Ready Player Two

As my avatar rematerialized, my vision 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:

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called “life”…

But I’m here to tell you, there’s something else—the Afterworld!

As soon as he said “The Afterworld!” there was a deafening crash of thunder that shook my bones, and a second later, tines of purple lightning arced across the sky. Then the rolling purple clouds parted for a moment, revealing a cherry-shaped moon (complete with stem), sitting high in the eastern sky.

I turned to look in the opposite direction and realized that I could also see the sun, hanging motionless just above the western horizon. I found myself wondering why the Afterworld had been designed this way—just before I heard the man himself explain that it was “a world of never-ending happiness, you can always see the sun, day or night.”

As the song continued to play, the gates of Paisley Park began to open before us. Once they’d opened up all the way, Aech turned to address me.

“OK,” she said. “Opening the gates activates all of the local quests, and since we’re clanned up, they should be activated for you now too. So let’s have another look at that Fourth Shard….”

I took the Fourth Shard out of my inventory and held it up. Prince’s Love Symbol was still etched into its surface, but as we watched, seven more symbols appeared on either side of it, along with a capital letter V.

At first, I thought the V was a Roman numeral for the number five, to indicate the Fifth Shard. But then, because of its size and placement relative to the other eight symbols, it occurred to me that it might also be an abbreviation for the word “versus.”

The first seven symbols to the left of the V looked like variations of the familiar Prince Love Symbol. But the eighth and final symbol was very different. I didn’t recognize it at all. It looked like a number 7 placed off-center inside a circular diagram of an orbiting electron. Or maybe the face of an old analog timepiece, with the number 7 forming the big and little hands of a clock at around 8:35.

As soon as Aech saw this string of strange symbols appear on the shard, her smile vanished and her eyes went wide.

“This isn’t a quest, Z,” she said, looking over at me. “It’s a fucking suicide mission!”

A split second after Aech dropped the F-bomb, we heard a loud buzzer sound, and then a large empty glass jar suddenly appeared, floating in the air beside her, with a label on it that said “Spud’s Swear Jar.”

Aech scowled at it, then she let out an annoyed sigh and dropped a single gold coin into the jar. When she did, it vanished. I decided not to ask. Instead, I pointed down at the row of symbols on the shard.

“Aech,” I said. “Do you know what these symbols mean?”

She nodded and took a deep breath.

“I think they mean that to obtain the Fifth Shard, we have to battle the Seven,” Aech replied, pointing to the seven love symbols on the left. “By joining forces with ‘The Original 7ven.’ ”

Shoto and I exchanged confused looks. Aech continued. “The Seven are a team of seven different NPC incarnations of the Purple One. Each from a different stage of his career. Each with godlike powers.”

“Have you done battle with any of them before?” Shoto asked, innocently enough.

“Of course not!” Aech replied, clearly offended by the question. “You’re asking for serious trouble if you attack any incarnation of His Royal Badness on the Afterworld. Facing down seven at once is suicide. Would you visit Mount Olympus or go to Asgard to pick a fight with all of the gods? Only non-fan, level-grinding tourists ever even attempt to do battle with the Seven, and every last one of them gets zeroed out as a reward for their insolence and hubris.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “But that was probably because none of them were true Prince fans. But you are. You know everything about him, and about this planet. Come on, Aech.” I pointed down at the symbols on the shard. “If we have to fight the Seven, where do we find them?”

Aech hesitated before answering. Then she sighed and nodded toward the southern horizon.

“There’s a temple out in the desert, seven miles south of the city,” she said. “The Temple of Seven. In the center of its courtyard is an arena, and if you set foot inside it, the seven incarnations of Prince are summoned there from all over the Afterworld to do battle with you.”

Aech took off running again, through the open gates of Paisley Park, once again motioning for us to follow her.

“Why are we going in there?” I yelled after Aech. “I thought you said the arena was in a desert outside of town?”

