The central interface consisted of coloured glass beads that were arranged on a spiralling double helix. Ludi spun wheels, flicked switches and mixed liquids. Then, apparently satisfied, he would slide the glass beads up, down or along his twisting abacus and the digital screen at the front of the Orbitini would display a new ‘Event Card’.
Nova watched as he moved three of the orange beads partway along the double helix so they collided with a necklace of yellow and purple beads further along. An Event Card appeared: a tornado with a rating of 3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale would tear through the centre of Berlin in the next few minutes. She flipped to cam mode and checked the video feeds being labelled #BreezyBerlin.
If anything, she was slightly annoyed that she wasn’t there to experience it for herself. She’d practiced her ‘High Velocity Object’ combinations only the week before in one of the Simulators. There had been fifteen objects to dodge, ranging in size from a flying deckchair that would knock off a handful of health points if you failed to avoid it to a small lorry that would kill you outright.
The combinations had been pretty simple, and she’d completed the module without error, but like every Solo knew, executing moves in the safety and comfort of a Simulator Booth was a different proposition to executing them in the Gameworld for ‘real’ in a situation like this, when health points were at risk.
The first few gusts took players by surprise. She saw arms outstretched as hats were blown from heads and sallied forth on currents of air, saplings bending this way and that, doors slamming shut and bursting open. Within thirty seconds players needed to lean at unnatural angles and hold on to buildings and lampposts to remain where they stood.
As the moody-looking tornado gathered speed, so too did the death counter. It ticked upwards, dozens at a time. She watched a car get flipped into the air and bowl down the street, striking people out of existence as it went. People, it would seem, who had failed to master the most basic of combinations. People who hadn’t bothered to learn their Science. Nova smiled. This was survival of the fittest. Best for noobs to go out early on, leaving serious players, Solos like her and Sushi, to battle it out properly.
The winds abated as quickly as they had started. Six thousand players had lost a life, all thanks to Mr Random. Nova let out a long, quiet whistle while she flicked through some of the previous Event Cards. He’d made it rain teleport tokens in Tokyo, had turned the city of Strasbourg green for a week, and last Thursday had given all prime-numbered players in the upper-right quadrant three spins of the Tweel of Fate.
But she wasn’t here to study Ludi’s Event Cards or laugh at noobs. She walked over to the northeast corner of the room, which remained empty for now. Solarversia, like most other massive multiplayer online games, incorporated a technique known as ‘phasing’ which enabled certain areas of the game world to look different to different players. Sushi, who had already visited Castalia and seen the new character Banjax, would see him in this corner if she was here. Nova, who was yet to unlock the character, only saw an empty corner. As she approached it, she heard the familiar ‘ding’ of a Bucket List item being ticked off.
To her right, a small platoon of arkwinis appeared, their little monkey hands struggling to get much purchase on the taut ropes that were attached to a glass tank two storeys high. The stop-start motion of their actions caused gallons of water to slosh over the sides, drenching some, making others slip over. Water splattered around Nova’s feet and she jumped back to watch from a safe distance. Once it was close enough to the wall, the arkwinis ran round to the front of the tank and pushed with all their might until it came to rest, tight against the northeast corner.
Inside the tank was Banjax, the twelve-armed dodectopus. He was a deep green colour, like a pond thick with algae. Though she’d seen the Tweels of Fate based on his appearance, she hadn't expected him to be so big or look so ferocious. The beast had remained relatively still during his transportation by pushing against the sides of the square tank with his tentacles.
Now the tank was at rest, he released all but one of his powerful green arms, unsuckering them one by one. She approached the tentacle that remained attached to the side. About a foot back from its sucker, the tentacle swelled spherically. It looked like a python that had swallowed a football. A similar sphere was present on each of the other arms. She went close to the tank and looked into the open sucker. It contained a man’s face, jabbering away so quickly it looked like he was talking in tongues.
