Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

We had already rewatched the footage of the crash several times, frame-by-frame. We couldn’t see what had happened to Samantha. But I was still inclined to agree with Shoto. She’d only had a split second to get clear before Anorak crashed the jet and a giant ball of flame exploded across the landscape.

I didn’t want to believe she was dead. But I wasn’t going to delude myself either. Despite how Samantha Cook was often depicted in movies and cartoons, she wasn’t a superhero. Here in the real world, she was just a regular person—a geeky Canadian gamer girl from the suburbs of Vancouver. She couldn’t outrun giant explosions on foot like Rambo.

Still. My mind kept replaying that last moment of the jet’s descent. It had hit nearby, not on top of her. Maybe there was a chance.

“Why did she have to be so stupid?” Aech said, her tone shifting from shock to grief. “Why did she bail out? Why didn’t she just sit tight until we got Anorak to release her?”

“Samantha was never a big fan of waiting around for someone else to rescue her,” I said.

The others nodded. Then the silence was broken by the sound of another incoming call. Faisal rushed to answer it. When he did, Anorak’s face appeared on the conference room’s viewscreen, frowning down at us like some malevolent deity.

“I’m calling to express my condolences for the loss of your friend,” Anorak said. “I was genuinely surprised by Ms. Cook’s actions. I calculated a very low probability she would attempt to bail out of that autojet. Who knew she would be so foolish?” He shrugged. “I warned her, didn’t I? In fact, I warned all of you what would happen if you failed to cooperate with me. If she hadn’t tried to escape, she’d still be alive.”

“No!” Aech shouted. “If you hadn’t murdered her, she’d still be alive!” Her voice cracked, and she choked on each word as she spoke it. “You didn’t have to kill her! Or any of those other people…”

“Of course I did, dear,” Anorak replied softly. “I didn’t want to kill her. I liked her. She was an incredibly brave and intelligent young woman. But she gave me no choice. If I hadn’t punished her for disobeying me, what message would that have sent? It would’ve completely undermined my credibility and caused Parzival here to doubt my resolve. But now he knows I mean business. Don’t you, Z?”

I was too overcome with grief and rage to respond with words. But I managed to nod slowly.

“See?” Anorak said, nodding back at me from the viewscreen. “I assure you all, I don’t wish to harm anyone else if I don’t have to. And I’m sure that you don’t want any more blood on your hands either.”

“You’re nothing like James Halliday,” Aech told him. “You’re not human. You’re a fucking toaster! You don’t even care about those people you just killed….”

“Why should I, dear?” Anorak said, with what sounded like genuine curiosity in his voice. “To quote Sarah Connor: ‘You’re all dead already.’ You, your friends, your customers—all of you. You poisoned your own planet, destroyed its climate, defiled its ecosystem, and killed off all of its biodiversity.” He pointed at each of us. “You’re going to be extinct soon, too, by your hands. And you know it. That’s why most of you spend every second you can wired up to the OASIS. You’ve already given up, and now you’re all just waiting around to die.” He shrugged. “The people I killed today don’t have to wait around anymore. And if you continue to defy me, too, more people will meet the same fate. Now, get to work, kids.”

When he called us “kids,” I finally snapped and went into a total berserker rage, lunging at the viewscreen, as if I could crawl through it and throttle him.

“You’ll pay for this, you son of a bitch!” I shouted, because I’d obviously seen way too many movies, and because I was terrified and wanted desperately not to show it.

“That’s the spirit!” Anorak said, grinning. “You better get moving, Parzival.” He tapped his imaginary watch again and sang, “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future….”

With that, Anorak ended the call and the giant viewscreen went dark for a moment. Then it went back to displaying several live aerial and ground video feeds of Samantha’s crash site. The smoke had cleared enough so that we could see the firefighters who were finally starting to arrive on the scene.

“A medevac helicopter is en route to the crash site,” Faisal said. “But it’ll be a while before they’ll be able to get that blaze under control.”

“How could anyone survive an explosion like that?” Aech muttered.

“You have to hit the ground running,” we heard a familiar female voice say.

We all turned to see Samantha’s avatar, just as it finished rematerializing in the corner of the conference room.

“Then I kept on running,” she continued. “And I hit the deck just before the jet made impact. There was a little stone footbridge over a stream and I dove under it.” She winced. “I’ve got a few first- and second-degree burns, and I’m gonna need a few stitches. But I’m OK.”

Aech and Shoto ran over and threw their arms around her avatar. I resisted the urge to join them, but just barely. Instead I just stood there next to Faisal, who couldn’t resist hugging me instead. And I was so happy, I hugged him back.

Samantha was still alive. I still had a chance to make things right with her. To tell her how wrong I’d been, about everything. To apologize for not listening to her. And to tell her how much I’d missed her…

But she didn’t stick around that long.

“I only jumped online for a few seconds, to let you all know I was OK,” she said, gently pulling free of Aech’s bearlike embrace. “Now I need to go let the medics clean me up. There are also a few things I need to do, and I can’t do them while Halliday-9000 is watching.”

Her deadpan 2001 joke caused me to involuntarily snort-laugh. Samantha was the only person who had ever been able to make me do this, and she knew it. I glanced over at her in embarrassment and she smiled at me again. And this time, with great effort, I managed not to look away.

“Z, you, Aech, and Shoto need to start searching for the Second Shard now, ” she said. “Hurry! I’ll rejoin you as soon as I can.”

And then she vanished without waiting for me to reply.

I stood there for a minute, staring at the spot where her avatar had been, attempting to rein in my stampeding thoughts.

“Zero in, buddy,” Shoto said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Arty’s right. We need to find the Second Shard. And fast.”

I nodded and removed the First Shard from my inventory. When I held it aloft in my hand, it filled the conference room with its incandescent blue glow as each of its facets caught the light and refracted it onto the walls and the floor in a kaleidoscopic pattern.

I held the shard out to Aech, but when she attempted to take it, her hand passed right through it, as if it were an illusion. Shoto tried the same thing and got the same result.

“Halliday coded this shard so that anyone could find its hiding place and trigger its appearance,” I said. “But it can only be picked up by one of Halliday’s two heirs. Me or Ogden Morrow. Halliday gave Og his old arcade-game collection, remember?”

I told them how I’d used the Boris Vallejo calendar in Og’s basement to change the year of the Middletown simulation, and how I’d obtained the First Shard in Kira’s bedroom. I didn’t mention that I’d paid a girl named L0hengrin a billion dollars to figure all of this out for me. I was ashamed to admit that I’d needed her help. And I was determined not to call on her for more assistance unless I had no choice.