By this point we had all started shouting at her to reconsider, as if she could hear us. Samantha stepped away from the applicator, now wearing the parachute on her back. She pulled on a pair of goggles. Then she went to the emergency exit and pulled down on the manual-release handle with all of her weight, briefly hanging from it before it finally gave. The door detached itself from the fuselage and flew off, depressurizing the cabin and sucking everything outside through the opening.
Including Samantha.
Her vidfeed became a spinning whorl of blue, then stabilized as she went into a back-first free fall. We caught a glimpse of the jet above her, and could just make out that it was still connected to the much larger refueling drone by its automated umbilical.
Faisal cycled through the cameras on board the jet itself, pulling up a downward-facing external camera mounted on its underside. It gave us a perfectly centered shot of Samantha, just in time to see her pull the ripcord. Her parachute unfurled and opened, revealing the Art3mis Foundation logo printed on top of it—the one where the adjacent letter t and number 3 in her name resembled an armored woman in profile, drawing back on a futuristic hunting bow.
“Holy shit, Arty!” Aech said, amid a fit of anxious laughter. “I can’t believe she just did that. Girl got a death wish!”
Faisal and Shoto burst into applause. I joined in, trying to ignore my fear. Was outsmarting Anorak really going to be so easy?
That was when the view from the autojet’s video feed veered off to the side. The plane was changing course. Its camera was now showing only empty sky. On the feed from Samantha’s phone, still clipped to her chest, we had a POV shot of her feet, which she appeared to be kicking up like a girl on an amusement park ride, as her parachute floated downward.
Her hands rose in front of her chest and she raised both middle fingers in the direction of the jet. Even through the wind, we could just make it out when she shouted, “Now you can hold that empty plane hostage, Anorak!”
She dropped her hands fast, though. Probably because like us, she had just noticed that her jet was still banking around and down into a dive—one that put it on a collision course with her falling parachute.
“Oh shit!” I shouted. “He’s going to ram her!”
We watched helplessly as the jet rapidly closed the distance between them. As the jet’s nose filled her POV, we saw a jolt on Samantha’s feed—she had cut her primary chute loose and was in free fall, just in time for the jet to soar by harmlessly above her. She continued to dive for several more seconds, even though the warning lights on her altimeter were already flashing red.
Finally, she pulled her reserve chute and slowed her rapid descent. She came in, still falling far too fast, landing in a small, heavily wooded park just a few miles east of downtown, and we watched as the chute dragged through the tree branches on its way to the ground.
Then she touched down with a jolt that made every bone in my body ache—and her phone’s vidfeed cut to black.
“Is she all right?” I asked Faisal with a shaky voice. “Did she make it to the ground safely?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m trying to call her back, but she isn’t answering.”
My eyes shifted back to the viewscreen, which still displayed the live vidfeed from Samantha’s commandeered jet. It hadn’t pulled out of its dive. Instead it had increased its angle of descent, so that now it was hurtling straight toward the ground like a missile.
“Oh my God,” Faisal said. “He’s gonna crash into her landing site!”
By the time he’d finished saying it out loud, it was already happening.
But as the jet was about to crash, it pulled up sharply, so instead of hitting her landing site dead-on it made impact a few hundred feet away, in the middle of a deserted picnic area.
As it hit, our remaining vidfeed cut to black.
We stared at the blank viewscreen in silence for a moment. Then Faisal had the presence of mind to check the local Columbus newsfeeds, and in less than a minute we were watching high-definition drone footage of the crash site. The just-refueled jet had detonated like a fuel-air bomb. The immediate area surrounding its crash site had been razed to nothing by the awesome force of the initial explosion. If Samantha or anyone else had been within that radius, they would have been incinerated.
The real problem now was the fuel, which had been flung far beyond the initial blast zone, like a botched napalm strike. A dozen different fires now raged across the entire park and several of the office buildings adjacent to it. It looked like a war zone down there.
