Solarversia: The Year Long Game (20 page)

According to the Route Planner the quest was on Rangitoto Island, a few kilometres from the mainland. It guided her to the nearest Dockingtons, the place on the seafront that stored the boats. Either side of a long wooden jetty, a series of thick metal clotheslines extended into the distance for as far as the eye could see. Hung from the clotheslines, spaced every five metres or so, were players’ boats, attached by giant clothes pegs that left the boats dangling in the wind.

The jetty was throbbing with people who were racing to reach the quest first, making Nova all the more eager. She found a spare screen, tapped in her player number, and waited several excruciating seconds for Dockingtons to do its thing. A convoluted array of cogs, gears and wheels spun into action, threading the clothesline that housed her boat through a succession of poles and gates.

It arrived within eight seconds alongside her on the jetty and was released into the ocean by a peg that immediately whizzed off to the arrivals area. Waiting until the boat was steady, she clambered aboard and set course for the quest. Her boat Bruno was actually a hovercraft with neon blue lights down the side. The driver’s seat looked like an electric chair from a horror movie, and the oversized propeller was shaped like the international symbol for radiation. Bruno was kickass.

As he pulled out of the bay she checked her datafeeds to read up on the action. The Travelling Circus of Nakk-oo had pitched up on Rangitoto Island on Monday and was there for a week. Emperor Mandelbrot was keen for players to learn about the life forms and cultures on his home planet and had arranged for a circus to travel the globe. It was the reason she had come to Auckland in the first place: the circus contained several Bucket List items and needed to be visited at some time in the year.

She’d already been to it a couple of times since Monday to tick off the Juggling Jellyfish, the Exploding Yertle, and the Heffervescent Heffalump, but details of today’s quest were still scarce. All she knew was she had to head to the aviary, which had become a phased zone for the quest.

Pulling into the arrivals area of the Dockingtons at McKenzie Bay, she waited for a peg to droop down and attach itself to Bruno’s grill before jumping ashore. The recording of an Austrian guy saying, “I’ll be back!” sounded, one of the few catchphrases she still had switched on. The datafeed pinpointed the location of the aviary on the circus map, about three minutes away at her current running speed. She locked on and hoped that she wasn’t too late.

A choir of squawks, warbles and shrieks greeted her arrival at a huge marquee decorated with Maori art. Standing just inside the entrance to the marquee was a glum-looking woman — identified by the datafeed as an NPC — feeding twigs to a bird twice her height. The creature arched its neck down, snatched twigs from the palms of her hand and gulped them down in one. Nova approached the woman, but kept one eye on the giant bird, unsure whether it was friend or foe.

“Excuse me, there’s supposed to be a quest here at the aviary, do you know anything about it?”

“I’m Octavia, the bird keeper of Nakk-oo. Travinsky has flown from his tree; we can’t find him anywhere. We’ll have to cancel his show if we can’t find him, and we’ve not done that in all the time I’ve worked here. I’m scared I’ll lose my job. It was my fault he escaped, you see.” Nova glanced at the bird by Octavia’s side and wondered whether Travinsky was anywhere near as big.

“Please help me find him; there’s a reward if you do.” She grabbed another handful of twigs from the sack at her side to feed to the giant bird. Nova flicked back to her news feed, eager to see what other players had discovered. Someone had identified the large bird as a Moa, a flightless bird that had been extinct for more than 600 years. And there was plenty of information about Travinsky: photos of him and his tree, a reward poster, and some instructions on how to find him. She would need to grab a handful of twigs from the sack and head to the centre of the marquee.

If she hadn’t seen the photos on the feed, she would have walked straight past Travinsky’s musical tree. She supposed that it did vaguely resemble a tree, just not one that nature would produce. Its trunk, made of shiny metal, was as wide at the top as it was at the bottom. It had plenty of branches, but they protruded from the trunk at perfect right angles. And the leaves were all of the same size and shape. It was the most symmetrical tree Nova had ever laid eyes on.

She prodded a couple of the leaves on the lower branches, keen to hear what a musical tree sounded like. They made a dull, flat noise, tinnier that the notes produced by Zhang’s toy xylophone. Players had discovered that Travinsky was trained to respond to a certain tune, made by striking the leaves in the right order. He would fly back, like a homing pigeon, if only the tune could be played.

