Solarversia: The Year Long Game (2 page)

“Looks like we have ourselves a winner. Get the truck ready, I’ll be down soon to help pack the tents away.” He switched frequencies and spoke again. “Tell Father that the eagle has landed. I repeat, the eagle has landed, over.”

***

Artica Kronkite pulled his jacket tight and cursed the biting February wind. As he walked the last stretch of his daily commute, he spoke into the mic embedded in his glasses. Costing more than the average Londoner’s monthly mortgage payment, their thick oblong frames incorporated technology that was able to augment his surroundings, but also kept the swirls of unkempt hair out of his stubbly face.

“Hannah, let Carl know that I replied to the HGR guys. They reckon there’s an issue with the larger drones, bloody ridiculous. We’ve been working on this thing for six months, and now there’s a problem. I told them, they screw up the opening ceremony, we never do business with them again, period.”

He rounded the corner into Redchurch Street and looked up to the roof of the building opposite. A black hand appeared from behind and clamped itself round the Victorian chimney, cracking it down the centre. Another hand appeared and grabbed onto a spare satellite dish.

Using its newfound brickwork grips, the hulking gorilla poked its head over the building and let out a scream that Arty thought sounded more like a dying giraffe. It stared right at him, and then was gone, as fast as it had appeared. Bricks and tiles, dislodged by the impatient primate, smashed as they hit the pavement below. Six commuters walked on by, unaware of the virtual carnage that his glasses had made seem real.

A new message from Hannah appeared in his field of vision: “Where are you? Meeting in Chess. Urgent.”

His voiced reply was automatically transcribed to text and sent to her: “Two minutes away.”

The area in front of Spiralwerks HQ buzzed with reporters, gamers and fans, some of whom had turned up every weekday for the past year, so eager had they been to meet the staff. Arty signed promotional posters for the fanboys, posed for selfies with the gamers and ignored the inane questions from the reporters. Unmanned aerial drones hovered overhead, fulfilling various tasks. Some captured live footage; others delivered breakfast orders to nearby digital agencies.

Arty pushed through the mob and entered reception, admitted through the sturdy metal gates by a robotic security guard whose facial recognition software could tell identical twins apart at a hundred metres. The intelligent paint covering the circular edge of the double-storey lobby displayed an aquatic scene. Orcas, tiger sharks and scuba divers accompanied his ascent in the lift, which made a bubbling sound when it reached the sixth floor.

High-resolution floor-to-ceiling screens at the front of the room told visitors everything they needed to know. This was mission control. Although the entire room buzzed with activity, heads still turned when Arty entered the room. It was a big day for everybody, but they all knew how much it meant to their CEO. He popped his bag on his desk and dashed over to the chess-themed meeting room. The colleagues he passed offered a nod and a smile but didn’t engage him in the usual banter.

“… They’re telling me it’s a credible threat, and we need to be taking it seriously. Hang on. For those dialled in, Arty’s just walked in.”

He declined a seat, joining those standing round the table instead. The screen on the wall displayed the avatars of the dialled-in management team. The smart table around which they crowded was overlaid with images and holograms pertaining to the meeting.

“OK. Tell me what we’re dealing with here.” Arty addressed Hannah McCreadie, the Head of Communications and a close ally. She was a patient woman whose ability to understand and react to complex problems had gained her a lot of respect within the organisation.

“You remember those nutjobs in the US we heard about a few weeks back?”

“You mean the techno-mystical wannabe terrorists?”

“Them indeed, ‘the Holy Order’. They just issued a hit list of corporate targets. Guess who's on top?”

Hannah nodded at the list on the large screen at the front of the room. The room fell silent while Arty studied it.

“Is there any indication why? We build games in virtual worlds, for God’s sake, it’s not like we sell crack-laced sweets to kids.”

Hannah shrugged, exhaling through pursed lips.

“When you say that they ‘issued’ the hit list, how exactly? To whom and when?”

“Emailed to a generic address at each of the companies on the list. Arrived at one minute past eight this morning. They used an anonymous remailing system making the original source untraceable. We’re expecting the story to break any moment.”

