Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“Phoenix-Rie was Kodama’s alias,” Shoto said. “I visited that planet a few times during the contest. It contains quest portals that lead to OASIS ports of every game Kodama ever worked on, including Ninja Princess. That must be where we need to go.”

“Boom!” Aech said. “Then let’s make like a tree and get outta here.”

I selected Aech and Shoto’s avatars on my HUD and prepared to teleport all three of us to the planet Phoenix-Rie in Sector Eight. But of course, I couldn’t take us anywhere. Anorak had taken my teleportation powers away from me, along with my other superuser abilities, when he stole the Robes of Anorak from my inventory. My avatar was still maxed out at ninety-ninth-level, but now I was mortal once again, just like any other avatar. And I wasn’t properly equipped. I’d collected plenty of new weapons, magic items, and vehicles over the past three years, but I didn’t lug all of that stuff around with me. Everything was in my old stronghold on Falco, and we didn’t have time to waste making a detour back there so that I could gear up.

“Hey, Faisal,” I said, trying to conceal my embarrassment. “Can you hook me up with one of those Admin rings you gave to everyone else during our first co-owners meeting?”

Faisal smiled and removed a small silver ring from his inventory and then tossed it to me. I caught it and slipped it onto the pinky of my right hand. It appeared in my avatar’s inventory as a Ring of OASIS Administration . It gave me the ability to teleport anywhere in the OASIS for free, and enclosed my avatar in a shield that made me immune to attacks from other OASIS avatars, even in PvP zones. Faisal had offered me one of these Admin rings when he’d given them to Art3mis, Aech, and Shoto, but I’d declined because the Robes of Anorak already gave me those abilities and many more—and I was also showing off for Art3mis.

“Thanks, Faisal,” I said.

“Here,” Aech said impatiently. She flashed her own admin ring at me, then selected Phoenix-Rie on her own OASIS atlas. “Let me do the honors.”

She placed her right hand on Shoto’s shoulder and her left one on mine, then she uttered the brief incantation required to activate her teleportation spell, and our avatars vanished.

A split second later, we rematerialized on the surface of the planet Phoenix-Rie. It was a bright and beautiful little world, rendered in colorful 8-bit graphics, and its pixelated landscape was a patchwork of different environments that Rieko Kodama had created for a variety of games. The area where Aech, Shoto, and I arrived was modeled after the game Alex Kidd in the Miracle World. But as we began to traverse the planet’s surface, we found ourselves running through the Green Hill Zone from the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Then the landscape quickly changed to resemble environments from the very first Phantasy Star game. I recognized graphical elements from all three planets in the Algol system—in just a few minutes, we sprinted through the forests of Palma, the deserts of Motavia, and the icy plains of Dezoris.

We also saw dozens of different nonplayer characters from Kodama’s games roaming around aimlessly, but like most OASIS NPCs, they wouldn’t attack or talk to you unless you attacked or talked to them first, so we just stayed out of their way.

Eventually we reached the planet’s equator, where we found a line of game portals positioned along it, stretching to the pixelated horizon in each direction. The portals were arranged in chronological order by the games’ year of release.

We found the Ninja Princess portal in less than a minute, positioned between the portals leading to OASIS re-creations of the games Championship Boxing and Black Onyx.

Each glowing circular portal had an icon denoting the corresponding videogame’s original packaging hovering just above it, so the Ninja Princess portal had an arcade cabinet icon above it, while the portals to either side of it had Sega MyCards above them.

As we approached the Ninja Princess portal, I began to notice a ringing in my ears, which began to increase steadily in volume the closer I got to it. Aech and Shoto didn’t seem to hear it at all, so I decided to check my inventory. That was when I realized the sound was emanating from the First Shard. The icon denoting it on my item list was pulsing in time with the ringing in my ears—as if the shard were calling out to me. Just like that green Kryptonian crystal that called to young Kal-El in Superman: The Movie. In fact, I was pretty sure Halliday had lifted the sound effect I was hearing directly from that film.

When I took the shard out of my inventory to examine it, the ringing stopped, and the inscription on the shard changed before my eyes. Now it read:

Ninniku and Zaemon aren’t alone on her roster

Once you reclaim her castle, you must face her imposter

I showed the new couplet to Shoto and Aech and their eyes lit up.

“Ninniku and Zaemon are the two main bad guys in Ninja Princess,” Aech said. “Kurumi has to defeat both of them to win the game and ‘reclaim her castle.’ ”

“Then ‘face her imposter,’ ” I recited. “That must be Kazamaru, the male ninja they replaced her with in the Master System port. I guess I’ll have to fight him too.” I cracked my knuckles. “Couldn’t be too difficult, right?”

“Share your POV feed with us so we can monitor your progress,” Shoto said. “I’m calling you now audio-only, so Aech and I can feed you tips as you go. Just like old times. Oh, and that reminds me…”

Shoto changed out of his formal ninja attire and put on his ornate gold armor and then strapped on his swords. This prompted Aech and me to change into our old gunter attire too. Then Aech threw up a mirror so that the three of us could admire ourselves.

“Look at those handsome devils,” she said, before blasting the mirror to smithereens with a shot from her assault rifle. “Now, let’s do this.”

“OK, amigos,” I said, accepting Shoto’s audio call on my HUD. “Here goes nothing.”

I bumped fists with both of them at once, then turned around, took a deep breath, and jumped into the Ninja Princess portal.

I wasn’t sure what Iwas expecting. Maybe that I would find myself in an immersive VR re-creation of Ninja Princess, similar to the OASIS port of Black Tiger I’d encountered during the contest. Except that the rules of the old contest no longer seemed to fit, not after that flashback of Kira’s life I’d experienced when I touched the First Shard. It was impossible for her to have played a role in all this, I knew that. But what I’d experienced had seemed equally impossible.

When I stepped through the portal, I didn’t find myself inside a videogame, or in a historical simulation of feudal Japan. Instead, I found myself standing in a place I’d visited once before—years ago, during the contest.

Happytime Pizza.

The original Happytime Pizza was a small mom-and-pop pizza parlor and video arcade that had existed in Middletown, Ohio, from 1981 to 1989. Halliday had spent countless hours there during his youth, and he’d re-created it in loving detail inside the OASIS, along with the rest of his hometown, on the planet he’d named after it. But during the contest I’d discovered another instance of Happytime Pizza, hidden in the subterranean videogame museum on the planet Archaide. That was where I’d played my perfect game of Pac-Man and earned the extra life quarter that allowed me to survive the detonation of the Cataclyst on Chthonia.

Given my previous visits to Happytime Pizza, my surroundings should have felt familiar. But it was the opposite, because this time, I was wearing the ONI. This time, I could smell the tomato sauce and burnt pepperoni grease in the air. I could feel the subtle vibration of the sound system’s speakers through the floorboards, pulsing in time with the bass line as they blasted the song “Obsession” by Animotion. This time, I felt like I was really here, like I’d genuinely traveled back in time to Middletown, Ohio, sometime in the late 1980s.