“Well?” Aech said.
I lowered my head in defeat and held out the shard so they could all see the symbol engraved on it. Then I closed my eyes and silently began to count to three. I only made it to one…
“Oh-my-fucking-God!” Aech cried. “No way! It can’t be!” She started to do a funky dance toward me, then she started to dance around me. “That’s Love Symbol #2, Z! It’s Prince!”
“Prince who?” Shoto asked.
“The Prince,” Aech said. “As in ‘the Artist Formerly Known as’？ The Prince of Funk! The High Priest of Pop! His Royal Badness. The Purple One!”
“Oh yeah,” Shoto said. “He’s the dude who changed his name to a Glyph of Warding back in the ’90s, right?”
Aech pointed a finger of warning at him, then smiled wide.
“We’re in luck, guys,” she said, still dancing in place. “My dad left me his entire collection of Prince’s music and films when he moved out. I grew up listening to them and watching them. I probably know more about Prince and his artistic output than any other human being in history.”
“I know,” I said. “Do you have any idea how many times you tried to make me watch Purple Rain with you?”
She stopped dancing and pointed an accusing finger at me. “And do you remember how many times you actually sat through the entire film with me? Nada. Never. Not once. And we both know why, don’t we? It was because Prince always made you feel a little sexually confused and uncomfortable, didn’t he?”
The old Wade would have denied this. But like I said, the ONI had broadened my horizons. Enough, at least, for me to recognize the truth about my adolescent self.
“OK, maybe that’s a little true,” I said, smiling. “Whenever I was watching old episodes of Friday Night Videos and ‘When Doves Cry’ came on, I always averted my eyes when he was getting up out of that bathtub. Every single time.” I placed my right hand over my heart. “Please accept my sincere apologies, Aech. I’m sorry I never let myself appreciate Prince’s genius.”
Aech closed her eyes and raised one palm to the sky like a gospel singer and shouted, “Finally! The truth!”
“So where do we need to go?” Shoto said. “I take it there’s a Prince planet somewhere?”
Aech scowled at him.
“Yes, fool,” Aech said. “There is an entire OASIS planet devoted to Prince, his life, his art, and his music. But we don’t call it ‘the Prince planet.’ Its name is an unpronounceable symbol. The symbol on that shard. But you can refer to it by its nickname, ‘The Afterworld.’ It began as a shrine created shortly after the Purple One’s death, during the first decade the OASIS was online. Kira Morrow was one of the fans who helped build it.”
Aech threw up a 3-D hologram of the Afterworld. It wasn’t a sphere, like most other OASIS planets. It was shaped exactly like the symbol etched into the Fourth Shard—what Aech had referred to as Love Symbol #2.
“It’s in Sector Seven, located right next to Beyoncé, Madonna, and Springsteen, in the superstar cluster,” Aech said. “The Afterworld’s surface is covered with a stylized recreation of downtown Minneapolis in the late 1980s, along with locations from Prince’s other movies and music videos. You can walk into a simulation of every club gig and concert he ever performed during his career. It’s a big place…It’s easy to get lost and wander around in circles there. And we don’t even know where to start looking for the shard…”
“Hopefully the shard will give us another clue once we get there,” I said.
Aech nodded.
“There’s no time like the present,” she said. “Ready to roll?”
I nodded and turned around to wave farewell to Queen Itsalot, who was once again reading to her baby-animal subjects. She waved back at me, and it occurred to me that I should ask her if she’d seen Ogden Morrow here earlier today. But no—Og had only collected the first three shards before he’d called it quits. Which was pretty strange, now that I thought about it. Og was one of Halcydonia’s creators. This should have been the easiest shard for him to obtain. And this also would have been an extremely easy place for him to hide clues about his location, since he had admin permissions on the whole planet, and total control of its NPCs, so he could’ve changed anything he wanted…
That was when it hit me. Maybe Og had left more clues for me here. I’d already seen them—the unauthorized, R-rated Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman NPCs. But what the hell was he trying to say? Like his high score on Ninja Princess, I just needed to figure out why he…