Solarversia: The Year Long Game

by Mr Toby Downton

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Casey’s hands shot to his skull as it spasmed with red-hot electric pain. It felt like someone had poured lava-coated wasps through his earhole and then booted him in the face to make them angry. When the pain finally subsided, he fell into Theodore’s embrace, trembling and gasping for breath, while the graphs and monitors on the wall of the Epicenter displayed the cold hard data his suffering entailed.

  “It’s OK, son, it’s over now, that understood? I don’t like having to do that, you gotta trust me when I say that. That was only a small shock and it was for your own benefit. Look at the graph on the left of the wall and you’ll see what I mean.”

  Steadying himself against the older man, Casey looked at the readout. The shock he’d just received represented a mere five percent of the total power available to Theodore. Below it were the figures for his previous two shocks. The one he’d received at the shooting range had registered ten percent, and the original shock, a week ago at the Epicenter, had been closer to twenty percent. Father pulled him close and stared deep into his eyes.

  “I promise you that I get no pleasure from hurting my children. I’m not gonna feed you some line about these shocks hurting me as much as they do you; we’d both know that to be some vile bullshit. But it’s my job to ensure you do your job. That makes me your commander as well as your saviour. And I’ve always found punishment to be a more effective incentive than reward. You don’t want me to punish you again, do you?”

  “N-no, Father, of course n-not. I b-b-belong to the Holy Order, and I’m r-ready to do your bidding.”

  “There’s a good boy,” Theodore said, ruffling Casey’s hair. After the searing pain of the charge, simple human contact felt good. He hated himself for liking it, needing it. “It’s time to talk you through some logistics. You fly out tomorrow. In the morning an unmarked self-driving car will take you to Dallas/Fort Worth airport. From Heathrow you’ll go directly to your hotel, where you’ll get a good night’s sleep, leaving you nice and refreshed for the Solarversia closing ceremony on Saturday. Got all that so far?”

  Casey offered the most sincere smile he could manage and hailed the Magi in his head. Other than the chart showing the electric shocks he’d received, the wall was full of information relating to his mission. The tickertape of words relating to his thoughts was gone, presumably working in the background somewhere. He wondered how sophisticated the mind-reading technology was. Could it discern that his smile was fake? Was it reading every one of his thoughts, including ones like this, when he wondered what it knew?

  “While you’re at the hotel you’ll receive a package containing three special darts. They’re self-directing like the ones at the range, but are even more special than that. The tips contain nanoengineered blood cells that are programmed to put down roots once they reach the brain of the host they’ve been exposed to. They’ll perform a similar function to the electrodes in your brain, but without the need for a messy operation. If the Magi is to reach its full potential, it will need to colonise a diverse range of organic brains, helping it to assimilate human value systems of all varieties.”

  As Theodore pulled away from him, his face lit up. He twirled a finger in the air and brought up a new set of screens on the wall, one of which displayed news from Solarversia.

  “I don’t mean to alarm you, but there’s been a slight change of plan. You’re still going to target Spiralwerks’ CEO of course, and since he survived the attack on New Year’s Eve, that will be Artica Kronkite. Having the resources of a company like Spiralwerks at my control will ensure the Magi goes on to become the sole superintelligence on the planet. But I learned some rather interesting news last weekend.”

  Theodore gestured to a news clip that displayed the rotating avatars of the final ten players, alongside a paragraph describing the video they’d submitted during the penultimate round.

  “Our friend Nova Negrahnu managed to scrape into the final ten. Dedicated her little video to her dead friend. Ain’t that sweet? She’ll be there at the stadium on Saturday. It’s funny. Only a few weeks ago I wanted her and Mr Kronkite dead. But I’ve come round to the idea of bringing them onboard — we can harness the power of their brains for the good of all mankind. That means you have two people to shoot during the inevitable mayhem.”

  “I’ll t-try my best, Father.”

