Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

Step 14 required me to battle my way into the castle, by running under ladder walkways suspended on pylons before I had to fight Zaemon once again. Then I continued on to Step 15, where I had to make my way into the castle’s inner chambers, through a series of washitsu, Japanese-style rooms with walls made of translucent paper.

When at last I reached Step 16, I finally got to face off with Zaemon and his minions in the castle throne room. I lunged forward into the final boss battle, with Aech and Shoto both shouting advice in my ear and cheering me on, like my own personal Mickey Goldmill and Paulie Pennino.

Luckily I’d picked up a few more lives in the last ten levels, because it took all of them to defeat Zaemon. Finally, I had reached the end of the game. But it was a strange ending. Even though they were supposed to be dead, Ninniku and Zaemon both reappeared, standing on a stage inside the castle alongside Princess Kurumi herself. Shoto told us the game’s lead designer, Yoshiki Kawasaki, had chosen this ending to imply that the events depicted in the game were just a stage play that had been acted out for the player’s benefit. No one had actually been hurt.

After the game’s characters finished their curtain call, the following text appeared on the screen:

CONGRATULATIONS!

THE PRINCESS HAS COMPLETED

HER ADVENTURE AND REGAINED

THE KANTEN CASTLE

A huge cheer erupted from the boys gathered around me, but I didn’t turn around right away. I still had one life remaining, so the game had started over again at the beginning of the first level, and I kept playing to see if Kurumi’s “imposter” was going to appear. After a minute of nothing more than the familiar color-blind ninjas, I let my one remaining life expire. GAME OVER appeared on the screen and I was prompted to enter my initials for the high-score list. I started to put in my own out of habit, but then I remembered who I was supposed to be and entered “K.R.U.” instead, for Karen Rosalind Underwood.

When the list of high scores appeared, I discovered that my score of 365,800 points put me only in second place on the list of “specialists.” The person in first had racked up a score of 550,750, outscoring me by over 200,000 points. They appeared to be sharper than me, too, because they’d entered the initials “K.R.A.” beside their score—the three-letter signature Kira Underwood had used on videogame high-score lists, instead of her initials. I’d failed to recall this obscure piece of trivia until I saw it in front of me. But my predecessor had not.

That was when I realized I was looking at Ogden Morrow’s score. Which made perfect sense. Og had completed this challenge earlier today. Just a few hours ago. And judging by his score, he was much better at Ninja Princess than I would ever be. Either that, or he’d kept on playing after he beat the final level and the game started over at the beginning again, to rack up those extra points. But why would he do that? Was he trying to match Kira’s real high score? Had I just screwed up somehow?

I snapped a screenshot of the high-score list so that I could examine it later. Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and nearly jumped out of my skin.

I turned to see a young Ogden Morrow smiling at me.

Og looked like he wasaround sixteen years old. About the same age he was when he met Kira for the first time—at a local arcade, when she moved to Middletown in the summer of 1988.

No wonder this setting and the scenario I was acting out both felt so familiar. I’d read about it seven or eight years earlier, in Ogden Morrow’s bestselling autobiography, Og . Unlike Halliday’s blog and diary entries in Anorak’s Almanac, Og’s recollections were infuriatingly vague when it came to details, but in the second or third chapter of the book, he described meeting his future wife for the first time, on the last day of summer vacation before his junior year of high school. He’d described how an “unbelievably gorgeous girl, with short dark hair and beautiful blue eyes,” had wandered into “one of the local arcades,” where he watched from a distance as “she beat one of the toughest games there on a single quarter.”

But Og had never bothered to specify which local arcade it was, or the name of the game Kira had played, and other written accounts had given conflicting information about both. Now I knew he’d met Kira here at Happytime Pizza. And that the game he’d watched her beat with one quarter was Sega Ninja, aka Ninja Princess.

I was reenacting the moment Ogden and Kira Morrow first met.

If I recalled Og’s book correctly, he’d walked over to congratulate Kira after she finished her game. But then his socially inept shadow, Halliday, had interrupted them to ask Og for a ride home. He always waited until the last possible moment to return to his troubled home, so Og knew his friend didn’t really want to leave yet. Halliday was attempting to cock-block him. This shocked and amused Og, because he’d never seen him display jealousy over a girl before. Just computer hardware.

“Hi,” the teenage Og said, finally working up the nerve to make eye contact with me. “I’m Og. And you—you’re amazing! I can’t believe you defeated Sega Ninja on one quarter! This is the first time any of us have ever seen anyone do that. Way to go!”

Og awkwardly held up his right hand. It took a second before I realized he was offering me a high five. So I high-fived him. He looked extremely relieved when I did.

Then he locked eyes with me, and as he did, I felt my heart beat faster. My skin began to tingle with what felt like invisible tendrils of electricity. This was a sensation I was familiar with. It was how I’d felt the first time I met Samantha in the real world.

I couldn’t imagine how present-day Ogden Morrow had felt while going through this challenge. He must’ve been using a conventional haptic rig, thankfully—he’d never used an ONI by choice, and he’d still been without one in Anorak’s little blackmail livestream—so at least he’d been spared all the physical sensations. But re-experiencing this moment from Kira’s perspective must’ve still been heartbreaking for him.

“Thanks, Og,” I heard myself say, with Kira’s voice, and in her British accent. “I’m Karen Underwood—but my friends call me Kira.” I felt my head nod in the direction of the Sega Ninja cabinet beside me. “We have this game in one of the shops near my parents’ flat, back home in London. But over there, it’s called Ninja Princess. Not Sega Ninja.” I felt the corner of my mouth curl into a smirk, then I added: “I guess American boys don’t like to play with girls.”

“Yes, we do!” Og replied immediately. Then he began to turn red and stammered, “I mean, we’re not against playing games with girls! Videogames, that is. That have a girl main character. Like this one here.”

Og gave the Sega Ninja cabinet an awkward pat, as if it were an unfamiliar Labrador. Then he shoved both of his hands into his pockets and grinned at me like a lovestruck idiot. He looked as if his pupils might change into cartoon hearts at any second.

He opened his mouth to say something else to me, but right on cue, another extremely familiar-looking teenage boy interrupted our conversation. I immediately recognized him as James Halliday—at age seventeen. Wearing his half-inch-thick horn-rimmed eyeglasses, a pair of faded jeans, worn Nikes, and one of his beloved Space Invaders T-shirts.

Just as he appeared, the arcade’s sound system skipped forward from “Jessie’s Girl” to “Obsession” by Animotion. I knew that couldn’t be a coincidence.

“I gotta get home,” the young Halliday urgently told Og, without making eye contact with either him or me. “I’m out of quarters and…so…I need a ride home.”