“He’s dishing out prizes for the Tweel of Fate,” one of the arkwinis said. “Banjax controls every tweel in Solarversia — hundreds of thousands of them — from here.”
The tweels were strange things and players were divided on whether you should bother visiting them. Jockey, who had been stung three times in row, losing teleport tokens and even his prized Battle Axe, swore that he would never visit one again. Burner had laughed in his face and declared that you needed “to be in it to win it”. Unsurprisingly, his experience had been mostly positive. So had hers: yesterday she’d won a bottle of Growsome that promised to add two feet to her height for sixty seconds. She couldn’t wait to use it.
“The faces near the end of his tentacles, the ones dishing out the prizes. Are they all the same face? My friend Burner and I can never decide.”
“Have you done Master Arkwal’s tour of the palace yet?”
“The one where he shows people the different domes? Yeah, I did it a few weeks ago, why?”
“There’s a similar tour for each of the Emperor’s entourage. Even one for the Emperor himself. Questions like that are answered on the tours. I’m not allowed to divulge anything myself. Sorry, but you know what Master Arkwal’s like.”
He raised his little eyebrows, and they exchanged a smile. It was only when his little chimp face pixelated slightly — which happened occasionally due to bandwidth restraints — that she remembered he wasn’t real. A shiver went down her spine. She’d been caught in the uncanny valley, interacting with a program as if he was a sentient being.
As the arkwini got back to his mopping, Nova saw a message flash up from her mum asking when she’d be home. She quickly pinged a reply saying she was just about to wrap things up and would be there soon. Having her mum call the school to track her down was the last thing she needed — Nova had skilfully managed to omit mention of her detentions from every conversation they’d had this month — but one phone call was all it would take to reach Game Over. She checked back into her Corona Cube, took a deep breath and braced herself for an evening of not really concentrating on King Lear.
Chapter Fourteen
The old man dissolved into nothingness and Sushi found herself standing in the middle of a deserted lounge bar. The arrangement of the place struck her as odd: the small circular tables, the stiff-backed chairs arranged neatly around them and the vulgar carpets decorated with a recurring image of an old bearded man carrying a trident. It was the view through the windows of the ocean that told her she was aboard a cruise liner. But what was she supposed to do? It wasn’t like the puzzles she was used to, and besides, her avatar couldn’t move from its spot.
A background noise piqued her curiosity. She couldn’t place it or say much about it, save for the fact that it was getting louder by the second. When the tidal wave hit the ship a few seconds later it sent her crashing against a couple of bar stools, her avatar still out of her control. The lounge windows soon cracked under the pressure of the surrounding seawater and the incoming tsunami flushed her down a corridor into the depths of the ship. She tumbled head over heels for what seemed like an eternity, and finally came to rest sprawled on her hands and knees looking like a washed-up shaggy dog.
Getting to her feet, she looked up at the appliances hanging down from the floor-turned-ceiling: ovens, sinks and workspaces. She was in the ship’s kitchen. Small fires were burning where boxes of cereals and other dry goods had been flung out of cupboards and onto the hobs. Water flooding into the room was beginning to
swirl around her ankles. A message flashed in her display: Escape from the Poseidon. 11,762 safe spots left. And then, for the first time, she was able to move.
Ten minutes earlier she’d arrived at Ayers Rock in Australia. She was there to see Giganja, one of nine Grandmasters players were required to visit throughout the course of the year. Grandmasters hosted the Planetary Puzzles, a series of self-contained games that started on the hour, every hour. The datafeed had told her that there were 16,803 people there with her to play the 10 a.m. puzzle. She now knew what the puzzle was about. Unless she escaped from the ship in time, she’d lose one of her three precious lives.
Glancing around the steaming, smoking cauldron of a room, she desperately searched for clues, consoled only by the knowledge that every other player, in his or her phased instance of the ship, would have been as disoriented as her.
First she tried looking for clues in the water. It was infused with a random assortment of cans of food, kitchen utensils and dinner ingredients. An oxygen counter appeared in her display while her head was submerged — it looked like she could remain underwater for a maximum of thirty seconds at a time.