“We can’t go to the arena yet,” she replied. “First we gotta collect a few weapons. And power-ups. Like, a lot of them…”

“I’m already carrying plenty of weapons in my inventory,” Shoto said. “And so are you. We can loan Parzival anything he needs.”

Aech shook her head.

“Conventional weapons won’t work against his Royal Badness,” Aech said. “In any of his seven incarnations. Only locally forged sonic, percussive, and musical weapons can affect the Seven and their familiars. All of them are armed with deadly sonic weapons, too, and some of them are powerful artifacts that can deal enough damage to kill your avatar with one attack. That’s why we need to gear up before we attempt to face them, OK? And boy, do I love wasting precious seconds myself, because y’all don’t trust me to know what I’m doing!”

“We trust you, Aech!” I replied. “Lead on.”

She led us on, to the front entrance of Paisley Park. As soon as we reached it, Aech opened one of the glass front doors and waved us inside. We could hear the opening of the cheerful song “Paisley Park” emanating from within.

“First we need to go in here,” she said. “And by ‘we’ I mean you, Z. This is your quest to complete. But I’ll walk you through it, step by step. OK?”

“OK,” I said, reluctantly peering inside.

A split second later, I felt Aech’s foot hit me squarely in the small of my avatar’s back, propelling me forward, through the doorway, and into Paisley Park.

The moment we reached the foyer, Aech began leading, prodding, and dragging me forward, through the building’s mazelike interior. Shoto followed close on our heels as we sprinted up and down Paisley Park’s marble hallways and through its ornately carved wooden doors, many of which were marked with either a moon or a star.

Aech led me from one padded purple velvet room to the next, occasionally stopping to tell me to touch a specific object (or undergarment) to gain access to a secret passage, which would lead us to yet another padded purple velvet room. By following her instructions, I was able to collect five hidden pieces of a Love Symbol–shaped power cell, which Aech said we needed to repair a spaceship that was parked up on the roof. Luckily, she already knew exactly where and how to obtain each of the five pieces.

As we sprinted from the Candle Room to the Music Club to the Boudoir to the Virtual Video Room, a song called “Interactive” played on a continuous loop in every room. Aech explained that this was a song Prince wrote exclusively for a Myst-like videogame he released with the same title. In the game, players had to collect five pieces of the Prince Symbol hidden throughout Paisley Park, and this was a re-creation of that quest.

After we collected the first four pieces, Aech led me and Shoto down another carpeted corridor, into a large open room filled with museum exhibits. Dozens of Prince’s outfits and instruments were on display inside glass cases. Aech hurried past them, toward the opposite side of the room, without stopping to look at anything. Shoto and I did the same, following behind her single-file, to ensure that we only stepped where she did.

When she reached the door at the other side of the room, she threw it open—but then I saw something catch her eye. Parked off in the far corner of this room, surrounded by velvet ropes, was a purple motorcycle. I tapped an icon on my HUD to zoom in on the placard mounted on the wall behind it, which identified the bike as the 1981 Hondamatic that Prince rode in the movie Purple Rain.

“Wait here!” Aech shouted over her shoulder as she ran across the room and leaped over the velvet ropes. I thought she was going to hop on the bike and steal it, but instead she pulled a giant serrated Rambo knife out of her inventory and slashed the motorcycle’s tires, then stabbed a large hole in the side of its gas tank. When she rejoined us at the exit, I saw tears glinting in her eyes, just before she wiped them away with her hand.

“I had to immobilize the Hondamatic now, so that later on, when we face Purple Rain Prince in the arena, he won’t be riding it. And that might save our ass, because he won’t be able to use it to run down Morris. That bike is his Achilles’ heel!”

“Morris who?” Shoto and I asked as we chased after her.

