Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

The second we’d finished, Art3mis jumped to her feet and prepared to leave. “Tell Miles and his team I’m logging out right now, and that they better not leave without me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Faisal replied. “But we’ve already got three security teams on deck, along with three squads of aerial enforcer drones. So there’s really no need for you to put your own life at risk, Ms. Cook.”

“Ogden Morrow saved our lives once,” she said. “I’m gonna do everything I can to return that favor.” She turned to me. “Stay in touch,” she said. “And good luck!”

She gave me another smile, then she turned to go. As she did, it occurred to me that if the worst happened, this might be the last time I ever saw her. So I reached out to touch her avatar’s shoulder, and when she felt it through her haptics, she turned back around to face me. And as always, she looked beautiful.

“Hey, in case something does happen,” I said, “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. For a lot of different things. But mainly, I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you. All this time, you were right, and I was wrong.”

She grinned and placed her right hand against my cheek. The last time she had done this, it was in the real world, during our week together at Og’s in Oregon. Exactly 1,153 days ago. It wasn’t her real hand, but I could still feel it, and it still made my heart race.

“You never cease to amaze me, Watts,” she said. “There’s still hope for you yet.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. Then she backed up several steps, to ensure that we were all outside her teleportation spell’s area of effect.

“Good luck, guys.”

“Good luck to you, too, Arty,” I replied. “Don’t get hurt, OK?”

Art3mis gave all of us one last nod, then she teleported away, and her avatar vanished in a shower of glittering silver dust. Then I turned to Aech and Shoto.

“You guys ready to rock?” I asked.

Shoto nodded and gave me a nervous thumbs-up. Aech cracked her knuckles.

“Ten-four and ready for more,” she said.

I checked the ONI countdown on my HUD. I now had just two hours and twenty-eight minutes remaining before I hit my limit. Aech and Shoto each had about ten minutes less than that. Faisal was about to hit the two-hour mark. And we still had three more shards to collect. If the last three took as long to locate as the first four had, we were in trouble.

“Buckle up, fellas,” Aech said, smiling. “We’re off to the Afterworld! And when we get there, prepare to follow my lead, OK?”

We nodded, then all waved farewell to Faisal once again. Aech turned to me and Shoto and placed a hand on each of our shoulders. Then, just before she teleported all of us to the Afterworld, we heard her shout, “Oh no, let’s go!”

As my avatar rematerialized, myvision stabilized, and I found myself standing in the middle of a long concrete tunnel, fifty yards in length, with a curved ceiling that formed a half-circle with the concrete floor. Every inch of the ceiling and a good portion of the floor was covered in graffiti—all of it paying tribute to Prince Rogers Nelson, scrawled here by his fans over the past three decades. There were snippets of his song lyrics, pairs of initials inside arrow-pierced hearts, and thousands of messages of love and devotion, all directed toward the Artist and his work. Phrases like Thank you, Prince and We love you, Prince and We miss you, Prince were repeated over and over again, in different colors and in different handwriting. I also saw several portraits of Prince painted on the tunnel walls, along with the dates of his birth and death (6-7-1958 and 4-21-2016) and thousands upon thousands of different hand-drawn renderings of his unpronounceable symbol.

I forced myself to stop looking at all of the graffiti and tried to get my bearings. Behind me, one end of the tunnel terminated in a bright half-circle of blinding-white light. At the opposite end, the tunnel opening was a half-circle of bright-green forest, just beyond a black chain-link fence about ten feet high.

In an effort to avoid showing the full depth of my ignorance about Prince and his music, I pulled up his complete discography, filmography, biography, and his career timeline in different semitransparent windows on my HUD, so I could refer to them at all times. My image-recognition plug-in was also constantly giving me information about my surroundings, throwing it up in small windows in the air all around me, like I was inside an episode of Pop-Up Video.

As I scanned Prince’s discography, I noticed that he had released both an album and a movie titled Graffiti Bridge . So, in an effort to appear like I actually knew something about this place, I turned to Shoto and said, “This is the famous Graffiti Bridge that inspired the album and film of the same name….”

“No it isn’t, Z,” Aech said, resting a hand on my shoulder as she corrected me. “The real Graffiti Bridge was located in another suburb of Minneapolis called Eden Prairie. It was torn down in 1991. There are plenty of replicas of the original Graffiti Bridge here, though, spread all over the planet. But this isn’t one of them. This is a re-creation of a tunnel down the road from Prince’s home.” She glanced around, smiling. “I come here every year on his birthday. This was my last departure point. It’s also one of the Afterworld’s designated arrival locations.”

I was about to respond, but Aech was already in motion, running toward the green end of the tunnel.

“Come on!” she shouted back over her shoulder. “This way!”

Shoto and I both sprinted after her.

Once we emerged from the mouth of the tunnel, I saw that it was actually a culvert running beneath a four-lane highway bridge over a dry riverbed. The name BULL CREEK ROAD was engraved above the tunnel entrance.

We followed Aech as she took a sharp right, onto a worn dirt path skirting the black chain-link fence to our left, which appeared to run all the way around the perimeter of the forested property beyond it. The fence had a bunch of notes, purple flowers, and purple ribbons tied to it. They seemed to grow in number and density the farther along it we ran.

I glanced upward, then swiveled my head all the way around to scan the entire horizon. It was hard to tell what time of day it was supposed to be. The sky was a dozen different shades of purple and was filled with luminous storm clouds that drifted rapidly across it.

Eventually, the trees on the other side of the fence began to thin out, and beyond them I could see a circular white building, like an ivory tower, rising from a sprawling field of green grass. Beyond the white tower was a much larger building, also white, which looked like it was constructed out of cube-shaped building blocks of polished white marble. There were floodlights encircling the whole structure, bathing it in a brilliant, otherworldly light.

The image-recognition software running on my HUD informed me that we were approaching the entrance of Paisley Park, Prince’s famous home and creative compound. A moment later, we finally arrived at the property’s front gates, which were wrought iron and covered in purple chrome.

Without saying anything, Aech walked up to the gates and grabbed one of the bars with her right hand. When she did, this action triggered our first needle drop, and churchlike organ music filled our ears. The song-identification software running on my HUD identified it as the opening of a song called “Let’s Go Crazy.” It seemed to emanate from somewhere high above us, as if the sky itself were one giant speaker. A second later, we heard the voice of the Purple One himself, booming down from the sky like the voice of God Almighty, as Prince recited an excerpt of the song’s spoken intro: