I glanced down at the Second Shard in my hand, then held it out to Aech and Shoto, so we could examine it together. When I turned it over in my palm, we saw that this shard had an inscription carved into its glassy surface just like the first one. Aech read it aloud.
“？‘Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending.’？”
“？‘Andie’s first fate,’？” Shoto repeated. “Wasn’t Andie the name of Kerri Green’s character in The Goonies?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Her name was spelled with a y at the end. Not an i-e.”
“A-N-D-I-E,” Aech said, shutting her eyes, as if to better picture the name. “Like Andie MacDowell?” She turned to Shoto and gripped his shoulder. “Oh shit! Maybe the next shard is on the Planet Punxsutawney? I used to go there every Groundhog Day to—”
“Hold on!” Shoto said, cutting her off. He’d opened a browser window in front of his avatar and was reading from it. “Andie MacDowell also starred in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984. But the director hired Glenn Close to loop all of her dialogue, because he didn’t like her Southern accent! Do you think that could be what ‘recast the foul, restore his ending’ is a reference to? Maybe that film had an alternate ending…”
“Wait, are we talking about the movie where Connor MacLeod plays Tarzan?” Aech said. “Directed by the cat who made Chariots of Fire?”
“That’s the one!” he said. “There must be a Flicksync devoted to it somewhere…” He pulled up his OASIS atlas in another window. “Maybe on Lambert? Or one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs–themed planets in Sector Twenty? If we—”
“Guys!” I shouted, signaling a time-out with my hands. “Come on. You’re really reaching. Do you seriously believe the Third Shard’s hiding place is somehow connected to Andie MacDowell? Or Tarzan? Neither one is mentioned in the Almanac. Or in any of the books I’ve read about Kira’s life.”
Aech shrugged. “She could’ve been an Andie MacDowell fanatic, for all we know,” she replied. “I never did that much research into Kira’s interests. According to Og, Halliday never bothered to get to know who Kira really was.”
“He must have known her a lot better than he let on,” I said, thinking about the shard flashbacks. They had both felt like Recs, not Sims. The differences were subtle, but no Sim—at least not as far as I’d experienced, and I’d tried thousands—had just the mix of strangeness, uncertainty, and intensity that came from a recording of a real-life moment.
But they couldn’t be recordings. Because there definitely hadn’t been any ONI headsets lying around in Middletown, Ohio, in the fall of 1988.
So what had I just experienced?
I was still mulling that over when my brain produced a match for the name Andie in the jumbled recesses of my memory. I opened a browser window in the air in front of me and did a quick Web search to make sure my memory was correct.
“Andie Walsh!” I shouted. “With an i-e! That was the name of Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink.”
Aech and Shoto both groaned and rolled their eyes. Neither was the world’s biggest John Hughes fan, but they knew that Art3mis and I both adored his films. During Halliday’s contest, Art3mis had published dozens of essays about his movies on her blog, dissecting each of them in loving detail, scene by scene. None of her encyclopedic knowledge had proven useful in finding Halliday’s egg, but she might get her chance to put it to use now. Unless I managed to find the shard quickly, before she even got back online. That would save time—and probably also impress the hell out of her.
“Pretty in Pink would make sense,” I said. “Kira and Og were both huge John Hughes fans. And they helped code some of the first quests on Shermer.”
“You think we have to go to Shermer next?” Aech asked. “Arty will lose her mind!”
“OK,” Shoto said, rereading the clue. “If it’s Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink, then what does ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending’ mean?”
“Pretty in Pink originally had a different ending,” I replied. “One where Andie ended up with Duckie, instead of with Blane. Arty—Samantha—posted an essay about it on Arty’s Missives a long time ago.”
“Of course she did,” Aech said. “She’s an even bigger dork than you.”