She recognised the photo even in its jumbled state — it was Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out. The photo had been divided into sixteen squares, and had had one square removed so that the remaining fifteen could be moved around. She smiled as she slid the squares back and forth. It was a type of puzzle she’d played dozens of times in the Simulator Booths throughout the year, and one she’d mastered without the presence of arrows. Hopefully there would be lots like it.
Completing this puzzle had the same effect, sounding the jingle and dissolving the wall on which it had been displayed to reveal the cube next to hers in an anticlockwise direction. Arkwal made them repeat the exercise one last time on one of the outer faces of the Grid. The wall displayed a crossword puzzle, complete except for one twelve-lettered word, which already contained the third letter, an ‘m’ and the eleventh letter, an ‘o’. The clue read, ‘Fun way of solving problems as organised by fit magician with oxygen’.
She smiled and made a mental note to let her dad know that his years of teaching hadn’t gone unrewarded. Clues in cryptic crosswords were little puzzles in their own right. All you needed to do was work out how to interpret them. This one was elementary and she solved it in seconds just by looking at it. She proudly scribbled the answer — gamification — on the wall using her finger before Arkwal provided it to everyone else.
“Please note that the outer face of the grid goes somewhere too — it connects to the cube on the far side of the grid, ten thousand rows away. Every one of the hundred million cubes in the grid is connected to the cubes adjacent to it. All you need to remember is that if there’s a puzzle on the face of the cube you’re in, whether it’s the wall, ceiling or floor, it leads to another cube somewhere. If you can solve the puzzle, that is. The goal of Race to the Origin is simple: you need to get from the outer ring to cube number one in the very centre of the grid. The hard part is ensuring that you’re one of the first hundred thousand people to do so.”
Nova gulped. Minority Winners, with its single, binary decision, suddenly seemed like a walk in the park.
“There’s no way I can do this. I’m going to crash out, I just know it.”
“You’re just having a last-minute attack of nerves,” Burner said. “If anyone can do it, you can do it.”
“And we’re right here to help you,” Charlie said, rubbing the back of her neck as he spoke.
Thank God for her front-line support team — her ‘crack commando unit’, according to Burner — there to help her solve puzzles and navigate the grid. Players were allowed as many people as they wanted in their support team, although as Arkwal had reminded them earlier in the week, too many cooks spoil the broth. So she’d chosen to tackle the round in her own room, rather than the common room, which everyone agreed might be too rowdy.
Additionally, students in her corridor had agreed to have their rooms turned into mini command centres that hosted specialised teams: maths bods, puzzle fans, subject specialists and so on. Jono, the overall project manager, would be dipping into each room and publishing the best comments and suggestions in a datafeed that Burner and Charlie could review. He’d also lent Nova his quality speakers, so any game sounds or instructions would be crystal clear. It was the best setup they could think of. She only hoped it would be good enough.
“There are two other things you need to know. First, you will always be able to tell which cube you’re in and how far it is it from the Origin because each of its internal faces is stamped with the cube’s number and ring position.”
Nova glanced at the bright blue stamp that adorned each face of the cube: Ring: 5,000, Grid Number: 99,990,001. She was in the top-left hand corner of the grid.
“Second, the behaviour of the Grid during the round will be similar in nature to that of Solarversia as a whole. That is to say, the gameplay will evolve as the game progresses. As usual, those changes will be signalled by the sound of Gorigaroo’s gong. Without further ado, I’m delighted to announce that the Emperor himself will start the proceedings. The moment he starts singing, the grid becomes live. Good luck to one and all.”
Although the exact shape of his body altered by the minute, Emperor Mandelbrot had maintained roughly the same form throughout the year. The purple gooey substance he was composed of still dripped over the edge of the circular dais on which he was positioned. Arms, legs and faces still poked out of his body, the central column of which still rose all the way to the ceiling of the chamber, a deformed totem pole punctured with hundreds of grotesque mouths. His song started with the mouths at the bottom of the pole. Several bass voices set the tone of the song before the chanting crept upward to the contraltos and sopranos closer to the ceiling. The Race to the Origin had begun.
