As he felt more beads of sweat trickle and tickle their way down his face, he turned his head to look at Elmer lying on the gurney next to him. With the same oafish, spaced-out look he always had, he gave Casey a big smile.
“I’m going to be famous, a star of the screen. Who’da thought it? Lil’ old Elmer. More drugs, please, matron, the good shit. Only the best for old Elmer these days.”
Brandon turned to face them. He looked at Elmer, then at Casey, and made a circular motion with his finger around his temple.
“No more drugs for you, old loony tunes. You won’t need them in a few minutes anyway. You’re going cold turkey. For good. What about you, Case? How you getting on?”
“All good, thanks, bud,” Casey snapped back.
He wondered if he’d ever told a lie so large. It was alright for Elmer, he didn’t have a say in what was going on. Even if he did, Casey doubted he had the wherewithal to say anything of consequence. Christ knows what Frances had been pumping into his veins these last few days, the stupid homeless bastard.
Thoughts raced through Casey’s mind. He found a thimbleful of solace in the fact that the operation hadn’t yet happened. It wasn’t too late to put a stop to this nonsense. Grabbing hold of a bar on the side of the gurney, he raised his head to scan the room. He wiggled his toes at the end of the bed, their nakedness an awkward reminder that he was hardly dressed for an escape attempt.
What did escape even look like? He pictured himself performing a kung fu leap off the trolley and disabling Brandon and Frances with two deft moves. Nothing painful, he’d do Vulcan nerve pinches like Spock used to do in the old Star Trek films. He’d apologise as he pinched their necks, catch them as they fell and lay them to sleep on the floor while the Medibot looked on, blissful in its ignorance.
Then he’d dress, sneak out of the sickbay, tiptoe down the corridor to the backroom where they counted the money, grab a few bundles from the safe, leap through the back window and get away in one of the kayaks. He knew the Delta better than anyone by now. He could be in Mexico by the weekend, could start afresh. And he’d never breathe a word about the Order to anyone, they could count on that.
His daydream was interrupted by the Medibot as it beeped and hummed into life. It extended two additional arms, onto which Brandon placed the tray of instruments, and then trundled alongside Casey’s bed, its wheels ticking as they passed over the wooden boards. Casey wiped his brow with his forearm. He wasn’t breathing right and his entire body was soaked in sweat, making the johnny gown stick to it.
“Tell Father there’s been a mistake. I can’t do this. Anything but this. I’ve got other ideas. Better ones. Less risky ones. He’ll love them, I know he will.”
He was on his elbows, firing out desperate snippets of speech, first at Brandon, then at Frances, a condemned man clutching at straws. Using one of its main arms, the Medibot pushed him back down, pinning him to the mattress with the strength of a mechanical ox.
“It’s alright, Case. Everything’s going to be OK. Father warned us that you might have a last-minute attack of the nerves, it’s perfectly natural. Remember why you’re doing this, the bigger picture: man and machine joined for salvation. You were the best match — that kinda makes you the chosen one who gets to play a special part. It’ll all be over before you know it. There’s a good boy.”
Casey watched in horror as Frances held the syringe before her, flicked it a couple of times and gently squeezed the plunger to check that it still worked. As she thrust it into his forearm, Casey screamed.
“No, no, no. Take it out. Get Father. I’ve changed my mind. I won’t do it. Mother, please, I beg you, don’t do this. Look at the state of him, for Christ’s sake. I don’t care if he’s a match, he’s an old drunk. He’s damaged goods, broken beyond repair. We don’t go together. Get off me, you bitch.”
He stammered on for fifteen seconds or so, oscillating between rational request and profane petition. As he looked into Frances’ eyes, he could tell that under her mask she was smiling a kind smile. She never meant to hurt him. She was his mother, his and Brandon’s, mother to everyone at the Compound. And mother knew best. Wasn’t that the saying? His head lolled to one side. As his eyelids fought to stay open he saw Elmer again, gawping at him with the same moronic look, a daisy chain of dribble hanging off his chin. My chin, Casey thought as he lost the battle of the eyelids.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nova stared at the flashing cursor. Her essay was due the next day, but the page remained blank, save for the title, which she’d typed out half an hour earlier: A Comparison of Techniques for Mitigating Cognitive Bias. She felt as enthused about the prospect of writing it as she did about the other thing looming over her — the long list of people she needed to apologise to as part of the ‘Soul’ section of her Super Nova project.