Aech blurted out a reply, but she was too far away and moving too fast for us to make out any of it. She led us out of the museum and down another series of corridors, to another door. When she opened it, there was a spiral staircase on the other side, suspended in an endless starry void. It corkscrewed downward, through a field of stars, galaxies, and nebulae. We followed Aech up this long spiral staircase, until we arrived at a door labeled STUDIO. Inside, we passed through a large wood-paneled control room filled with giant mixing boards and recording equipment, and then on into the main recording studio. Aech sidestepped the piano, then hustled over to a red painting of two women hanging on the wall, which she slid aside to reveal a safe hidden behind it. She entered the combination from memory and opened it. The fifth and final piece of the Love Symbol power cell was inside.

Once all five pieces were reassembled, the power cell began to glow.

Aech led us back up the surreal spiral staircase, all the way to the top, into a large domed room. Just as she had promised, a large purple spaceship sat parked in the center of it. It resembled a giant thimble, with half a dozen capsule-shaped tanks bolted to the outside. Aech pressed a button on its exterior and a hatch opened in its perfectly smooth hull. The three of us crammed into the ship’s tiny purple velvet-lined cockpit, and Aech pointed out a Love Symbol–shaped indentation in the control panel in front of us. I placed the Love Symbol power cell inside it. The control panel lit up, and we could hear its engine powering on directly beneath our feet. At the same moment, the domed ceiling above us split apart like the segments of an orange and retracted to reveal a starry night sky, filled with billowing purple clouds.

Aech gave me a thumbs-up, then she took the ship’s crushed velvet–covered steering yoke in her hands and launched us into the sky. She circled over Paisley Park a few times, then turned the ship east, toward the distant Minneapolis skyline on the horizon.

Aech pulled up a map of the Afterworld on the ship’s navigation display. The planet wasn’t a globe, but it still rotated like one, spinning like a Love Symbol pendant suspended from an invisible chain in virtual space. Most of the surface was covered by a surreal, shrunken-down version of mid-’80s Minneapolis, Minnesota, but it had streets and locations from L.A., Paris, and several other locations scattered throughout. The map divided the city into different neighborhoods, like Big City, Erotic City, Crystal City, Beatown, and Uptown. Aech flew us directly into the heart of Downtown and set the ship down in the middle of a busy intersection, directly in front of a place called the Huntington Hotel.

Aech opened the ship’s outer hatch. But before we exited, she removed the Love Symbol power cell from its cradle and stashed it in her inventory, causing the whole ship to go dark and power down.

The street outside was crowded with NPC pedestrians and motorists, many of them cursing and honking at us for abandoning our purple UFO in the middle of a busy intersection. Aech ignored them and headed for a large, fortress-like black building on the opposite corner of the street. A curved sign over its front entrance read FIRST AVENUE, in large capital letters.

Aech pointed farther down the street, at a side entrance that led into the same building. It had a small awning over the door with 7TH ST. ENTRY printed on it. She told us to wait for her there, then she sprinted straight toward the club’s front entrance, like Lancelot storming a castle single-handed.

As she went inside, I pulled up her POV video feed on my HUD, giving me a glimpse of the interior. Aech was pushing her way through a dance floor that was packed with hundreds of NPCs of every race, creed, and social class. Teenagers and adults, packed in shoulder to shoulder, all getting their groove on. Then there was a flurry of movement, during which I couldn’t see much of anything. I heard what sounded like several rapid blasts from a plasma rifle. A few seconds later, Aech emerged carrying an all-white guitar, with gold knobs and tuning keys, and a gold Love Symbol painted on its body, just above the gold pickups. It was one of the most beautiful musical instruments I had ever seen.

“Ka-ching!” Aech said, holding it triumphantly over her head for a moment before she added it to her avatar’s inventory. “It shoots sonic blasts that are almost as powerful as the Purple Special! Now we just need a few more things, and we’ll be ready to head to the arena.” She took off running again, motioning for us to follow. “Come on! We’ve got an audition.”