***
The first hour of the game was spent getting to grips with the different kinds of puzzle on offer. Like the Grandmaster Puzzles, they were of an abstract nature and therefore ungooglable. In addition to the slide puzzles and cryptic crosswords clues, there were distorted songs to identify, abstract images to recognize and trivia of the most miniscule order about movies, books, games and celebrities.
Gorigaroo first struck his gong after half an hour, causing Ludi Bioski to turn the prime-numbered cubes into teleport machines. Stampedes to the closest prime-numbered cube were followed soon after by the sobering realisation that teleporting wasn’t necessarily a helpful thing to do. From what Burner was able to gather from the datafeeds, although tokens weren’t needed, it looked like a player could only teleport three times.
To confuse matters further, every machine was fitted with a TeleTrixis device, so that while some players teleported thousands of spaces closer to the centre, others had ended up in cubes on the outer ring, back where they’d started. When Gori next struck his gong, an hour after the round had started, Burner’s datafeed went crazy.
“Holy roly-poly. I had a feeling Ludi might try something like this.” Burner frantically scratched his scalp. “Those batshit-crazy animals have joined the fun. Looks like they’re entering the grid through the Fibonacci sequence. I’ll stick the numbers on the wall so we can monitor them.”
He moved data between his tablet and the smart wall while Charlie looked on, entranced. “It looks like the Fibonacci numbers between one thousand and a hundred million — 23 in total — have become gateways connected to the white half of the Decision Dome on Pluto. Animals are spilling into those 23 cubes at a rate of knots.”
At that moment Jono stuck his head into their room. “Somebody just had a good idea: it seems to be the special numbers — Primes, Fibonaccis and so on — that are being targeted by Ludi Bioski. The maths bods have drawn up a list of other special numbers that might be affected when Gori next strikes his gong. They’ll ping the list round so that everyone can monitor it.”
Nova smiled. Although she was exhausted, having spent the week cramming puzzle practice on top of her normal schedule of lectures and early morning runs, it felt awesome having teams of specialists working on her behalf. As she slotted the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place on the wall in front of her, it disappeared and she walked through to the next cube — a prime-numbered cube in ring 4,213 that Burner had been guiding her towards for the last twenty minutes.
“According to the datafeeds, the machine in this cube is teleporting people closer to the origin 92% of the time. It’s the most reliable machine in this section of the grid.”
He pointed at the map of the grid on the wall while he spoke to show Charlie what he meant.
“But what about this one here? It looks like it’s got a 94% rating. Or am I reading the map wrong?”
“No, you’re right. But look at the state of this cube.” He pointed to another close by.
“It’s one of the Fibonacci numbers. And the animals have started to spread into the cubes surrounding it.”
“Exactly. That teleport machine might have a better rating, but it’s more dangerous in the overall scheme of things. That’s why the maths team suggested this on
e. They’ve built a data model that uses the position of the animals and the teleporters as inputs to spit out suggested routes — similar to how the Route Planner works.”
“And the teleporters work in the same way they’ve always worked?”
“Not quite. Usually you’d type in your destination coordinates, but the keypads have been disabled. I guess otherwise people would just type in the origin every time. It looks like the mechanics of how you trace round the keypad have remained in place, though. In cubes above the origin, and in the central row, you need to dial in a clockwise direction. Below the origin, you go anticlockwise. Doing it wrong seems to increase the probability of getting sent the wrong way.”
Nova volleyed an eye back to the room for a second. “Finish your lecture, Professor, I’m ready to go.”
Charlie and Burner exchanged a nervous look. The last thirteen players to use this machine had been teleported closer to the origin. They watched as Nova made a clockwise circular motion around the keypad. The signpost started its rotation. It bore only a single sign, which read ‘Somewhere in the Grid’. She clenched her fists and death-stared the sign, willing it to end up pointing anywhere more central.
