There had been a brief moment of euphoria following Carl’s discovery. Spiralwerks had been very strict about only allowing real people to sign up and play Solarversia, and had worked hard to prevent people from creating multiple accounts. So they’d sent the details of the players involved in the griefing attack to MI6 and the FBI, confident that they were about to help catch the lunatics behind it.
Today Arty had received a call. Yes, the people involved in the attack were real, but every one of them had been ruled out as having anything to do with the Order. Each avatar was real, but they belonged to down-and-outs, vagrants and beggars who had been approached a couple of years back and been paid a few bucks to stand still while someone waved a phone over them. The euphoria had quickly soured.
Arty stuck his fork deep into the mound of rogan josh and lifted it carefully to his mouth. Then he pushed his chair back from his desk and changed channels on the big screen until he came across one of the numerous Solarversia programmes. Some were dedicated to certain aspects of the game, such as quests, exhibitions or vehicle choices, others were punditry shows, following celebrities and players that were doing well, having won lots of money or obtained a special item of some sort. Many featured user-generated content.
He chose to watch a show about the Planetary Puzzles, one of the types of quest he’d been heavily involved with in the creative stages. Players had to face nine Grandmasters in total, one on each planet in the Solar System. They progressed in difficulty with the planet’s distance from the Sun. Mercury’s Grandmaster, Killanja, was the easiest, then Meganja on Venus, ending with Brontanja on Pluto, the most difficult of them all. Players would have to face every Grandmaster, though not in any particular order, and such visits were included in Bucket Lists later in the year. Unsuccessful attempts at puzzles lost players a life, although the item was ticked off the list for the attempt.
A problem that Spiralwerks had encountered as soon as they began working on Solarversia was the viral nature of information. As soon as one person knew something, everyone in the world could know it. The minute a puzzle had been played, word of how to solve it would be out there, on forums, on social media, in tweets. There was no way to prevent the spread. The only way round it was to find a solution that meant no puzzle was ever played more than once.
But in a game supporting a hundred million players over the course of a year, the number of individual puzzles Spiralwerks needed to devise stretched towards infinity. It had taken a lot of false starts, but the team had eventually managed to created an artificially intelligent program, which spawned hundreds of thousands of unique puzzles at the right level of difficulty, puzzles that were surprisingly varied and fun to play. These were the Planetary Puzzles.
The TV presenter of the programme introduced a player who had just faced Giganja, the Grandmaster in charge of Earth’s puzzles. Arty loved these segments, where the person watched a replay of some recent action and spoke about what had been going through their mind at the time, discussing the reasons they’d acted in the ways they had. Suddenly the programme cut to a sombre-looking man in a newsroom.
“We interrupt this programme to bring you some breaking news. A series of explosions have been reported across the United States, all occurring shortly after midday. Five cities were targeted, killing nineteen people, injuring many more. The death count is expected to rise. Some viewers may find the following scenes disturbing.”
The first and most devastating blast had struck the Electropets’ Headquarters in Menlo Park, California. A knot formed in Arty’s stomach — Electropets were on the Holy Order’s corporate hit list. Someone had gained access to the building carrying a bomb in a suitcase and detonated it in a busy lift. Eight people, severed from life in an instant. Arty watched a fire crew pump water into a mangled, blackened lift shaft before the programme cut to an eyewitness account with a clearly shocked, middle-aged American-Asian woman who spoke in fits and starts:
“It was lunchtime. My colleague Jerry asked if I wanted to grab yum-cha. I walked to the elevator with him before realising that I’d forgotten my purse. Jerry even made a joke about it. I can see him laughing right now — I always forget my purse. I told him I’d join him. He said he’d save a place for me in the line. It was so loud it shook the entire building. I fell into the water cooler. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Jerry’s gone.”
The next piece of footage was from a gaming cafe in Seattle where multiple lives had been lost. No, thought Arty. His fork, suspended in mid-air since the newscast began, clattered to the ground. Was the cafe affiliated with Spiralwerks? Was this an indirect attack on them? The entire front section of the cafe was missing, as was the top half of the van parked outside. Every window in the vicinity had been blown out of its frame. The road was chock-full of police cars, ambulances and fire engines that struggled to pass one another. People were either hugging each other in tears or sitting on the curbside, hands on heads, staring into space. This wasn’t right, it couldn’t be happening. He grabbed his tray with shaking hands and put it on the desk, suddenly feeling sick. The newscast reverted to the studio.
“All of the targets appear on a list that was recently circulated by the Holy Order, an organisation comprised of ‘techno-shamans’ who have declared allegiance to an artificially intelligent being … who doesn’t exist as yet. The Holy Order claim that this being — who they refer to as the ‘Magi’ — has contacted them from the future and persuaded them to help ‘give birth’ to it. The Order’s manifesto, entitled Sacred Singularity, provides an explanation of the reasoning behind their bizarre beliefs, stemming from a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The group claims that the logical outcome of the thought experiment is that the world will become a far better place once the Magi is in charge of it, and use this explanation to excuse their terrorist attacks.”
