Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

Og stared at him for a moment in disbelief while Halliday kept his eyes on the carpet. Og gave me an embarrassed smile, then turned back to Halliday.

“Hold on just a few minutes,” Og said. “Or go wait by my car until I’m ready to leave. Or—” He fished a crumpled dollar bill out of the front pocket of his acid-washed jeans. “It’s too wrinkled for the token machine, but they’ll change it at the counter.”

Og tossed the bill in Halliday’s general direction and turned back to Kira without waiting for him to reply. The money hit him in the chest and then silently fell to the floor.

“No!” Halliday shouted, suddenly furious, stomping his right foot down like a toddler preparing to throw a tantrum. When his shoe made contact with the ground, Og and all of the other NPCs vanished, leaving me alone with the seventeen-year-old James Halliday.

And in the same instant, our surroundings changed too.

The Happytime Pizza game room was gone, replaced by a throne room that looked an awful lot like a live-action version of the 8-bit one in the final stage of Ninja Princess. The teenage Halliday morphed into the masked, black-clad ninja Kazamaru, who to my eyes looked exactly like Shô Kosugi in Revenge of the Ninja back in 1983.

I glanced down at my avatar and saw that my own appearance had changed too. I still appeared to be a girl, but now I was dressed in a flowing tunic made of red silk, with gold piping and a Chinese dragon stitched onto each sleeve.

I was also holding a sword in my right hand, and in its mirrored surface I could see that I was no longer wearing Kira Underwood’s face. My avatar had changed into a live-action representation of Princess Kurumi—and the creator of this simulation had chosen to make me look exactly like Elsa Yeung in Challenge of the Lady Ninja, also from 1983.

“ ‘Reclaim her castle and face her imposter,’ ” Shoto recited. “This is it! Kick his ass, Princess!”

I nodded, then lunged forward and did as Shoto instructed—I kicked Kazamaru’s ass.

Thankfully, the mechanics of ONI-based combat were more or less identical to old-school haptic-rig combat. You didn’t have to physically perform any of your avatar’s complex special moves and powered attacks yourself unless you wanted to. Instead, you could use a simple hand gesture or voice command to make your avatar execute a move or an attack. The only difference was, when you were using an ONI, you could feel your avatar’s body movements as it automatically carried out these actions, so for a few seconds, it felt like you were moving on autopilot.

I was prepared for a brutal fight, but whoever had programmed this challenge had made Princess Kurumi a lot tougher than her knockoff male counterpart, who barely put up a fight. He only managed to land one or two hits before I knocked his life-meter down to nothing, with a steady barrage of throwing knives.

When I reduced his life bar to just 1 percent, the words FINISH HIM appeared floating in the air between us for a moment. When they vanished, I dispatched Kazamaru with one final roundhouse kick to the head. The last sliver of his life bar turned red—but he didn’t die. Instead, the manly, black-clad ninja master abruptly fell to his knees and began to cry, then vanished in a cloud of smoke a few seconds later.

When it dissipated, I saw the Second Shard floating there in front of me.

I reached for it, wondering if I was about to experience another “flashback.” And as my fingers wrapped around it…

I was back inside the body of seventeen-year-old Kira Underwood, and now teenage Ogden Morrow was standing in front of me, holding my hands in his. It was dark, and we were standing on a grassy hill bathed in moonlight, overlooking the tiny Middletown skyline in the distance. Og was placing a silver necklace in my hands—the same necklace from Kira’s jewelry box that had transformed into the First Shard—just as he whispered the words “I love you,” for what I knew must be the very first time.

Og had written about this moment in his autobiography, too, I realized. But he hadn’t described it in any detail, or given the time and place it occurred.

I felt my body starting to tremble as Kira reacted to what her future husband had just told her….

…And then I was back inside my own avatar’s skin. I was back on Kodama, standing next to Aech and Shoto in front of the Ninja Princess portal. It looked as though my avatar had just been ejected from it. When I looked down, I saw the Second Shard lying in my open palm. It was another multifaceted blue crystal, nearly identical to the first one in size and appearance.

Shoto and Aech both threw their arms around me. “You did it!”

“No,” I said. “ We did it. I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

I held out both of my fists and they each bumped one of them and silently nodded.

“That final challenge was insane, right?” Shoto said. “I mean, why would Halliday want you to kill the teenage version of himself?”

“That’s gotta be some serious self-hatred happening there,” Aech said. “Maybe he finally realized what a dick he was to Kira, and to Og?”

I couldn’t focus on what they were saying. I was still reeling from the flashback I’d just experienced. Another of Kira Underwood’s private memories, rendered with a detail and intensity that should’ve been impossible. Just what in the name of Crom was going on here?

I didn’t have time to stop and ponder the possibilities. We had shards to collect and absolutely no time to spare.

I glanced down at the Second Shard in my hand, then held it out to Aech and Shoto, so we could examine it together. When I turned it over in my palm, we saw that this shard had an inscription carved into its glassy surface just like the first one. Aech read it aloud.

“ ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending.’ ”

“ ‘Andie’s first fate,’ ” Shoto repeated. “Wasn’t Andie the name of Kerri Green’s character in The Goonies ?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Her name was spelled with a y at the end. Not an i-e. ”

“A-N-D-I-E,” Aech said, shutting her eyes, as if to better picture the name. “Like Andie MacDowell?” She turned to Shoto and gripped his shoulder. “Oh shit ! Maybe the next shard is on the Planet Punxsutawney? I used to go there every Groundhog Day to—”

“Hold on!” Shoto said, cutting her off. He’d opened a browser window in front of his avatar and was reading from it. “Andie MacDowell also starred in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984. But the director hired Glenn Close to loop all of her dialogue, because he didn’t like her Southern accent! Do you think that could be what ‘recast the foul, restore his ending’ is a reference to? Maybe that film had an alternate ending….”

“Wait, are we talking about the movie where Connor MacLeod plays Tarzan?” Aech said. “Directed by the cat who made Chariots of Fire ?”

“That’s the one!” he said. “There must be a Flicksync devoted to it somewhere….” He pulled up his OASIS atlas in another window. “Maybe on Lambert? Or one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs–themed planets in Sector Twenty? If we—”

“Guys!” I shouted, signaling a time-out with my hands. “Come on. You’re really reaching. Do you seriously believe the Third Shard’s hiding place is somehow connected to Andie MacDowell? Or Tarzan? Neither one is mentioned in the Almanac . Or in any of the books I’ve read about Kira’s life.”

Aech shrugged. “She could’ve been an Andie MacDowell fanatic, for all we know,” she replied. “I never did that much research into Kira’s interests. According to Og, Halliday never bothered to get to know who Kira really was.”