With the flames still raging, it was impossible to see how many people had been engulfed by the sudden inferno. Anyone who had would be a charred corpse by now.
And I knew that any one of those burned bodies might belong to Samantha.
Minutes passed, but to me it felt as though time had completely stopped.
I stared at the images on the viewscreen in shock as an aching hollowness spread across my limbs and torso and slowly made its way to my heart.
My mind played a montage of every moment I’d ever spent with Samantha, both in the OASIS and in reality, while I tallied up the long list of stupid things I’d said and done to her in the years since our breakup. And all of the apologies I’d never made.
Aech was the first one to break the silence. “If anyone could figure out a way to survive that, it’d be Arty. We don’t know for sure…maybe she found cover before it hit….”
“There’s no way, Aech,” Shoto said, still in shock. “Did you see that fireball? There’s no way she had enough time to get clear of it….”
We had already rewatched the footage of the crash several times, frame-by-frame. We couldn’t see what had happened to Samantha. But I was still inclined to agree with Shoto. She’d only had a split second to get clear before Anorak crashed the jet and a giant ball of flame exploded across the landscape.
I didn’t want to believe she was dead. But I wasn’t going to delude myself either. Despite how Samantha Cook was often depicted in movies and cartoons, she wasn’t a superhero. Here in the real world, she was just a regular person—a geeky Canadian gamer girl from the suburbs of Vancouver. She couldn’t outrun giant explosions on foot like Rambo.
Still. My mind kept replaying that last moment of the jet’s descent. It had hit nearby, not on top of her. Maybe there was a chance.
“Why did she have to be so stupid?” Aech said, her tone shifting from shock to grief. “Why did she bail out? Why didn’t she just sit tight until we got Anorak to release her?”
“Samantha was never a big fan of waiting around for someone else to rescue her,” I said.
The others nodded. Then the silence was broken by the sound of another incoming call. Faisal rushed to answer it. When he did, Anorak’s face appeared on the conference room’s viewscreen, frowning down at us like some malevolent deity.
“I’m calling to express my condolences for the loss of your friend,” Anorak said. “I was genuinely surprised by Ms. Cook’s actions. I calculated a very low probability she would attempt to bail out of that autojet. Who knew she would be so foolish?” He shrugged. “I warned her, didn’t I? In fact, I warned all of you what would happen if you failed to cooperate with me. If she hadn’t tried to escape, she’d still be alive.”
“No!” Aech shouted. “If you hadn’t murdered her, she’d still be alive!” Her voice cracked, and she choked on each word as she spoke it. “You didn’t have to kill her! Or any of those other people…”
“Of course I did, dear,” Anorak replied softly. “I didn’t want to kill her. I liked her. She was an incredibly brave and intelligent young woman. But she gave me no choice. If I hadn’t punished her for disobeying me, what message would that have sent? It would’ve completely undermined my credibility and caused Parzival here to doubt my resolve. But now he knows I mean business. Do
n’t you, Z?”
I was too overcome with grief and rage to respond with words. But I managed to nod slowly.
“See?” Anorak said, nodding back at me from the viewscreen. “I assure you all, I don’t wish to harm anyone else if I don’t have to. And I’m sure that you don’t want any more blood on your hands either.”
“You’re nothing like James Halliday,” Aech told him. “You’re not human. You’re a fucking toaster! You don’t even care about those people you just killed….”
“Why should I, dear?” Anorak said, with what sounded like genuine curiosity in his voice. “To quote Sarah Connor: ‘You’re all dead already.’ You, your friends, your customers—all of you. You poisoned your own planet, destroyed its climate, defiled its ecosystem, and killed off all of its biodiversity.” He pointed at each of us. “You’re going to be extinct soon, too, by your hands. And you know it. That’s why most of you spend every second you can wired up to the OASIS. You’ve already given up, and now you’re all just waiting around to die.” He shrugged. “The people I killed today don’t have to wait around anymore. And if you continue to defy me, too, more people will meet the same fate. Now, get to work, kids.”
