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 recreation of the gig or gigs that Prince had once performed there—detailed, immersive simulations, extrapolated from old photographs and archived video and audio recordings.