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Unfortunately, I’d been too head-over-heels in love to retain much of what she’d told me, and too busy staring at her to take in the details of our surroundings.
I’d heard Samantha sing once before, during the week we spent together at Og’s estate, so I knew she wasn’t using an autotuning app. Yet somehow I’d forgotten what an unusually beautiful singing voice she possessed, on top of all her other talents. Hearing it again now, under these circumstances, made my heart ache with a sudden ferocity that caught me completely off guard.
In choreographed unison, seven different bathrobe-clad men emerged from their individual homes to retrieve their morning papers. I recognized six of these men as actors—Chevy Chase, Paul Dooley, Michael Keaton, Steve Martin, John Heard, and Lyman Ward—the men who portrayed Clark W. Griswold, Jim Baker, Jack Butler, Neal Page, Peter McCallister, and Tom Bueller respectively. All suburban dad characters in various Hughes films.
At a certain point, the descriptions in this book just become mind-numbing. That point was a long time ago.
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“Look at this lily-white hellscape,” Aech said, shaking her head as she stared out her own window. “Is there a single person of color in this entire town?” “Sure,” Art3mis replied. “But most of them hang out at a place called the Kandy Bar over in Chicago. This planet does have a serious diversity problem—like the whole of ’80s cinema….”
This is like the first worthwhile critique of nostalgic media this book has managed to offer up
“Every day is her birthday,” Art3mis said. “And the morning after it. All the movie simulations on Shermer operate on an accelerated concurrent timeline, with the events depicted in each film repeating over and over in a continuous loop. All these NPCs are stuck in their own private Groundhog Day. Including that poor sweetheart of a girl…”
These violent delights have violent ends...
She smiled at me again, and this time I smiled back. We continued to grin at each other for a few more seconds—then we remembered Aech and Shoto and turned to see them both watching us intently. Caught, they both quickly averted their eyes.
She motioned for us to put them on. When we complied, the clothing on each of our avatars abruptly changed, so that the three of us were dressed like the “Dork Squad” in Sixteen Candles. I was now “The Geek,” played by Anthony Michael Hall; Aech was John Cusack’s character, Bryce; and Shoto was their pal Cliff.
Art3mis laughed and then put on her own shades. As she did, her own avatar’s outfit changed once again, this time into the threads that Ferris Bueller wore on his day off.
The school bell rang a few seconds later, and the hallway began to clear as NPC students filtered into their individual classrooms. One of them bumped into me as she went by, and when she turned to say, “Excuse me,” I saw that it was a young Juliette Lewis, with her hair done up in a frizzy blond ’80s perm. I knew her best from her starring roles in Strange Days and From Dusk Till Dawn, so it took me a moment to remember that she’d portrayed Audrey Griswold in Christmas Vacation. Art3mis was right—for someone who had trained themselves to identify pop-culture icons from the ’70s and ’80s, this
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It was the school’s computer room, and it was currently filled with student NPCs typing out their term papers on rows of ancient desktop computers. A sign posted above the chalkboard said HACKERS WILL BE EXPELLED, and that was one of the reasons I did a double-take a few seconds later, when I spotted the greatest fictional hacker of the ’80s, Bryce Lynch, sitting at one of the computers. Then I noticed that Bryce looked older than I remembered, and he wasn’t wearing his glasses. That finally made me realize that I was looking at Buck Ripley, a character in The Great Outdoors portrayed by Chris
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“There he is,” she said. “Philip F. Dale. Better known as Duckie, aka the Duck Man. One of the most divisive and controversial characters ever to spring forth from John Hughes’s imagination.”
She nodded toward Duckie, then drew her curved Elven sword from the scabbard on her back. Its blade sang like a giant tuning fork as she pulled it free.
“There can be only one!” she shouted as Duckie’s head went flying, taking his blow-dried pompadour along with it. It bounced off a nearby locker with a loud metal clang before coming to rest on the waxed marble floor of the hallway, not far from his now-decapitated body. The
Art3mis dug through the locker’s bizarre contents until she finally found a crumpled brown paper bag. She opened it and pulled out another, even smaller paper bag, stained with what appeared to be French-fry grease. From inside that bag, she then withdrew a clear plastic sandwich bag, filled with a copious amount of marijuana.
I was hoping for bags all the way down
The prospect of being alone with Art3mis for the first time in years rendered me momentarily speechless. After a few seconds of awkward silence I finally blurted out a response. “Sure,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could. “That’s a great idea. And very thoughtful of you.”
Romantic writing at its finest
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The first house we passed on our left was one I recognized from Some Kind of Wonderful. It belonged to Craig Sheffer’s character, Hardy Jenns. I could see him inside, through one of the big picture windows, plotting with his yuppie pals. A few seconds after we walked past his house, a black-and-gray limousine pulled up out front, and Mary Stuart Masterson got out. She opened the door for Eric Stoltz, and then he opened Lea Thompson’s door. Eric and Lea went into Hardy’s house, and Mary Stuart stayed behind and leaned against the limo’s bumper. A few seconds later, a black cargo van pulled into
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That made me laugh out loud, which somehow earned me another one of her smiles.