Beside him, Arty noticed that Hannah had entered the room. She’d initiated a bridge call in Settlers of Catan, the meeting room down the corridor, and wanted him to join them as soon as possible. He nodded to her and mumbled his confirmation while anger rose inside of him. No, he wanted to say, no, I cannot join them. It would be a meeting focused on death and destruction. What did he know about such things? Nothing. He was a creator, an innovator. He made things, didn’t destroy them, and he wanted it to stay that way.
All of a sudden, the Year-Long Game had deformed into something bearing more resemblance to a Year-Long Nightmare.
Chapter Fifteen
The days after the blast were the hardest of Nova’s life. As soon as she stepped through the front door that evening, she knew something was wrong. Her parents wore the sombre expressions they’d had the day her grandmother had died. They made her sit down on the sofa before they gave her the news. At first, her body went numb. Then it shook uncontrollably, while tears had streamed down her face.
Eventually they’d helped her to her feet, up the stairs and to her room. She’d taken the Valium her mum had handed her without question and, for the briefest of moments, had hoped she wouldn’t wake up. At least, not until everything was back to normal again.
Everything seemed lost. Nothing had meaning. Her books lay unopened on her desk; her Booners were discarded where she’d left them, somewhere downstairs probably. She didn’t care. Even Zhang couldn’t comfort her. His playful demeanour was so unsettling that she turned him off for a bit. Her dad spent most of the time in his shed, aware that there was nothing he could say or do to make things better, while her mum waited on her hand and foot, and was there to cuddle and cry with.
Messages of sympathy poured in from Burner, Jockey and many school friends she didn’t know cared. She read them, touched by their sentiment, but found that she had nothing to say in reply. The only person she wanted to talk to had been taken from her, forever. How could her Solarversia Sister be gone?
The footage from the destroyed gaming cafe in Seattle had imprinted itself on her mind. She’d forced herself to view the attack from the 360-d
egree cams in the area, like it was the bare minimum she could do for her friend, to have been there with her until the end. A single feed had captured Sushi at the moment of the blast. Thank God it had been grainy and slightly out of focus. A mercy, however small. One second Sushi was there, the next she was gone. And it hurt, like nothing she’d known.
Nova had often heard it said that it was the small things in life that meant the most. So it was with her friend’s death. Hearing their favourite songs played on the radio was enough to send her to her knees, immobilised by grief. She changed her route to Maidstone High to avoid the Japanese restaurant where Sushi had earned her name because the sight of it left her winded.
But the thing that made Nova saddest of all was not having Sushi to play with. Not having someone tempt her to bunk off homework to play a quick sim. Not having someone to practise her Combinations with, or to patiently listen while Nova described her latest idea for an amazing game she’d devised. And, stupid as it sounded, she hated that she’d never get to see her friend transform into her Siamese cat Super Avatar.
One evening, a week after the blast, Nova’s world was shaken for a second time. She’d retreated to her room with a bunch of movies she’d liked as a kid when her Booners signalled an incoming message. She froze, almost choking on her own breath. The message ringtone was the Solarversia jingle, the one she and Sushi used as a ringtone for one another. She hadn’t set it to go off under any other circumstance.
She stared at her Booners for a while, mulling possibilities over in her mind. They’d definitely just played the jingle, she was sure of that. She’d never known Burner do something this twisted. He might have been immature and prone to taking things too far, but this? He wouldn’t have dared. Perhaps some jerk from school had recently discovered trolling.
She clasped her ponytail and threaded it between her hands while she pondered a list of likely suspects, people she might have offended somehow. The Booners sat there, on her desk, containing a mystery all of a sudden. She reached out to them a couple of times like she was scared they might leap up and attack her before she could allow herself to grab them, then peered into the display from a safe distance.
The message was from Sushi, its subject line a simple one: “I’m on Soul Surfer.” An old memory stirred from its slumber. Her eyes flitted to the ceiling while she said the words out loud. Soul Surfer. The ghost of a smile crept across her face as she remembered what this was about.
She hadn’t been the victim of some sick prank after all. Soul Surfer was the name of an app they’d got excited about a few years ago, the same way they’d gotten excited about a hundred different things. She strained to remember the details — something about a computer algorithm pretending to be you once you’d died, allowing your spirit to live on. It was immortality for the masses, served in a bottle shaped like an app.
She was conscious of the concerted effort she made when slipping her Booners on, the way she carefully brushed her hair behind her ears, straightened her shoulders, even cleared her throat — like she was about to go on a virtual date. She paused a few seconds, took a deep breath and opened the message, all the while reminding herself to keep her expectations low and to stay on guard, knowing that it might yet turn out to be a phishing scam of sorts. The message was from the CEO of Soul Surfer rather than Sushi herself, an introductory few lines that explained the purpose of the app.
“Dear Nova Negrahnu, I’m sorry to learn that you recently lost someone you were close to. Sushi Harrison listed you as her ‘best friend in the world’ on her profile and indicated that you might be interested in this novel way of communicating with her now that she’s gone. Soul Surfer has been helping millions of people just like you deal with their grief since 2017. We’ve created a computerised version of your friend, who now exists on our servers, and is waiting for you should you choose to proceed with using the app. My sincerest condolences, Charlotte Applewhite, founder and CEO of Soul Surfer Inc.”
