Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“He must have known her a lot better than he let on,” I said, thinking about the shard flashbacks. They had both felt like Recs, not Sims. The differences were subtle, but no Sim—at least not as far as I’d experienced, and I’d tried thousands—had just the mix of strangeness, uncertainty, and intensity that came from a recording of a real-life moment.

But they couldn’t be recordings. Because there definitely hadn’t been any ONI headsets lying around in Middletown, Ohio, in the fall of 1988.

So what had I just experienced?

I was still mulling that over when my brain produced a match for the name Andie in the jumbled recesses of my memory. I opened a browser window in the air in front of me and did a quick Web search to make sure my memory was correct.

“Andie Walsh!” I shouted. “With an i-e ! That was the name of Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink .”

Aech and Shoto both groaned and rolled their eyes . Neither was the world’s biggest John Hughes fan, but they knew that Art3mis and I both adored his films. During Halliday’s contest, Art3mis had published dozens of essays about his movies on her blog, dissecting each of them in loving detail, scene by scene. None of her encyclopedic knowledge had proven useful in finding Halliday’s egg, but she might get her chance to put it to use now. Unless I managed to find the shard quickly, before she even got back online. That would save time—and probably also impress the hell out of her.

“ Pretty in Pink would make sense,” I said. “Kira and Og were both huge John Hughes fans. And they helped code some of the first quests on Shermer.”

“You think we have to go to Shermer next?” Aech asked. “Arty will lose her mind!”

“OK,” Shoto said, rereading the clue. “If it’s Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink, then what does ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending’ mean?”

“ Pretty in Pink originally had a different ending,” I replied. “One where Andie ended up with Duckie, instead of with Blane. Arty—Samantha—posted an essay about it on Arty’s Missives a long time ago.”

“Of course she did,” Aech said. “She’s an even bigger dork than you.”

I ignored her, trying to hold on to my train of thought. “I think they decided to change the ending of the movie after some poor test screenings—”

As if on cue, Art3mis appeared next to us.

“Speak of the devil and the devil appears!” Aech said, greeting her with a fist bump. “You make it somewhere safe, Arty?”

Arty nodded, then pressed her index finger to her lips for a moment.

“Sorry I was gone so long,” she said. “Looks like I missed a wardrobe change.”

She grinned, admiring our old-school gunter attire. Then she snapped her fingers and spun around in a circle. Her avatar’s outfit was replaced by the scaled gunmetal-blue armor she’d worn during the contest, along with her twin blaster pistols in their low-slung quickdraw holsters, and a long, curved Elven sword in an ornate Mithril scabbard was now strapped to her back. She’d even donned her fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves.

Seeing her dressed like that again brought back a flood of old feelings and long-suppressed memories. They left me feeling momentarily lightheaded. And weak-hearted.

“There’s our girl, back in uniform!” Aech said as they gave each other a double high five.

“Bravo, team!” she said. “I can’t believe you guys already found the Second Shard. That was wicked fast!”

“Yes, it was,” Shoto said. “Because I held Z’s hand, all the way through it—”

“While I held his other hand,” Aech added, laughing. “And now that Arty has rejoined our posse, too, we will be un-fucking-stoppable. The Siren’s Soul shall be ours, my friends!”

Art3mis and Shoto both let out a cheer in agreement. I raised my right fist halfheartedly, then cleared my throat.

“Not to cut the celebration short,” I said. “But I think I may have figured out what the Siren’s Soul is, and why Og refused to give it to Anorak.”

Their smiles faded as all three of them turned to look at me expectantly.

“OK,” I said. “First, let me ask you a question. Why do you think Halliday called it the ‘Siren’s Soul’?”

“Because Kira named her D&D character Leucosia,” Shoto replied. “After one of the Sirens in Greek mythology.”

“Correct,” I said. “So if Kira is the ‘Siren,’ and the Seven Shards are ‘fragments’ of her ‘Soul,’ what does Anorak assume will happen when we put those pieces back together? When we ‘once again make the Siren whole’?”

Art3mis looked back over at me.

“Holy shit, Wade,” she muttered. “You don’t think…?”

I nodded.

“Anorak doesn’t think that the Siren’s Soul is a magical artifact named after Kira,” I said. “He believes it is her. An AI copy of Kira. Just like Anorak is a copy of Halliday.”

Art3mis didn’t respond, but she looked horrified by the thought.

“Come on, Z,” Aech said. “That’s impossible.”

“I thought so too,” I replied. “But there’s no other explanation for what I’ve been experiencing.”

Art3mis furrowed her brow.

“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning forward. “What, exactly, have you ‘been experiencing’?”

I told them about the flashbacks, and filled Art3mis in on the battle she’d just missed.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Art3mis muttered, shaking her head. “The first two challenges required you to possess detailed knowledge of the Smiths and Ninja Princess?”

I nodded. “Neither of those things was ever mentioned once in Anorak’s Almanac, ” I said. “And those two flashbacks I experienced? They felt like ONI recordings of real moments. They were way too detailed to be simulations.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Art3mis asked. “Anything could be simulated convincingly for a few seconds.”

Aech shook her head.

“No way, Arty,” she said. “You don’t know what ONI playback is like. You can almost always tell the difference. Besides, James Donovan Halliday was a brilliant videogame designer and programmer. But he didn’t know anything about women—especially Kira. There’s no way he could’ve convincingly re-created one of her memories, from her perspective. He was a self-obsessed sociopath, incapable of feeling empathy for anyone else. Especially Kira…”

I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from leaping to Halliday’s defense. The man had been far from perfect, but he’d given us our entire world. “Sociopath” didn’t just seem harsh, but downright blasphemous.

“But what you’re suggesting can’t be possible, Z,” Shoto said. “The OASIS Neural Interface didn’t exist back in the ’80s, when Kira was a teenager. GSS didn’t build the first fully functional ONI prototype headset until 2036—two years after Kira Morrow’s death.”

“I know,” I replied. “It doesn’t jibe with the official timeline. But no one was better at keeping secrets than Halliday….” I took a deep breath. “I think we need to consider the possibility that somehow, before Kira Morrow died, Halliday made a copy of her consciousness. Using the same technology he used to copy his own mind and create Anorak.”

All three of them stared at me in horrified silence. Then Art3mis shook her head.

“Kira never would’ve allowed Halliday to do that,” she said. “Og wouldn’t have either.”

“So maybe Halliday figured out a way to scan Kira without her or Og realizing it.” I swallowed as I realized what I was about to say. “Halliday was obsessed. He knew he could never have the real Kira, so he decided to make a copy of her for himself.”