Ready Player Two

Og looked like he was around 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.”

Og stared at him for a moment in disbelief while Halliday kept his eyes on the carpet. Og gave me an embarrassed smile, then turned back to Halliday.

“Hold on just a few minutes,” Og said. “Or go wait by my car until I’m ready to leave. Or—” He fished a crumpled dollar bill out of the front pocket of his acid-washed jeans. “It’s too wrinkled for the token machine, but they’ll change it at the counter.”

Og tossed the bill in Halliday’s general direction and turned back to Kira without waiting for him to reply. The money hit him in the chest and then silently fell to the floor.

“No!” Halliday shouted, suddenly furious, stomping his right foot down like a toddler preparing to throw a tantrum. When his shoe made contact with the ground, Og and all of the other NPCs vanished, leaving me alone with the seventeen-year-old James Halliday.

And in the same instant, our surroundings changed too.

The Happytime Pizza game room was gone, replaced by a throne room that looked an awful lot like a live-action version of the 8-bit one in the final stage of Ninja Princess. The teenage Halliday morphed into the masked, black-clad ninja Kazamaru, who to my eyes looked exactly like Shô Kosugi in Revenge of the Ninja back in 1983.

I glanced down at my avatar and saw that my own appearance had changed too. I still appeared to be a girl, but now I was dressed in a flowing tunic made of red silk, with gold piping and a Chinese dragon stitched onto each sleeve.

I was also holding a sword in my right hand, and in its mirrored surface I could see that I was no longer wearing Kira Underwood’s face. My avatar had changed into a live-action representation of Princess Kurumi—and the creator of this simulation had chosen to make me look exactly like Elsa Yeung in Challenge of the Lady Ninja, also from 1983.

“ ‘Reclaim her castle and face her imposter,’ ” Shoto recited. “This is it! Kick his ass, Princess!”

I nodded, then lunged forward and did as Shoto instructed—I kicked Kazamaru’s ass.

Thankfully, the mechanics of ONI-based combat were more or less identical to old-school haptic-rig combat. You didn’t have to physically perform any of your avatar’s complex special moves and powered attacks yourself unless you wanted to. Instead, you could use a simple hand gesture or voice command to make your avatar execute a move or an attack. The only difference was, when you were using an ONI, you could feel your avatar’s body movements as it automatically carried out these actions, so for a few seconds, it felt like you were moving on autopilot.

I was prepared for a brutal fight, but whoever had programmed this challenge had made Princess Kurumi a lot tougher than her knockoff male counterpart, who barely put up a fight. He only managed to land one or two hits before I knocked his life-meter down to nothing, with a steady barrage of throwing knives.

When I reduced his life bar to just 1 percent, the words FINISH HIM appeared floating in the air between us for a moment. When they vanished, I dispatched Kazamaru with one final roundhouse kick to the head. The last sliver of his life bar turned red—but he didn’t die. Instead, the manly, black-clad ninja master abruptly fell to his knees and began to cry, then vanished in a cloud of smoke a few seconds later.

When it dissipated, I saw the Second Shard floating there in front of me.

I reached for it, wondering if I was about to experience another “flashback.” And as my fingers wrapped around it…

I was back inside the body of seventeen-year-old Kira Underwood, and now teenage Ogden Morrow was standing in front of me, holding my hands in his. It was dark, and we were standing on a grassy hill bathed in moonlight, overlooking the tiny Middletown skyline in the distance. Og was placing a silver necklace in my hands—the same necklace from Kira’s jewelry box that had transformed into the First Shard—just as he whispered the words “I love you,” for what I knew must be the very first time.

Og had written about this moment in his autobiography, too, I realized. But he hadn’t described it in any detail, or given the time and place it occurred.

I felt my body starting to tremble as Kira reacted to what her future husband had just told her….

…And then I was back inside my own avatar’s skin. I was back on Kodama, standing next to Aech and Shoto in front of the Ninja Princess portal. It looked as though my avatar had just been ejected from it. When I looked down, I saw the Second Shard lying in my open palm. It was another multifaceted blue crystal, nearly identical to the first one in size and appearance.

Shoto and Aech both threw their arms around me. “You did it!”

“No,” I said. “We did it. I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

I held out both of my fists and they each bumped one of them and silently nodded.

“That final challenge was insane, right?” Shoto said. “I mean, why would Halliday want you to kill the teenage version of himself?”

“That’s gotta be some serious self-hatred happening there,” Aech said. “Maybe he finally realized what a dick he was to Kira, and to Og?”

I couldn’t focus on what they were saying. I was still reeling from the flashback I’d just experienced. Another of Kira Underwood’s private memories, rendered with a detail and intensity that should’ve been impossible. Just what in the name of Crom was going on here?

I didn’t have time to stop and ponder the possibilities. We had shards to collect and absolutely no time to spare.