Aech led us down the brightly lit tunnel of neon that was Seventh Street. After several blocks she made a left onto Hennepin Avenue. We followed that for a few blocks, then she continued to zigzag her way east, leading us down a labyrinth of numbered streets and dark alleyways, filled with broken bottles, busted fire escapes, and enough randomly generated burning barrels to make Donkey Kong envious.

Aech was very specific about each turn she took, like she was entering the combination to a safe. She led us right onto South Fifth Street, left onto Second Avenue South, right onto South Fourth Street, left onto Third Avenue South, and then right onto South Third Street.

As we weaved through this maze, I glanced down a side street and finally spotted something I recognized—probably because it wasn’t directly related to Prince. Hanging out in an alley were characters and settings from Break Street and Ghetto Blaster, two (very) old-school hip-hop videogames I’d played as a kid, using the Commodore 64 emulator on my old laptop. Someone had converted them into photorealistic mini-quests, and then anchored them here in the back alleys of the Afterworld. When I asked Aech what they were doing here, she smiled and shrugged.

“Nobody knows,” she said. “They’re a weird little Easter egg, left by one of this planet’s original designers.”

“Do you think Kira could’ve been the one responsible?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

Aech made a sharp right, leading us down another alley. But this particular alley seemed slightly darker and more ominous than the others, and Aech must’ve thought so too. Because I saw her take out a thermal detonator and arm it.

Aech held up her hand to bring us to a halt. Then she pointed out a pack of feral NPC gangbangers who were stepping out of the shadows up ahead of us. They were all wearing large gold crucifixes around their necks. The NPC name tags hovering above their heads on my HUD informed me that there were ten of them, and that their gang was known as the Disciples. Each one was toting a machine gun, and without saying a word, they opened fire on us. Shoto and I took cover behind burning barrels, but Aech remained out in the open, letting their bullets ricochet off her shield. Then she casually tossed her thermal detonator into their midst. There was a brilliant flash of light, and all ten of the Disciples were incinerated in a single blast.

Then Aech kept right on walking, fanning her hands in front of her face to clear the Disciple dust that now filled the air.

When we emerged from the other end of the alley, Aech quickened her pace, and Shoto and I did the same to keep up with her as she continued to bob, sidestep, and weave through the crowd and the surreal landscape around us, which appeared to be a living mash-up of all of Prince’s different album covers and music videos. The streets were lined with music venues of all types and sizes.

Like an overly knowledgeable tour guide, Aech explained how each of the venues we saw here on the Afterworld was a replica of a real club or concert hall or stadium where Prince had once performed, and that you could walk into any one of them, sit down in an audience of period-appropriate NPCs, and watch a re-creation of the gig or gigs that Prince had once performed there—detailed, immersive simulations, extrapolated from old photographs and archived video and audio recordings.

According to Aech, the best ones to check out were Prince playing in the middle of a rainstorm in Miami at Super Bowl XLI, and his midnight show on New Year’s Eve in 1998—when everyone finally got to party like it was 1999.

We also passed a replica of Mann’s Chinese Theatre, where, Aech explained, the Purple Rain movie premiere on July 24, 1984, was always happening, over and over, on a continuous loop. We saw Pee-wee Herman pull up in a miniature hot-rod, just a few cars ahead of Purple Rain Prince himself, arriving in a purple limo, dressed in a glittering purple tuxedo, solemnly holding a single purple rose with both hands as his bodyguard—a giant gray-bearded gentleman with a bleach-blond mullet and a striped zebra vest—cleared the great one’s path onto the red carpet.

Just a few doors down from Mann’s, we passed a replica of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where Aech told us it was always March 25, 1985, and the Fifty-Seventh Academy Awards were always being held, just in case any visitors wanted to watch Prince walk up onstage (with Wendy on one arm and Lisa on the other) to receive his Oscar statuette from Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.

Farther down the street, we passed a nightclub with a neon sign that said SUGAR WALLS. An NPC of Sheena Easton was strutting up and down the street out front, and when we spotted her, it triggered another needle drop, this time for the Prince song “U Got the Look.” Aech and I both paused to stare at her as she swaggered by, grooving and lip-syncing to her 1987 hit single.