Beneath the message was a personal video from Charlotte, which Nova vaguely remembered from the time she and Sushi had read about it. She’d lost her husband and only child, a son in his early twenties, in a road traffic accident. With an interest in machine learning, the funds from the sale of a previous start-up, and a laser focus fuelled by grief, she’d been the perfect candidate to work on such a controversial idea.
Feeding in every known piece of information about her loved ones — photos, videos, email transcripts; input from everyone that knew the deceased — she slowly iterated algorithms that approximated their personalities. Word got out about what she was doing, other bereaved people started asking questions, and before long she was swamped with requests to make the software available to the public.
Nova explored the app further. She flinched when she saw Sushi’s profile. It knew the time, location and cause of her death. If she chose to use the app, it would take Sushi’s entire digital footprint and create a specific ‘instance’ of her, one unique to Nova. Anyone else who used the app to talk to Sushi would receive their own version of her. Every time Nova interacted with her instance of Sushi, she could provide feedback to her friend — or at least, the computer algorithm learning to be her — to make her more Sushi-like. Slowly, over time, the different instances of the program would diverge, creating multiple copies that embodied her different personality traits as remembered by the people who knew her.
She removed the goggles, placed them on her lap and exhaled slowly and deliberately. Life without Sushi was incomprehensible. They’d attended the same nursery from the age of two and had, according to Mrs Negrahnu, been inseparable from the day they’d met.
Nova had been playing with a tipper truck in the sandpit when an older boy had steamed over and snatched it from her. Spotting the incident from the other side of the nursery, Suzy — as Sushi was still known back then — had intercepted the fleeing boy, grabbed the truck off him and returned it to a teary-eyed but grateful Nova.
A couple of years later when the two girls were already the best of friends, their mums arranged a quick visit to the local sushi joint for the four of them one evening. On arriving at the restaurant Nova had burst into tears, distraught at the prospect that they were there to ‘eat Suzy’. When the adults burst into laughter, Suzy put an arm around her friend, drew her close and promised that she’d always be there to protect her. It was the incident that had earned Sushi her nickname.
And now, what was this? A computer version of her Solarversia Sister? She didn’t know what to think. Would she be offended if Nova didn’t use the app? What would Sushi want her to do? They sounded like ridiculous questions, and Nova surprised herself with the amount of serious thought she gave them. She imagined the roles being reversed. What would she have wanted Sushi to do? Win Solarversia, of course. But also ensure that justice was done, that whoever killed her was found and sent to rot in a jail somewhere.
She put her Booners back on without knowing why and, instead of returning to Soul Surfer, opened up The Sandbox, a generic app that allowed you to build simple virtual structures. “Create cube, sides three metres in length. Place me in the centre. Colour the ceiling black.” She paused, suddenly aware that she was recreating a Corona Cube. The pulsing yellow walls of plasma didn’t seem appropriate. “Colour the walls blue. Actually, make them different shades of blue. The wall I’m facing, give it a title in large white letters along the top. Title: ‘the Holy Order’. Perform Google search on title. Display results on wall. Group by file type.”
The wall came to life in front of her face. The top layer, just below the title, started filling up with text-based documents: the Order’s manifesto, articles and forum results blossomed into view. Beneath that were images: symbols from the manifesto including the curly swastika, avatar pictures of the homeless people involved in the griefing attack and photos of the destruction caused by the bombs. The bottom layer of results was made up of videos, mainly newscasts and opinion pieces. She stepped back from the wall and tri
ed to take it all in at once, feasting on the newly assembled gestalt, allowing it to permeate her being. It was several minutes before she moved or spoke again.
“On the wall to my left, create a timeline. I want the bombings in the middle. Before that event I want to see the places that the Holy Order showed up online. To which sites did they post their manifesto and in what chronological order?” The timeline flowered into existence: a thick horizontal line from which a series of vertical branches soon sprouted. Some of the documents, images and videos on the main wall flashed before moving around the cube to append themselves to the branches, their size determined by the relative importance of the search result.
She studied the line up close, interacting with its contents, increasing the size of some of the results and flicking others out of existence. “Place the list of corporate targets on the wall behind me.”
And so it went. Nova paced around the cube, adding and subtracting information from it, sorting it, visualising it in different ways, doing everything she could to make sense of it. She had been going at it for three hours straight before she began to wonder where she was going with it all. What exactly was she looking for? If a major clue stared her in the face, would she even know it?
She kept being drawn back to the section of wall with the maps on it: one that showed the companies on the hit list and one that showed the locations of the attacks. She glanced between the maps and the section of wall that contained the symbols while a vague idea bubbled away in the depths of her mind. As much as she valued her independence and wanted to do this without help, if she was going to do this properly, she’d need reinforcements. She messaged Burner.
“Are you there, mate?”
The Sandbox automatically positioned a static picture of his avatar floating in mid-air in front of her face. She gently pushed the picture to one side so that she could continue staring at the composition on the wall. A few seconds later, his avatar replied.
Solarversia: The Year Long Game Page 11