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“Sure, Z, ” Shoto replied. “Sorry. Hey! Get that shuriken power-up! ”

In the game, I grabbed a small power-up dropped by one of the ninjas I’d slain. As I did, the theme music changed to a more heroic tune, and instead of throwing knives, my character began to hurl giant black shuriken, which could take down multiple enemies in a row, when they were kind enough to line up for me.

When I reached the end of the first level, Zaemon’s golden-haired second-hand man Ninniku appeared and attacked me with a giant boomerang-like weapon. I dodged it, then lined up with Ninniku and began to unload on him with my shuriken.

“Keep shooting him until his hair turns red! ” Shoto told me.

I did as he instructed, and after seven or eight hits, Ninniku’s hair turned from blond to red—apparently to indicate his rising anger. Then the gameplay froze and Step 1 ended. The game tallied up my points, along with my total number of shots and hits and my overall hit ratio. The map of the kingdom popped up again, revealing that by clearing the first level, I’d moved slightly closer to the castle at the top. Then the next level began.

Step 2 required me to fight more ninjas while wading through rice paddies. When I battled my way to its end, Ninniku appeared once again, and once again I attacked him until his hair turned red, signaling his defeat.

Shoto continued to coach me, but Aech remained quiet, except to shout warnings or congratulate me on a nice move.

Shoto referred to Step 3 as the “avalanche level, ” because it required you to battle ninjas while also dodging giant boulders that were continuously appearing from the top of the screen. It required a completely different strategy from the first two levels, and I lost my first life figuring that out. Then I lost another life during Step 4, where Princess Kurumi spent the entire level fighting off packs of ravenous wolves. It was a truly great game, and it was also kicking my ass. Now I only had one life left, and my confidence started to waver.

I found myself wishing there was a way Shoto could play through the trickier levels for me, but that was impossible. Tricks like hacked OASIS haptic rigs and illegal software, which had allowed Sorrento to take control of any of the avatars under his command, were obsolete now. None of them worked with ONI headset technology. I was on my own.

Thankfully, I hit my stride again during the next level, Step 5, which was set in a dense forest of bulbous 8-bit trees, concealing wave after wave of what Shoto referred to as “Keebler Ninjas. ” I managed to earn back one of the lives I’d lost.

Step 6 was set on a roaring river, which the player had to cross by leaping from log to log like in Frogger, while battling more ninjas along the way. When I reached the other side, Ninniku appeared once again, hurling his boomerang at me from the riverbank until I landed enough hits to defeat him.

As I played, I noticed something odd about the music playing on the arcade’s jukebox. The same three songs kept playing, over and over. “Obsession” by Animotion, then “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, followed by “My Best Friend’s Girl” by the Cars. It was easy to see the connection. All of these songs could’ve been about Halliday’s obsession with Kira—his best friend’s girl. And, I realized, I could be reliving the moment his obsession began.

I pulled my mind back to the game. I was now in the seventh stage, which took place in the streets of the village outside the castle walls. Shoto referred to the oddly dressed enemies I encountered here as “Pastel Ninjas, ” because many of them appeared to be wearing turquoise tunics and pink pantaloons. I had to battle several “Clown Samurai” who wore red-striped Hammer pants that made them look like walking circus tents with swords. Once I defeated all of them, I cleared that level too. Seven down. Nine to go. Almost halfway there…

Shoto referred to Step 8 as the “stampede stage, ” because you spent the entire level trying not to get trampled by an endless string of horses stampeding across the screen, while fighting off more Pastel Ninjas, who miraculously never seemed to get trampled even once. The lucky bastards.

At some point, a small crowd of onlookers began to form around me—the NPCs who’d been playing on the other machines, I assumed. And the longer I played, the bigger the crowd sounded. I didn’t turn around to do a head count, but I caught brief, warped glimpses of them in the lenses of my mirror shades, during the pause in gameplay at the end of each level, when my score and hit count was tallied and I was given a brief view of my progress toward the castle on the map. I tried to put them out of my mind, too, so that I could remain focused on the task at hand.

Ninja Princess was a strangely nonviolent action game. There was no blood or gore in it at all. Or killing. When Princess Kurumi got hit, she would just fall down and cry. The Puma Ninja clan members and bosses didn’t collapse and die when they were dispatched. They just vanished in a puff of smoke. When I asked Shoto about it, he told me it was a conscious choice by the game’s creators, to promote pacifism and nonviolence.