“You know,” Shoto said, “it’s pretty obvious that Prince was plagiarizing those old Jordache Jeans commercials when he wrote this song.”

He laughed and began to mix up the song and the jeans jingle, using a set of holographic turntables that he produced from his inventory. “You’ve got the look!” he sang. “You’ve got the look. The Jordache look!”

Aech didn’t respond. She just quietly backed away from him several steps, pulling me with her. A split second later, a big, fat purple bolt of electricity descended from the sky and struck Shoto directly on the top of his head, knocking him flat on the pavement. The bolt also apparently caused enough hit points of damage to nearly kill his avatar—I saw his health bar indicator start flashing red for a few seconds, until he could cast a few healing spells on himself.

Aech walked over and helped him up off the ground.

“I warned you, didn’t I?” she said. “I told you not to blaspheme against the Purple One here? But did you listen to me?”

Shoto shook his head but didn’t say anything. A few seconds later, I realized that he couldn’t speak. The gods of the Afterworld had apparently muted his avatar as punishment for his blasphemy, in addition to the lightning bolt. I felt bad for him. When you were wearing an ONI headset, getting hit by lightning was no joke—it was almost as bad as getting tasered.

“Remember how much grief you gave me when you found out I don’t like watching scary movies?” Aech said, pointing an accusing finger at us. “Well, guess what. Now the shoe is on the other foot! So listen up, ass-heads, and listen good. Do not crack jokes at the Artist’s expense. In fact, just stop speaking altogether, and don’t do anything I don’t tell you to do. Just keep your trap shut and stick to my heels. Got it, Larry?” She glared at Shoto until he nodded. Then she turned to me. “What about you, Curly?”

“Yes, Moe,” I said, stepping out of her way. “We heard you. Lead on, O Wise One….”

Aech gave me an impolite shove, then she turned and led on. We rounded another corner, onto Hennepin Avenue, and immediately passed a small one-room schoolhouse. It caught my eye because it looked incredibly out of place in the middle of a crowded downtown Minneapolis street. Through one of the schoolhouse’s open windows, I could see and hear Prince dancing with a whole classroom full of Muppets while singing about having starfish and coffee for breakfast. One of the kid Muppets singing along with Prince bore a distinct resemblance to him.

I considered asking Aech if one of the Seven Princes we would have to face was “Muppet Prince,” but then I thought better of it. She still didn’t appear to be in the mood for jokes. Her face was stoic with concentration as she led us through the Afterworld’s surreal urban landscape, and her eyes were constantly scanning the area around us, looking for anything that would slow us down.

We passed the Gotham Art Museum, which I recognized as a set from Tim Burton’s Batman film from 1990, a movie for which Prince wrote the soundtrack—another of the few meager pieces of Prince-related knowledge I didn’t need to get from my HUD.

We rounded a corner, onto Washington Avenue, which took us along the border of Downtown and Erotic City. Just across it, glittering like the Golden Gate, there was a nightclub with a vulva-shaped entrance. The pulsing pink neon sign above it read A LOVE BIZARRE. Shoto took a few steps toward it, as if hypnotized, but Aech pulled him back, shaking her head.

“You’re a married man, Shoto,” Aech said. “And we definitely don’t have time to go in there right now….”

“I didn’t want to anyway!” Shoto replied, revealing that he was no longer muted.

Aech swiveled her head 180 degrees to ogle an NPC of Sheila E in a tight-blue dress that had just emerged from the club. She sauntered right up to the Erotic City border and beckoned us to cross it and join her on the other side.

Aech looked tempted for a second. Then she shook it off and continued running. We followed her down the street, weaving our way through the oncoming crowd of NPCs in colorful costumes. One of them caused me to do a double take—a young black woman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Aech when I’d first met her. When I pointed Aech’s NPC doppelgänger out to her, she smiled and nodded.

