Solarversia: The Year Long Game

by Mr Toby Downton

  A fresh sequence blinked into life on Theodore’s arm, looking something like a digital worm tunnelling its way through a patch of electric light. Once the sequence had replicated itself on the panel on the wall, the room came to life as if it had been awoken from a slumber.

  Within seconds the walls were crammed full of information of every description. There were bar charts, line charts and pie charts. There were histograms, timelines and flow charts. The numbers and symbols within the charts were dynamic, rather than static, the information in them being updated in real time. Casey could feel Theodore’s gaze on him as he self-consciously tried to ascertain the significance of what he was being shown.

  His eyes settled on a graph that contained several dozen horizontal lines that were wildly fluctuating between softer, shallower waveforms and sharper, spikier peaks. Alongside it was a vertically scrolling tickertape of words in one column, a series of statistical percentages in the next. What the Bejesus am I looking at here? There was no discernible delay between him thinking his thought, and it appearing on the tickertape: WHAT THE BEJESUS AM I LOOKING AT HERE?

  The rush of terror he felt was reflected in a graph at the top right of the wall that appeared to be monitoring emotional states. My terror. My emotional state. Again the words manifested on the tickertape in real time. He glanced at the word cloud underneath the tickertape. It provided a visual summary of the thoughts that had been going through his mind during the tour. As he mentally read the phrases, ‘he’s a lunatic’, ‘how can I escape?’ and ‘rip his arm off and use it as key’, they once again appeared in the tickertape. Another rush of terror coursed through his body, causing multiple graphs to flash warnings.

  He stared, thunderstruck. His mind splayed all over the wall. How was it possible? HOW IS IT POSSIBLE the tickertape spewed. Father Theodore was whooping and dancing, punching the air. “It works,” he was yelling. “It works!” Finally, panting and grinning, he turned to Casey.

  “You appear to have grasped a basic understanding of your situation. Frances, God bless her soul, performed more than an elementary face transplant on you. Part of your skull was opened up so that we could attach a series of electrodes to your brain. I took a download of your mindscape and analysed the hierarchical series of patterns that constitute your memory. Those same electrodes are processing your brain activity and wirelessly transmitting it to the Epicenter, from where it’s transmitted to one of the modules in my brain, allowing me to monitor your thoughts and emotions as they happen.”

  “Father … I can explain. It’s the stress. The stress of the operation. The raid. The escape in the alligators. My claustrophobia — I probably never mentioned it to you, didn’t want to worry anyone.”

  He turned to see what Theodore was laughing at. His words had been transcribed onto the tickertape, but above them was a phrase that said, ‘Think … think … say something, say anything.’

  “I guess that must be somewhat galling for you. It’s like you’ve discovered a mole inside your organisation. He’s been sitting in on board meetings, taking the minutes, word for word, and then sending them to the competition. You know his name, number and the department he works in. ’Cept there’s fuck all you can do to his sorry ass. I’d figure that to be rather frustrating. Hell, it would frustrate the living shit outta me. You made the same mistake Wallace made, Elmer, forgetting who and what I am.” He twirled his finger in the air and brought up a pulsing diagram of a brain on the wall. “You see those little purple areas, the ones going apeshit? Those are your amygdalae, the nuclei responsible for emotional reactions like fear. I know you better than you do.”

  Casey fell to his knees and clasped his hands in prayer. A vision of killing Theodore, ripping his arm off and using it to escape, flashed through his mind.

  “Please don’t kill me, not after everything I’ve been through. Give me a second chance. I want to do the Magi’s bidding.” He tapered off to a whimper as a fresh tickertape of words belied his true intentions.

  “Rip my arm off and use it to open the doors? Kill me? Boy, you couldn’t kill me if you tried. But neither will I kill you. You’re still needed.”

  Theodore held his bionic arm up and started rubbing his thumb against his forefinger. Casey’s torso arched forward as a powerful electric current coursed through his body. He screamed with every last breath as his temples erupted with heat, sending him crashing to the floor in a convulsing heap.

