Solarversia: The Year Long Game (17 page)

“Now I’m going to show you another aspect of the app’s interactivity. Social: on.”

“You’ve made it look like a comet.”

“Exactly. Except the tail is made of social interactions rather than cosmic gas. As the planets orbit the Sun, the people who witness them fly past, like we’re doing now, get to upload social data: comments, photos and videos. Some people even host ‘Planet Parties’ to celebrate the fly-bys. If we zoom in a bit closer you’ll notice that particles in the tail are different colours, signifying the different types of social interaction, and if we zoom in a bit closer, you’ll even see the words, images and videos themselves. The closer the social particle to the planet, the more recently it was uploaded. Look at what I’m holding. It’s a photo of us shaking hands downstairs when you arrived. I place the photo on the planet, like so, and it joins the tail.”

“It’s very impressive, I must say. I can see new particles appearing from the other groups in the room. And if we go back along the tail a bit further, I’ve noticed this. It’s a picture of my sons. ‘We hope you enjoy your visit to Spiralwerks.’ How thoughtful of them.”

“Actually, Madam Mayor, that particle’s a video. The picture of your sons is merely the thumbnail image. If you prod it with your finger, it’ll start playing.”

She did as instructed. The video particle grew in size until it appeared as a cinema-sized screen in front of them; behind them the Sun dimmed to create the optimal viewing conditions. A clip started playing of the mayor going about her official business in London, mostly stock footage. It looked rather corporate, Arty thought, not the kind of clip he would have expected to see from a couple of teenage boys. A few seconds later the backing track screeched to a halt, leaving a frozen image of the mayor on the screen. When a Sword of Sadism appeared alongside her, he knew something was wrong but had no time to react. The sword whirled through the air and decapitated her. An arm came on screen, picked up the head by a clump of its hair and used the bleeding stump to scrawl the curly swastika logo belonging to the Holy Order.

Arty tore his headset off, leapt towards the mayor and helped her remove hers. She stared at him, speechless, her lower lip trembling, the glint of a tear in her eye. It was a blow, seeing her like that, someone who was usually so confident and self-assured, standing there limp, broken. Everyone in the room — the gamers, dignitaries and staff — stared at Arty, waiting for a fix he didn’t have. The only noise came from the side of the room, where a dozen journalists eagerly filed their reports. Hannah looked at him, wide-eyed and in shock. Why hadn’t they even thought to protect themselves from something like this? Spiralwerks needed to up its game. And quickly.

Chapter Seventeen

Nova looked at the signpost and cursed. She was in Australia to see Giganja, the Grandmaster in charge of Earth’s Planetary Puzzles. Except Giganja resided on Ayers Rock, and she was in Darwin, which, as she had just discovered, was a full 1,435 km away. What a stupidly big country. She had fifty-seven teleport tokens in her inventory and this journey would cost forty. She had enough to get there, but what if she needed them later on?

The only alternative — flying there in Hawk — would take ages and she needed to be back at her books by the time her parents got back from the supermarket. It might have been a week before her first exam, but they seemed to expect her to revise
all day
. Too much revision frazzled the brain. That’s what Sushi always said.

She hadn’t visited her in the Soul Surfer app again. There’d been a few occasions when she’d
nearly
visited her, but bottled it at the last second. She wasn’t even sure what she was scared of. Perhaps that seeing her again would intensify the pain she felt. She couldn’t help but think the app was a cheap trick being played at the expense of desperate people.

Anyway, she hardly had time to spend with an algorithm based on her dead friend’s digital media history when there was endless revision to be done. And far more important than visiting a computer version of Sushi, was avenging the real Sushi’s death. Burner had come up trumps, like she’d known he would.

He’d spoken to his brother Jono, who had secured the support of Max and Maurice, a couple of tech geniuses he knew in Nottingham. They’d developed a program that was capable of performing the kind of data analysis Project Drone required. There was one hitch: Nova would need to find the money to fund it, and Burner was talking about thousands of pounds.