Nova walked round the tree, inspecting it up close, looking for holes in the trunk where the twigs might go, tapped the occasional leaf to hear its note, and generally pondered its secrets. Before she’d discovered anything of interest, an arkwini appeared, holding a large pencil sharpener in one hand and a small wooden aeroplane in the other. He craned his little chimp head up to the ceiling and shouted at the top of his voice.

“Roll up, roll up, get your twogs here, best prices in all of Solarversia! Travinsky has gone flyabout. If you want to lure him back, you’ll need yourself some twogs.”

“What’s a twog when it’s at home?” she asked.

“This here is a twog.” He held up the small plane in the palm of his hand, a look of pride on his simian face. It resembled a miniature Concorde, made out of twigs. The sharp cone at its front pointed down, while at the rear its slim wooden wings and rudder were engraved with the words ‘Twog Air’.

“You’ll need to get yourself some twogs to play Travinsky’s tune. Five will cost you one teleport token, fifteen will cost you two. Best prices in all of Solarversia, guaranteed.”

He held up the twog like a dart and aimed it at the tree, altering its angle until a leaf it was pointing at changed from black to white. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he released the little plane. It flew through the air, whistling as it went, and struck the white leaf, playing its note before falling to the floor and breaking apart.

“Travinsky’s tune consists of five notes. You’ll need to play them, one after the other, to lure him back.”

Nova checked her inventory. She had seventy-one tokens, enough for plenty of attempts.

“OK. I’ll have fifteen twogs, please. Let’s do this.”

She handed the arkwini a load of twigs that she’d taken from Octavia’s sack and heard a ding as the teleport tokens were debited from her account. He fed each one into the end of the sharpener, and when they popped out of the other end like logs from a sawmill, they’d been transformed into the tiny aeroplanes. Wasting no time, she grabbed one and pointed it at the tree. A targeting system appeared in her display and the leaf that the arkwini had hit turned white.

She was disconcerted by the slight shake in her forearm, unsure whether it was the pressure she felt to complete the quest, or the alcohol still coursing through her veins. Her first shot was good, but not great, striking a leaf next to the white target. As the twog fell to the ground in pieces, she quickly checked the datafeed for news. Someone had managed to hit three leaves in a row before they missed. The competition was stiff, and getting stiffer — new players were arriving at the aviary every few seconds.

She did her best to ignore her next two failed attempts, and then to remain calm when her fourth hit the target. The second leaf was far easier to get. It was round the other side of the tree, but close to the bottom, and she hit it first time. When the third leaf turned white she let out a moan. It was on the highest branch, close to the trunk. The twog she launched at it soared way over the tree to disappear out of sight.

Her remaining shots met with varying success: five hits and four misses. But she got closer each time as her hand got steadier, the adrenaline pumping hard around her body, overriding the effect of her hangover. She didn’t hesitate to buy another fifteen, and although she missed with the first, it was by a whisker. Her feed flared up again. Someone had just hit four in a row, and then missed the fifth. This time, instead of feeling more pressure, she had a flashback to the evening of the bullseye record. She was Nova Negrahnu, the Kent darts champion, here to complete a quest on behalf of her best friend Sushi Harrison, whose death she had sworn to avenge.
She could do this
.

Her next twog hit the first leaf dead in its centre. She smashed the second one out of the park. But while aiming for the third one at the top of the tree, she remembered something: the bottle of Growsome she’d won in a spin of the Tweel of Fate. Pulling it up in her inventory, she quickly reread the label. It would add two feet to her height for sixty seconds. She necked its contents in one and instantly sprouted the additional inches, making the shot far simpler. When it struck the leaf, she didn’t jump for joy, but tried instead to remain calm. She wasn’t done yet.

The fourth leaf was another easy one at her new height, and she dispatched it in seconds. But the fifth was higher up, and partially obscured from whatever angle she looked at it. No wonder it hadn’t been hit yet. She held her breath and rocked her forearm back and forth. The target hovered around the leaf, never staying put. She would need to time the throw to perfection — in the next six seconds, before the Growsome wore off.

