deserted picnic area.

As it hit, our remaining vidfeed cut to black.

We stared at the blank viewscreen in silence for a moment. Then Faisal had the presence of mind to check the local Columbus newsfeeds, and in less than a minute we were watching high-definition drone footage of the crash site. The just-refueled jet had detonated like a fuel-air bomb. The immediate area surrounding its crash site had been razed to nothing by the awesome force of the initial explosion. If Samantha or anyone else had been within that radius, they would have been incinerated.

The real problem now was the fuel, which had been flung far beyond the initial blast zone, like a botched napalm strike. A dozen different fires now raged across the entire park and several of the office buildings adjacent to it. It looked like a war zone down there.

With the flames still raging, it was impossible to see how many people had been engulfed by the sudden inferno. Anyone who had would be a charred corpse by now.

And I knew that any one of those burned bodies might belong to Samantha.

Minutes passed, but to meit felt as though time had completely stopped.

I stared at the images on the viewscreen in shock as an aching hollowness spread across my limbs and torso and slowly made its way to my heart.

My mind played a montage of every moment I’d ever spent with Samantha, both in the OASIS and in reality, while I tallied up the long list of stupid things I’d said and done to her in the years since our breakup. And all of the apologies I’d never made.

Aech was the first one to break the silence. “If anyone could figure out a way to survive that, it’d be Arty. We don’t know for sure…maybe she found cover before it hit….”

“There’s no way, Aech,” Shoto said, still in shock. “Did you see that fireball? There’s no way she had enough time to get clear of it….”