When he called us “kids,” I finally snapped and went into a total berserker rage, lunging at the viewscreen, as if I could crawl through it and throttle him.
“You’ll pay for this, you son of a bitch!” I shouted, because I’d obviously seen way too many movies, and because I was terrified and wanted desperately not to show it.
“That’s the spirit!” Anorak said, grinning. “You better get moving, Parzival.” He tapped his imaginary watch again and sang, “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future….”
With that, Anorak ended the call and the giant viewscreen went dark for a moment. Then it went back to displaying several live aerial and ground video feeds of Samantha’s crash site. The smoke had cleared enough so that we could see the firefighters who were finally starting to arrive on the scene.
“A medevac helicopter is en route to the crash site,” Faisal said. “But it’ll be a while before they’ll be able to get that blaze under control.”
“How could anyone survive an explosion like that?” Aech muttered.
“You have to hit the ground running,” we heard a familiar female voice say.
We all turned to see Samantha’s avatar, just as it finished rematerializing in the corner of the conference room.
“Then I kept on running,” she continued. “And I hit the deck just before the jet made impact. There was a little stone footbridge over a stream and I dove under it.” She winced. “I’ve got a few first- and second-degree burns, and I’m gonna need a few stitches. But I’m OK.”
Aech and Shoto ran over and threw their arms around her avatar. I resisted the urge to join them, but just barely. Instead I just stood there next to Faisal, who couldn’t resist hugging me instead. And I was so happy, I hugged him back.
Samantha was still alive. I still had a chance to make things right with her. To tell her how wrong I’d been, about everything. To apologize for not listening to her. And to tell her how much I’d missed her…
But she didn’t stick around that long.
“I only jumped online for a few seconds, to let you all know I was OK,” she said, gently pulling free of Aech’s bearlike embrace. “Now I need to go let the medics clean me up. There are also a few things I need to do, and I can’t do them while Halliday-9000 is watching.”
Her deadpan 2001 joke caused me to involuntarily snort-laugh. Samantha was the only person who had ever been able to make me do this, and she knew it. I glanced over at her in embarrassment and she smiled at me again. And this time, with great effort, I managed not to look away.
“Z, you, Aech, and Shoto need to start searching for the Second Shard now,” she said. “Hurry! I’ll rejoin you as soon as I can.”
And then she vanished without waiting for me to reply.
I stood there for a minute, staring at the spot where her avatar had been, attempting to rein in my stampeding thoughts.
“Zero in, buddy,” Shoto said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Arty’s right. We need to find the Second Shard. And fast.”
I nodded and removed the First Shard from my inventory. When I held it aloft in my hand, it filled the conference room with its incandescent blue glow as each of its facets caught the light and refracted it onto the walls and the floor in a kaleidoscopic pattern.
I held the shard out to Aech, but when she attempted to take it, her hand passed right through it, as if it were an illusion. Shoto tried the same thing and got the same result.
“Halliday coded this shard so that anyone could find its hiding place and trigger its appearance,” I said. “But it can only be picked up by one of Halliday’s two heirs. Me or Ogden Morrow. Halliday gave Og his old arcade-game collection, remember?”
I told them how I’d used the Boris Vallejo calendar in Og’s basement to change the year of the Middletown simulation, and how I’d obtained the First Shard in Kira’s bedroom. I didn’t mention that I’d paid a girl named L0hengrin a billion dollars to figure all of this out for me. I was ashamed to admit that I’d needed her help. And I was determined not to call on her for more assistance unless I had no choice.
“The First Shard has a clue etched into its surface,” I said, turning it over in my hands so they could see it. “A hint about the next shard’s hiding place.”
Aech cleared her throat and read the clue out loud.
“ ‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero,’ ” she recited. “ ‘The very first heroine, demoted to hero.’ ” She raised her eyes to meet mine. “Any ideas?”
