“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, 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 recreation 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.