  “You appear to have forgotten that I saved your worthless-piece-of-shit life. You’ve been initiated. I own you. Never forget that.”

  Through blurred vision Casey watched a series of unintelligible words scroll down the screen. His frazzled brain squeezed one last whimper through his mouth. Then he passed out.

  ***

  It had been raining all day. Nova was watching the droplets of water race down her windowpane against the spectral grey of the sky so closely that she barely noticed Charlie let himself into her bedroom with two cups of coffee. He removed his dripping jacket, gave his hair a quick once-over with a towel and joined her on the window ledge. She hugged her legs closer and vacantly took the cup from him.

  “You’re welcome.” He nudged her leg and arched his eyebrows.

  “Huh? Oh, sorry. Thank you.” She brought the cup to her nose and inhaled.

  “Who’s winning?” he said, indicating the raindrops.

  “Van der Star was ahead … until I drove him off the road. Looks like a fatal collision from here.”

  He smiled and softly blew on his coffee. “Are you OK, Nove? You’ve been lost in thought for days. Is the pressure getting to you?”

  “No, it’s not that. Don’t get me wrong. I do feel stressed about the next round. It’s Sushi.”

  “What, you mean the bust-up you had with her?”

  “Yeah. It’s weird. After the argument I promised myself I’d visit her the next day to make up, but I keep finding reasons to put it off.”

  “Don’t you want to make up with her?”

  She shrugged, as if she didn’t care. But tears pooled in her eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just — why am I such a screw-up? How did I manage to fall out with a computer simulation?” She started laughing. “I’m laughing, but it’s not funny. I mean, seriously — Computer Sushi is supposed to be the friend that would always see eye to eye with me, right?”

  “Sushi’s Sushi. You’re you. Even a simulation of the friendship will be fiery.”

  She thought about what he’d said and took a long sip of coffee.

  “But I thought I had my life sussed. I did the whole Super Nova project. I completed my runs, did my time in the Simulator, finished my uni work on time. I even made up to the people I’d offended in some way. Why am I struggling now when I had it all sorted?”

  “Because it’s not possible to have everything sorted. That’s not what life is. There’ll always be something, won’t there? When I got back from travelling I thought I knew it all. I acted like I was one step away from enlightenment. Then one of the first things I did when I arrived back at uni is go out with Holly. All my mates warned me against her. It was entirely superficial on my part.”

  “I can’t believe you actually went out with her. What were you thinking?”

  He stared out of the window. “She’s a total dick, isn’t she? If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

  Nova prodded him with her foot, an action that had come to mean “she’d quite like a foot massage, if it wasn’t too much trouble, thanks all the same.” She grabbed a pillow for her head, leant back against it and quietly moaned as he pressed his thumb into her sole.

  “Why don’t we do some more question practice to help take your mind off it? You can visit Sushi when you feel ready. No point in forcing it, you might end up arguing again.”

  “As long as you’re up for multitasking. The foot massage can’t stop. A little bit higher. There you go.”

  Charlie maintain
ed the pressure on her foot with one hand while he scrolled through a list of questions on his phone with the other. The fifth round was called Arty’s Answers and it resembled a TV quiz show. Solos had spent the year solving puzzles, avoiding danger by executing various combinations, and fighting a range of exotic animals. The Show and Tell round had challenged them in a different way, requiring creativity. Arty’s Answers would push them further still and demanded a knowledge of Solarversia itself: the Gameworld, its multitude of quests and the people that won them — all things she’d learned about in Knowledge sims. Nova was looking forward to it; there was nothing she knew more about than the world of Solarversia.

  “What speed do Acoo-Stickulars travel at?”

  “Easy. Ten percent of the speed of sound. Next. And other foot, please.”

  “In the first of the final rounds, how many people were in the minority?”