  “I believe you will. There’s one other thing before I have you escorted back to your room. You’ve been thinking about using the trip to London to escape. No, no — no need to apologise. Tricky things, thoughts, the way they pop into your mind all uninvited. The important thing is that you’ve not been dwelling on such thoughts. But still, I want you to be under no illusion. The shocks I’ve been giving you work just as well remotely, and that includes being aboard a plane. You’ll receive a shock every hour that you’re awake. They won’t be big ones, just a couple of percent. Enough to keep you on your toes is all. I advise you to remember the pain of the first shock once you leave here. It would be a stroll in the park compared to the one you’d receive if you betrayed me. You’re dismissed.”

  Casey turned to follow the ’bots back to his room. And this time, he didn’t bother with a fake smile.

  ***

  Nova traced the stars of Emperor Mandelbrot’s constellation with a feeling of trepidation, part of her unable to comprehend the improbable situation she found herself in. It was Saturday the 27th of February, the day before the final round and the day before her 19th birthday. None of it felt real. She’d made the Grand Final. Even if she went out in tenth place, she’d be one million pounds richer.

  If she managed to last any longer, prizes climbed by a whopping half-million pounds all the way to second place, which paid out a cool £5,000,000. Double that amount would be paid to the last person standing, the Grand Champion of the Solarverse. It was crazy, and try as she might, she was unable to put thoughts of the final, and all of that money, out of her mind.

  When the face of the Corona Cube disappeared, a purple blobby bridge was revealed, leading out from her profile square. It wound its way to the Emperor’s dais in the centre of the Magisterial Chamber, interweaving and criss-crossing with the bridges that led the nine other finalists to the same place.

  The ten of them had spent the week at the Trumpton Hotel, quietly preparing for the biggest day of their lives. Not that Nova had spent much time with any of them. When she wasn’t training in her rig, working out or answering the same old questions in one of the compulsory interviews with some media outlet, she was camped in her room with Charlie and Burner, studying her competitors’ highlights reels and discussing the finer points of various strategies. The ten of them watching the sixth and final story together, like they’d been required to do, would be, she realised, the first they’d been together since qualifying last weekend.

  Stepping along the bridge with care, she couldn’t help but stop every few metres to admire Spee-Akka’s artwork. The colourful vines that usually hung from the ceiling had been removed, so she had an unrestricted view of the four triptychs. The middle panel of the ceiling’s triptych, resplendent in all its Renaissance-inspired glory, was taking shape. Only one area remained blank: the oval in the centre, which was reserved to depict the events of the following day.

  The twisting bridge led Nova to her seat: one of ten purple hands protruding from the Emperor’s base, facing inward so that each player looked at the central column that stretched up to the ceiling. It looked like they’d been seated in order of age. Immediately to her left was Matas the Mole, the youngest and shortest finalist. His thick crop of uneven brown hair matched his even bushier eyebrows. He was only seventeen and hadn’t said a thing since introducing himself on the first day.

  On her right, Pedey Gonzalez zhooshed her hair a couple of times and practiced crossing and uncrossing her legs. Of all the finalists, Pedey seemed most at home with the incessant media attention and actually seemed to enjoy doing the interviews. Her only problem, Nova thought,
was that she didn’t seem capable of switching off. She seemed to live every second of her life as if it was being mediated to a global audience, including mealtimes, private conversations and even virtual appearances such as this one.

  Fortunately, Jools van der Star, one place to the right of Pedey, was out of Nova’s line of sight, helping her put him out of her mind. It was Vera, the mild-mannered Chinese woman, who spotted the Emperor bubbling first. As the lights in the chamber dimmed, the bubbling grew more intense, reminiscent of the opening ceremony when he had first appeared. On this occasion, instead of shooting up, his central column melted downwards, regressing into its base until the ten finalists were sitting around a large bubbling pot of purple soup.