“That’s Boni Boyer,” she said. “She played keyboards for both Prince and Sheila E. And she was a total badass. She gave me hope. If a girl who looked like her could wind up performing with Prince, I figured there might still be a chance for me.”

“And look at you now,” I said.

“Running for my life inside a computer simulation that I willingly plugged my brain into?” she said.

“No, fool!” I said. “I meant that now you’ve become an inspiration too.”

She grinned her giant grin at me. “I know what you meant, Z,” she said. “Thanks.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she stopped walking and turned to face me.

“What you were going through on Halcydonia…I get it now,” she said. She motioned at our surroundings. “The Prince records and videotapes I inherited from my dad when he moved out, they were the only things he left behind. Besides me, I guess.” She shrugged. “Growing up knowing he’d been such a huge Prince fan always made me wish he’d stuck around. I figured he probably would’ve been OK with my sexuality. Or at least more accepting of it than my mother.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. Neither did Shoto.

About a year after we won Halliday’s contest, I’d asked Aech if she ever thought about trying to get back in touch with her mother. Aech told me her mother, Marie, had already come looking for her, as soon as she learned that her estranged lesbian daughter had become one of the world’s wealthiest and most famous people. Apparently that prompted Marie to abruptly change her homophobic tune and before long she showed up on Aech’s doorstep.

Aech didn’t let her mother come inside. Instead, she reached out and pressed her thumb to Marie’s phone, and transferred her a million dollars.

Then, before Marie even had a chance to thank her, Aech threw her mother’s own words back at her.

“Your choices have made me ashamed of you,” Aech told her. “Now, leave me be. I never want to see you again.”

Then she slammed the door in her mother’s face, and told her security guards never to let her on the property again.

“You know what really sucks, Z?” Aech asked me as we continued to walk down Washington Avenue.

“No, Aech,” I replied. “What really sucks?”

“Later in life, after he became a Jehovah’s Witness, Prince came out as anti-gay,” she said. “He believed that God didn’t approve of homosexuality, so he couldn’t either. Can you believe that, Z?” She shook her head. “For decades he was an icon and a role model to generations of sexually confused kids and adults. He spoke for us, through his lyrics: ‘I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I am something that you’ll never understand.’ ”

She started to get choked up and had to pause for a few seconds to collect herself.

“Then, one day,” she went on, “Prince suddenly changes his mind, and says, ‘No, no. I was wrong all along. You really should hate yourself for being gay, because God says it’s a sin for you to be the person He made you to be….’ ”

She shook her head. “It’s stupid. Why should I care if some old rock star gets religion?”

“It makes total sense, Aech,” I said after a moment. “First your mom rejects you. And then Prince—who was like a surrogate for your dad—he rejected you too.”

She nodded. Then she smiled. “Yeah, but you didn’t reject me. Even though I was catfishing you for all those years.”

I smiled back at her. “Of course not,” I replied. “I fucking love you. You’re my best friend. You’re part of my chosen family, which is the only kind that matters. Right?”

She smiled and nodded again, and she was about to respond when she suddenly came to a halt on the sidewalk.

“Quick!” she said, pointing toward some sort of clothing thrift store on the street corner directly in front of us. “We need to stop in there! Hurry!”

The sign above the entrance said MR. MCGEE’S FIVE-AND-DIME. I ran over and tried to open the front door, but it wouldn’t budge.

“No, not that way!” Aech shouted. “Around back!”

Shoto and I followed her around back, and this triggered another needle drop—“Raspberry Beret.” When we got to the rear of the store, Aech was holding open a back door, with a sign on the inside that said Out.

“You can only get in through the Out door,” she explained, waving us inside.

I let out a weary sigh. Then I checked my ONI usage countdown. I now had just one hour and forty-four minutes remaining.

“Is all of this absolutely necessary, Aech?” I asked.

“Yes!” Aech replied, pushing me through the door. “Now, keep moving!”