“Wow, ” Aech said. “A nonviolent game about killing people with knives. Genius. ”

“Shh! ” Shoto whispered. “Let the man concentrate! ”

I made it to Step 9, which was a battle through the stone courtyard surrounding Kanten Castle’s outermost wall, followed by Step 10, which required you to scale that wall while fighting off dozens of expert-climber “Spider Ninjas. ”

Step 11 required me to fight my way down a lone stone walkway through the castle grounds. Step 12 was another wall-scaling level, identical to Step 10, but with the color scheme changed. When I reached the top of this second wall, I faced Ninniku one final time, dispatching him for good.

“Boom! ” Shoto shouted triumphantly as I completed the level. “You took out Ninniku! You’re almost to the castle! ”

Shoto was right. Step 13 required me to fight my way through more ninjas and samurai, making my way up a long stone path that led to the castle steps. When I reached those steps, the main villain, Zaemon Gyokuro, finally appeared and started shooting at me with a pair of ball-and-shot pistols. When I managed to hit him enough times, the level ended. And then I finally made it back into Kanten Castle—my former home, now overrun with usurping Pastel Ninja dipshits.

Step 14 required me to battle my way into the castle, by running under ladder walkways suspended on pylons before I had to fight Zaemon once again. Then I continued on to Step 15, where I had to make my way into the castle’s inner chambers, through a series of washitsu, Japanese-style rooms with walls made of translucent paper.

When at last I reached Step 16, I finally got to face off with Zaemon and his minions in the castle throne room. I lunged forward into the final boss battle, with Aech and Shoto both shouting advice in my ear and cheering me on, like my own personal Mickey Goldmill and Paulie Pennino.

Luckily I’d picked up a few more lives in the last ten levels, because it took all of them to defeat Zaemon. Finally, I had reached the end of the game. But it was a strange ending. Even though they were supposed to be dead, Ninniku and Zaemon both reappeared, standing on a stage inside the castle alongside Princess Kurumi herself. Shoto told us the game’s lead designer, Yoshiki Kawasaki, had chosen this ending to imply that the events depicted in the game were just a stage play that had been acted out for the player’s benefit. No one had actually been hurt.

After the game’s characters finished their curtain call, the following text appeared on the screen:

CONGRATULATIONS!

THE PRINCESS HAS COMPLETED

HER ADVENTURE AND REGAINED

THE KANTEN CASTLE

A huge cheer erupted from the boys gathered around me, but I didn’t turn around right away. I still had one life remaining, so the game had started over again at the beginning of the first level, and I kept playing to see if Kurumi’s “imposter” was going to appear. After a minute of nothing more than the familiar color-blind ninjas, I let my one remaining life expire. GAME OVER appeared on the screen and I was prompted to enter my initials for the high-score list. I started to put in my own out of habit, but then I remembered who I was supposed to be and entered “K. R. U. ” instead, for Karen Rosalind Underwood.

When the list of high scores appeared, I discovered that my score of 365, 800 points put me only in second place on the list of “specialists. ” The person in first had racked up a score of 550, 750, outscoring me by over 200, 000 points. They appeared to be sharper than me, too, because they’d entered the initials “K. R. A. ” beside their score—the three-letter signature Kira Underwood had used on videogame high-score lists, instead of her initials. I’d failed to recall this obscure piece of trivia until I saw it in front of me. But my predecessor had not.

That was when I realized I was looking at Ogden Morrow’s score. Which made perfect sense. Og had completed this challenge earlier today. Just a few hours ago. And judging by his score, he was much better at Ninja Princess than I would ever be. Either that, or he’d kept on playing after he beat the final level and the game started over at the beginning again, to rack up those extra points. But why would he do that? Was he trying to match Kira’s real high score? Had I just screwed up somehow?

I snapped a screenshot of the high-score list so that I could examine it later. Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and nearly jumped out of my skin.

I turned to see a young Ogden Morrow smiling at me.

Og looked like he was around sixteen years old. About the same age he was when he met Kira for the first time—at a local arcade, when she moved to Middletown in the summer of 1988.