  The broth soon began to solidify, and took the form of a large yellow sphere surrounded by a number of smaller spheres: a solar system with seven orbiting planets. Nova watched as the star, and six of the planets, receded from view, leaving the fourth planet, which grew in size until it dominated the celestial show. Although the planet consisted of blue oceans and vast green continents, it was unmistakably different from Earth. As the finalists watched in silence, an old woman began to narrate.

  “The planet you are looking at was once called Nakk. It was the home of the Unglai and was Emperor Mandelbrot’s planet. Many thousands of years ago, the Unglai had reached the state of technological evolution that you currently enjoy on Earth. They’d connected billions of computers to form a gigantic networked web. They had reverse-engineered their own genetic structure. They had created virtual reality.

  “And then, in the space of a few decades, they moved from a world of economic scarcity to one of abundance. They learned how to harness enormous reserves of energy from their star, created artificial intelligence and soon became the kind of beings they had once only dreamed of. When they reached the Technological Singularity — with the creation of superintelligence — they added the ‘-oo’ suffix to the end of the planet’s name, depicting the infinite array of possibilities that lay before them. And off they went, to explore the galaxy.”

  Nova watched the Unglai evolve as the years whizzed by. Millions of satellites, probes and space stations were built and launched. Spaceships darted off in every direction. Lines depicting their solar travel started to thicken, interweave and criss-cross. Before long they were a truly intergalactic species.

  “After searching their galaxy for centuries, the Unglai found a planet on which other species lived. The most sentient of the life forms on this planet were far behind the Unglai in terms of their cultural development and yet, it was clear that they were evolving and had already left a more primitive existence behind them. It was the most exciting discovery in all of Unglai’n history. They weren't alone. It was decided by the finest minds on Nakk-oo that they would watch the life forms on Terra Bojaxia, as they called it, from a distance. They would not make contact, nor under any circumstance meddle with the evolution of life as it unfurled. They watched, enthralled as the sentient beings on this planet developed and refined tools, began to source the raw materials of their world, learned to farm, industrialized and developed technological prowess, all the while praying in temples and fighting long, violent battles over territory and belief. Things were comparable to life on Nakk-oo, except in one major respect. The people of this planet seemed not to recognize the effects of their actions on their planet. They seemed to treat it as if its resources would continue to meet their ravenous desires without end. The planet started to buckle under the pressure.”

  Nova watched spellbound as time-lapse footage showed rainforests turn into deserts, people turn against one another, and nuclear warheads flatten whole cities. The footage was richly annotated with population and death count figures.

  “Although tempted on many occasions to intervene, the Unglai stuck by their original decision, hoping that sense, love and logic would prevail. They watched as Terra Bojaxia grew hotter and hotter, its seas rose and its lands were flooded. They watched as hurricanes and tsunamis grew in intensity and frequency. They watched as thousands upon thousands of species died out, and remained nothing but bystanders when the last of the people on the planet lost their fight for survival.

  “The Unglai were devastated. The only proof they’d ever found of life elsewhere in the universe was gone. They had watched it wither and decline. At home, there was outrage and despair that an alien race had been allowed to self-destruct. It was agreed by the High Council of Nakk-oo that if the Unglai were ever to find themselves in a similar position again, they would intervene, for life was what mattered most. The Unglai continued their intergalactic explorations and many years later, a similar situation did arise. They discovered a god-worshipping, seafaring quadrupedal species called the Ma-Hudratha, who were fast approaching the end of their scarce resources.

  “The Unglai thought long and hard and decided that their intervention would take the form of a game, one that everyone on the planet could play. They devised a giant elimination game that lasted one orbit of the planet around its sun. Contacting the Ma-Hudratha, they found people on the planet willing and able to create The Game and the countless games within it.

  “The Ma-Hudratha played the Year-Long Game with a concentration and sense of purpose the Unglai hadn’t predicted. During the year, the species came together to explore their very nature and found that competition complemented collaboration. When The Game was over, they appealed to the Unglai to help them create another, and over time, further games were devised, increasing in complexity as they went. Destructive practices, which had been harmful to the planet and the life that walked upon it, became unpopular. The rising temperature reached a plateau and began to decline. The oceans remained unpolluted and teeming with water life. Forests grew and were tended with respect.

