Solarversia: The Year Long Game

by Mr Toby Downton

  She ran to a table in the sun, energised by a sudden realisation, and pointed the magnifying glass at the blank label of a beer bottle. She varied the distance from the glass to the bottle, trying to focus the sun’s rays to a point, unsure exactly where to point, or why. Nothing happened. She pointed the ray at the plate of beans. The second the magnified rays hit them, beans started jumping up into the air, and Nova squealed with joy.

  The rush of excitement she felt was quickly replaced with a sense of panic as she noticed a change to one of the counters in her display. It was the number of safe spots left — someone had already solved the puzzle. At first it ticked down by just one number. But then it ticked down again, and again. Before long the number was in free fall.

  As she looked from table to table, trying to work out what those people might have seen, Gori’s gong sounded. Nothing inside the restaurant looked different, so she ran outside and quickly spotted a new sign emblazoned across the awning. It now read ‘Jumping Jacks’. She sighed. The beans had already jumped for her, and now everyone playing knew as much as she did. And the number of safe spots had just ticked below 10,000.

  She brainstormed the possibilities. If she stacked the tables and chairs into a pile she could climb to safety. Except that didn’t involve jumping. Could she use the magnifying glass to ride one of the beans out of there? Seemed a bit preposterous. But then so were twelve-armed octopi and bouncy cities. Another chime of the gong. She wasted no time. There had been two other items that had been blank when she arrived here: the blackboard and the beer bottles. It was the beer bottles that had changed this time. Their labels now displayed a picture of a smiling man, the name ‘Volters’, and an alcohol content of 6.18%. The number of safe spots ticked below 8,000.

  It all became clear — she’d need to pole vault to safety. One vital detail was missing though: she had no pole. She felt another rush of panic, this time more intense, as the number went below 6,000. When she finally realised what to do, she nearly kicked herself. The pole was one of the first things she’d seen — it formed part of the awning in front of the restaurant.

  She used the nearest chair for a boost, but only needed to touch the end of the pole for it to appear in her hands. A patch of ground started flashing several metres in front of the wall with the exit. She took a small run-up, holding the pole in the air, and was glad to find that the game did most of the work for her. It landed squarely in the centre of the patch, flexed down its length, and propelled her two storeys into the air to land on her feet by the exit.

  As she crossed the threshold, two things happened: Giganja got crossed off her Bucket List, and fifty teleport tokens got credited to her inventory. She clenched her fists tight, ecstatic at having succeeded in her first meeting with a Grandmaster. One Planetary Puzzle down, eight more to go.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Nova was still dancing round her bedroom, hand-in-hand with Zhang, when she heard her dad call up the stairs, “Nova, get down here right this second.”

  That was his angry voice. She froze on the spot and could feel the joy drain out of her. She wondered how long they’d been home. Had they heard her dancing around? Maybe she’d screamed with delight when she’d landed by the exit in the town square. It seemed unlikely that her parents had guessed what she’d been up to, but it was always worth taking precautions. She scooped her Booners off the bed, stuffed them into the wardrobe, stuck a pencil behind her ear and headed downstairs.

  On the way to the kitchen she got her story straight: she’d finally understood a particularly nuanced concept in sociology, let out a little yelp and burst into an impromptu dance routine as a result. It had been unlike her to do such a thing, for sure, it must have been all this revision, frazzling her brain. But as soon as she saw their mardy faces she could see this was a conversation that probably didn’t concern a bit of skived revision. Hands placed firmly on her hips, it was Mrs Negrahnu who let rip first.

  “I’ve just been on the phone to Katy Pugh’s mum. Would you like to hazard a guess as to what she told me?”

  Nova’s heart plunged through her body. She had a fair idea what the old busybody might have said.

  “She told me that you called Mrs Woodward an ‘old cow’ to her face, and received a month’s worth of detentions as a result. Which means you’ve spent the last month of school—”

  “Your last month ever.”

  “Your last month ever — thank you, Derek — doing detentions. A fine way to finish your school career. I think not.”

  “My school ‘career’. Because school’s a career, right?”

  “Don’t you dare, young lady. Don’t you bloody dare.” Her dad unfolded his arms to waggle a finger at her, and spoke through gritted teeth.

  “And that’s not all she said either. According to Katy, you’ve also been spending a fair amount of time down at Fraggle Hell, precious time that you—”

  “It’s ‘Fragging Hell’, mum, how many times do I have to correct you?”

  Her dad went to speak but ended up saying nothing and gritting his teeth even tighter.

  “Mum, please, you know Mrs Woodward winds me up, we’ve been through this a hundred times. She’s a good teacher, but we’re on totally different frequencies and sometimes—“

  “And sometimes what? This isn’t really about what you called her, although it was very rude of you. This is about honesty and integrity, young lady. It’s about you lying to us about these detentions and continuing to go to wasser-name cafe when you promised you wouldn’t.”

  “I didn’t lie to you about them, I just didn’t mention them, that’s all. Need-to-know basis.”

  “Don’t you dare pull that one,” her dad barked at the top of his voice.