Without a job, and barely a hundred quid to her name, the plan was going nowhere, fast. In the meantime, she continued to labour away in the virtual room she’d created, sorting, curating and analysing the various automated feeds she’d set up to monitor online mentions of the Order.

She looked at the time, and then the signpost again. If she teleported now, she’d make the 3 p.m. puzzle in time, could tick it off May’s list and be back at her books before her parents were any the wiser. Puzzles ran on the hour, so if she didn’t visit Giganja now, she didn’t know when she’d have time. Besides, a visit to this particular Grandmaster held a special significance; completing his puzzle was the last thing Sushi had ever done.

It was a done deal.

Halfway down the signpost, enclosed in a yellow circle, was the name of her current location, Darwin, and below it, a keypad. After typing in the coordinates of her desired destination, she touched her finger to the top of the circle and dialled round it, remembering to go anticlockwise. If she’d gone clockwise, like players needed to do in the northern hemisphere, she would have been fined a token. She promised never to be so stupid.

The top half of the signpost started to rotate, the quantum teleportation jingle sounded, and Nova materialised next to a signpost near the summit of the mighty red rock, delighted to have lost her teleportation cherry and to have ticked off a Bucket List item in the process.

Giganja sat cross-legged on the ground in the centre of a circle of small rocks. As people stepped into the circle they disappeared from Nova’s view: Planetary Puzzles had to be tackled alone, so the circles were phased zones. She crossed the circle’s boundary with 90 seconds to spare.

She was excited to meet her first Grandmaster. He was an old Chinese man whose wispy white beard looked like it would flutter away if the wind blew hard enough. She’d heard that the nine Grandmasters all looked alike and that the only way to tell them apart was the colour of their robes — Giganja’s were bright orange. At precisely 3 p.m. he started talking in a croaky voice that reminded her of Burner with a hangover.

“Welcome to your Earth puzzle, Nova Negrahnu. Failure to solve it in time will mean the loss of a life, so I encourage you to pay attention to what I’m about to say. You may not accept assistance of any kind from any person or any form of artificial intelligence. You’ve given me permission to record the audio and video from your headset’s cameras and microphones. 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.”

Nova knew the rules of Puzzles by heart, having practised them in the Simulator for close to a hundred hours. She was endlessly fascinated by them and kept a journal of everything she learned about them. If she blitzed one, she wanted to know why. What was it about the Puzzle that she’d grasped so intuitively? Had she missed anything that might have led to a quicker time? She documented any Puzzles she screwed up even more closely, poring over their structure and content, seeking to understand the error of her ways.

She kept a note of her ideas for Puzzle scenarios in a separate diary. If she managed to defy all the odds and take Solarversia down, she wanted to be prepared for her role in helping to design the 2024 Game. Her aim was impress the people at Spiralwerks to such an extent that they offered her a job at the company.

“There are 15,880 people here to play my puzzle this hour, but only 11,116 safe spots. You will see that the number of safe spots available diminishes as other players start completing the puzzle. If the counter reaches zero before you solve it, you will die and find yourself back in your Corona Cube. Every three minutes Gorigaroo will strike his gong, signalling the appearance of a new clue somewhere within the puzzle. Good luck, and remember: the man who beats the same drum with the same stick hears the same tune. There Can Be Only One!”

As her headset counted down the seconds to the start of the game, she drew a deep breath and struck what she thought resembled a martial arts pose, readying herself for anything. That was the thing about Puzzles: they were always different. Apparently Spiralwerks had managed to generate several million of them, so although training helped, you never knew what you’d be in for.

When the timer hit zero, Giganja, his circle and the rest of Ayers Rock disappeared, and she found herself standing in an old town square, enclosed on each side by a stone wall two storeys high. In the middle of the square was a restaurant whose undecorated awning sheltered some tables and chairs. She glanced at the walls encircling the piazza. At the top of one of them was a door with a bright green exit sign. She ran to the base of the wall and looked up. The exit was way out of her reach, yet the wall contained no hand or foot holds. She retreated a short way, charged at full speed, leapt as high as possible and bounced straight off to crash to the floor in a heap.

