One thing seemed obvious: twenty-six doors meant one for each letter of the alphabet. All she had to do was work out which door related to which letter, and then use that information to find the girl’s name. Half distracted by the number of safe spots, which had already begun ticking down, she opened the small green door. Behind it appeared another wall of doors, identical to the first save for one thing: the number on each door was a ‘2’. Further investigation revealed that the number on the door acted like a marker, telling her which ‘level’ of doors she was on. As the number of safe spots ticked below 100 she had a small brainwave.
Volleying an eye back to the lounge, she ripped some wrapping paper from Zhang’s hands and grabbed the closest pen. On the back of the paper she replicated the grid of doors as they appeared in the game, five columns of five rows, with a 26th door above the one in the top right-hand corner. Taking a gamble that the wall imitated the snail-like pattern of the Player’s Grid, she wrote an ‘A’ on the door in the middle’, a ‘B’ on the door above it, a ‘C’ to the left of that one, spiralling outward until the ‘Z’ of the door that stuck out.
With no other clues in sight, and barely twenty safe spots left, she used her new chart to navigate through the various levels, using the only piece of information she had been given — ‘Lutty’, the little girl’s name. Starting with the ‘L’ on level one, and finishing with the ‘Y’ on level five, she walked through the final door — an ornate wooden beast that belonged in a medieval castle — to be greeted by big, bouncing letters that spelled out ‘Lutty’. The little girl was next to them, jumping for joy while the puzzle jingle played.
For completing Zettanja’s puzzle before Gori had sounded his gong, Nova was awarded an additional fifty teleport tokens. She threw off her headset, seized Zhang and swung him round the living room. It wasn’t the 4000-odd tokens she’d need to get to the other planets, but it was a pretty good Christmas present all the same.
***
Casey studied his reflection in the rusty old rear-view mirror he’d found in the Lockup a few days before and stashed under the pillow of his bunk. Although Frances had told him the bandages could come off his head, he’d taken to leaving them on. The thin strips of woven gauze seemed to help him to hide from the reality of his fucked-up situation.
Escaping to the bunk room to peel back the bandages and examine his appearance in private had become a daily ritual. The face would take some getting used to, that was for sure. A new face that frowned when he did, smiled when he did. Controlling his prosthetic arm with the power of thought, he combed through his hair with his fingers, tracing the delicate scars that crept up to the top of his skull.
He wondered what Mary-Ann would think. The image flashed into his mind again — her convulsions on his garage floor, the blood belching out of her crushed nasal cavity. She was gone. That was all that mattered. Was it the way she’d died, with her face caved in, that had motivated him to make this ultimate sacrifice to the Order? As if losing his own face was a form of penance for his sins. A face for a face. A life for a life too, because Casey Brown was dead. It was official. He was Elmer Sullivan now, the homeless guy they’d kidnapped, the guy whose face Casey now wore as his own.
He had to admit it, Frances was a brilliant surgeon. His new face fitted. Frankenstein’s monster had haunted his dreams during the week after his operation, but there were no screws or bolts poking out of his head. He thought he wore the face better than Elmer himself, at least now the bruising had gone down. The immunosuppressive medication had worked its magic. The face had taken.
What was strange was the way in which he found his new face easier to accept than his new name. What was a name, he wondered? How could such a little thing mean so much? Three little syllables: K-C-Brown. As Father hadn’t stopped reminding him, Casey Brown was dead. Whatever his name was, he was both more and less than a man. He had an arm that had been developed in a lab, a face that had developed in a different mother’s womb, lined and mottled by a life he hadn’t lived. He was special now, a cyborg, a half-thing. He was empty. Soulless. At least he still had a reflection.
He jolted forward suddenly and the mirror nearly flew from his hand. An attack of phantom pain in his amputated arm. The attacks were milder and less frequent these days, but hadn’t completely disappeared. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. In this way, he’d got the attacks under control, had learned how to endure them. He was at peace with his bionic arm. It was his mind that had been giving him most trouble.