I glanced down at the Second Shard in my hand, then held it out to Aech and Shoto, so we could examine it together. When I turned it over in my palm, we saw that this shard had an inscription carved into its glassy surface just like the first one. Aech read it aloud.

“ ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending.’ ”

“ ‘Andie’s first fate,’ ” Shoto repeated. “Wasn’t Andie the name of Kerri Green’s character in The Goonies?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Her name was spelled with a y at the end. Not an i-e.”

“A-N-D-I-E,” Aech said, shutting her eyes, as if to better picture the name. “Like Andie MacDowell?” She turned to Shoto and gripped his shoulder. “Oh shit! Maybe the next shard is on the Planet Punxsutawney? I used to go there every Groundhog Day to—”

“Hold on!” Shoto said, cutting her off. He’d opened a browser window in front of his avatar and was reading from it. “Andie MacDowell also starred in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984. But the director hired Glenn Close to loop all of her dialogue, because he didn’t like her Southern accent! Do you think that could be what ‘recast the foul, restore his ending’ is a reference to? Maybe that film had an alternate ending….”

“Wait, are we talking about the movie where Connor MacLeod plays Tarzan?” Aech said. “Directed by the cat who made Chariots of Fire?”

“That’s the one!” he said. “There must be a Flicksync devoted to it somewhere….” He pulled up his OASIS atlas in another window. “Maybe on Lambert? Or one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs–themed planets in Sector Twenty? If we—”

“Guys!” I shouted, signaling a time-out with my hands. “Come on. You’re really reaching. Do you seriously believe the Third Shard’s hiding place is somehow connected to Andie MacDowell? Or Tarzan? Neither one is mentioned in the Almanac. Or in any of the books I’ve read about Kira’s life.”

Aech shrugged. “She could’ve been an Andie MacDowell fanatic, for all we know,” she replied. “I never did that much research into Kira’s interests. According to Og, Halliday never bothered to get to know who Kira really was.”

“He must have known her a lot better than he let on,” I said, thinking about the shard flashbacks. They had both felt like Recs, not Sims. The differences were subtle, but no Sim—at least not as far as I’d experienced, and I’d tried thousands—had just the mix of strangeness, uncertainty, and intensity that came from a recording of a real-life moment.

But they couldn’t be recordings. Because there definitely hadn’t been any ONI headsets lying around in Middletown, Ohio, in the fall of 1988.

So what had I just experienced?

I was still mulling that over when my brain produced a match for the name Andie in the jumbled recesses of my memory. I opened a browser window in the air in front of me and did a quick Web search to make sure my memory was correct.

“Andie Walsh!” I shouted. “With an i-e! That was the name of Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink.”

Aech and Shoto both groaned and rolled their eyes. Neither was the world’s biggest John Hughes fan, but they knew that Art3mis and I both adored his films. During Halliday’s contest, Art3mis had published dozens of essays about his movies on her blog, dissecting each of them in loving detail, scene by scene. None of her encyclopedic knowledge had proven useful in finding Halliday’s egg, but she might get her chance to put it to use now. Unless I managed to find the shard quickly, before she even got back online. That would save time—and probably also impress the hell out of her.

“Pretty in Pink would make sense,” I said. “Kira and Og were both huge John Hughes fans. And they helped code some of the first quests on Shermer.”

“You think we have to go to Shermer next?” Aech asked. “Arty will lose her mind!”

“OK,” Shoto said, rereading the clue. “If it’s Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink, then what does ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending’ mean?”

“Pretty in Pink originally had a different ending,” I replied. “One where Andie ended up with Duckie, instead of with Blane. Arty—Samantha—posted an essay about it on Arty’s Missives a long time ago.”

“Of course she did,” Aech said. “She’s an even bigger dork than you.”

I ignored her, trying to hold on to my train of thought. “I think they decided to change the ending of the movie after some poor test screenings—”

As if on cue, Art3mis appeared next to us.

“Speak of the devil and the devil appears!” Aech said, greeting her with a fist bump. “You make it somewhere safe, Arty?”

Arty nodded, then pressed her index finger to her lips for a moment.

“Sorry I was gone so long,” she said. “Looks like I missed a wardrobe change.”

She grinned, admiring our old-school gunter attire. Then she snapped her fingers and spun around in a circle. Her avatar’s outfit was replaced by the scaled gunmetal-blue armor she’d worn during the contest, along with her twin blaster pistols in their low-slung quickdraw holsters, and a long, curved Elven sword in an ornate Mithril scabbard was now strapped to her back. She’d even donned her fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves.

Seeing her dressed like that again brought back a flood of old feelings and long-suppressed memories. They left me feeling momentarily lightheaded. And weak-hearted.

“There’s our girl, back in uniform!” Aech said as they gave each other a double high five.

“Bravo, team!” she said. “I can’t believe you guys already found the Second Shard. That was wicked fast!”

“Yes, it was,” Shoto said. “Because I held Z’s hand, all the way through it—”

“While I held his other hand,” Aech added, laughing. “And now that Arty has rejoined our posse, too, we will be un-fucking-stoppable. The Siren’s Soul shall be ours, my friends!”

