Ready Player One - Ernest Cline [57]
Now I heard a repetitive electronic beeping. It seemed to be coming from the right pocket of the jeans I was wearing. Keeping my left hand on the joystick, I reached in my pocket and pulled out a digital watch. The readout said 7:45 a.m. When I pushed one of the buttons to silence the alarm, a warning flashed in the center of my display: DAVID, YOU’RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL!
I used a voice command to pull up my OASIS map, hoping to learn where the gate had transported me. But it turned out that not only was I no longer on Middletown, I was no longer in the OASIS at all. My locator icon was in the middle of a blank screen, which meant I was OTM—off the map. When I’d stepped into the gate, it had transported my avatar into a stand-alone simulation, a virtual location separate from the OASIS. It seemed that the only way I could get back would be to clear the gate by completing the quest. But if this was a videogame, how was I supposed to play it? If this was a quest, what was my goal? I continued to play Galaga while pondering these questions. A second later, a young boy walked into the arcade and came over to me.
“Hi, David!” he said, his eyes on my game.
I recognized this kid from the movie. His name was Howie. In the film, Matthew Broderick’s character hands his Galaga game off to Howie when he rushes off to school.
“Hi, David!” the boy repeated, in the same exact tone. As he spoke this time, his words also appeared as text, superimposed across the bottom of my display, like subtitles. Below this, flashing red, were the words FINAL DIALOGUE WARNING!
I began to understand. The simulation was warning me that this was my final chance to deliver the next line of dialogue from the movie. If I didn’t say the line, I could guess what would probably happen next. GAME OVER.
But I didn’t panic, because I knew the next line. I’d seen WarGames so many times that I knew the entire film by heart.
“Hi, Howie!” I said. But the voice I heard in my earphones was not my own. It was Matthew Broderick’s voice. And as I spoke the line, the warning on my display vanished and a score of 100 points appeared, superimposed at the top of my display.
I racked my brain, trying to mentally replay the rest of the scene. The next line came to me. “How’s it going?” I said, and my score jumped to 200 points.
“Pretty good,” Howie replied.
I started to feel giddy. This was incredible. I was totally inside the movie. Halliday had transformed a fifty-year-old film into a real-time interactive videogame. I wondered how long it had taken him to program this thing.
Another warning flashed on my display: YOU’RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR SCHOOL, DAVID! HURRY!
I stepped away from the Galaga machine. “Hey, you wanna take this over?” I asked Howie.
“Sure,” he replied, grabbing the controls. “Thanks!”
A green path appeared on the floor of the arcade, leading from where I stood to the exit. I started to follow it, then remembered to run back and grab my notebook off of the Dig Dug game, just like David had in the movie. As I did this, my score jumped another 100 points, and ACTION BONUS! appeared on my display.
“Bye, David!” Howie shouted.
“Bye!” I shouted back. Another 100 points. This was easy!
I followed the green path out of 20 Grand Palace and up the busy street a few blocks. I was now running along a tree-lined suburban street. I rounded a corner and saw that the path led directly to a large brick building. The sign over the door said Snohomish High School—David’s school, and the setting of the next few scenes in the movie.
My mind was racing as I ran inside. If all I had to do was rattle off lines of dialogue from WarGames on cue for the next two hours, this was going to be a breeze. Without even knowing it, I’d totally overprepared. I probably knew WarGames even