How could he have brought that young woman to Father Theodore’s attention? Seeing her face on the night of the ceremony, understanding she was to be a target of attack, Casey had decided to abandon the Holy Order. The desire to get away from these people possessed him with the suddenness and intensity of his previous impulse to join them. They might have saved his life, Frances and Wallace, warding off his demons and retrieving him from the brink of suicide, but that wasn’t enough. Not for him to take part in these new attacks. And certainly not with Wallace gone.
Since that night he’d been planning his escape meticulously. He couldn’t go yet. Without an arsenal of immunosuppressive meds, he’d die. He would have to stick around for a few weeks until he’d snaffled a reasonable supply from the sickbay. Frances might have been absent-minded at times, but she was far from stupid. He’d been taking the occasional vial here and there, whenever her back was turned.
The plan itself was simple. He’d wait until his Brothers and Sisters at the compound were asleep, slip to the Lockup unseen, commandeer a kayak stuffed full of cash and begin to snake his way down the Mississippi through a convoluted series of interconnecting tributaries, avoiding the various lookout towers, booby traps and dead ends, to wind up on the main branch of the river.
It’d been Wallace who had warned him about the booby traps when he first showed Casey around the Compound, and Wallace who had pointed them out to him on their trips into town. With his friend gone, Casey had been free to explore the Compound’s layout in more detail. He’d spent countless hours working out a route in minute detail in order to avoid the worst of them.
The escape meant more than freedom. It would be a tribute to Wallace, whose life he would remember and celebrate. He would escape with plenty of money. Enough to share with Wallace’s family and with Mary-Ann’s family. He’d send it discreetly, possibly even make up a story to explain their sudden good luck.
The thoughts of escape and redemption had been the only thing keeping him sane during the weeks of endless pain, medication and physio. He tilted the mirror at an angle that enabled him to study his new smile. Another attack of phantom pain took him by surprise. He heard the crack before he saw that the spasm in his arm had caused him to clutch the mirror tight enough to break the glass.
He stared at himself through the newly fractured shards. Fractures suited him.
Chapter Thirty-Six
On the freezing cold walk from Burner’s car to Fragging Hell, they talked through Nova’s predicament for the hundredth time. She still needed to get to Neptune and to Pluto, and now had six hours before her time ran out and a grand total of 237 teleport tokens to play with. Data feeds were awash with speculative strategies.
Some players were teaming up to take on the crazed circus animals. A defeated Huntropellimous was worth 250 teleport tokens, although players would need to split the bounty between them. Others formed into ‘Will Groups’, bequeathing all of their items to a designated player before committing ‘last life suicide’, hoping that the combination of their items and tokens would be enough for the chosen one to go all the way.
Nova had contemplated a few such deals being advertised on the forums, but only in a half-hearted way. She was already in a Will Group of her own, and had been from the start. It wasn’t so much that her Solarversia Sister would have a problem with it — Sushi would likely back any decision she made. It just didn’t feel right, some stranger joining them after all they had been through together. No,
she would make the Final Million on her own or not at all. While she contemplated the impossible predicament she was in, a worried-looking couple called over to them.
“Guys, you wouldn’t be able to help us out, would you? Our car won’t start. It does that sometimes, needs a good push is all. And my wife here,” the man said, gesturing sympathetically to the woman at his side, “has injured her back.”
“Lifted a heavy box without bending my knees.” She placed a hand on her coccyx and winced in pain. “I’m such a fool.”
The guy looked at his watch. “We’re in a bit of a state. The plan was to be in Cambridge to see the New Year in. By now we should halfway up the M11, but as you can see, we’re stuck here.”
“My brother’s over from Spain,” the woman added. “I’ve not seen him in years. You couldn’t spare a couple of minutes to help bump-start it, could you?”