She’d gone down to the caves by the lake to seek inspiration, but had found temptation instead. She was sitting on a large rock by the craggy stone wall, and her Booners were sat on the next rock along. She kept glimpsing at them. I should have never brought you with me, she muttered under her breath. One last look-see, perhaps. She’d said that the last five times, but this time she meant it, for real. Five more minutes, and then she’d crank the essay out in one go. Playing Grandmaster Petanja’s puzzle would be her reward. A quick play, then the essay, then the puzzle. Her right hand shook her left. It was a deal, Nova style.
She slipped the headset on and found herself back in the games room aboard the SS Jupiter. Planetary Spaceships had been designed by Spiralwerks to follow the theme associated with the name of the planet, and the SS Jupiter was her favourite. In Roman mythology, Jupiter, or Jove, was the god of sky and thunder, so the spaceship’s sumptuous games room, which had been furnished with ivory thrones, velvet ottomans and open fires, played a thunderstorm sound effects track non-stop, while the ceiling displayed real-time high-res footage of the actual planet Jupiter.
Spaceships could transport up to five thousand players at one time. Most people boarded one, logged out of Solarversia and didn’t log in again until they’d arrived at their destination planet a number of days later, depending on its distance from Earth. Games rooms had been included for those, like Nova, who wanted to keep playing the whole time.
The circular room was surrounded by a single spiral bookshelf that started at ground level and corkscrewed its way up the wall until it hit the ceiling. A few minutes ago Nova had superimposed the conga line onto the spiral bookshelf. The little people swerved in and out of the ornaments that lined the shelves, waltzing past the works of Dickens, Vonnegut and Bronte. It was a cool feature that some of the exhibitions had, allowing players to superimpose their contents wherever they wanted, including surfaces in the real world.
Her datafeed informed her that at that very moment, 156 people were superimposing the line onto a surface somewhere in either the real or the virtual world. She volleyed into the headcam of a girl in Chile who watched the line as it progressed along the twisted branch of an apple tree in her backyard, then to a camera in the lounge of a flat in New York where a couple of exhibitionists had superimposed the line around the leopard skin rug they were making love on.
She loved that the line was still going eight months after the start of the game. When she’d spun a Tweel of Fate the other day, Banjax had informed her that the maximum number of people in the line at any one time had been 490,338. He did that sometimes, when you spun his tweel — gave you a random factoid. It was better than having him steal your items or teleport you somewhere you hadn’t asked to go.
Before she could decide which cam to check out next, a crackling voice boomed over the spaceship’s loudspeakers.
“This is your captain speaking. Please note that we will soon be entering Jupiter’s atmosphere and will need to prepare for descent. In fifteen minutes time you will be asked to return to your seats, over.”
Glancing at the time, she saw that her five minutes were already up. Which was ridiculo
us. She twitched her nose while she weighed up her options. The captain had mentioned fifteen minutes until the descent. It made sense to start the essay then, instead. In a way, it was like Jove himself had made the suggestion. Fifteen more minutes, and then she’d whip the essay into submission.
She left the bookcase to join a small crowd watching a middle-aged Norwegian man standing in front of two large floating images. The left one displayed a section of the Player’s Grid, with his own profile square situated in the middle. The right image was a picture of somebody’s face. He was playing the Grid Memory Game, and had achieved a score she could only dream of getting. The game was simple — you needed to recall details of the people located in the vicinity of your own square.
The difficulty level determined the level of detail you needed to recall. In easy mode you were shown a face and needed to point to the person’s square within the grid. In intermediate mode, the one she usually played, you needed to point to their location but also get their name right. Nova was a 49er in that mode, which meant she had completed a 7 by 7 grid. Burner and Jono played the game on hard mode, where you needed to know the person’s nationality as well as their name and location. Burner was a 144er, while Jono, who was on the university team, was a 576er, having once completed a 24 by 24 grid.