Abandoning the underwater search, she clambered onto a metallic vent that enabled her to reach several cupboards. The first two were empty. Bummer. Balancing one leg on the vent and the other on a pipe protruding from the wall, she stretched to reach the third one. Its door swung open to reveal a brightly coloured object. She couldn’t make out what it was, only that the same Poseidon logo that had appeared on the carpet in the lounge was printed on its side.
Heart thrashing around in her chest, she strained to reach it. Her fingers flailed towards it uselessly, so she decided to leap. Headsets like hers — the same make of BoonerMax goggles that Nova owned — worked off brain waves to move avatars around the Gameworld. The technology wasn’t yet perfect, but according to the creators of such devices, it would be by the time the next Game started in 2024.
She sprang through the air, snatched the object clean off the shelf — it was a snorkel — and crashed to the water below, hitting a fixture on the way down. Her datafeed told her the snorkel could lengthen the duration of any underwater excursion to two minutes. The fall had cost her 18 health points, but at least she could search underwater now without the risk of drowning.
The water had reached waist height and was still rising. Swimming through a medley of bobbing potatoes and carrots, she cruised around the upturned kitchen, not quite sure what she was looking for. Other cupboards were either bare or contained nothing more interesting than the kitchen cupboards at home. And the freezer room, which had looked promising at first, also turned out to be a red herring. Wading past the thawing carcass of a lamb, and panicking slightly as she glimpsed the number of safe spots start to diminish, she spotted a discarded chef’s hat with the same logo emblazoned on its side.
She turned the hat inside out to find a map stitched to the lining. A dotted arrow led from the kitchen to the ship’s engine room, where the map’s legend indicated she’d find a door in the hull that led to freedom. At last, she was getting somewhere. As she waded through the water to the kitchen’s exit, she heard Gorigaroo strike his gong. He wasn’t actually there on the ship; Grandmaster Giganja had mentioned that the gong would sound every three minutes, signalling a new clue. The cupboard that had contained the snorkel started flashing. Those who hadn’t discovered it yet soon would.
Sushi squealed with joy when she reached the engine room door. The sign above its handle — which she’d had to crane her neck to read — confirmed that it led to freedom. Except the door was locked. As the minutes passed without her discovering a single additional clue, her joy gave way to fear and frustration. There were fewer than five thousand safe spots left when the gong sounded again.
This time the ship’s furnace flashed. Diving back under the water, she cursed at her stupidity — she’d noticed a chunky metal grill affixed to its front in one of her reccies, but not thought to inspect it. Idiot girl. The grill came away from the furnace as soon as she touched it to reveal an opening wide enough for her head, but not her shoulders. Clutching hold of the sides, she poked her head inside and soon found a metal plaque bearing an inscription: Find the boy in the cabin with the keychain round his neck.
She resurfaced and felt a huge rush of energy course through her body. It was all coming together. The corridor that led from the kitchen to the engine room had also led to a dozen or so cabins. After checking the first couple and finding nothing she’d ignored the rest in her excitement to get to the engine room.
She re-entered the corridor and did her best to ignore the visceral fear creeping through her. The water was up to her neck and gave no indication that it was going to stop. Her display flashed as the number of safe spots ticked under two thousand. She entered the first cabin and checked the only places large enough to hide a boy: the wardrobe and the bathroom. No dice.
Next cabin, the water now creeping above her chin. Wardrobe empty, bathroom too. Ditto the next cabin. Come on, little boy, where are you hiding? By the time she found him, curled on the top shelf of the wardrobe in the fifth cabin, there was less than a foot of air to the ceiling. A new chart for his oxygen level appeared in the display next to hers. Shit — she was now responsible for his life too, and they’d have to share the snorkel, halving the two-minute time frame. She was, however, relieved to spot the keychain around the boy’s neck. Taking his hand, she started the swim back to the engine room. It wasn’t far, but with the safe spots counting down in her peripheral vision — now fewer than a thousand — it felt like a slog.