“So you’re telling me that this, rather than the start of The Game, is going to be the news tonight?”

“We’re doing what we can to stay on message.”

Arty stared at the list for a long while. Finally, noticing the worried expressions on the faces of his team, he clapped his hands and smiled, hoping it looked more genuine than it felt. “Let’s not lose focus on what we’ve got to do today. We’re only fourteen hours from the opening ceremony. Everyone needs to be at the top of their game.”

Members of his team started to move. “That’s it, get a move on, we haven’t got time to waste. Except for you, Carl. I want to know what’s going on with those bloody drones.”

Chapter Three

Nova sat cross-legged on the sofa in the lounge and checked the Solarversia countdown clock for the hundredth time that day. On the night of the sleepover with Sushi, when they’d signed up to play, the timer had displayed what seemed like an impossible number of days to wait. Now, with the days and hours both on zero, and the minutes about to tick under fifteen, she felt ready to burst.

“How do you like your magic goggles then, love? Are they better than the old ones?”

“Much better, thanks, Dad. The resolution is out of this world. Not quite as good as actual reality, but not far off, either. And the skull pads read my brain waves, so I can control my avatar’s movement by the power of thought. Which means I don’t have to carry my haptic gloves around with me any more.”

“I understood the first bit, when you said they were better than your old pair,” her mum said. “The rest of it might as well have been in Chinese.”

It was quarter to midnight on the 28th February 2020, the day of Nova’s 18th birthday. Her parents had given the present she’d been longing for: a BoonerMax virtual reality headset. Resembling a pair of futuristic ski goggles, the streamlined latticework of gunmetal titanium encased more computing power than some families had in their entire homes.

Headsets like these allowed users to alternate their view of the world as they saw fit. Switched off, they functioned like a normal pair of glasses. In ‘augmented mode’, headsets displayed your immediate environment, but overlaid text, images and objects onto it, altering it in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Advanced headsets, like the Booners, were even capable of occluding objects, effectively rendering them invisible. Full virtual reality immersed users into entirely fictional worlds.

Nova removed her Booners, exhaled onto the rim and lovingly rubbed it with the sleeve of her jumper. Already, they were her favourite thing in the world. At the front of the lounge the Solarversia opening ceremony played on the TV. The final few floats of the parade pulled into the Olympic Stadium to complete a circuit of the track, cheered on by a crowd of eighty thousand people and watched by several hundred million more online.

The build-up to The Game had been impossible to ignore. Cities had been inundated with interactive billboards that flashed up the profiles of new entrants from around the world. These square-shaped profiles provided a snapshot of information about the player: their avatar name and picture, nationality, vehicle choices and, in Nova’s opinion, the most important piece of information of all, their number in the Player’s Grid.

The grid was comprised of ten thousand rows by ten thousand columns, with square number one bang in the centre. Numbers two to nine were positioned around it, and numbers ten to twenty-five around that. The numbers spiralled out like a snail’s shell all the way to one hundred million. It was common practice to scan the grid number of interesting profiles on billboards and flip into augmented or virtual mode on a headset in order to view the person’s position in the grid and check out their bio.

In the run-up to the start date, the marketing for Solarversia had become unavoidable and, to gamers like Nova, utterly tantalising. Characters from Solarversia kept popping up unexpectedly in augmented displays all over the world. She and Burner had participated in an event at Maidstone’s Mote Park, which had involved a bunch of geocached clues that led to the lake — where a fifty-foot dodectapus known as Banjax was found lurking. Displays like this had become tourist attractions in their own right.

Lots of people seemed to agree — Solarversia was the largest, most exciting thing ever to have been created in the history of the world. Burner’s brother Jono had gone so far as to attend a boot camp to train for it, lured, like so many others, by the large cash prizes for the top thousand places, and the promise of instant worldwide fame for those who made it further. Discussion of tactics and strategy had been endless, and tens of millions of pounds had been waged in bets. For Nova and her friends, the opening ceremony represented three and a half years of hype, excitement and trepidation.

Hearing the Solarversia jingle in her headset, Nova slipped it back over her head. All her old settings were already synced to her new Booners — it could only be a message from Sushi.