As the twog left her hand she knew it was good. And it was. The leaf played and the twog fell to the ground. But there was no fanfare or applause. Instead, the tree started to morph. The hard, straight metallic trunk and each of its branches twisted and buckled. The leaves burst into a thousand colours, except the five she had played, which remained white and played the tune over and over, in the same flat, xylophonic noise.

To her surprise, it wasn’t Travinsky who appeared, but the giant Moa. With his beak he touched each leaf in order. The sound the tree made when the Moa played the leaves was very different to anything Nova had heard so far. These were beautiful sounds, ivory keys touched by a virtuoso pianist. The Moa played scales and arpeggios, and finally broke into a piece of music known as
The Firebird Suite
. It was
this
music that brought Travinsky swooping back into the marquee, followed soon after by a delighted-looking Octavia.

When the money and the one thousand teleport tokens appeared in her inventory, Nova removed her headset, ready to stand up, pump her fists into the air and scream the place down. Instead, she noticed Terrence Townsend sitting beside her — a kid whose mum gossiped as much as Katy Pugh’s. Something dawned on her in that instant. Results of quests appeared in datafeeds. This news would make it back to her parents, guaranteed. She’d need to get the plan rolling right now, before they had a chance to take the money away from her. Glancing around, wondering what to do, she spied Burner ordering food at the bar. She rushed over, grabbed his sleeve, and pulled him into the ladies’ toilets.

“My God, are you still drunk? Help, I’m being raped by a madwoman,” Burner mock-cried in the direction of the bar.

“Shut the hell up already. You want to get us caught?”

“Caught doing what? I thought we were here for Krazy Karting, not friends with benefits.”

“I just made two and a half grand completing a quest. We’ve got the money for the plan. But we need to move fast.”

“Two and a half grand? What was the quest? Show me the replay. Preferably back in the bar, before someone finds us in here.”

“We don’t have time for that. You have to get back to Burnside, right now, and get those drones in the air. We need to kick off the plan before my parents can stop us. As soon as you leave I’ll transfer you the cash.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a salute.

Nova couldn’t help but smile. Finally, things were going her way.

Chapter Twenty-One

Nova wiped away the last of her tears with Zhang’s tail. She had cried more during the last few weeks than she had in her whole life, with an intensity that she hadn’t experienced before. She’d cried so much that morning that it felt like she’d be unable to produce more tears if she tried. It was a bright July morning and the sun had already warmed a patch of her bed. She rolled onto it, soaking up its warmth while Zhang purred gently by her side. Her Booners sat on the desk, calling to her. She reached out and grabbed them, remembering that they were a doorway to more than just games.

Finally she felt ready to see her friend again, even as something of a last resort. As she launched the Soul Surfer app, the same wave of trepidation washed over her, but this time she knew things were different. She didn’t
want
to see her friend; she
needed
to see her. The same vista greeted her arrival, the Seattle skyline as viewed from a hill, Sushi sitting on her bench overlooking the city.

“Hey, Nova. How are you?”

As Sushi asked the question, a box flashed up beside her head. Nova must have missed it on her first visit. This time she read it. Sushi had asked the default question spoken by avatars whenever the Soul Surfer app was launched. It could be amended by users, but the creators recommended keeping it or using a question like it, because it helped the artificially intelligent programme that was running in the background identify what tone to take in the conversation. She discarded the pop-up box and took a seat next to her friend.

“I’m probably having the second-worst week of my life, after the one when you died. So yeah, not great, but thanks for asking. How’s deadsville?”

There was a pause before Sushi answered in a soft voice, “I’m sorry to hear that. Would you like to tell me about it or just sit for a while?”

Nova flinched. The app hadn’t registered her cynicism in the way the real Sushi would have done, and it made her feel a bit weird. Another box flashed up, explaining that users were able to provide feedback to the app whenever they wanted to shape the avatar of the person they were visiting into the person they remembered. Or not. Users could choose to remove annoying habits, accentuate desirable ones, and even change facial features and mannerisms. Sushi had left her avatar totally customisable, which Nova liked. It showed how much her friend must have trusted her, when she was alive. In turn, Nova resolved that she would mould this computer version to be the closest approximation to her friend as was technically possible.