Instead a flashing, beeping alert began. An earthquake of magnitude 3 was to begin in three seconds and she had to survive it without any outside help if she wanted to head towards the Origin. Failure to complete the Combo would send her back to the outer reaches of the Grid.
It should have been simple. She’d completed the earthquake sim enough times that she did know the Combinations by heart. There were ten of them — one for each of the numbers on the Richter scale — and the number of moves in the combo was the number on the scale multiplied by two. That meant a magnitude 3 quake had six moves in it. The timer announced that she had five seconds in which to complete the Combo.
She put her hands on her hips and thrust forwards. Shrugged her left shoulder. Performed a squat. And then she froze. What came after the squat, a shrug of her right shoulder, or a rotation of the hips? It was one, and then the other, she knew that much. But the sequence got reversed in a magnitude 4 quake, and right now, with everything going on, she couldn’t remember which was which.
The counter timed out, and a couple of seconds later she materialised at her destination. The long, strangled gurgling sound that left her mouth had never before been uttered by a human being, and certainly couldn’t be found in a dictionary, however comprehensive. Burner almost apologised to Charlie for her, worried that he might dump her on the spot.
“I’m back in ring 4,721? You have got to be having a laugh Mr Mandelbrot, you purple blobby turd.” Volleying back to the room, she looked at Burner. He mouthed the words in time with her. “Magnitude 3 quake: thrust, squat, right shoulder shrug, hip rotation, squat, thrust.” She threw her hands in the air and jutted her bottom jaw outward as far as it would go. “How come I remember it now, two seconds after it’s needed?”
“Eighty minutes of work down the toilet,” Burner said before collapsing on to her bed, head in his hands.
Charlie positioned himself behind Nova and started to massage her shoulders again. “Come on, guys, it’s not lost yet. Nova, perk up, you’re losing vital seconds. Nobody’s got to the Origin yet, so there’s a hundred thousand places left, and one of them has your name on it.”
As Charlie gave his pep talk, a new video appeared on the wall, showing the cheering avatar of a young Lithuanian guy, Matas the Mole, the first person to make it to the Origin.
“I’ll sit down and stop talking for a bit,” Charlie said, creeping back to his chair.
The next hour flew by. Nova was mostly on autopilot, a robotic lab rat being guided through a gargantuan virtual maze by Dr Burner and co. She’d enter a new cube and scan the puzzle on the wall that formed part of her route. Then she’d volley an eye back to the map on the wall to confirm that the suggested route remained unchanged. If so, they’d all work together on solving the puzzle and progressing through the grid. She’d just entered a new cube when Gori struck his gong for the third time.
“I reckon you stay where you are for a second, mate, until we know what’s hap—”
“What was that noise? It certainly didn’t sound like an animal.” Charlie turned the volume up and cocked his head to one side. “It sounds like metal being twisted or a large lever being wrenched.”
Burner pointed at a video feed being highlighted by the people in the common room. “Check this out. It’s a bird’s-eye view of the grid from where the Emperor’s sitting. That sound is the grid itself. It’s being deformed.”
“What does this mean for the route, does it change, or do I keep on going?”
The corridor burst into activity as everyone tried to understand the implications of the change. Some sections — like Nova’s — had remained unchanged, lying flat against the north wall. Others had buckled outward, away from the grid, and rolled up on themselves like pieces of old carpet. The occasional row of numbers, some as long as a hundred cubes, had pronged outward at right angles, protruding like pins from a cushion. Volleying to Emperor Mandelbrot’s point of view, it was clear that the grid was taking the form of the Milky Way — swirling arms spiralling out from a central mass.
“Earth to Burner — what’s the latest on my route? Fifty thousand people have made it to the Origin already; we need to act fast.”