As they progressed along the corridor, her heart, which was already pounding, stepped up a gear as the lights started to flicker. The ship was losing power. She checked on the boy. His terror mirrored her own, exacerbated by the unnatural sound of cast iron being twisted and bent as it succumbed to the enormous pressure of water bearing down on the vessel.
All of a sudden she was close to panicking, despite reminding herself that none of it was real; she was at a gaming café in town, not stranded inside the claustrophobia-inducing bowels of a capsized ship. Now kissing the ceiling, the deluge of water into the craft had finally finished; the ocean had won and the exit was still ten metres away.
She watched her display in horror, not knowing what to fear more, the dearth of safe spots — three hundred and counting — or their lack of oxygen. As they reached the door in the hull, the boy’s key started to flash. So did the oxygen gauge — they each had less than five seconds of air. She looked up, craning her neck as far as it would go above the water — there was an air pocket — the little beauty!
Kicking like a donkey on heat she surfaced into the pocket with a second to spare and was overjoyed to watch their oxygen counters slowly replenish. Waiting what she considered to be the bare minimum, she nodded at the boy and the pair of them sunk back under.
As soon as they got to the handle, the little boy took charge, removing the keychain from round his neck and inserting the key into the lock. Then he moved aside and motioned for her to turn it. Clutching it with both hands, she started to wind it in an anticlockwise direction, just like the sign advised, happy with herself for thinking it through on the swim back and realizing that the direction would be the same, regardless of either the sign or the door’s uprightness.
The next few seconds seemed to occur in a singular moment: the handle making a thunking sound, the door swinging up and open to reveal a clear blue sky, and Sushi and the little boy being winched to safety by the waiting rescue team. She’d done it – solved Giganja’s puzzle, the first of her friends to do so.
She ripped the Booners off her face, inhaled sharply and realized she’d been holding her breath for real. The panicky feelings on the boat had been strong, and for some reason she wasn’t shaking them. It was hard to regulate her breathing. She rubbed her eyes. Too long in VR? She looked up and around at the gamers on chairs to the left and right of her. That was weird — the gir
l to her left was also rubbing her eyes. So were the group of guys by the bar who’d been drinking beers and watching replays. One of the men started to cough and the others coughed in sync. Sushi sniffed the air. Something was burning — rubber?
Suddenly the air burst into a thousand shards of glass.
***
Arty wanted to relax. He wanted to go home, get a takeaway, flop in front of the TV and forget about his week. Instead, finding himself unable to leave the office, he’d ordered a curry that remained untouched on his plate, his mind still on the griefing attack at Ripley’s Junction. It had been consuming him endlessly. The analysis they’d done on the night of the attack hadn’t relieved him one bit, because it had shown that it probably hadn’t been perpetrated by the ROFL Mongers or any of the other griefing clans that Spiralwerks knew about, the kind that griefed for the ‘lolz’. They were fairly sure it had been the work of the Holy Order.
It was the conga line, viewed from above, that had clued them in. Lots of the players involved in the griefing attack had abandoned their cars to join the line, but after a while, most of them had got bored of waiting and had wandered off to the nearest Corona Cube to log out. The griefers had stayed in the line long enough that they reached the front and were able to control its direction. They’d steered it over a bridge and looped back round under the road that passed beneath it.
Carl, the Chief Technical Officer, had been the one to spot the pattern. Viewed from above, the snaking ‘S’ symbol was overlaid on itself at ninety degrees. The conga line had been distorted until it was configured like a curly swastika, a symbol that featured prominently in the Order’s manifesto. They were proud to be promoting a new form of fascism, one that involved loyalty and devotion to an unseen, as yet unmanifested superintelligent cybernetic organism. And they had a beef with Spiralwerks for an unknown reason that was killing him. The whole thing made him feel sick.
Solarversia: The Year Long Game Page 10