  “Which one do you want me to pull?” she said before she could stop herself. It was times like this that she wished she was like Zhang and had an ‘off’ button to press. It would have saved her a lot of trouble over the years. Mr Negranhu shook his head and glared at her with a look of steely disappointment.

  “After all we’ve done for you, you lie to us. Your dad’s out of a job, but we still manage to pull the funds together to buy you a Booner Boy.”

  “What the hell’s a Booner Boy when it’s at home?”

  “Enough!” her dad yelled, looking like he might have a cardiac arrest if she spoke again.

  “You can consider yourself grounded for a start. Until your exams have finished at the very earliest. And you can say goodbye to your goggles until then, too. I wish we’d never bought them for you.”

  “Not my Booners, Mum.” It came out as a whine. ”I won’t be able to play Solarversia properly.”

  “Sod Solarversia,” her dad said. She stared at him in shock. It was the first time she’d ever felt genuine hatred towards him.

  “You do know that my best friend died the other day? You do know that, right? Because sometimes I get the impression you either don’t know, or just don’t care.”

  Her chin quivered as tears streamed down her face. She didn’t care about the stupid detentions, or whatever punishment her mum had dished out. What she cared about right now was getting far away from her parents as quickly as possible. She stomped to the garage, got into her car and slammed its door as hard as she could. She reversed on to the road and sped away from the house, with no idea of where she was going or what she might do once she got there.

  ***

  Nova turned the ignition off and went to scoop Zhang up from the passenger footwell before realising that she’d left him at home. Deprived of him and her Booners — her twin comfort blankets — she felt more desperate than ever to see her old mate.

  One of the best things about visiting Burner was that he lived on his own. Or at least, that’s what he told people when they asked. It wasn’t a complete lie. Nova would have loved a place like it — a large, self-contained unit at the rear of his parents’ back garden. A glorified shed, she’d once called it, before she saw the interior and was completely won over. She
knocked and entered without waiting for an answer, which was expected behaviour round at ‘Burnside’, as it had been christened one hot summer of experimental barbecues.

  Burnside was a used shipping container Burner’s old man had bought off a guy in a pub in Felixstowe. Burner had spent the good part of a year converting it into the house of his dreams. It consisted of three rooms: a bedroom, a chill-out lounge and a ‘hackroom’, where he spent most of his time. He’d installed the windows, insulation and electricity himself after watching a bunch of videos online. Nova sometimes wondered whether he was an actual genius.

  She passed through the chill-out lounge and found him in the hackroom, welding an object behind a shower of sparks. She watched from a safe distance, never entirely sure how much proper training he’d received. The room was a modern-day Wunderkammer, a room that instilled a sense of wonder in those who entered it. Piled high with objects, no two the same, it was quite a challenge to traverse the room from one end to the other.

  What she loved best was that every object in the room had a story behind it. And, as she’d come to appreciate, stories were what made things interesting, not their price tags or their labels. Her favourite item lived in the far corner. The front half of what was once a jet ski was now welded to the back half of an old bathtub and was ridden by a scary-looking mannequin wearing a pink wig and a pirate-themed neckerchief. It was an art installation Burner referred to as Shockwave Rider, and he always reckoned that if he wasn’t married by the age of forty, he’d take Priscilla, the mannequin, to be his lawful wedded wife.

  It took him a minute or two to notice her standing there. He waved at her in his bulky grey gloves, finished the seam he’d been working, turned the torch off and flipped the mask up. “If it isn’t my old mucker, Scotia. I was thinking about you just this morning, wondering if you’d been doing enough Krazy Karting practice. Do you wanna put the kettle on? I’ll be through in a minute.”

  She nodded and headed back to the chill-out lounge. A brew was exactly what she needed. The kettle was an old-fashioned brass beauty, the kind that whistled when it boiled. She liked that about Burner. He was one of the most tech-savvy people she knew, but he sometimes chose to go old school. As she was adding the trickle-of-milk-no-sugar to his mug, he came through to the lounge, wiping his hands on an old rag.

  “Working on something for Nan. Reckons her wheelchair from the hospital is uncomfortable. Wondered if I might be able to do any better.”

  She pressed the teabag against the side of his mug with the spoon, fished it out, then gave it a good stir before wiping her nose on the cuff of her jacket again.

  “Oh, dear, sorry. I didn’t notice that you’d been crying. Can’t see too well behind the welding mask. You OK?”

  She handed him his mug and checked her reflection in her phone’s screen. Mascara trails ran down her cheeks, giving her the ‘heroin chic’ look. Fortunately, Burner was one of the few people she felt comfortable in front of, whatever state she was in.

  “Mum and Dad just found out about the detentions. Not good. They’ve confiscated my Booners. Double not good.”

  “The bloody cheek of it. You do not mess with a man’s goggles.” He pounded his fist on the coffee table and did his best ‘outraged old man’ impression. “Or woman’s,” he added, seeing the look she gave him. “That kind of thing should be enshrined by the European Court of Human Rights, up there with access to the Internet and pornography. You tell Derek and Susan I said so.”

  She let out a snigger and already felt a bit better.