“Of course we can. Might help warm us up too.”
“You’re a couple of real-life good Samaritans. Here, let me hold your toy while you push.”
Nova handed Zhang to the woman and joined Burner at the rear of the car. It took five attempts before the old Volvo chugged into life, its dirty exhaust belching a pungent cloud of smoke straight at them. The four of them cheered when the engine revved. They exchanged good wishes for the year ahead before the couple sped off, waving out of the windows.
“First we help those guys, now we’re going to sacrifice precious drinking time helping Jockey out.” Burner waved one last time as the car drove out of sight. “She was wrong, we’re not good Samaritans, we’re a couple of mugs.”
Entering the warm confines of Fragging Hell, the two of them exchanged a look of relief. A shiver coursed down Nova’s spine as her body shook off the cold. The place bustled with regulars blasting aliens and storming enemy castles, and the gamer smell was stronger than ever. She popped Zhang on the side rail, and they headed to the bar. Jockey greeted them with a wide grin and a hearty handshake.
“You made it then, fantastic. We’ll be packed to capacity, it should be a storming evening. Nova, I’ve got you down to make the punch; everything’s ready for you. Burner, you’re in charge of setting up the disco. Lots of equipment and loads of leads, should be a doddle for you. With any luck we’ll be finished in an hour and can get down to some serious partying.”
On the way to the kitchen Nova was stopped a couple of times by regulars who were keen to grab a quick selfie with her.
“Hey, it’s Nova, right?’ said a guy wearing a Batman onesie. “I’m doing a piece for the Maidstone Wobbler on the Final Million. You’re the last person in the whole of Maidstone who’s still in with a chance of making it. Jockey said you’d be here tonight. Could I get a quick photo? Preferably one of you and Zhang together? He’s quite the star.”
Nova paused. First the broken-down car, now all of these photo requests — and she hadn’t even started mixing the punch. But she wasn’t going to argue about Zhang being a star. She loved it when people recognised him and secretly hoped they might appear on Kiki La Roux’s show together one day. Though now she was so close to leaving The Game, her moments left in the limelight looked numbered.
“OK, but make it quick, I’m on punch duty. I’ll just grab Zhang. Back in a min.”
As she headed to the side rail, an unfamiliar jingle sounded in her Booners strung around her neck. She peered into the display and was surprised to see a message from Gogmagog. Hadn’t she turned the notifications off the other day after receiving all of those annoying alerts? She stopped to ponder this for a second, half distracted by the roar of an ogre being slaughtered somewhere. No, she hadn’t turned the alerts off altogether. She’d followed Burner’s advice and amended the settings so that the program only sent her critical alerts. She read the subject line: “Gogmagog Critical Alert: Multiple Items of Evidence Related to the Holy Order. Urgent Action Required.”
She looked back across the room to catch Batman’s eye. When she mouthed “one minute” to him, he nodded back and gave her a thumbs-up. The message contained four files. When she opened the first — a video file — her heart skipped a beat. The footage showed Burner talking to Jono. But then the picture went wild for a couple of seconds before ending with footage of people’s feet.
She screwed her nose up and watched it again. The metadata associated with the file stated that the video had been taken by Zhang a couple of months ago at The Commodore gaming cafe in Nottingham. It was the seconds leading up to her undignified departure from the Krazy Karting final. But what did that have to do with anything, and why had Gogmagog flagged it as critical? She remembered what Burner had told her, that the program was still in beta and prone to making errors. Perhaps it had got its wires crossed?
She scrolled down to the second item, another piece of footage with similar metadata. It was the first three seconds of the first clip, slowed down and overlaid with annotations. The wild footage was taken as Zhang span through the air. One second it showed Burner talking to Jono, the next it showed Charlie’s outheld hands as Zhang was released from his grip. Charlie’s face could be seen, changing from a smile to a grimace as a hand slammed into his shoulder. As Zhang left Charlie’s grip, he rotated in the air and captured footage of the person who had pushed them. His bracelet, decorated with a series of curly swastikas, was marked as being a critical piece of evidence. Nova felt her chest tighten. Who the hell was that?
