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 recreation 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.