Like the other wall decorations in Og’s basement, the calendar couldn’t be taken down or removed. And its pages couldn’t be flipped to another month.
“Halliday coded the Middletown simulation to re-create his hometown circa October 1986, right?” Lo said. “So why would there be a calendar for the year 1989 here?”
“Good question,” I said, glancing between the calendar on the wall and the one in her hand. “But gunters around the world spent years studying the contents of this room. Why didn’t any of them find it?”
“Because it wasn’t here,” Lo said, grinning wide. “I checked Gunterpedia. There’s an itemized list of every single object in this basement. The only calendar listed on it is the one hanging on the wall.” She held up the 1989 calendar. “So either they somehow missed this one, or—”
“It appeared on that bookshelf after Halliday’s contest ended,” I finished.
L0hengrin nodded and held the 1989 calendar out to me.
“Now try swapping it with the one on the wall.”
I took the calendar from L0hengrin, then, with my other hand, I reached out and tried to take the 1986 calendar down off the wall. To my surprise, it slid right off the nail it was hanging on. I carefully hung up the 1989 calendar in its place, and opened it to the month of January.
As soon as I let go of the calendar, its pages began to flip upward on their own, until the month of April was displayed. As the pages were flipping, the sky outside cycled rapidly between day and night, pulsing on and off like a strobe light. The entire Middletown simulation was fast-forwarding all around us, like time-lapse film footage played back at high speed.
When the strobing stopped, our surroundings had changed. The couches in Og’s basement had rearranged themselves, and two more bookshelves had appeared against the far wall, both filled with more gaming supplements. There were also several new posters on the walls. But the most striking difference was the time of day. Outside the basement windows, night had fallen. The streetlights were on and there was a full moon out.
“Whoa,” I heard myself whisper. I glanced at the digital alarm clock sitting on top of one of the bookshelves. Its glowing blue display said the local time was now 1:07 A.M.
I turned back to L0hengrin. She was beaming with pride.
“Swapping the calendars changes the time period of the Middletown simulation from October 1986 to April 1989,” she explained. “But only this one instance of the simulation has been updated. The other two hundred and fifty-five copies of Middletown spread out across the planet remain set to the 1986 version. I’ve checked.”
“If this is April in 1989,” I said, “then what happens if we go over to the Barnetts’ empty guest bedroom now?”
Lo grinned. “Before we head over there, you need to obtain an item located in this room. An audio cassette tape that Kira gifted to both Halliday and Og….”
She locked eyes with me, studying my reaction.
“What, are you actually quizzing me now?” I asked.
Lo nodded and folded her arms. The dubious expression on her face made me laugh out loud.
“It was called Leucosia’s Mix,” I said. “Oscar Miller mentions it in his memoir, The Middletown Adventurers’ Guild. But he doesn’t give the full track list. He just mentions one song that was on it—‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by the Smiths.”
Lo nodded. “That’s exactly right,” she said. “And now that we’ve jumped ahead to 1989, there are two copies of Leucosia’s Mix in the Middletown simulation. One in Halliday’s Walkman in his bedroom, and one here.”
She walked over to the ground-level window at the opposite end of the basement, which looked out onto the Morrows’ moonlit backyard. Og’s boombox was resting on the window ledge. She pressed the Eject button and removed the tape inside.
“According to Miller’s book, Kira made two copies of this mixtape,” she said, holding it up. “She gave one to Og and one to Halliday, a few months before her school year abroad ended and she had to go back home to London.”
She tossed the tape to me and I held it up to read the sticker on its A side: Leucosia’s Mix was written on it in cursive, above a track-list insert filled out in the same handwriting.
“Thanks,” I said, adding the tape to my inventory.
Lo was already running up the basement steps.
“Kira’s house is just a few blocks from here,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Follow me!”
When we reached the Barnetts’ house a few minutes later, L0hengrin halted at the end of the darkened sidewalk leading up to it. Then she pointed up to Kira’s bedroom window on the second floor. It was the only room in the house with a light on. In fact, glancing up and down the street, I saw that it was the only illuminated window on the entire block.
L0hengrin saw me noticing this and nodded her approval. But she didn’t say anything.
I thought for a moment, then took the copy of Leucosia’s Mix out of my inventory and examined the track list. There it was, the seventh song on side A. “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths. One of Kira’s all-time favorites.
I turned to point this out to L0hengrin, but she was already sprinting into the house. I followed her inside.
L0hengrin was waiting for me inside the guest bedroom. On my previous visits, this room had been undecorated and empty, aside from a bed, a dresser, and a small wooden desk. Now sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks were piled everywhere, and posters adorned the walls. The Dark Crystal. The Last Unicorn. Purple Rain. The Smiths. Homemade collages hung there, too, made from magazine clippings of videogame characters and artwork.
Sheets of graph paper were tacked up everywhere, filled with Kira’s meticulous renderings of characters, objects, and landscapes from classic role-playing videogames, like Bard’s Tale and Might and Magic. I’d read about this. Kira had spent hundreds of hours copying pixels from the screen onto the graph paper, coloring them in by hand one square at a time, to figure out how different artists achieved their effects and improve on their techniques. When she worked at GSS later on, she became famous for creating artwork that pushed the boundaries of the computer hardware available at the time. Og was fond of saying that his wife had “always had a knack for bringing pixels to life.”
I turned around slowly, trying to absorb as many details as I could. There were no family photos displayed anywhere. But she did have several pictures taped around the edge of her mirror, showing Kira with her nerdy new circle of friends—Halliday, Og, and the other misfit members of the Middletown Adventurers’ Guild. Several of those boys would later write tell-all books about growing up with Halliday and Og, and like every other die-hard gunter I’d scoured them all for details that might help me unlock the puzzles and riddles Halliday left behind. I’d reread them all again a few years ago, this time absorbing the details they contained about Kira’s life, so I knew that not a single one of them described the interior of her room at the Barnett residence. She was never allowed to have male visitors up there, and none of the boys in the guild had ever seen Kira’s room, including Og and Halliday. But I would’ve been willing to bet they’d both spent plenty of time imagining what it looked like. Maybe that was what I was looking at now—a simulation of what Halliday imagined Kira’s room looked like back then.