No wonder this setting and the scenario I was acting out both felt so familiar. I’d read about it seven or eight years earlier, in Ogden Morrow’s bestselling autobiography, Og. Unlike Halliday’s blog and diary entries in Anorak’s Almanac, Og’s recollections were infuriatingly vague when it came to details, but in the second or third chapter of the book, he described meeting his future wife for the first time, on the last day of summer vacation before his junior year of high school. He’d described how an “unbelievably gorgeous girl, with short dark hair and beautiful blue eyes, ” had wandered into “one of the local arcades, ” where he watched from a distance as “she beat one of the toughest games there on a single quarter. ”

But Og had never bothered to specify which local arcade it was, or the name of the game Kira had played, and other written accounts had given conflicting information about both. Now I knew he’d met Kira here at Happytime Pizza. And that the game he’d watched her beat with one quarter was Sega Ninja, aka Ninja Princess.

I was reenacting the moment Ogden and Kira Morrow first met.

If I recalled Og’s book correctly, he’d walked over to congratulate Kira after she finished her game. But then his socially inept shadow, Halliday, had interrupted them to ask Og for a ride home. He always waited until the last possible moment to return to his troubled home, so Og knew his friend didn’t really want to leave yet. Halliday was attempting to cock-block him. This shocked and amused Og, because he’d never seen him display jealousy over a girl before. Just computer hardware.

“Hi, ” the teenage Og said, finally working up the nerve to make eye contact with me. “I’m Og. And you—you’re amazing! I can’t believe you defeated Sega Ninja on one quarter! This is the first time any of us have ever seen anyone do that. Way to go! ”

Og awkwardly held up his right hand. It took a second before I realized he was offering me a high five. So I high-fived him. He looked extremely relieved when I did.

Then he locked eyes with me, and as he did, I felt my heart beat faster. My skin began to tingle with what felt like invisible tendrils of electricity. This was a sensation I was familiar with. It was how I’d felt the first time I met Samantha in the real world.

I couldn’t imagine how present-day Ogden Morrow had felt while going through this challenge. He must’ve been using a conventional haptic rig, thankfully—he’d never used an ONI by choice, and he’d still been without one in Anorak’s little blackmail livestream—so at least he’d been spared all the physical sensations. But re-experiencing this moment from Kira’s perspective must’ve still been heartbreaking for him.

“Thanks, Og, ” I heard myself say, with Kira’s voice, and in her British accent. “I’m Karen Underwood—but my friends call me Kira. ” I felt my head nod in the direction of the Sega Ninja cabinet beside me. “We have this game in one of the shops near my parents’ flat, back home in London. But over there, it’s called Ninja Princess. Not Sega Ninja. ” I felt the corner of my mouth curl into a smirk, then I added: “I guess American boys don’t like to play with girls. ”

“Yes, we do! ” Og replied immediately. Then he began to turn red and stammered, “I mean, we’re not against playing games with girls! Videogames, that is. That have a girl main character. Like this one here. ”

Og gave the Sega Ninja cabinet an awkward pat, as if it were an unfamiliar Labrador. Then he shoved both of his hands into his pockets and grinned at me like a lovestruck idiot. He looked as if his pupils might change into cartoon hearts at any second.

He opened his mouth to say something else to me, but right on cue, another extremely familiar-looking teenage boy interrupted our conversation. I immediately recognized him as James Halliday—at age seventeen. Wearing his half-inch-thick horn-rimmed eyeglasses, a pair of faded jeans, worn Nikes, and one of his beloved Space Invaders T-shirts.

Just as he appeared, the arcade’s sound system skipped forward from “Jessie’s Girl” to “Obsession” by Animotion. I knew that couldn’t be a coincidence.

“I gotta get home, ” the young Halliday urgently told Og, without making eye contact with either him or me. “I’m out of quarters and…so…I need a ride home. ”

Og stared at him for a moment in disbelief while Halliday kept his eyes on the carpet. Og gave me an embarrassed smile, then turned back to Halliday.

“Hold on just a few minutes, ” Og said. “Or go wait by my car until I’m ready to leave. Or—” He fished a crumpled dollar bill out of the front pocket of his acid-washed jeans. “It’s too wrinkled for the token machine, but they’ll change it at the counter. ”

Og tossed the bill in Halliday’s general direction and turned back to Kira without waiting for him to reply. The money hit him in the chest and then silently fell to the floor.

