She prodded a couple of the leaves on the lower branches, keen to hear what a musical tree sounded like. They made a dull, flat noise, tinnier that the notes produced by Zhang’s toy xylophone. Players had discovered that Travinsky was trained to respond to a certain tune, made by striking the leaves in the right order. He would fly back, like a homing pigeon, if only the tune could be played.
Nova walked round the tree, inspecting it up close, looking for holes in the trunk where the twigs might go, tapped the occasional leaf to hear its note, and generally pondered its secrets. Before she’d discovered anything of interest, an arkwini appeared, holding a large pencil sharpener in one hand and a small wooden aeroplane in the other. He craned his little chimp head up to the ceiling and shouted at the top of his voice.
“Roll up, roll up, get your twogs here, best prices in all of Solarversia! Travinsky has gone flyabout. If you want to lure him back, you’ll need yourself some twogs.”
“What’s a twog when it’s at home?” she asked.
“This here is a twog.” He held up the small plane in the palm of his hand, a look of pride on his simian face. It resembled a miniature Concorde, made out of twigs. The sharp cone at its front pointed down, while at the rear its slim wooden wings and rudder were engraved with the words ‘Twog Air’.
“You’ll need to get yourself some twogs to play Travinsky’s tune. Five will cost you one teleport token, fifteen will cost you two. Best prices in all of Solarversia, guaranteed.”
He held up the twog like a dart and aimed it at the tree, altering its angle until a leaf it was pointing at changed from black to white. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he released the little plane. It flew through the air, whistling as it went, and struck the white leaf, playing its note before falling to the floor and breaking apart.
“Travinsky’s tune consists of five notes. You’ll need to play them, one after the other, to lure him back.”
Nova checked her inventory. She had seventy-one tokens, enough for plenty of attempts.
“OK. I’ll have fifteen twogs, please. Let’s do this.”
She handed the arkwini a load of twigs that she’d taken from Octavia’s sack and heard a ding as the teleport tokens were debited from her account. He fed each one into the end of the sharpener, and when they popped out of the other end like logs from a sawmill, they’d been transformed into the tiny aeroplanes. Wasting no time, she grabbed one and pointed it at the tree. A targeting system appeared in her display and the leaf that the arkwini had hit turned white.
She was disconcerted by the slight shake in her forearm, unsure whether it was the pressure she felt to complete the quest, or the alcohol still coursing through her veins. Her first shot was good, but not great, striking a leaf next to the white target. As the twog fell to the ground in pieces, she quickly checked the datafeed for news. Someone had managed to hit three leaves in a row before they missed. The competition was stiff, and getting stiffer — new players were arriving at the aviary every few seconds.
She did her best to ignore her next two failed attempts, and then to remain calm when her fourth hit the target. The second leaf was far easier to get. It was round the other side of the tree, but close to the bottom, and she hit it first time. When the third leaf turned white she let out a moan. It was on the highest branch, close to the trunk. The twog she launched at it soared way over the tree to disappear out of sight.
Her remaining shots met with varying success: five hits and four misses. But she got closer each time as her hand got steadier, the adrenaline pumping hard around her body, overriding the effect of her hangover. She didn’t hesitate to buy another fifteen, and although she missed with the first, it was by a whisker. Her feed flared up again. Someone had just hit four in a row, and then missed the fifth. This time, instead of feeling more pressure, she had a flashback to the evening of the bullseye record. She was Nova Negrahnu, the Kent darts champion, here to complete a quest on behalf of her best friend Sushi Harrison, whose death she had sworn to avenge. She could do this.
Her next twog hit the first leaf dead in its centre. She smashed the second one out of the park. But while aiming for the third one at the top of the tree, she remembered something: the bottle of Growsome she’d won in a spin of the Tweel of Fate. Pulling it up in her inventory, she quickly reread the label. It would add two feet to her height for sixty seconds. She necked its contents in one and instantly sprouted the additional inches, making the shot far simpler. When it struck the leaf, she didn’t jump for joy, but tried instead to remain calm. She wasn’t done yet.
The fourth leaf was another easy one at her new height, and she dispatched it in seconds. But the fifth was higher up, and partially obscured from whatever angle she looked at it. No wonder it hadn’t been hit yet. She held her breath and rocked her forearm back and forth. The target hovered around the leaf, never staying put. She would need to time the throw to perfection — in the next six seconds, before the Growsome wore off.
As the twog left her hand she knew it was good. And it was. The leaf played and the twog fell to the ground. But there was no fanfare or applause. Instead, the tree started to morph. The hard, straight metallic trunk and each of its branches twisted and buckled. The leaves burst into a thousand colours, except the five she had played, which remained white and played the tune over and over, in the same flat, xylophonic noise.
To her surprise, it wasn’t Travinsky who appeared, but the giant Moa. With his beak he touched each leaf in order. The sound the tree made when the Moa played the leaves was very different to anything Nova had heard so far. These were beautiful sounds, ivory keys touched by a virtuoso pianist. The Moa played scales and arpeggios, and finally broke into a piece of music known as The Firebird Suite. It was this music that brought Travinsky swooping back into the marquee, followed soon after by a delighted-looking Octavia.