Art3mis and Shoto both let out a cheer in agreement. I raised my right fist halfheartedly, then cleared my throat.

“Not to cut the celebration short,” I said. “But I think I may have figured out what the Siren’s Soul is, and why Og refused to give it to Anorak.”

Their smiles faded as all three of them turned to look at me expectantly.

“OK,” I said. “First, let me ask you a question. Why do you think Halliday called it the ‘Siren’s Soul’?”

“Because Kira named her D&D character Leucosia,” Shoto replied. “After one of the Sirens in Greek mythology.”

“Correct,” I said. “So if Kira is the ‘Siren,’ and the Seven Shards are ‘fragments’ of her ‘Soul,’ what does Anorak assume will happen when we put those pieces back together? When we ‘once again make the Siren whole’?”

Art3mis looked back over at me.

“Holy shit, Wade,” she muttered. “You don’t think…?”

I nodded.

“Anorak doesn’t think that the Siren’s Soul is a magical artifact named after Kira,” I said. “He believes it is her. An AI copy of Kira. Just like Anorak is a copy of Halliday.”

Art3mis didn’t respond, but she looked horrified by the thought.

“Come on, Z,” Aech said. “That’s impossible.”

“I thought so too,” I replied. “But there’s no other explanation for what I’ve been experiencing.”

Art3mis furrowed her brow.

“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning forward. “What, exactly, have you ‘been experiencing’?”

I told them about the flashbacks, and filled Art3mis in on the battle she’d just missed.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Art3mis muttered, shaking her head. “The first two challenges required you to possess detailed knowledge of the Smiths and Ninja Princess?”

I nodded. “Neither of those things was ever mentioned once in Anorak’s Almanac,” I said. “And those two flashbacks I experienced? They felt like ONI recordings of real moments. They were way too detailed to be simulations.”

“How can you be sure of that?” Art3mis asked. “Anything could be simulated convincingly for a few seconds.”

Aech shook her head.

“No way, Arty,” she said. “You don’t know what ONI playback is like. You can almost always tell the difference. Besides, James Donovan Halliday was a brilliant videogame designer and programmer. But he didn’t know anything about women—especially Kira. There’s no way he could’ve convincingly re-created one of her memories, from her perspective. He was a self-obsessed sociopath, incapable of feeling empathy for anyone else. Especially Kira…”

I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from leaping to Halliday’s defense. The man had been far from perfect, but he’d given us our entire world. “Sociopath” didn’t just seem harsh, but downright blasphemous.

“But what you’re suggesting can’t be possible, Z,” Shoto said. “The OASIS Neural Interface didn’t exist back in the ’80s, when Kira was a teenager. GSS didn’t build the first fully functional ONI prototype headset until 2036—two years after Kira Morrow’s death.”

“I know,” I replied. “It doesn’t jibe with the official timeline. But no one was better at keeping secrets than Halliday….” I took a deep breath. “I think we need to consider the possibility that somehow, before Kira Morrow died, Halliday made a copy of her consciousness. Using the same technology he used to copy his own mind and create Anorak.”

All three of them stared at me in horrified silence. Then Art3mis shook her head.

“Kira never would’ve allowed Halliday to do that,” she said. “Og wouldn’t have either.”

“So maybe Halliday figured out a way to scan Kira without her or Og realizing it.” I swallowed as I realized what I was about to say. “Halliday was obsessed. He knew he could never have the real Kira, so he decided to make a copy of her for himself.”

“Hold up,” Aech interjected. “Kira was madly in love with Og. So why would he want to make a copy of her? If it was a true copy, it wouldn’t love him either.”

“I know,” I said. “But the copy would also never grow old or die,” I added. “Maybe Halliday thought he could convince it—her—to fall in love with him, over time….”

“Jesus,” Aech muttered, shaking her head. “If you’re right…this is some extremely twisted shit we’ve gotten ourselves mixed up in, fam.”

I nodded. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach too. Like I’d just learned that my childhood idol and hero had been a serial killer in his spare time.

Which was all the more reason why we couldn’t just give Anorak the Siren’s Soul and trust him to keep his word.

But the Siren’s Soul appeared to be his one weakness. Once we had it, maybe we could use it to barter with him. Or lure him into a trap.

“We’ve still got five more shards to find,” I said. “We gotta keep moving.”

“Do we know where we’re heading?” Art3mis asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, beaming with pride. “We sure do.”

“And it’s a good thing you’re here, Arty,” Shoto added. “Because we’re gonna need your help with this one.”

Art3mis’s smile vanished. She replaced it with a fiercely competitive scowl that I recognized from the days of Halliday’s contest. She called this “putting her game face on.”

“So,” she said, turning to face me. “Lay it on me, ace. Where are we headed?”

“Your old stomping grounds,” I replied. “Shermer, Illinois.”