She scrolled down to the third item, more footage taken by Zhang, this time at the Goose Fair in Nottingham town centre. It showed Nova and Burner reading a flyer. She thought back. That’s right, they’d bumped into the same guy who’d asked to take her photo at the Karting final. Raymond. He’d invited them to a New Year’s Eve party in Soho. As she and Burner had walked away, Zhang was still facing him and kept recording. He’d captured the guy mouthing something behind their backs. The program had automatically transcribed the lip movements and overlaid the text onto the footage in real time: “At the close of perfect vision, twelve lost souls advance our mission.” What the holy fuck?
The roar of elves and ogres dissolved into the background. All that existed was the pounding of her heart and the thoughts racing through her mind. It was all so fragmented. What did any of it mean? The implications were too large for her to take in. She looked up, ashen faced, at her would-be photographer. He was still looking her way, only he was no longer smiling. She quickly scrolled to the fourth and final item, inexorably drawn to it.
It was a blurry photo taken by Zhang a few minutes ago — a photo of Batman, or at least, a person dressed in a Batman costume. And there, on his wrist, was the same bracelet. It was Raymond, a guy clearly involved with the Holy Order. She took a huge gasp of air, unaware that she’d been holding her breath. Please God, this wasn’t happening. She lowered her headset and risked one last look at the caped crusader. His camera was gone, in its place a remote control. His brow was furrowed, his lips moving. “At the close of perfect vision …”
***
Arty slid across the bonnet of a yellow taxi, landed on his feet and kept running across the busy New York street into the path of oncoming traffic. Behind him, shots rang out. A bullet ricocheted off a traffic light close to his head, another smashed the windscreen of the dump truck he had just ducked behind. He pulled out a loaded Time Whisk, span round to fire a shell, then continued on his way. Five seconds of reversed time would give him the breathing space to formulate a new plan. Even against the best player in the company.
It was the Spiralwerks’ New Year’s Eve party, an evening when Spiralheads got to play their own games. This was Grid Runner, one of the company favourites, where the odd-numbered players on the Employee’s Grid faced the even numbers. Each player was assigned a random selection of items, the game algorithm ensuring that the overall split between the teams was fair. At the start of the game, the teams got teleported to a random location within Solarversia. One team had to reach a nearby trigger, the other had to stop them. If Carl, the last of T
he Wizballs, could stop Arty, the last of the Bomb Jacks, getting to the trigger, his team would win for the fifth year running.
Arty weaved in and out of the traffic trying to avoid whatever was fired at him. It looked like Carl was out of classic ammunition for now — spider webs had replaced the bullets. One whizzed straight past Arty’s head and ensnared a pedestrian, pinning them against the mermaid logo of a Starbucks’ window. Every attempt was closer than the last. Carl loved playing to a crowd, building the suspense, letting his opponent get ever closer to the trigger before finishing them off in style.
As Arty rounded the corner into Broadway he spied his target at long last — the shiny trigger at the top of the steps that led to the Coke sign in the middle of Times Square. As he locked onto it and started sprinting down the street, the rest of the Bomb Jacks cheered him on from the surrounding office blocks. With less than a hundred metres to go, this was already the closest game of Grid Runner in the company’s history.
Bam! A great shot by Carl snared Arty’s right side and sent him tumbling to the ground. His real-world body convulsed. BoonerMax had released a line of haptic bodysuits the previous week. Spiralwerks had ordered several dozen for Spiralheads to try out during the Christmas party and were planning to dress players in them during the Grand Final. Arty howled in mock pain. The tactile feedback he’d experienced hadn’t hurt him, but when combined with the virtual action going on around him, it was easy to get carried away.
Solarversia: The Year Long Game Page 30