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 doppelg?nger 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.”