A few minutes later, we reached the Donnelly residence, where the events depicted in Weird Science were transpiring in and around the house. A few seconds after we arrived, a half-naked girl shot up out of the chimney and landed in a small pond in the front yard with a loud splash.
Beer cans, pizza boxes, and horny teenagers were strewn across the lawn.
I found Art3mis holding two extremely handsome teenage boys at gunpoint—Ian and Max from Weird Science.
(Googles...) I mean, they’re handsome, but I don’t know if “extremely” is warranted. Unless we’re getting some hints that Wade is not as straight as they come.
Update: funny enough, this is the start of some genuine queer-baiting from Cline
And Ian was played by an impossibly young Robert Downey Jr.
This should make casting the movie easy. Marvel already built a young Bobby D. Jr. cgi model for Civil War — Spielberg can just use that.
When his transformation completed, it triggered another music cue. At first I thought I was hearing the song “I Want a New Drug” by Huey Lewis and the News, but as soon as the lyrics kicked in, I realized it was actually Weird Al Yankovic’s parody—“I Want a New Duck.” The song only played for five or six seconds, while the newly anointed Robert Duckey Jr. did a little dance to show off his new attire. Then the song cut out and he struck a pose and said, “I remain now, and will always be, a Duck Man.”
I recited the inscription again, this time from memory. “ ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending.’ So that was Andie’s first fate?” I said. “To wind up with RDJ as Duckie? And the only way to ‘mend’ that fate is to ‘recast the foul’?” I smiled at Art3mis and shook my head. “Arty, you’re a genius!”
What does this shard's puzzle have to do with Kira? The last one was an artistic influence on her career, and this is just an alternate ending to a John Hughes movie.
“There are five different John Candy NPCs wandering around Shermer,” she said. “Can you name all of them?” “Sure,” I said. “Del Griffith, of course. Then there’s Chet Ripley, C. D. Marsh, and Gus Polinski, the Polka King of the Midwest. Oh, and I saw Buck Russell this morning.” She grinned at me, impressed.
This series in a nutshell
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As soon as our feet touched the driveway, another needle drop went off: “Modigliani (Lost in Your Eyes)” by Book of Love. Hearing it, Art3mis glanced over at me, and we shared a brief smile of recognition.
I recognized both of them from their brief scene in The Breakfast Club when they drop Anthony Michael Hall’s character, Brian, off at detention, and his mom says, “Well, mister, you better figure out a way to study!” and then his little sister says, “Yeah!” (Another piece of trivia I’d learned from Artie’s blog, years ago, was that they were played by Anthony Michael Hall’s real-life mother and sister.)
“Mrs. Hughes!” she said, lowering her eyes and bowing her head, as if she’d just encountered royalty.
I realized they must be NPC re-creations of the Hugheses’ two sons, James and John. Seeing them reminded me of an interview John Hughes gave, where he mentioned that his screenplay for Mr. Mom was based on his experience caring for his two boys on his own for a year, when his wife, Nancy, spent a lot of time traveling for work. Hughes’s children and marriage had directly inspired so much of his work—it seemed fitting that this interactive tribute to his family was hidden here on Shermer, among all of his fictional creations.
That feels creepy and invasive to me
Now that he was Mr. Hughes, he was full of energy and emotion—along with epic amounts of nicotine and caffeine,
The guy had a firm grip!
He should be friends with Aech
The clack of his keys sounded like machine-gun fire, and the carriage return moved rapidly from left to right in just a few seconds, like an ammo belt feeding it a steady supply of bullets.
That was when we both saw the brand name and model number. It wasn’t just a keyboard. It was a Memotech MTX512—the vintage computer that Gary and Wyatt used to create Lisa in Weird Science, which had (in revolutionary-at-the-time fashion) hidden its 8-bit CPU in the chassis of the keyboard itself.
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“When I ran into Wyatt’s house earlier, I noticed that his computer was missing from his bedroom,” she said. “The FDX hard-drive add-on was still there, but this keyboard was gone. Which would appear to indicate that someone took it from Wyatt’s and brought it here….” I leaned forward to study the keyboard more closely. There were four missing letters—the R, A, I, and K keys were gone. Then it hit me. “Og!” I said. “He was here earlier today, when he collected the Third Shard. And he put the computer here, where he knew we would see it.” I pointed at the Memotech MTX512. “In Weird Science, a
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Then, on the off chance that Anorak was monitoring my video feeds, I closed my eyes and typed out my entire message to Lo without looking at it:
Showoff
I owe you a Wookiee Life Debt for this.
Art3mis drove us back to the Shermer Hotel, where the NPC of Robert Duckie Jr. was standing frozen out front.
Andie Walsh was waiting there, standing all alone in her homemade pink dress, biting her lower lip and looking around nervously.
The return of biting one’s lower lip!
Now everyone in the room was motionless, staring at Andie and Duckie, with bourgeois contempt burning in their eyes.
Are the straights okay?
