When we finished rematerializing on the planet surface, we found ourselves standing on a small train platform in front of a circular redbrick station house. There was a crowd of several dozen NPCs standing around us, all ’80s-era business-suit-clad men and women who were waiting for the morning train.
As we arrived, a song I recognized from my Hughes research began playing—the opening of Kirsty MacColl’s cover of “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby,” from the She’s Having a Baby soundtrack. The music seemed to emanate from nowhere, as if there were invisible speakers floating in the air all around us. This was an indication that we’d triggered a needle drop. These were music cues hard-coded into specific areas of the simulation. They began to play whenever an avatar walked over or passed through a predetermined location—sort of like stepping on a soundtrack landmine. On our previous visit here together, Art3mis had told me that Shermer had more needle drops per square kilometer than any other planet in the OASIS. （That time, we’d arrived inside the Shermer simulation’s replica of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, which was almost always snowed-in, year-round.）
As the song continued to play, a half-empty train pulled into the station behind us. When its doors slid open, the mob of commuters waiting on the platform around us began to pour into it. Art3mis motioned for us to follow her and took off in the other direction, pushing through the oncoming crowd of NPCs to reach the platform exit with Aech, Shoto, and me in tow.
As we cut through the adjacent parking lot, we passed two NPCs—a young man and woman—in the midst of a passionate kiss. When they came up for air, we could see that the young man was Kevin Bacon, dressed in a gray business suit, and that the young woman he’d been kissing was Elizabeth McGovern. I recognized them as Jake and Kristy Briggs, the two main characters in She’s Having a Baby, Hughes’s most autobiographical film. Jake kissed his wife goodbye one more time, then turned and sprinted off to make the train.
Across the street from the station, we passed the church where the wedding from Sixteen Candles took place. Just beyond it, I spotted a familiar neon billboard that said WELCOME TO SHERMER, ILLINOIS—ONE OF AMERICA’S TOWNS! POPULATION 31,286. But Art3mis led us in the opposite direction, onto Shermer Road, which led farther into town.
When the Shermer simulation was originally created in the early days of the OASIS, it had only incorporated locations and characters from four of John Hughes’s films: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Weird Science. Over the decades since, it had been updated and overhauled several times to include other Hughes classics like Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, She’s Having a Baby, Uncle Buck, Mr. Mom, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, The Great Outdoors, and the aforementioned Home Alone and Vacation flicks. And in recent years, fans had expanded it to cover even the most obscure corners of his filmography, with characters and locations reflecting everything from Curly Sue to Career Opportunities. So when you visited Shermer now, interactive recreations of all of these movies were constantly playing all around you. And the events depicted in those films played out over and over again simultaneously, day after day and week after week, on an endless loop.
I pulled up a map of the town, to pinpoint our location. Shermer had a set of railroad tracks running diagonally through its middle, dividing the town into two more-or-less equal halves, which were labeled RICH and POOR, and were color-coded red and blue respectively. The rich half of Shermer was the one that bordered the miniaturized version of Lake Michigan. The poor side was the one you had to drive through to get to the miniaturized version of downtown Chicago. The majority of Hughes’s films were shot in and around Chicago, and many of them were filmed on location in the suburb of Northbrook, where Hughes himself attended high school. （A few were shot in L.A., like Pretty in Pink, though its story was set in suburban Chicago.） The geographic continuity in Hughes’s films had made it possible for the planet’s designers to re-create all of them here, inside one contiguous, interconnected simulation.
Judging by the proximity of the sun to the eastern horizon, it was still pretty early in the morning. But that was one of the many disorienting things about Shermer. Different parts of the town were set to different times of day, as well as to different seasons of the year. It was always daytime in the winter on some streets, but two blocks away it might be nighttime in the early spring.
By now we’d walked a few blocks north of the tracks, into the rich side of town. Huge mansionlike homes lined both sides of the street, each with an immaculately manicured lawn and a circular driveway. Enormous oak and maple trees lined both sides of the street, their long, leafy branches stretching out over it, forming a green tunnel up ahead of us that seemed to go on forever. The sidewalks and side streets around us were deserted, except for a lonely paperboy making the morning rounds on his bike a few blocks farther down.