  “Together with the Unglai, the Ma-Hudratha chose to spread their games throughout the galaxy. When they found living planets, they approached them with the offer of a game to play. Some species were so combative and warlike that they couldn’t see the offer as anything but a guerrilla ambush from outer space. But others accepted gratefully, delighted by the idea. The Unglai and the Ma-Hudratha were always happiest when they brought The Game to species who looked like they might wipe themselves out, and they learned to customise each one to meet the needs and value systems of the species in question.

  “They continue to play their own Year-Long Games even now, although theirs are considerably more complex and last far longer than a single planetary orbit around a medium-sized star. The Unglai evolved over millennia into a new kind of being. The Game, and its power to transform the lives of so many, ended up transforming them. Mortality is far behind them now, as far behind them as the planet Nakk. They created the Intergalactic Gaming Commission and appointed various individuals to be The Game's commissaires and Grandmasters — Emperor Mandelbrot, for example, who, as an intergalactic host, has the privilege of hosting inaugural Year-Long Games on planets such as Earth.

  “As time has passed the Emperor’s form has changed. First his gender changed. He lived for many years as a female. Then he became gender neutral. After several millennia living as a person, he began to metamorphose into various types of animal. For the last sixteen hundred years he’s been exploring life from different amorphous forms. The body shapes you see bulging out of his base are his old lives, the men, women and animals who have previously embodied him. The mouths in his totem pole once belonged to the beings who lost their lives on Terra Bojaxia, the planet that didn’t make it. It’s his way of remembering the souls lost there.

  “He’s evolved into a being whose superintelligence surpasses the sum total of that on Earth multiplied by several quintillion. At any one time he’s able to hold trillions of conversations, write billions of emails, books and documents, compose several million songs, direct thousands of films and watch several dozen Year-Long Games from around the galaxy. He watches a Year-Long Game from every possible perspective in the time it would take you to blink. His games ag
ainst other Grandmasters involve eleven-dimensional grids that contain quadrillions of intelligent beings. One of his games, against Grandmaster Pottsypto, takes place within the Buddhabrot fractal and has been going for five and a half thousand years.

  “The Emperor hopes that you enjoyed playing the inaugural Year-Long Game here on Earth as much as he enjoyed designing it. Based on his initial analysis of your planet, certain parameters were tweaked to ensure that mankind maximises its chances of survival. You have a precarious geopolitical system as global hegemony transfers from the United States of America to China, a situation compounded by your move away from fossil fuels toward renewable sources such as solar power. The Player’s Grid has been designed to encourage further integration among players of all ages, races, countries and interests. He’d like you to remember that all of life is a game, one where you make the rules — rules that can change at any time.”

  As the voice stopped talking the Emperor transformed one last time so that an outer section of his circular base resembled the ten finalists: in front of Nova was a replica of her avatar, sitting on a purple hand, looking inward. Whenever she moved, her replica followed suit, shifting from left to right, turning its head and so on.

  Around her she watched the other finalists similarly transfixed by their own doppelgangers. Popping up in a ring in front of the replicas was another set of replicas, smaller than the first, so that Nova now looked upon and had control over two versions of herself. This process kept repeating itself for as far as Nova could see. Each ring of replicas started to spin and then a purple hand popped out of the centre, holding a sign, which read ‘The End’.

  ***

  Stuff was strewn anywhere Nova cared to look. There were laptops, tablets and headsets lying on the floor among piles of clothes. Zhang, who had recently completed a short gig for them using the miniature theatre from the Show and Tell round, was plugged into the wall, recharging, while the theatre sat abandoned behind the wonky lamp at the back of the room, dumped there by Nova after she’d nearly tripped over it on the way back from the bathroom.