Her flashing display gave her the bad news: three lost health points. What the hell had she been thinking? She gritted her teeth and grumbled a few choice words under her breath. If the wall couldn’t be climbed, the solution had to be found in the restaurant. From the disarray of the chairs and the unfinished plates on the tables, it looked like it had been deserted halfway through lunch.

The blackboard in the corner read ‘Today’s Specials’ along the top, but was blank apart from that, as if the staff had forgotten to write them in. The plastic tables were laid with an odd assortment of items: bottles of beer whose labels, like the blackboard, were blank, plates of beans, and a magnifying glass. She held each up in turn, checking for hidden clues and was dismayed to find nothing.

She held the magnifying glass in one hand and slowly tapped it against her palm. Two minutes had gone by and she felt no closer to solving the puzzle. The exit was all the way up the wall, and she needed to reach it. But how were a bunch of random objects supposed to help?

She ran to a table in the sun, energised by a sudden realisation, and pointed the magnifying glass at the blank label of a beer bottle. She varied the distance from the glass to the bottle, trying to focus the sun’s rays to a point, unsure exactly where to point, or why. Nothing happened. She pointed the ray at the plate of beans. The second the magnified rays hit them, beans started jumping up into the air, and Nova squealed with joy.

The rush of excitement she felt was quickly replaced with a sense of panic as she noticed a change to one of the counters in her display. It was the number of safe spots left — someone had already solved the puzzle. At first it ticked down by just one number. But then it ticked down again, and again. Before long the number was in free fall.

As she looked from table to table, trying to work out what those people might have seen, Gori’s gong sounded. Nothing inside the restaurant looked different, so she ran outside and quickly spotted a new sign emblazoned across the awning. It now read ‘Jumping Jacks’. She sighed. The beans had already jumped for her, and now everyone playing knew as much as she did. And the number of safe spots had just ticked below 10,000.

She brainstormed the possibilities. If she stacked the tables and chairs into a pile she could climb to safety. Except that didn’t involve jumping. Could she use the magnifying glass to ride one of the beans out of there? Seemed a bit preposterous. But then so were twelve-armed octopi and bouncy cities. Another chime of the gong. She wasted no time. There had been two other items that had been blank when she arrived here: the blackboard and the beer bottles. It was the beer bottles that had changed this time. Their labels now displayed a picture of a smiling man, the name ‘Volters’, and an alcohol content of 6.18%. The number of safe spots ticked below 8,000.

It all became clear — she’d need to pole vault to safety. One vital detail was missing though: she had no pole. She felt another rush of panic, this time more intense, as the number went below 6,000. When she finally realised what to do, she nearly kicked herself. The pole was one of the first things she’d seen — it formed part of the awning in front of the restaurant.

She used the nearest chair for a boost, but only needed to touch the end of the pole for it to appear in her hands. A patch of ground started flashing several metres in front of the wall with the exit. She took a small run-up, holding the pole in the air, and was glad to find that the game did most of the work for her. It landed squarely in the centre of the patch, flexed down its length, and propelled her two storeys into the air to land on her feet by the exit.

As she crossed the threshold, two things happened: Giganja got crossed off her Bucket List, and fifty teleport tokens got credited to her inventory. She clenched her fists tight, ecstatic at having succeeded in her first meeting with a Grandmaster. One Planetary Puzzle down, eight more to go.

Chapter Eighteen

Nova was still dancing round her bedroom, hand-in-hand with Zhang, when she heard her dad call up the stairs, “Nova, get down here right this second.”

That was his angry voice. She froze on the spot and could feel the joy drain out of her. She wondered how long they’d been home. Had they heard her dancing around? Maybe she’d screamed with delight when she’d landed by the exit in the town square. It seemed unlikely that her parents had guessed what she’d been up to, but it was always worth taking precautions. She scooped her Booners off the bed, stuffed them into the wardrobe, stuck a pencil behind her ear and headed downstairs.