“No! ” Halliday shouted, suddenly furious, stomping his right foot down like a toddler preparing to throw a tantrum. When his shoe made contact with the ground, Og and all of the other NPCs vanished, leaving me alone with the seventeen-year-old James Halliday.

And in the same instant, our surroundings changed too.

The Happytime Pizza game room was gone, replaced by a throne room that looked an awful lot like a live-action version of the 8-bit one in the final stage of Ninja Princess. The teenage Halliday morphed into the masked, black-clad ninja Kazamaru, who to my eyes looked exactly like Shô Kosugi in Revenge of the Ninja back in 1983.

I glanced down at my avatar and saw that my own appearance had changed too. I still appeared to be a girl, but now I was dressed in a flowing tunic made of red silk, with gold piping and a Chinese dragon stitched onto each sleeve.

I was also holding a sword in my right hand, and in its mirrored surface I could see that I was no longer wearing Kira Underwood’s face. My avatar had changed into a live-action representation of Princess Kurumi—and the creator of this simulation had chosen to make me look exactly like Elsa Yeung in Challenge of the Lady Ninja, also from 1983.

“ ‘Reclaim her castle and face her imposter, ’ ” Shoto recited. “This is it! Kick his ass, Princess! ”

I nodded, then lunged forward and did as Shoto instructed—I kicked Kazamaru’s ass.

Thankfully, the mechanics of ONI-based combat were more or less identical to old-school haptic-rig combat. You didn’t have to physically perform any of your avatar’s complex special moves and powered attacks yourself unless you wanted to. Instead, you could use a simple hand gesture or voice command to make your avatar execute a move or an attack. The only difference was, when you were using an ONI, you could feel your avatar’s body movements as it automatically carried out these actions, so for a few seconds, it felt like you were moving on autopilot.

I was prepared for a brutal fight, but whoever had programmed this challenge had made Princess Kurumi a lot tougher than her knockoff male counterpart, who barely put up a fight. He only managed to land one or two hits before I knocked his life-meter down to nothing, with a steady barrage of throwing knives.

When I reduced his life bar to just 1 percent, the words FINISH HIM appeared floating in the air between us for a moment. When they vanished, I dispatched Kazamaru with one final roundhouse kick to the head. The last sliver of his life bar turned red—but he didn’t die. Instead, the manly, black-clad ninja master abruptly fell to his knees and began to cry, then vanished in a cloud of smoke a few seconds later.

When it dissipated, I saw the Second Shard floating there in front of me.

I reached for it, wondering if I was about to experience another “flashback. ” And as my fingers wrapped around it…

I was back inside the body of seventeen-year-old Kira Underwood, and now teenage Ogden Morrow was standing in front of me, holding my hands in his. It was dark, and we were standing on a grassy hill bathed in moonlight, overlooking the tiny Middletown skyline in the distance. Og was placing a silver necklace in my hands—the same necklace from Kira’s jewelry box that had transformed into the First Shard—just as he whispered the words “I love you, ” for what I knew must be the very first time.

Og had written about this moment in his autobiography, too, I realized. But he hadn’t described it in any detail, or given the time and place it occurred.

I felt my body starting to tremble as Kira reacted to what her future husband had just told her….

…And then I was back inside my own avatar’s skin. I was back on Kodama, standing next to Aech and Shoto in front of the Ninja Princess portal. It looked as though my avatar had just been ejected from it. When I looked down, I saw the Second Shard lying in my open palm. It was another multifaceted blue crystal, nearly identical to the first one in size and appearance.

Shoto and Aech both threw their arms around me. “You did it! ”

“No, ” I said. “We did it. I couldn’t have done it without your help. ”

I held out both of my fists and they each bumped one of them and silently nodded.

“That final challenge was insane, right? ” Shoto said. “I mean, why would Halliday want you to kill the teenage version of himself? ”

“That’s gotta be some serious self-hatred happening there, ” Aech said. “Maybe he finally realized what a dick he was to Kira, and to Og? ”

I couldn’t focus on what they were saying. I was still reeling from the flashback I’d just experienced. Another of Kira Underwood’s private memories, rendered with a detail and intensity that should’ve been impossible. Just what in the name of Crom was going on here?

I didn’t have time to stop and ponder the possibilities. We had shards to collect and absolutely no time to spare.