When the money and the one thousand teleport tokens appeared in her inventory, Nova removed her headset, ready to stand up, pump her fists into the air and scream the place down. Instead, she noticed Terrence Townsend sitting beside her — a kid whose mum gossiped as much as Katy Pugh’s. Something dawned on her in that instant. Results of quests appeared in datafeeds. This news would make it back to her parents, guaranteed. She’d need to get the plan rolling right now, before they had a chance to take the money away from her. Glancing around, wondering what to do, she spied Burner ordering food at the bar. She rushed over, grabbed his sleeve, and pulled him into the ladies’ toilets.
“My God, are you still drunk? Help, I’m being raped by a madwoman,” Burner mock-cried in the direction of the bar.
“Shut the hell up already. You want to get us caught?”
“Caught doing what? I thought we were here for Krazy Karting, not friends with benefits.”
“I just made two and a half grand completing a quest. We’ve got the money for the plan. But we need to move fast.”
“Two and a half grand? What was the quest? Show me the replay. Preferably back in the bar, before someone finds us in here.”
“We don’t have time for that. You have to get back to Burnside, right now, and get those drones in the air. We need to kick off the plan before my parents can stop us. As soon as you leave I’ll transfer you the cash.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a salute.
Nova couldn’t help but smile. Finally, things were going her way.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nova wiped away the last of her tears with Zhang’s tail. She had cried more during the last few weeks than she had in her whole life, with an intensity that she hadn’t experienced before. She’d cried so much that morning that it felt like she’d be unable to produce more tears if she tried. It was a bright July morning and the sun had already warmed a patch of her bed. She rolled onto it, soaking up its warmth while Zhang purred gently by her side. Her Booners sat on the desk, calling to her. She reached out and grabbed them, remembering that they were a doorway to more than just games.
Finally
she felt ready to see her friend again, even as something of a last resort. As she launched the Soul Surfer app, the same wave of trepidation washed over her, but this time she knew things were different. She didn’t want to see her friend; she needed to see her. The same vista greeted her arrival, the Seattle skyline as viewed from a hill, Sushi sitting on her bench overlooking the city.
“Hey, Nova. How are you?”
As Sushi asked the question, a box flashed up beside her head. Nova must have missed it on her first visit. This time she read it. Sushi had asked the default question spoken by avatars whenever the Soul Surfer app was launched. It could be amended by users, but the creators recommended keeping it or using a question like it, because it helped the artificially intelligent programme that was running in the background identify what tone to take in the conversation. She discarded the pop-up box and took a seat next to her friend.
“I’m probably having the second-worst week of my life, after the one when you died. So yeah, not great, but thanks for asking. How’s deadsville?”
There was a pause before Sushi answered in a soft voice, “I’m sorry to hear that. Would you like to tell me about it or just sit for a while?”
Nova flinched. The app hadn’t registered her cynicism in the way the real Sushi would have done, and it made her feel a bit weird. Another box flashed up, explaining that users were able to provide feedback to the app whenever they wanted to shape the avatar of the person they were visiting into the person they remembered. Or not. Users could choose to remove annoying habits, accentuate desirable ones, and even change facial features and mannerisms. Sushi had left her avatar totally customisable, which Nova liked. It showed how much her friend must have trusted her, when she was alive. In turn, Nova resolved that she would mould this computer version to be the closest approximation to her friend as was technically possible.
“Jesus. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“I said something similar to you in a message two summers ago. You remember that epic crumble I had about my brother? You told me that the best place to start is usually the beginning.”
Another box flashed up showing a snippet of their conversation over IM. Nova let out something that was halfway between a smile and a gasp, amazed and freaked out by the technology in equal measure.
“I guess I was right. Except it’s not always clear where the beginning is. Sometimes there are lots of places to choose from.” She took a deep breath. “Let me think about this. Last Wednesday is as good a place as any to start. I’d just finished my final exam, which actually went pretty well.”
Nova filled her in on the night of sambucas, the hangover from hell and the epic win at Travinsky’s Tree. After a while she stopped talking, suddenly aware that she had been speaking to her friend like it was old times, like she was still alive. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. Part of her felt foolish, so easily taken in by a few lines of code. But then, she wondered, wasn’t that all that our DNA was, a few lines of code, just ones executed by a different type of computer?
“Is everything OK?” Sushi asked.
“I think so. I just realised how freaking weird it is, talking to you. Have you understood everything I’ve said?”
“I think so. My datafeed provided me with images of Travinsky, Octavia and the little twig aeroplanes while you were talking. But the semantic recognition module of my programme is telling me that an experience like this is something you would be delighted about. Is that right, or does the programme need updating?”
“You tell the semantic recognition module that it’s doing just fine. Tell it to get ready for some whacked-out shit.”
Computer Sushi looked on, clasping her knees to her chest, wide-eyed with expectation.