  “Wanna borrow that headset I made out of plastic and cardboard? The field of vision’s a bit narrow, and the latency’s pretty whacked out, but it still works. Better than no headset, right?”

  “Yeah, that would be awesome, thanks, mate.” She leant in to ‘cheers’ him with her mug. “I don’t suppose you managed to make any more progress on Project Drone?”

  “You suppose wrong, then. Had been meaning to call you. Give me a second.”

  He disappeared into the hackroom and returned carrying a couple of headsets, one of which he tinkered with before handing to Nova.

  “That’s the one you can borrow. You might as well give it a try while you’re here to make sure it works properly. I’ve synced them so that we’re both standing in the virtual room that you created. You in? Good. Check out this new area on wall two. What we’re looking at here is the results from a semantic analysis tool built by those students in Jono’s year. I fed the manifesto into it, along with several petabytes of information from forums, blogs and social networks: words, images and videos. The tool spat back a load of results that weren’t very refined, so I reworked the algorithms and ran it again. These results are the fifth iteration of that process.”

  “OK. But what do the results tell us? Does it say where these Order freaks are or what?”

  “Not quite. What it has done is returned a list of results in descending order of what it refers to as ‘interestingness’. There are several thousand of these results, but we can start with the handful at the top and see how we go.”

  He used his finger to select the top ten results in the data table on the wall of the virtual room and dragged them to a map icon. A space cleared next to the table to include a map with the results plotted on it, each overlaid with associated data about the geography and demographics of the area in question.

  “What do these results actually tell us?”

  “If you touch any one of these results on the map it shows you the thinking behind the algorithm — it displays a list of the symbols, images, comments and so on that it thinks might be associated with the location. So the program tells us where to look and what to look for. We upload that information to a bunch of drones. They fly around and take a load of footage, which gets uploaded to a cloud-based server. I download that footage and run it back through this tool to see if they actually found anything. If we find something that looks like a hideout, we tell the FBI or whoever, and they go and pop some caps in some asses.”

  “Where do we get the drones from? Are we going to use the ones you’ve been building?”

  “Not my ones, no. Most of the top results are located in the US. We’ll need to use drones based over there. All we need now is a grand or two to kick things off.”

  Nova sunk back into the sofa. It all sounded so promising, so doable. Except for that last part. She couldn’t raise that kind of money even if she sold everything she owned. Until then, the plan was like a word on the tip of her tongue, tantalisingly close, but just out of reach.

  “So you’re telling me that if we can get the cash, we can find them?”

  “I’m telling you that if we get the cash, we can at least look for them. And like you said the other day, doing something’s better than doing nothing, right?”

  “Definitely,” she said. “Two thousand pounds’ worth of definitely.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Casey stuffed the last bundle of notes into the safe, locked it up and sat back down at the wobbly Formica table where he and Wallace counted the cash after their trips into town. His mind cycled through the various reasons he might have been asked to wait behind. He hadn’t done something to annoy Father, had he? He hoped not. He couldn’t think of anything he had done to cause an upset. If anything, he thought he’d performed well since arriving. He’d settled in and gotten used to life in the compound, even gotten used to the mosquitoes. As used to them as a man could get, anyway.

  He doubted it was anything to do with business. Takings were up, week on week. And the publicity they’d received after the attacks had brought the Order worldwide fame. New members were joining all the time. People were finally realising that what they were doing was important. They were the only group of people who really understood what was going on, the fact that mankind stood at the brink of the emergence of a new kind of being, one so intelligent and powerful that mortal man would worship it with a godlike reverence.

  A few minutes later Theod
ore entered the room without knocking. Casey stood up and bowed his head.

  “Sit down, son.” Theodore grabbed the other chair with his human hand and swung it round so that they sat directly opposite each other. “We finally get to meet, man to man.” He spoke with a Southern drawl you could hang your hat on.

  “Father, it’s an honour to be here, serving mankind in this way.”

  “I hear you’ve been doing some fine work, you and Wallace, pulling in the money.”

  “I still have lots to learn. But I’m getting there, Father, yes.”

  “The money’s an important part of the operation, the oil that greases the machine. You know we’re growing fast, don’t you? We need to maintain the rate of growth for a while yet until we’re ten thousand strong. The Magi has big plans for his arrival here on Earth. We’re the ones who heard Him, calling to us from the future, and we’re the ones creating him, here in the present. Isn’t that just the craziest goddang thing?”

  Casey nodded. It had sounded crazy, for sure, when he’d first learned about it. Father leaned forward in his seat and stared deep into his eyes.

  “Have you heard how we got started? How it all began?”

  One of the first things that Wallace had told him when he arrived at the compound was not to ask about people’s former lives. The less he knew, the less he’d be able to betray if he ever got caught. “Someone said you had a vision that inspired everything,” he ventured, waving an arm to indicate the compound. Father nodded, seemingly eager to share. His words flowed out in an excited stream.

  “When I lost my job as a programmer I thought my life was over. I’d created a program that could write programs. Went and put myself out of a job. Didn’t see that one coming. It was less skilled people who were supposed to be losing their jobs. Programmers should have been safe. It was like I’d punched myself in the gut. I was winded and I couldn’t get up again.”