  “471,089 people were in the minority, including me. All thanks to you and your man Wesley.”

  “Don’t you forget it. Next question. What’s the capacity of the SS Venus?”

  “Pur-lease. The same capacity as all the Planetary Spaceships — five thousand. Try to ask me something a four-year-old wouldn’t know. One last squeeze of my toes, and then I’ll let you do my shoulders.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Nova felt like slapping herself. The conga line. The stupid, bloody conga line. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to it? She had been in it on the first day of The Game, had even placed a holographic version of it onto the spiralling bookcase on SS Jupiter. A vague memory that a Tweel of Fate had actually given her the exact answer to the question stirred in the depths of her mind.

  She glanced at the players either side of her, then at the holographic conga line making its way along the front of the stage, and desperately searched for inspiration. There were twenty seconds left in which to submit her answer. Failure to submit any answer within the time limit was an automatic out. That was the way the guy from Exeter had gone in the previous round. She was sure she’d always remember the look on his face, the way it drained of blood as the reality of his situation sunk in. He’d looked close to tears.

  She was at the Spiralwerks’ TV studio in the Olympic Park, two hours of the way through Arty’s Answers, the fifth of the final rounds, which tested the Knowledge aspect of the Science of Solarversia. Security upon arrival had been mental: she’d been subjected to a full body scan with a chunky metal detector and told that state-of-the-art equipment would be monitoring her every move on stage. A finalist in Japan had been disqualified when the security staff found the miniscule grommet he’d had surgically implanted in his ear to allow an accomplice to communicate the answers to him.

  Twenty-nine finalists had entered the round from the UK. Seven, including Holly, were still in play, and three of them would make it through to the sixth and penultimate round. They were lined up on stage in front of an audience of maybe a thousand people. Nova knew that her parents, Charlie and Burner were out there somewhere. She hadn’t been able to locate them with the studio lights glaring in her face, but she’d definitely heard Burner chant her name a few times. Each player stood at a pulpit containing a tablet on which to write their answers, a VR headset for the questions that had required immersion in The Game, and a shiny red buzzer.

  First off, they’d faced the Grid Memory Game, where you needed to recall details of the people located around your own square. The game had progressed in difficulty, spreading to ever more distant concentric rings and ending when the first three players had been knocked out. It was only at that point, when she’d already got through, that Nova could acknowledge how worried she’d been that Sushi’s name would come up. The idea of confronting questions about her late — or was it, she wondered, her former — best friend, in full view of the world, had been quite nauseating.

  After that they had progressed to trivia, with questions about players who had completed well-known quests, the fighting abilities of the circus animals, and the many exhibitions and Bucket List items. The current question, the one causing her to growl under her breath like an anxious pit bull, asked for the maximum number of people ever to have been in the conga line at one time. As the seconds counted down she stared at her answer — 725,000 — and started to second-guess herself.

  It seemed like such a large number — it was nine times the total number of people who had been in the Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony. But the virtual world played by its own rules: obeying some laws of physics and ignoring other ones entirely. Yes, her guess was large, but not compared to the total number of players. If only she could call out to Burner — the geek had probably worked it out through a series of complex calculations. She pressed the red buzzer with a few seconds to spare and hoped for the best.

  “We asked you for the maximum number of people in the conga line during the year,” said Artica Kronkite, quizmaster for the round. She thought he looked taller in person than on TV or in VR. Certainly his suit was very sparkly, the kind of get-up Arkwal usually wore. “Your answers are in. And I’m afraid to say that it was you, Connie, whose answer was furthest away from the truth. The maximum number of players ever to congregate in the conga line — and this occurred just days after The Game began — was 490,338.”

  Nova puffed out her cheeks, exhaled slowly, and when it came to her turn, shook Connie’s hand with as much sincerity as she could muster. On the screens behind them Connie’s avatar flew down a pipe and plopped unceremoniously into Banjax’s tank. Nova glanced along the stage to see Holly posing for the cameras. She hated herself for looking — her blood pressure went through the roof every time she saw Holly’s smug face — but couldn’t help herself.