I shook my head.
“Not yet,” I said. “But this is the first opportunity I’ve had to try to decipher it.” I pointed to the first line of the clue. “But I think the first line must be a reference to Kira, and her career as a videogame artist. ‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero.’ ”
Aech nodded. But Shoto didn’t respond—he was already lost in thought.
“I’ll buy that,” Aech replied. “But what about ‘The very first heroine, demoted to hero’?”
I recited the line in my head a few times, trying to parse the meaning. But my brain wouldn’t cooperate. It had been a mistake to obsessively rewatch that crash footage for some sign of Samantha. Now all I could think about were all of those charred human corpses I’d seen littering the park where her jet had made impact. The bodies of at least a dozen people—people that Anorak had already killed, without hesitation.
“Come on, Z,” Aech said when I failed to respond. “You must have some ideas….”
“I don’t know,” I muttered, vigorously scratching my scalp in an attempt to jumpstart my brain. “I suppose it could be a reference to Ranma 1/2? A heroine demoted to hero?”
I was grasping at straws and Aech knew it.
“Come on, Z,” she said. “Ranma was a boy who changed into a girl, not the other way around. And besides, the clue reads ‘the very first heroine.’ ”
“Right,” I said. “You’re right. Sorry.”
We stared at the inscription on the shard in silence while Faisal watched anxiously from across the room, his eyes wide with fascination.
As precious seconds continued to tick away, I began to wonder if I was going to have to swallow my rapidly dwindling pride and call L0hengrin.
“Come on!” Aech whispered. “It can’t be that hard. Og found the Second Shard ten minutes after he found the first one!”
“Gee, I wonder why?” I said. “Do you think maybe Og knows a little more about his ex-wife than we do? He was only married to her for eighteen years!”
Aech was about to reply when Shoto spoke up, cutting her off.
“I don’t think the first line is about Kira,” Shoto sai
d. “ ‘Her paint and her canvas, the one and the zero.’ I think that’s a reference to Rieko Kodama, who was one of the very first women videogame designers. In one of her early interviews, Kira said that Kodama was one of the women who inspired her to work in the videogame industry, along with Dona Bailey and Carol Shaw.”
I felt like kicking myself. In the head. Repeatedly. I knew all about Rieko Kodama. She was one of the co-creators of the Phantasy Star game series. And she’d also worked on the very first Sonic the Hedgehog game, one of Kira’s all-time favorite videogames—a game that also just happened to put the player on a quest to collect seven Chaos Emeralds.
But I still didn’t see a connection between Rieko Kodama and the second line of the clue. Probably because I didn’t have her entire credits memorized, when I clearly should have.
“OK,” I said. “Then what about ‘the very first heroine, demoted to hero’?”
“Rieko Kodama co-created the first arcade game with a woman as its hero!” Shoto said. “Back in 1985.”
I searched my memory, but the only woman hero of a Rieko Kodama game I could think of was Alis Lansdale, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Phantasy Star I—and that was a home console game. Released for the Sega Master System in Japan in 1987, and in the United States in 1988.
“I’m talking about the first human female protagonist in an action videogame.” Shoto cupped his right ear. “Anyone?”
“Wasn’t that Samus from Metroid?” Aech asked as she opened her own browser window to look up the answer. “No wait—Toby from Baraduke!”
Shoto shook his head again, then he closed his eyes and raised his right fist to the sky in victory.
“Princess Kurumi!” he shouted. “Released by Sega in March of 1985! Rieko Kodama designed all the characters and environments. But when they released the game in the United States, they didn’t think American boys would put quarters in a game with the word princess on its marquee, so they changed its title to Sega Ninja!” He smiled at me, then shrugged. “It was one of my grandpa Hiro’s favorite games. We used to play together when I was very little. When he passed away, he left me his whole Sega game collection. I spent a lot of my time playing it, back when I was a hikikomori.”
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