I glanced down at the Second Shard in my hand, then held it out to Aech and Shoto, so we could examine it together. When I turned it over in my palm, we saw that this shard had an inscription carved into its glassy surface just like the first one. Aech read it aloud.

“ ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending. Andie’s first fate still needs mending. ’ ”

“ ‘Andie’s first fate, ’ ” Shoto repeated. “Wasn’t Andie the name of Kerri Green’s character in TheGoonies? ”

“No, ” I said, shaking my head. “Her name was spelled with a y at the end. Not an i-e. ”

“A-N-D-I-E, ” Aech said, shutting her eyes, as if to better picture the name. “Like Andie MacDowell? ” She turned to Shoto and gripped his shoulder. “Oh shit! Maybe the next shard is on the Planet Punxsutawney? I used to go there every Groundhog Day to—”

“Hold on! ” Shoto said, cutting her off. He’d opened a browser window in front of his avatar and was reading from it. “Andie MacDowell also starred in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984. But the director hired Glenn Close to loop all of her dialogue, because he didn’t like her Southern accent! Do you think that could be what ‘recast the foul, restore his ending’ is a reference to? Maybe that film had an alternate ending…. ”

“Wait, are we talking about the movie where Connor MacLeod plays Tarzan? ” Aech said. “Directed by the cat who made Chariots of Fire? ”

“That’s the one! ” he said. “There must be a Flicksync devoted to it somewhere…. ” He pulled up his OASIS atlas in another window. “Maybe on Lambert? Or one of the Edgar Rice Burroughs–themed planets in Sector Twenty? If we—”

“Guys! ” I shouted, signaling a time-out with my hands. “Come on. You’re really reaching. Do you seriously believe the Third Shard’s hiding place is somehow connected to Andie MacDowell? Or Tarzan? Neither one is mentioned in the Almanac. Or in any of the books I’ve read about Kira’s life. ”

Aech shrugged. “She could’ve been an Andie MacDowell fanatic, for all we know, ” she replied. “I never did that much research into Kira’s interests. According to Og, Halliday never bothered to get to know who Kira really was. ”

“He must have known her a lot better than he let on, ” I said, thinking about the shard flashbacks. They had both felt like Recs, not Sims. The differences were subtle, but no Sim—at least not as far as I’d experienced, and I’d tried thousands—had just the mix of strangeness, uncertainty, and intensity that came from a recording of a real-life moment.

But they couldn’t be recordings. Because there definitely hadn’t been any ONI headsets lying around in Middletown, Ohio, in the fall of 1988.

So what had I just experienced?

I was still mulling that over when my brain produced a match for the name Andie in the jumbled recesses of my memory. I opened a browser window in the air in front of me and did a quick Web search to make sure my memory was correct.

“Andie Walsh! ” I shouted. “With an i-e! That was the name of Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink. ”

Aech and Shoto both groaned and rolled their eyes. Neither was the world’s biggest John Hughes fan, but they knew that Art3mis and I both adored his films. During Halliday’s contest, Art3mis had published dozens of essays about his movies on her blog, dissecting each of them in loving detail, scene by scene. None of her encyclopedic knowledge had proven useful in finding Halliday’s egg, but she might get her chance to put it to use now. Unless I managed to find the shard quickly, before she even got back online. That would save time—and probably also impress the hell out of her.

“Pretty in Pink would make sense, ” I said. “Kira and Og were both huge John Hughes fans. And they helped code some of the first quests on Shermer. ”

“You think we have to go to Shermer next? ” Aech asked. “Arty will lose her mind! ”

“OK, ” Shoto said, rereading the clue. “If it’s Andie Walsh from Pretty in Pink, then what does ‘Recast the foul, restore his ending’ mean? ”

“Pretty in Pink originally had a different ending, ” I replied. “One where Andie ended up with Duckie, instead of with Blane. Arty—Samantha—posted an essay about it on Arty’s Missives a long time ago. ”

“Of course she did, ” Aech said. “She’s an even bigger dork than you. ”

I ignored her, trying to hold on to my train of thought. “I think they decided to change the ending of the movie after some poor test screenings—”

As if on cue, Art3mis appeared next to us.

“Speak of the devil and the devil appears! ” Aech said, greeting her with a fist bump. “You make it somewhere safe, Arty? ”

Arty nodded, then pressed her index finger to her lips for a moment.