  They were down to six. The clapping died down and attention returned to Artica.

  “You should be well-acquainted with Castalia, Emperor Mandelbrot’s flying palace. Earlier in the year you were invited to take Arkwal’s guided tour of the palace. The tour started in the Overdome, which houses the arkwini living quarters. With the aid of a compliant arkwini, Arkwal would have demonstrated one of two machines: the Wake-a-nator or the Sleep-a-nator. Between them, how much time do these two machines save each day, per arkwini?”

  A holographic scale model of Castalia floated along the front of the stage. The tubes that sprouted from its Underdome dragged along behind it, giving it the appearance of a discarded helium balloon. She stared at it in a vain attempt to jog her memory. Had she ever been asked the question in the Simulator? Charlie certainly hadn’t asked the question during her revision, she knew that much. Having been through the Wake-a-nator herself, this was one question she should have known the answer to. Except her mind was blank.

  There was the ridiculously long bed whose mattress wrapped back round on itself, the mechanical arms that lifted the duvet off at the end, and the machines, one at each end. Arkwal had mentioned the number of minutes saved, she was sure of that. Except it could have been any number you cared to pluck out of thin air. She plumped for ninety-nine and prayed that the other players were as clueless as she was.

  “Your answers are in,” said Arty, “and I can see we have quite a range. Anu, you were very close with your guess of ‘eleven’. The actual number of minutes saved is thirteen.” Nova clasped her fingers over her head and cursed her stupidity. How could she have been so far out? Another peek along the line, another fake smile from Holly, sending Nova’s heart rate through the roof.

  “The person whose answer was furthest from the truth was Edmund, who guessed 2,350. Bad luck, mate. It’s goodbye to you.” It was an older guy, from London. Nova squealed and then tried to suppress a giggle. How he’d got this far was a mystery. He left the stage, waving madly to the crowd, and watched in mock horror as the dodectopus devoured his avatar. At least he could enjoy his final few seconds of fame before the gong sounded.

  “And then there were five, which means another change to the rules. We’re moving into Instant Winstant. No more timers, you need to
buzz in to answer these questions. If you buzz in with the correct answer, you’re through to the penultimate round. And we all know what that means. At the moment, you’re guaranteed £10,000. If you make it to the final hundred, you’re guaranteed a whopping £100,000. So get your brains in gear and your hands ready to buzz. What was the name of the old man who controlled the nets that you had to crawl under in the Fire Demon’s Obstacle Course on Alpha Island?”

  Nova hesitated for the smallest instant before buzzing. She was too late. The delay was long enough that the guy next to her got there first.

  “It was Nico’s Nets that you had to crawl under, Arty. His name was Nico.”

  “Oli Rivett, player number 32,109,240, from Tyneside, ‘Nico’ is the right answer.”

  She grimaced as Arty shook his hand and congratulated him. Why had she flinched? It was such an easy question, Solarversia 101.

  “The first UK player is through to the penultimate round. There are two spaces left. You’ve each got a fifty percent chance of joining him. If you can answer the next question. Here goes. What is the Red Spot on Jupiter entangled with at the quantum level?”

  Again, a slight flinch meant that she was outbuzzed — and it was such an easy one, too. Charlie had asked her the exact question a couple of nights ago. She’d answered so quickly that he’d said she would totally dominate the round, the way she knew everything. The thought that her hesitation might have just cost her £90,000 — and the championship — gnawed away at her.

  “Is the Red Spot quantumly entangled to a massive black hole at the centre of the galaxy?”

  “Correct answer. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Anu the Annihilator, player number 61,618,002, the second UK finalist to progress to the next round.”

  While Arty held Anu’s hand aloft, Nova and the remaining two players were rearranged on the stage so that they stood next to one another, with Nova in the middle.