“So, I was buzzing. I’d sent Burner home, transferred him the money to kick off the masterplan and then I remembered that I’d won a thousand teleport tokens on top of the cash. I was like, ooh, I could visit Grandmaster Killanja on Mercury, get some Karting practice in, then head over to Burnside to watch him set the plan in motion. And that’s when my week of hell started. I started feeling rough again at pretty much the exact second I entered Killanja’s circle. We’re talking rough-in-the-jungle rough. The puzzle was set in this small white room, empty, except for a decapitated head resting on top of a Roman pillar.”
“I would have freaked out.”
“You totally would’ve done. It was creepy. The head was talking to me, Alfonso or something, telling me I need to pluck a lucky hair from his scalp, but I have to find it first. The whole room started to spin — for a moment I didn’t know if it was me or the puzzle. I tore my headset off and tried to stand up and nearly fell onto Terrence’s lap. You remember him, the freaky guy from our French class — I can’t think of anything more gross. The real room was spinning even worse than the virtual one, the strip lighting was blurred, and the carpet was moving. I ran to the loo, threw up my breakfast, and by the time I came back the puzzle had ended and I’d lost a life. To the easiest Grandmaster of them all. Then Terry Fuckwit turned to me and says, ‘Eurgh, I thought I could smell sick, you dirty little chunder bunny.’ It was all down my top and in my hair. Totally gross.”
Sushi held her hands to her cheeks, her mouth wide open.
“I don’t know what’s worse, you losing a life, or you having spew down your top taking shit from that idiot.”
Nova smiled: that sounded more like it.
“I swear I could have murdered him on the spot. By the way, here’s some of that feedback you asked for: Sushi would have totally cracked up at that story.”
Nova spent the next few minutes cycling through the list of laughs in Sushi’s repertoire, until she found one she thought best suited the situation. When she was done, Sushi replayed the last minute of dialogue on a screen in front of them so that Nova could confirm her choice.
“That’s exactly how you would have reacted. But you would have commiserated with me too, over the lost life.” Her profile square appeared, hanging in the air in front of them. Its violet border, unchanged since the start of The Game, flashed three times, and then turned green, replaying the change that occurred in the grid at the time of the incident. The coloured trim around the edges of the license plates on her vehicles followed suit. Nova bowed her head. “It was idiotic of me to try the puzzle in the state I was in. I can’t believe that I’m a green belt now — I feel like I’ve let you down.”
“You haven’t let me down, I promise.”
“Well, that makes one person on the planet — if we can count you as a person. You haven’t heard the rest of the story yet. The next day Burner messaged me. He reckoned the drones had found something interesting. He was about to visit his nan to take her this wheelchair he’s made, so I went to Fragging Hell to take a closer look at the results. And that’s when things started to go really pear-shaped, because I made the mistake of telling Jockey what we’d been doing. I was at the bar looking over the results and he was all interested and asking me loads of questions about the plan and getting all geeky about the drones and computational algorithms and stuff. So I told him I was going to post the results online. There’s three hundred gigs’ worth of stuff to look through, we’re never going to manage by ourselves, so we decided we might as well crowdsource it. And that’s when he started acting like my dad, telling me what to do, saying I should send the results to the police. I was like, ‘Yeah, fat lot of good they’ve done so far.’”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know, he started going off on one about people getting in trouble for doing stuff like this. All I could think about was the reason we’re doing it in the first place.” Nova went quiet for a few seconds. “I could feel the anger growing inside me, the same way it does with my parents sometimes, and the shitty teachers at school. And then out of nowhere I’m yelling at him, ‘There’s no need to be such a fat prick about it.’”
Sushi cocked her head to one side and spoke quietly. “Whoops.”
Nova went quiet again and looked into the distance. “He said if I felt that way I shouldn’t bother coming in anymore and I said, ‘Whatever, it’s a shithole anyway,’ and stormed off.”
“You were being a total bitch.”
Nova paused. “Brutal. But yeah, you’re right. I haven’t been back since and he probably thinks that I really meant it. But I haven’t finished telling you about the train wreck that my life is. The same evening the frickin’ police came round to speak to me. A couple of guys had actually gone to check out one of the locations highlighted in the search results from Project Drone. They trekked to a hill in the middle of Arkansas and found a weird pole that had been identified by one of the drones. It had carvings all over it, which are similar to some of the symbols in the manifesto. At the bottom of the hill they found a ditch containing two dead bodies. I’m not fucking kidding. Bodies. It’s all over the news. Apparently the FBI have gone ballistic. Reckoned they had leads of their own, and this has blown all of their good work, the terrorists are going to know they’re on to them, and it’s all my fault, blah, blah, blah. They also told my parents that I might have endangered myself. It’s not like I used my real name on the forum, I’m not stupid.”
Sushi stared at her friend in disbelief.
“Oh, yeah, there’s more. We can safely say that my folks know how I got hold of the cash in the first place, and that I spent it on a bunch of drones trying to find some terrorists, rather than helping them out with the bills. So they are absolutely delighted with me. Once the police had gone I told them I was sorry and Dad said ‘Sometimes, Nova, sorry isn’t good enough.’ Which was nice, because I wasn’t feeling shitty enough about my life already.”
“I’m sorry, Nova. About everything that’s happened. But also because I’m not entirely sure how I would respond in a situation like this.”
Solarversia: The Year Long Game Page 16