Эрнест Клайн - Ready Player Two

I ended the game program and took off my AR goggles, then I toweled off and drank some water before heading to my workout room. On the way there, I stopped by the garage to admire my car collection. Of all my daily rituals, it was the one that never failed to make me smile.

The estate’s enormous garage now contained four classic movie car replicas—the same four movie cars that had inspired my avatar’s OASIS mash-up vehicle, ECTO-88. I owned screen-accurate replicas of Doc Brown’s 1982 DeLorean DMC-12 time machine (pre–hover conversion); the Ghostbusters’ 1959 Cadillac hearse Ectomobile, Ecto-1; the black 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am Knight Industries 2000, KITT (with Super-Pursuit Mode); and finally, sitting down at the far end, a replica of Dr. Buckaroo Banzai’s matter-penetrating Jet Car, built from a heavily modified 1982 Ford F-series pickup truck, with air scoops from a DC-3 transport plane bolted onto its frame, along with a World War II German fighter plane cockpit, a turbine-powered jet engine, and parachute packs for rapid deceleration.

I had never driven any of these cars. I just came out to the garage to admire them. Sometimes I sat inside them with all of the screens and control panels lit up while I listened to old movie soundtracks and brainstormed ideas for the next chapter in my ongoing ECTO-88 film series—a project I’d started working on after my therapist suggested that I might benefit from having a creative outlet.

GSS already owned the media companies that owned the movie studios that held the rights to Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Knight Rider, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and by paying hefty licensing fees to the estates of Christopher Lloyd, David Hasselhoff, Peter Weller, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, I was able to cast computer-generated FActors (facsimile actors) of each of them in my film. They were basically nonplayer characters with just enough artificial intelligence to take verbal directions after I placed them on my virtual movie sets inside GSS’s popular Cinemaster movie-creation software.

This allowed me to finally bring my longstanding fanboy dream to life: an epic cross-over film about Dr. Emmett Brown and Dr. Buckaroo Banzai teaming up with Knight Industries to create a unique interdimensional time vehicle for the Ghostbusters, who must use it to save all ten known dimensions from a fourfold cross-rip that could tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum.

I’d already written, produced, and directed two ECTO-88 films. They’d both done pretty well by today’s standards—getting people to pay for or sit through a movie was tough these days, with the reams of inexpensive ONI-net options out there—but the films didn’t make enough to cover my runaway production costs and all those special-effects sequences. I didn’t care what my homemade movies grossed, of course. All that mattered was the fulfillment I got out of making them, watching them, and letting other fans experience them. Now I was working on ECTO-88 Part III—the last chapter of my supremely nerdy trilogy.

I went over and said hello to KITT, and he wished me a good morning. Then Max appeared on one of his cockpit screens, and complimented KITT on his new onboard hard drive. KITT thanked him and the two of them began to discuss the hard drive’s specs, like two gearheads obsessing about engines. And they kept at it, even after I walked out of the garage.

Next it was time for weight training, in the spare dining room I’d converted into a personal gym. Max occasionally offered words of encouragement as I pumped iron, with some snarky commentary mixed in. He made for a pretty good personal trainer. But after a few minutes I muted him to watch another Peter Davison–era episode of Doctor Who . It had been one of Kira Morrow’s favorite shows, and Davison had been her third-favorite Doctor, after Jodie Whittaker and David Tennant.

Research, I reminded myself. You have to keep up with your research.

But I couldn’t seem to focus on the episode. All I could think about was the quarterly GSS co-owners meeting scheduled for later that day, because it meant I would be seeing Samantha for the first time since our last meeting, three months ago.

Actually, our meetings were held in the OASIS, so I would only be seeing her avatar. But that didn’t really lessen my anxiety. Samantha and I first met online. We got to know each other through our OASIS avatars long before we met in the real world.

Samantha Evelyn Cook and I met in person for the first time at Ogden Morrow’s home in the mountains of Oregon, right after she’d helped me win Halliday’s contest.

Aech and Shoto were there, too, and we all spent the next seven days as Og’s honored guests, getting to know one another in person. After everything the four of us had been through together inside the OASIS, we already shared a strong bond. But the time we spent together in the real world that week transformed us into a family—albeit a highly dysfunctional one.

That was also the week Samantha and I fell in love.

Before we met in the Earl, I’d already convinced myself that I’d fallen in love with her inside the OASIS. And in my own naïve, adolescent way maybe I had. But when the two of us finally began to spend time together in reality, I fell in love with her all over again. And I fell much harder, much faster the second time, because our connection was now physical as well as psychological, the way nature originally intended.

And this time, she fell in love with me too.

Right before she kissed me for the first time, she told me I was her best friend, and her favorite person. So I think she’d already started to fall in love with me inside the OASIS too. But unlike me, she’d been smart enough not to trust or act on those feelings until the filter of our avatars had been removed and we finally met in reality.

“You can’t know if you’re in love with someone if you’ve never actually touched them,” she told me. And as usual, she was right. Once she and I started touching each other, we both found it difficult to stop.

We lost our virginity to each other three days after that first kiss. Then we spent the rest of that week sneaking off to make the beast with two backs at every opportunity. Like Depeche Mode, we just couldn’t get enough.

Og’s estate was designed to resemble Rivendell from the Lord of the Rings films and, like its fictional counterpart, it was nestled in a deep valley, so the acoustics of the place caused loud sounds to carry a long distance and echo off the adjacent mountain walls. But our friends and our host generously pretended not to hear all of the noise we must have made.

I’d never experienced such dizzying happiness and euphoria. And I’d never felt so desired and so loved. When she put her arms around me, I never wanted her to let go.

One night, we decided that “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls was our song, and then we listened to it over and over again, for hours, while we talked or made love. Now I couldn’t stand to hear that song anymore. I had it filtered out in my OASIS settings, to ensure that I never heard it again.

Aech, Shoto, Samantha, and I also spent that week answering an endless barrage of questions from the media, giving statements to various law-enforcement officials, and signing a mountain of paperwork for the lawyers managing Halliday’s estate, who were now tasked with dividing it equally among the four of us.

We all grew extremely fond of Ogden Morrow during our brief stay at his home. He was the father figure none of us had ever had, and we were all so grateful for his help during and after the contest that we decided to make him an honorary member of the High Five. He graciously accepted. (And since there were now only four of us, Og’s induction into the High Five also prevented our nickname from becoming a misnomer.)