“Sorry I was gone so long, ” she said. “Looks like I missed a wardrobe change. ”

She grinned, admiring our old-school gunter attire. Then she snapped her fingers and spun around in a circle. Her avatar’s outfit was replaced by the scaled gunmetal-blue armor she’d worn during the contest, along with her twin blaster pistols in their low-slung quickdraw holsters, and a long, curved Elven sword in an ornate Mithril scabbard was now strapped to her back. She’d even donned her fingerless Road Warrior–style racing gloves.

Seeing her dressed like that again brought back a flood of old feelings and long-suppressed memories. They left me feeling momentarily lightheaded. And weak-hearted.

“There’s our girl, back in uniform! ” Aech said as they gave each other a double high five.

“Bravo, team! ” she said. “I can’t believe you guys already found the Second Shard. That was wicked fast! ”

“Yes, it was, ” Shoto said. “Because I held Z’s hand, all the way through it—”

“While I held his other hand, ” Aech added, laughing. “And now that Arty has rejoined our posse, too, we will be un-fucking-stoppable. The Siren’s Soul shall be ours, my friends! ”

Art3mis and Shoto both let out a cheer in agreement. I raised my right fist halfheartedly, then cleared my throat.

“Not to cut the celebration short, ” I said. “But I think I may have figured out what the Siren’s Soul is, and why Og refused to give it to Anorak. ”

Their smiles faded as all three of them turned to look at me expectantly.

“OK, ” I said. “First, let me ask you a question. Why do you think Halliday called it the ‘Siren’s Soul’? ”

“Because Kira named her D& D character Leucosia, ” Shoto replied. “After one of the Sirens in Greek mythology. ”

“Correct, ” I said. “So if Kira is the ‘Siren, ’ and the Seven Shards are ‘fragments’ of her ‘Soul, ’ what does Anorak assume will happen when we put those pieces back together? When we ‘once again make the Siren whole’? ”

Art3mis looked back over at me.

“Holy shit, Wade, ” she muttered. “You don’t think…? ”

I nodded.

“Anorak doesn’t think that the Siren’s Soul is a magical artifact named after Kira, ” I said. “He believes it is her. An AI copy of Kira. Just like Anorak is a copy of Halliday. ”

Art3mis didn’t respond, but she looked horrified by the thought.

“Come on, Z, ” Aech said. “That’s impossible. ”

“I thought so too, ” I replied. “But there’s no other explanation for what I’ve been experiencing. ”

Art3mis furrowed her brow.

“What do you mean? ” she asked, leaning forward. “What, exactly, have you ‘been experiencing’? ”

I told them about the flashbacks, and filled Art3mis in on the battle she’d just missed.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me, ” Art3mis muttered, shaking her head. “The first two challenges required you to possess detailed knowledge of the Smiths and Ninja Princess? ”

I nodded. “Neither of those things was ever mentioned once in Anorak’s Almanac, ” I said. “And those two flashbacks I experienced? They felt like ONI recordings of real moments. They were way too detailed to be simulations. ”

“How can you be sure of that? ” Art3mis asked. “Anything could be simulated convincingly for a few seconds. ”

Aech shook her head.

“No way, Arty, ” she said. “You don’t know what ONI playback is like. You can almost always tell the difference. Besides, James Donovan Halliday was a brilliant videogame designer and programmer. But he didn’t know anything about women—especially Kira. There’s no way he could’ve convincingly re-created one of her memories, from her perspective. He was a self-obsessed sociopath, incapable of feeling empathy for anyone else. Especially Kira…”

I had to bite my tongue to prevent myself from leaping to Halliday’s defense. The man had been far from perfect, but he’d given us our entire world. “Sociopath” didn’t just seem harsh, but downright blasphemous.

“But what you’re suggesting can’t be possible, Z, ” Shoto said. “The OASIS Neural Interface didn’t exist back in the ’80s, when Kira was a teenager. GSS didn’t build the first fully functional ONI prototype headset until 2036—two years after Kira Morrow’s death. ”

“I know, ” I replied. “It doesn’t jibe with the official timeline. But no one was better at keeping secrets than Halliday…. ” I took a deep breath. “I think we need to consider the possibility that somehow, before Kira Morrow died, Halliday made a copy of her consciousness. Using the same technology he used to copy his own mind and create Anorak. ”

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