I ignored her, trying to hold on to my train of thought. “I think they decided to change the ending of the movie after some poor test screenings—”
As if on cue, Art3mis appeared next to us.
“Speak of the devil and the devil appears!” Aech said, greeting her with a fist bump. “You make it somewhere safe, Arty?”
Arty nodded, then pressed her index finger to her lips for a moment.
“Sorry I was gone so long,” she said. “Looks like I missed a wardrobe change.”
She grinned, admiring our old-school gunter attire. Then she snapped her fingers and spun around in a circle. Her avatar’s outfit was replaced by the scaled gunmetal-blue armor she’d worn during the contest, along with her twin blaster pistols in their low-slung quickdraw holsters, and a long, curved Elven sword in an ornate Mithril scabbard was now strapped to her back. She’d even donned her fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves.
Seeing her dressed like that again brought back a flood of old feelings and long-suppressed memories. They left me feeling momentarily lightheaded. And weak-hearted.
“There’s our girl, back in uniform!” Aech said as they gave each other a double high five.
“Bravo, team!” she said. “I can’t believe you guys already found the Second Shard. That was wicked fast!”
“Yes, it was,” Shoto said. “Because I held Z’s hand, all the way through it—”
“While I held his other hand,” Aech added, laughing. “And now that Arty has rejoined our posse, too, we will be un-fucking-stoppable. The Siren’s Soul shall be ours, my friends!”
Art3mis and Shoto both let out a cheer in agreement. I raised my right fist halfheartedly, then cleared my throat.
“Not to cut the celebration short,” I said. “But I think I may have figured out what the Siren’s Soul is, and why Og refused to give it to Anorak.”
Their smiles faded as all three of them turned to look at me expectantly.
“OK,” I said. “First, let me ask you a question. Why do you think Halliday called it the ‘Siren’s Soul’？”
“Because Kira named her D&D character Leucosia,” Shoto replied. “After one of the Sirens in Greek mythology.”
“Correct,” I said. “So if Kira is the ‘Siren,’ and the Seven Shards are ‘fragments’ of her ‘Soul,’ what does Anorak assume will happen when we put those pieces back together? When we ‘once again make the Siren whole’？”
Art3mis looked back over at me.
“Holy shit, Wade,” she muttered. “You don’t think…？”
I nodded.
“Anorak doesn’t think that the Siren’s Soul is a magical artifact named after Kira,” I said. “He believes it is her. An AI copy of Kira. Just like Anorak is a copy of Halliday.”
Art3mis didn’t respond, but she looked horrified by the thought.
“Come on, Z,” Aech said. “That’s impossible.”
“I thought so too,” I replied. “But there’s no other explanation for what I’ve been experiencing.”
Art3mis furrowed her brow.
“What do you mean?” she asked, leaning forward. “What, exactly, have you ‘been experiencing’？”
I told them about the flashbacks, and filled Art3mis in on the battle she’d just missed.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Art3mis muttered, shaking her head. “The first two challenges required you to possess detailed knowledge of the Smiths and Ninja Princess?”
I nodded. “Neither of those things was ever mentioned once in Anorak’s Almanac,” I said. “And those two flashbacks I experienced? They felt like ONI recordings of real moments. They were way too detailed to be simulations.”
“How can you be sure of that?” Art3mis asked. “Anything could be simulated convincingly for a few seconds.”
Aech shook her head.
“No way, Arty,” she said. “You don’t know what ONI playback is like. You can almost always tell the difference. Besides, James Donovan Halliday was a brilliant videogame designer and programmer. But he didn’t know anything about women—especially Kira. There’s no way he could’ve convincingly recreated one of her memories, from her perspective. He was a self-obsessed sociopath, incapable of feeling empathy for anyone else. Especially Kira…”
I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from leaping to Halliday’s defense. The man had been far from perfect, but he’d given us our entire world. “Sociopath” didn’t just seem harsh, but downright blasphemous.