Burner grimaced. “I wish I knew. According to the maths guys this changes everything — the new structure makes it exponentially more difficult for their model to suggest optimal routes. There are too many variables involved now.”
They all froze. The sound of twisting metal had started again, only this time it was much louder. Nova turned her full attention back to the cube she was in — it was on the move. The floor beneath her became a slope. She slipped backward until she came to rest on the wall behind her, a wall that soon became the new floor. Once she’d picked herself up, she discovered two things: the puzzles had changed, and there was timer ticking down from three minutes.
“Oh, great, a time limit has been introduced. A nice double whammy from our friend Ludi. And you’re telling me that we no longer have a plan? That I should just go any—”
“Wherever you’re going, you want to go there fast — there’s something in the adjoining cube.” Charlie leaned in and winced at the screen. “An Acoo-Stickular — not sure if I’m pronouncing that right? According to its profile, it’s a multicoloured waveform that travels at a rate of 10% of the speed of sound.”
Burner’s eyeballs rotated up into his skull as if he was trying to read the label on the back of his eyebrows. “The speed of sound is roughly 750 miles per hour, so these things travel at 75 miles per hour, and the cube sides are three metres in length. Oh, dear. They’re bouncing against the sides about eight times every second — there’s no way you’ll be able to dodge one if—”
Anticipating its arrival, Nova used one of her five precious Force Fields to split the cube in half and prevent the newly arrived waveform from striking her. The field would last thirty seconds — after that, she was a goner for sure. Once it made contact with her, it would burrow through skin and bone, attuning her DNA to its own frequency, after which she would collapse to her knees, grab her throat and scream until she could no more.
She turned to face the other wall, which asked a simple question: the house number of the Bueller family home in the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Charlie had found the movie in her collection and was already skipping through various scenes. With only five seconds left on the field, he stumbled onto the scene when Ed Rooney, Dean of Students, paid an unexpected visit to Ferris’ house. Nova shouted “2800,” and dove into the next cube as the wall turned transparent.
It was a prime-numbered cube that contained a teleporter. She didn’t have time to process any fear of the TeleTrixis device; the waveform was too close and too fast for that. She dialled around the keypad and held her breath. Seeing that she’d been transported to ring 2,566, halfway to t
he Origin, she let out an impromptu yelp and hugged the boys, only to be interrupted a few seconds later when the sound of the gong echoed through the room.
“Another change? This is ridiculous, they’re getting more frequent.”
“And without wanting to urinate further onto your second-round bonfire, there’s now fewer than five thousand safe spots left,” Charlie said, pointing to the counter on the wall.
Burner grabbed hold of a clump of his hair. “Do you want the bad news or the very bad news? The time limit for each cube just got reduced to one minute. If you fail to solve a puzzle in that time, the floor falls away and you get sucked down a pipe that leads to Banjax’s tank. Looks like a one-way kinda journey. To make matters worse, the prime-numbered cubes are exploding, destroying the teleport machines and setting the grid on fire. Hang on a second. Yup, the fire’s spreading to adjacent cubes. So I guess that last bit means that I had three pieces of news: some bad news, some very bad news and some very, very—”
“Burner, shut up, please. I get what you’re saying. I’m totally screwed.”
The answer to one of the current puzzles flashed in her display, answered by one of the support teams, and Nova was able to enter another cube, resetting the timer to one minute.
She shook her head as she looked at the carnage on the wall. The map showed animals everywhere, teleporters out of commission, and large swathes of the grid on fire. A lucky few players had made it to the central-most rings and had only a handful of puzzles ahead of them before they would reach the Origin. It was difficult to judge which was moving faster: the counter totting up the deaths or the counter ticking down the remaining positions.
The glint of a tear welled in her eye. She gently pulled her headset off her face and wiped it away in a discrete motion, grateful that the boys were too absorbed in the map to notice.
Solarversia: The Year Long Game Page 35