“Hey, birthday girl, have you checked out the fireworks cam yet? It’s seriously rockin’.”

“I’ve been too excited to do anything other than sit here and watch the clock count its way down to midnight. I can’t believe The Game starts in ten minutes. It doesn’t seem real. Send me the link.”

Nova switched to camera mode in her Booners. An array of video feeds appeared in her view, a thousand different perspectives available at the touch of a button, her gaze or the sound of her voice. She selected the fireworks cam by staring at the link in the message from Sushi. Half a second later she appeared to inhabit a 360-degree camera affixed to an aerial drone that hovered above the fireworks display in the stadium.

Rockets exploded around her, some so close that she instinctively jerked away from them, while Crackling Comets zoomed past her face, leaving behind glistening tails of multicoloured light she couldn’t help but try to touch. She breathed deeply through her nose, trying to smell the sulphur that hung thick in the air.

Mr Negrahnu peered over his newspaper. “Has it started yet?”

“As I’ve mentioned several thousand times, it starts when the counter hits zero. You’re worse than a little kid.”

“Says the person sitting there oohing and ahhing like there’s something wrong with their brain.”

She volleyed one eye back to the lounge and glared at him. “I’m oohing and ahhing because I’m floating in the middle of a fireworks display. Take a look for yourself. TV — sync to Booners.”

The TV switched channel to mirror the view in her headset. Mr Negrahnu leaned forward in his seat and peered over the rims of his spectacles.

“OK, I’ll admit it. That’s pretty cool.” He watched a couple of rockets explode into a shower of light before retreating to his crossword. Nova exchanged a wide-eyed look with her mum. It wasn’t often that her dad made a complimentary remark where modern technology was concerned.

She glanced at the countdown. Seven minutes to midnight. Still enough time to check out some of the other views. Once upon a time people hopped channels. Then they surfed the ’net. These days they volleyed cams. She chose one positioned on the lead float, which had just completed its lap of the track.

Its crew had stripped down to T-shirts despite the cold February air, their bodies warmed by a cocktail of rum and dance. Steam rose from their backs while the float’s chunky sound system doled out electro-flavoured sonic booms. Her kind of tunes. Around the stadium mighty lasers fired beams at huge disco balls, which diffracted the light into millions of sparkling shards.

The sound of a gong reverberated around the stadium, causing the crowd to erupt into a fresh chorus of cheers. Nova switched off cam mode, perched her Booners back on her forehead and rubbed her hands with glee. The digits on the timer were counting down the final 60 seconds — the Year-Long Game was about to begin.

***

The central podium in the Olympic Stadium was bathed in light. A holographic chimp dressed in a smart suit flickered into view. He climbed the stairs at the front of the stand, followed by a group of holographic monkeys half his size, who lugged a wooden cargo crate between them. They pushed and they heaved and they strained, willed on by every person watching.

“Come on, arkwinis, we’ve waited long enough,” Nova said from the edge of her seat.

“Ark-whatnies?” Mr Negrahnu asked.

“The chimpanzee in the suit is called Arkwal, and the little ones are the ‘arkwinis’.”

The arkwinis placed the crate to the right of the larger ape and then waddled back down the steps and out of view. Arkwal leaned in toward the microphone.

“Alright, Earthlings?” He wouldn’t have sounded out of place tending a market stall in the East End. “Thank you for accepting Emperor Mandelbrot’s invitation to the Year-Long Game. To win, you’ll need a combination of skill, luck, insight and creativity. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Everyone starts The Game in the same place: Castalia, the Emperor’s flying palace.”

Arkwal paused to look around the stadium, eyes narrowed, as if searching for someone or something in particular. He reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved what seemed to be a red baton. With a flick of his wrist, the baton extended into a full-length telescope, the height of an arkwini.

The spotlight followed him as he walked up to the wooden crate. He tapped it with the telescope then stepped away as it collapsed outward, revealing an object shaped like a miniature space shuttle with streamlined cylindrical thrusters pointed at the heavens. Arkwal stowed the compressed ’scope back in his pocket, strapped on the jetpack and clamped his thumbs down on the thrusters.