The next picture, of a gaunt woman with rollers in her hair, appeared floating on the guy’s right. He took one look at her, twirled his finger in the air a couple of times, and pointed to a square on the left screen. A jingle sounded and three points were added to his already gigantic score.
“Susana Pasquel,” he enunciated, to the delight of the crowd. Another three points. “Peru.” Four more points: three, plus a bonus for getting all of her details correct in under ten seconds, bringing his score close to 18,000. He was halfway through a huge 63 by 63 grid. If he completed it, he would regain his rank as one of the top hundred players in the world. Nova shook her head and snorted with glee as she watched his display of brilliance.
Behind her, two women were seated on thrones opposite one another, either side of a partition. They played another grid-based game, known as Happy Families. The rules were similar to the game Battleships. At the start of the game each woman had chosen ten groups of ten squares — their families. The aim of the game was to locate the opponent’s families.
They played using a weird variant of the rules that involved miniature versions of their planes flying reconnaissance missions to the other side of the board. Whenever a ‘family member’ was discovered, their profile square would light up and the avatar inside it would say their catchphrase. Nova never played it herself, but loved logging in to find that strangers had included her own profile square in their games, like she was shaping events remotely while she slept — even if she did cringe at the thought of her avatar saying her lame catchphrase out loud.
A far rowdier group sat in the corner by the open fire, hunched over a section of grid that had been turned into a board game called Lavadiles and Telescopes. It was played like Snakes and Ladders except that the winning square was in the middle, rather than one of the top corners. Players worked their way inward, having started on the outer ring. Kids usually played it, but this lot were about Nova’s age and had turned it into a drinking game.
Next up was a Romanian girl. She blew on the dice in her hands before casually chucking them into the fire. The flames roared into life, then morphed into a fire demon who held aloft the ‘six’ and the ‘two’ on the dice she had rolled. The girl howled in frustration as her mini avatar moved along the board, landed on a lavadile mouth, and slid down its slimy scales, four rings away from the centre.
Her companions chanted, “Drink! Drink! Drink!” while they each volleyed an eye to a cam in her real room in order to watch her drink the four fingers of beer she’d just forfeited. The girl was sprawled across a tatty mattress on the floor, clothes and dirty plates strewn everywhere. From her jerky movements it looked like she had already drunk her fair share of forfeits. The group cheered as she downed it in one, then booed as the captain gave the five-minute call.
Nova hurried onto the thunderbolt-shaped lift in the centre of the room to return to her seat. While wondering what puzzle Petanja had in store for her, she realised something important. She felt on form. And the thing about form, she reminded herself, was that it came and went. It would be stupid to waste it, reckless even. Petanja’s puzzle would be tough. He’d scalped a life from Burner a few weeks ago, and there was no way she was going to be his next victim. That settled it. She’d complete the puzzle now and then write the essay when she was buzzing from having solved it. Another quick handshake. It was a deal.
***
Nova whooped as she scudded around the penultimate gate with plenty of time to spare. In order to reach Grandmaster Petanja, she’d had to cross Jupiter’s gaseous surface by boat. As the planets got further away from the Sun, the Grandmasters got more difficult, both in terms of the puzzles they set, and in terms of the journeys you had to make to visit them.
This course, situated alongside the circumference of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a massive anticyclonic storm that had been raging for hundreds of years, had to be completed in under five minutes. The landing video aboard the SS Jupiter had shown, in terrifying detail, what happened to players unfortunate enough to steer their boats even one millimetre across the line that divided the red spot and the rest of the course.
As if she needed a further memo on the subject, some disastrous navigation by the guy in front rammed the message home. He’d been running out of time and taking increasingly large risks with the slalom gates, and had badly misjudged the final one. In trying to correct his mistake, he’d only served to exacerbate it, flipping his boat onto its side and performing a series of somersaults. That fiasco cost him sixty health points. Now came his landing.
