Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“Hold up,” Aech interjected. “Kira was madly in love with Og. So why would he want to make a copy of her? If it was a true copy, it wouldn’t love him either.”

“I know,” I said. “But the copy would also never grow old or die,” I added. “Maybe Halliday thought he could convince it—her—to fall in love with him, over time….”

“Jesus,” Aech muttered, shaking her head. “If you’re right…this is some extremely twisted shit we’ve gotten ourselves mixed up in, fam.”

I nodded. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach too. Like I’d just learned that my childhood idol and hero had been a serial killer in his spare time.

Which was all the more reason why we couldn’t just give Anorak the Siren’s Soul and trust him to keep his word.

But the Siren’s Soul appeared to be his one weakness. Once we had it, maybe we could use it to barter with him. Or lure him into a trap.

“We’ve still got five more shards to find,” I said. “We gotta keep moving.”

“Do we know where we’re heading?” Art3mis asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, beaming with pride. “We sure do.”

“And it’s a good thing you’re here, Arty,” Shoto added. “Because we’re gonna need your help with this one.”

Art3mis’s smile vanished. She replaced it with a fiercely competitive scowl that I recognized from the days of Halliday’s contest. She called this “putting her game face on.”

“So,” she said, turning to face me. “Lay it on me, ace. Where are we headed?”

“Your old stomping grounds,” I replied. “Shermer, Illinois.”

Shermer was a medium-size planetnear the center of Sector Sixteen. It was home to a lovingly detailed, decades-in-the-making OASIS re-creation of Shermer, Illinois, the fictional Chicago suburb where the filmmaker John Hughes set many of the movies he wrote and/or directed over the course of his celebrated career. Samantha used to say that Shermer was Hughes’s “post-adolescent paracosm.” A private fantasy world that he created and populated with his imagination, adding to it throughout his life—his own suburban, Midwest equivalent of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Using Hughes’s films as a reference, legions of fans had labored for decades to translate that private universe into an immersive interactive simulation here inside the OASIS. There was only one copy of the Shermer simulation, and it completely covered the planet’s vast surface area. The simulated suburb had a scaled-down replica of Lake Michigan along its northern and eastern borders, and a shrunken version of downtown Chicago bordering it to the west and the south, so all the ’80s Windy City landmarks featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could be incorporated in the simulation, too, including the Sears Tower, the stock exchange, Wrigley Field, and the Art Institute of Chicago. And out beyond the lake and the Chicago city limits, there was a ridiculously abbreviated version of the United States, so that the simulation could incorporate cities and locations from Hughes’s scripted Vacation and Home Alone films.

It tended to ruin the atmosphere and continuity of a simulation when avatars were teleporting in and out of it at random all the time. That was why some planets, like Shermer, had been created with a limited number of designated arrival and departure points. Outside those locations, no teleportation was permitted. So when I selected Shermer as my teleportation destination on my HUD, I was presented with a map of the planet’s designated arrival locations. Per Art3mis’s instruction, I selected a railroad stop on the western edge of town.

When we finished rematerializing on the planet surface, we found ourselves standing on a small train platform in front of a circular redbrick station house. There was a crowd of several dozen NPCs standing around us, all ’80s-era business-suit-clad men and women who were waiting for the morning train.

As we arrived, a song I recognized from my Hughes research began playing—the opening of Kirsty MacColl’s cover of “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” from the She’s Having a Baby soundtrack. The music seemed to emanate from nowhere, as if there were invisible speakers floating in the air all around us. This was an indication that we’d triggered a needle drop. These were music cues hard-coded into specific areas of the simulation. They began to play whenever an avatar walked over or passed through a predetermined location—sort of like stepping on a soundtrack landmine. On our previous visit here together, Art3mis had told me that Shermer had more needle drops per square kilometer than any other planet in the OASIS. (That time, we’d arrived inside the Shermer simulation’s replica of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, which was almost always snowed-in, year-round.)

As the song continued to play, a half-empty train pulled into the station behind us. When its doors slid open, the mob of commuters waiting on the platform around us began to pour into it. Art3mis motioned for us to follow her and took off in the other direction, pushing through the oncoming crowd of NPCs to reach the platform exit with Aech, Shoto, and me in tow.

As we cut through the adjacent parking lot, we passed two NPCs—a young man and woman—in the midst of a passionate kiss. When they came up for air, we could see that the young man was Kevin Bacon, dressed in a gray business suit, and that the young woman he’d been kissing was Elizabeth McGovern. I recognized them as Jake and Kristy Briggs, the two main characters in She’s Having a Baby, Hughes’s most autobiographical film . Jake kissed his wife goodbye one more time, then turned and sprinted off to make the train.

Across the street from the station, we passed the church where the wedding from Sixteen Candles took place. Just beyond it, I spotted a familiar neon billboard that said WELCOME TO SHERMER, ILLINOIS—ONE OF AMERICA’S TOWNS! POPULATION 31,286. But Art3mis led us in the opposite direction, onto Shermer Road, which led farther into town.

When the Shermer simulation was originally created in the early days of the OASIS, it had only incorporated locations and characters from four of John Hughes’s films: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Weird Science. Over the decades since, it had been updated and overhauled several times to include other Hughes classics like Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, She’s Having a Baby, Uncle Buck, Mr. Mom, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, The Great Outdoors, and the aforementioned Home Alone and Vacation flicks. And in recent years, fans had expanded it to cover even the most obscure corners of his filmography, with characters and locations reflecting everything from Curly Sue to Career Opportunities. So when you visited Shermer now, interactive re-creations of all of these movies were constantly playing all around you. And the events depicted in those films played out over and over again simultaneously, day after day and week after week, on an endless loop.

I pulled up a map of the town, to pinpoint our location. Shermer had a set of railroad tracks running diagonally through its middle, dividing the town into two more-or-less equal halves, which were labeled RICH and POOR, and were color-coded red and blue respectively. The rich half of Shermer was the one that bordered the miniaturized version of Lake Michigan. The poor side was the one you had to drive through to get to the miniaturized version of downtown Chicago. The majority of Hughes’s films were shot in and around Chicago, and many of them were filmed on location in the suburb of Northbrook, where Hughes himself attended high school. (A few were shot in L.A., like Pretty in Pink, though its story was set in suburban Chicago.) The geographic continuity in Hughes’s films had made it possible for the planet’s designers to re-create all of them here, inside one contiguous, interconnected simulation.