Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two [calibre]

“Not cool, Arty.”

Art3mis laughed and then put on her own shades. As she did, her own avatar’s outfit changed once again, this time into the threads that Ferris Bueller wore on his day off. Black-and-white leather jacket. Leopard vest. The whole shebang. She gave her Ferris cosplay the finishing touch by pulling out a black beret and putting it on her head. Then she grinned at us and rubbed her hands together excitedly.

“OK, gang,” she said. “This place is a lot more dangerous than it looks. Don’t touch anything, don’t talk to anyone. Just follow my lead.”

We each removed our sunglasses and resumed our normal appearance. Then we followed Art3mis up the steps that led to the front entrance. Once Art3mis reached it, she threw open the front doors, and another needle drop kicked in: “Eighties” by Killing Joke.

Hearing the song, she grinned and popped her collar as she led us inside.

As Art3mis led us throughthe hallowed halls of Shermer High School, we began to see a lot of strange things.

Just inside the entrance, we passed a gaggle of jocks wearing identical blue-and-gray letterman jackets featuring the school mascot, a bulldog. I recognized Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez’s character in The Breakfast Club ) among them, along with Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling’s character from Sixteen Candles ). They were both admiring a pep-rally banner that read GO BULLDOGS GO!

We also saw several posters urging students to attend the senior prom, which was scheduled for later tonight, in the main ballroom at the Shermer Hotel. Every night of the week was prom night here on Shermer. All year long.

“Hey guys,” Shoto called out, keeping his voice down to a loud whisper. “Over there! That’s her, isn’t it? Andie?”

He pointed out a familiar-looking girl with red hair who was walking toward us. It was Molly Ringwald again, but not the one from Sixteen Candles we’d spotted earlier on the bus. This was a slightly older Molly, with hair that was a much lighter shade of red.

“Wrong Ringwald,” Art3mis said, shaking her head. “That’s Claire Standish—the Molly from The Breakfast Club . We’re looking for the Molly from Pretty in Pink…. And at this time of the morning, she should be right…over…there!”

She pointed down the hall, where we saw yet another Molly Ringwald walking to class. This incarnation wore a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, her bright-red hair peeking out from beneath a black hat with a flower-print scarf wrapped around it. She was dressed in a pink sweater, over a pink blouse, and she did, in fact, look quite pretty in both of them.

“I hate this place,” Aech said, shaking her head as she took in our surroundings. “It’s like being stuck in the Matrix. With the Brat Pack.”

“That why I love it!” Art3mis replied. “Don’t yuck my yum, Aech. Don’t do it.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Andie Walsh didn’t attend this school in Pretty in Pink, did she?”

Art3mis shook her head.

“No,” she replied. “She attended another fictional school—Meadowbrook High in Elgin, Illinois. But Pretty in Pink ’s characters and filming locations were amalgamated into Shermer, along with the rest of Hughes’s filmography. Keeps you on your toes….”

We continued to follow Andie at a distance, until she stopped to greet her friend Jena, who was retrieving some textbooks from her locker. Shoto took a few tentative steps toward Andie, but Art3mis grabbed him by the arm.

“Not yet,” she said. “We need to wait until she leads us to another NPC. Until he shows up, we have to keep our distance….”

I started to ask who she meant, but I was drowned out by an approaching male voice that was repeatedly shouting the phrase “Save Ferris!”

We turned and saw that the voice belonged to a tall blond boy making his way through the crowd. He was holding out an empty Pepsi can to passing students, many of whom were eagerly dropping money into it.

“Thank you!” he said, bowing slightly after each donation. “God bless you! Save Ferris?”

The current of the crowd quickly carried him over to us, and he held his Pepsi can out to Aech before repeating his desperate plea: “Save Ferris?”

Aech stared back at him stoically, then said, “Excuse me?”

“Well, see, we’re collecting money to buy Ferris Bueller a new kidney,” the blond guy explained. “And those run about fifty G’s or so. So if you could help out—”

Aech slapped the can out of his hands, sending it flying. Art3mis hurried over and pulled Aech away, laughing, while the flustered blond boy accused her of being a heartless wench.

“Don’t get distracted,” Art3mis said. “We need to keep track of Andie!” She pointed up ahead of us. “I think she went that way. NPC behavior is somewhat randomized here. Andie usually visits her locker first, but sometimes she wanders into one of these classrooms and sits down instead. So keep moving, and keep an eye out for her. We’ll sweep the classrooms on both sides of the hall as we go!”

Art3mis took off down the hall again, pushing and weaving through the oncoming torrent of NPC high school kids. Aech, Shoto, and I hurried after her.

The school bell rang a few seconds later, and the hallway began to clear as NPC students filtered into their individual classrooms. One of them bumped into me as she went by, and when she turned to say, “Excuse me,” I saw that it was a young Juliette Lewis, with her hair done up in a frizzy blond ’80s perm. I knew her best from her starring roles in Strange Days and From Dusk Till Dawn, so it took me a moment to remember that she’d portrayed Audrey Griswold in Christmas Vacation .

Art3mis was right—for someone who had trained themselves to identify pop-culture icons from the ’70s and ’80s, this world was one huge distraction.

As we continued to follow Art3mis, she instructed us to split up and look inside each classroom we passed, to see if we could locate Andie Walsh.

I ran to the nearest door and glanced inside, then retreated as soon as I saw that it was an economics class being taught by Ben Stein, who was, of course, currently calling the roll.

“Adams, Adamly, Adamowsky, Adamson, Adler, Anderson?” he said. “Anderson?”

“Here!” I heard Anderson shout as I turned away and hurried on to the next classroom.

It was the school’s computer room, and it was currently filled with student NPCs typing out their term papers on rows of ancient desktop computers. A sign posted above the chalkboard said HACKERS WILL BE EXPELLED, and that was one of the reasons I did a double-take a few seconds later, when I spotted the greatest fictional hacker of the ’80s, Bryce Lynch, sitting at one of the computers. Then I noticed that Bryce looked older than I remembered, and he wasn’t wearing his glasses. That finally made me realize that I was looking at Buck Ripley, a character in The Great Outdoors portrayed by Chris Young, the same actor who had played Bryce Lynch on Max Headroom a few years earlier. Even so, before I turned to leave, I silently saluted him, recalling the dark time during Halliday’s contest when I’d used the name Bryce Lynch as my fake identity, to avoid detection by IOI and the Sixers.

A bit farther down the hall, I peeked into the open door of an art classroom. At first I thought it was empty, but then I spotted Keith Nelson (Eric Stoltz’s character from Some Kind of Wonderful ) standing at an easel near the back of the room, painting a portrait of Lea Thompson, aka Miss Amanda Jones, with the song “Brilliant Mind” by Furniture playing out of a jambox on the desk beside him. I stood there transfixed for a moment, after it occurred to me that I was watching the original Marty McFly paint a portrait of his mother. Then Art3mis shouted for me to keep up, so I hurried to catch up with her. We passed by the open doors of the school gym, and inside we could see a bunch of girls in blue leotards doing various gymnastics exercises. On the wall, I noticed a large banner that said GO MULES GO! I pointed it out to Art3mis.