“But what you’re suggesting can’t be possible, Z,” Shoto said. “The OASIS Neural Interface didn’t exist back in the ’80s, when Kira was a teenager. GSS didn’t build the first fully functional ONI prototype headset until 2036—two years after Kira Morrow’s death.”
“I know,” I replied. “It doesn’t jibe with the official timeline. But no one was better at keeping secrets than Halliday…” I took a deep breath. “I think we need to consider the possibility that somehow, before Kira Morrow died, Halliday made a copy of her consciousness. Using the same technology he used to copy his own mind and create Anorak.”
All three of them stared at me in horrified silence. Then Art3mis shook her head.
“Kira never would’ve allowed Halliday to do that,” she said. “Og wouldn’t have either.”
“So maybe Halliday figured out a way to scan Kira without her or Og realizing it.” I swallowed as I realized what I was about to say. “Halliday was obsessed. He knew he could never have the real Kira, so he decided to make a copy of her for himself.”
“Hold up,” Aech interjected. “Kira was madly in love with Og. So why would he want to make a copy of her? If it was a true copy, it wouldn’t love him either.”
“I know,” I said. “But the copy would also never grow old or die,” I added. “Maybe Halliday thought he could convince it—her—to fall in love with him, over time…”
“Jesus,” Aech muttered, shaking her head. “If you’re right…this is some extremely twisted shit we’ve gotten ourselves mixed up in, fam.”
I nodded. I was starting to feel sick to my stomach too. Like I’d just learned that my childhood idol and hero had been a serial killer in his spare time.
Which was all the more reason why we couldn’t just give Anorak the Siren’s Soul and trust him to keep his word.
But the Siren’s Soul appeared to be his one weakness. Once we had it, maybe we could use it to barter with him. Or lure him into a trap.
“We’ve still got five more shards to find,” I said. “We gotta keep moving.”
“Do we know where we’re heading?” Art3mis asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, beaming with pride. “We sure do.”
“And it’s a good thing you’re here, Arty,” Shoto added. “Because we’re gonna need your help with this one.”
Art3mis’s smile vanished. She replaced it with a fiercely competitive scowl that I recognized from the days of Halliday’s contest. She called this “putting her game face on.”
“So,” she said, turning to face me. “Lay it on me, ace. Where are we headed?”
“Your old stomping grounds,” I replied. “Shermer, Illinois.”
Shermer was a medium-size planet near the center of Sector Sixteen. It was home to a lovingly detailed, decades-in-the-making OASIS recreation of Shermer, Illinois, the fictional Chicago suburb where the filmmaker John Hughes set many of the movies he wrote and/or directed over the course of his celebrated career. Samantha used to say that Shermer was Hughes’s “post-adolescent paracosm.” A private fantasy world that he created and populated with his imagination, adding to it throughout his life—his own suburban, Midwest equivalent of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
Using Hughes’s films as a reference, legions of fans had labored for decades to translate that private universe into an immersive interactive simulation here inside the OASIS. There was only one copy of the Shermer simulation, and it completely covered the planet’s vast surface area. The simulated suburb had a scaled-down replica of Lake Michigan along its northern and eastern borders, and a shrunken version of downtown Chicago bordering it to the west and the south, so all the ’80s Windy City landmarks featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could be incorporated in the simulation, too, including the Sears Tower, the stock exchange, Wrigley Field, and the Art Institute of Chicago. And out beyond the lake and the Chicago city limits, there was a ridiculously abbreviated version of the United States, so that the simulation could incorporate cities and locations from Hughes’s scripted Vacation and Home Alone films.
It tended to ruin the atmosphere and continuity of a simulation when avatars were teleporting in and out of it at random all the time. That was why some planets, like Shermer, had been created with a limited number of designated arrival and departure points. Outside those locations, no teleportation was permitted. So when I selected Shermer as my teleportation destination on my HUD, I was presented with a map of the planet’s designated arrival locations. Per Art3mis’s instruction, I selected a railroad stop on the western edge of town.