Nova watched with clenched teeth as he tried to accelerate away from the line. Even at maximum throttle, his Sunseeker was no competition for the Spot, which was entangled at the quantum level to the enormous black hole situated at the centre of the Milky Way. He’d crossed the Spot’s event horizon and was now subject to its enormous gravitational pull. A small video feed appeared in the top corner of her display. It showed the rear end of his boat elongate as it got sucked into the swirling vortex. The guy soon joined it as he and his boat became a spindly soup of pixels, inexorably drawn towards the hole where he would soon be crushed to death.
She slowed right down to tackle the last gate, shaken by what she had just witnessed. Although she still had a life left, they were only two-thirds of the way through the Year-Long Game, and according to the people at Spiralwerks, the tricky bits were yet to come. Jono had crashed out for good the week before when a stray Asteroid Shower hit Morocco.
His valiant escape through the flaming town of Marrakesh had made for nail-biting viewing and gone viral, at least within Solar Soc, the university’s Solarversia Society. He’d escaped the worst-hit parts of town and been legging it to the closest Greasy Wrench when a Type Four asteroid had hurtled down the street toward him.
Nova, who had been watching a real-time video feed of his escape from the Hu Stu bar, recited the thirteen-move combination out loud as she’d willed him on. In the event, Jono stumbled on the tenth move, and the asteroid slammed straight into him, leaving two smoking stumps of leg in its wake. What a way to go. At least his Death Party had been fun.
Pushing thoughts of death to the back of her mind, Nova concentrated on the home straight. The finishing line, which she crossed with twenty-five seconds to spare, was strung across the entrance to a dark cave. The change in lighting was accompanied by a change in acoustics: the hum of Bruno’s engine amplified as it echoed off the cave walls. She pulled up to the Dockington’s jetty, waited for a peg to droop down and attach itself to her craft, and then followed a sign that instructed visitors to climb a rickety wooden ladder propped against the steep cave wall. It led to a mezzanine level where Petanja sat cross-legged in h
is circle. His green robes fluttered in the wind as it streamed through the cave entrance, powered by the mighty Red Spot in the distance. She sat down and awaited the next o’clock.
“ … Any evidence of cheating will be reviewed by a panel of judges, and is punishable by the deduction of a life and possible suspension from The Game itself. There are no exceptions to this rule for this puzzle. There are 6,390 players for the 4:00 p.m. puzzle today, and 3,195 safe spots. Please note that this puzzle is culturally specific and will relate to an aspect of your own national culture. Good luck, and remember these two things. First, use not a dirty mirror, if your warts you wish to see. Second, There Can Be Only One!”
As Petanja and his circle faded into nothingness, Nova found herself in a large stock cupboard lined with rows of shelving. She’d played plenty of Puzzle sims that had been restricted in one way or another, but as every Solo knew, tackling them in the Simulator Booth was very different to tackling one for real, when one of your precious lives was at stake.
A note on the wall above a wastepaper basket said “Find the defective product and put it in the bin.” She glanced up and down the room. There were dozens of rows of shelving and five shelves in each row. Each shelf held hundreds upon hundreds of identical porcelain figures. In endless repetition, she saw the same little man, six inches tall, playing his flute, the kind of figurine you found on tacky seafront market stalls. “Defective, defective, defective.” Nova repeated the word, as she tried to get to grips with the task at hand.
It took her far too long to pick a figure up in order to examine it, mistakenly believing that the rules were similar to the ones that governed the Lavadile puzzle, where touching a wrong scale had meant the immediate loss of a life. Realising her mistake, she grabbed the nearest two and scrutinized them from head to toe. Each figure was of a young man with brown hair, playing a silver flute. He wore a blue suit, and was glued to a circular base, with one leg in front of the other like he was walking. The problem was that the two figurines were identical, down to the smidgen of hardened glue that poked out from the side of the heel of the shoe. Did the glue mean something, or was it an attempt to faithfully replicate such a tasteless piece of tat?
Solarversia: The Year Long Game Page 23