Indy’s theme music began to play as I jogged down the corridor, and a variety of obstacles and enemies started to appear in front of me, forcing me to either dodge them or attack them with my imaginary whip. I earned points for every obstacle I avoided and for every enemy I vanquished. I could also earn bonus points for keeping my heart rate up, and for freeing the captive children being used as slave labor in the temple from their holding cells, which were scattered along my path. I ran a total of five miles like this, sprinting from one end of my house to the other and back again. And I managed to beat my previous high score.
I ended the game program and took off my AR goggles, then I toweled off and drank some water before heading to my workout room. On the way there, I stopped by the garage to admire my car collection. Of all my daily rituals, it was the one that never failed to make me smile.
The estate’s enormous garage now contained four classic movie car replicas—the same four movie cars that had inspired my avatar’s OASIS mash-up vehicle, ECTO-88. I owned screen-accurate replicas of Doc Brown’s 1982 DeLorean DMC-12 time machine （pre–hover conversion）; the Ghostbusters’ 1959 Cadillac hearse Ectomobile, Ecto-1; the black 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am Knight Industries 2000, KITT （with Super-Pursuit Mode）; and finally, sitting down at the far end, a replica of Dr. Buckaroo Banzai’s matter-penetrating Jet Car, built from a heavily modified 1982 Ford F-series pickup truck, with air scoops from a DC-3 transport plane bolted onto its frame, along with a World War II German fighter plane cockpit, a turbine-powered jet engine, and parachute packs for rapid deceleration.
I had never driven any of these cars. I just came out to the garage to admire them. Sometimes I sat inside them with all of the screens and control panels lit up while I listened to old movie soundtracks and brainstormed ideas for the next chapter in my ongoing ECTO-88 film series—a project I’d started working on after my therapist suggested that I might benefit from having a creative outlet.
GSS already owned the media companies that owned the movie studios that held the rights to Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Knight Rider, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, and by paying hefty licensing fees to the estates of Christopher Lloyd, David Hasselhoff, Peter Weller, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray, I was able to cast computer-generated FActors （facsimile actors） of each of them in my film. They were basically nonplayer characters with just enough artificial intelligence to take verbal directions after I placed them on my virtual movie sets inside GSS’s popular Cinemaster movie-creation software.
This allowed me to finally bring my longstanding fanboy dream to life: an epic cross-over film about Dr. Emmett Brown and Dr. Buckaroo Banzai teaming up with Knight Industries to create a unique interdimensional time vehicle for the Ghostbusters, who must use it to save all ten known dimensions from a fourfold cross-rip that could tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum.
I’d already written, produced, and directed two ECTO-88 films. They’d both done pretty well by today’s standards—getting people to pay for or sit through a movie was tough these days, with the reams of inexpensive ONI-net options out there—but the films didn’t make enough to cover my runaway production costs and all those special-effects sequences. I didn’t care what my homemade movies grossed, of course. All that mattered was the fulfillment I got out of making them, watching them, and letting other fans experience them. Now I was working on ECTO-88 Part III—the last chapter of my supremely nerdy trilogy.
I went over and said hello to KITT, and he wished me a good morning. Then Max appeared on one of his cockpit screens, and complimented KITT on his new onboard hard drive. KITT thanked him and the two of them began to discuss the hard drive’s specs, like two gearheads obsessing about engines. And they kept at it, even after I walked out of the garage.
Next it was time for weight training, in the spare dining room I’d converted into a personal gym. Max occasionally offered words of encouragement as I pumped iron, with some snarky commentary mixed in. He made for a pretty good personal trainer. But after a few minutes I muted him to watch another Peter Davison–era episode of Doctor Who. It had been one of Kira Morrow’s favorite shows, and Davison had been her third-favorite Doctor, after Jodie Whittaker and David Tennant.
Research, I reminded myself. You have to keep up with your research.
But I couldn’t seem to focus on the episode. All I could think about was the quarterly GSS co-owners meeting scheduled for later that day, because it meant I would be seeing Samantha for the first time since our last meeting, three months ago.