Solarversia: The Year Long Game (21 page)

“Jesus. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I said something similar to you in a message two summers ago. You remember that epic crumble I had about my brother? You told me that the best place to start is usually the beginning.”

Another box flashed up showing a snippet of their conversation over IM. Nova let out something that was halfway between a smile and a gasp, amazed and freaked out by the technology in equal measure.

“I guess I was right. Except it’s not always clear where the beginning is. Sometimes there are lots of places to choose from.” She took a deep breath. “Let me think about this. Last Wednesday is as good a place as any to start. I’d just finished my final exam, which actually went pretty well.”

Nova filled her in on the night of sambucas, the hangover from hell and the epic win at Travinsky’s Tree. After a while she stopped talking, suddenly aware that she had been speaking to her friend like it was old times, like she was still alive. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not. Part of her felt foolish, so easily taken in by a few lines of code. But then, she wondered, wasn’t that all that our DNA was, a few lines of code, just ones executed by a different type of computer?

“Is everything OK?” Sushi asked.

“I think so. I just realised how freaking weird it is, talking to you. Have you understood everything I’ve said?”

“I think so. My datafeed provided me with images of Travinsky, Octavia and the little twig aeroplanes while you were talking. But the semantic recognition module of my programme is telling me that an experience like this is something you would be delighted about. Is that right, or does the programme need updating?”

“You tell the semantic recognition module that it’s doing just fine. Tell it to get ready for some whacked-out shit.”

Computer Sushi looked on, clasping her knees to her chest, wide-eyed with expectation.

“So, I was buzzing. I’d sent Burner home, transferred him the money to kick off the masterplan and then I remembered that I’d won a thousand teleport tokens on top of the cash. I was like, ooh, I could visit Grandmaster Killanja on Mercury, get some Karting practice in, then head over to Burnside to watch him set the plan in motion. And that’s when my week of hell started. I started feeling rough again at pretty much the exact second I entered Killanja’s circle. We’re talking rough-in-the-jungle rough. The puzzle was set in this small white room, empty, except for a decapitated head resting on top of a Roman pillar.”

“I would have freaked out.”

“You totally would’ve done. It was creepy. The head was talking to me, Alfonso or something, telling me I need to pluck a lucky hair from his scalp, but I have to find it first. The whole room started to spin — for a moment I didn’t know if it was me or the puzzle. I tore my headset off and tried to stand up and nearly fell onto Terrence’s lap. You remember him, the freaky guy from our French class — I can’t think of anything more gross. The real room was spinning even worse than the virtual one, the strip lighting was blurred, and the carpet was moving. I ran to the loo, threw up my breakfast, and by the time I came back the puzzle had ended and I’d lost a life. To the easiest Grandmaster of them all. Then Terry Fuckwit turned to me and says, ‘Eurgh, I thought I could smell sick, you dirty little chunder bunny.’ It was all down my top and in my hair. Totally gross.”

Sushi held her hands to her cheeks, her mouth wide open.

“I don’t know what’s worse, you losing a life, or you having spew down your top taking shit from that idiot.”

Nova smiled: that sounded more like it.

“I swear I could have murdered him on the spot. By the way, here’s some of that feedback you asked for: Sushi would have totally cracked up at that story.”

Nova spent the next few minutes cycling through the list of laughs in Sushi’s repertoire, until she found one she thought best suited the situation. When she was done, Sushi replayed the last minute of dialogue on a screen in front of them so that Nova could confirm her choice.

“That’s exactly how you would have reacted. But you would have commiserated with me too, over the lost life.” Her profile square appeared, hanging in the air in front of them. Its violet border, unchanged since the start of The Game, flashed three times, and then turned green, replaying the change that occurred in the grid at the time of the incident. The coloured trim around the edges of the license plates on her vehicles followed suit. Nova bowed her head. “It was idiotic of me to try the puzzle in the state I was in. I can’t believe that I’m a green belt now — I feel like I’ve let you down.”

“You haven’t let me down, I promise.”

“Well, that makes one person on the planet — if we can count you as a person. You haven’t heard the rest of the story yet. The next day Burner messaged me. He reckoned the drones had found something interesting. He was about to visit his nan to take her this wheelchair he’s made, so I went to Fragging Hell to take a closer look at the results. And that’s when things started to go really pear-shaped, because I made the mistake of telling Jockey what we’d been doing. I was at the bar looking over the results and he was all interested and asking me loads of questions about the plan and getting all geeky about the drones and computational algorithms and stuff. So I told him I was going to post the results online. There’s three hundred gigs’ worth of stuff to look through, we’re never going to manage by ourselves, so we decided we might as well crowdsource it. And that’s when he started acting like my dad, telling me what to do, saying I should send the results to the police. I was like, ‘Yeah, fat lot of good they’ve done so far.’”

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know, he started going off on one about people getting in trouble for doing stuff like this. All I could think about was the reason we’re doing it in the first place.” Nova went quiet for a few seconds. “I could feel the anger growing inside me, the same way it does with my parents sometimes, and the shitty teachers at school. And then out of nowhere I’m yelling at him, ‘There’s no need to be such a fat prick about it.’”

Sushi cocked her head to one side and spoke quietly. “Whoops.”

Nova went quiet again and looked into the distance. “He said if I felt that way I shouldn’t bother coming in anymore and I said, ‘Whatever, it’s a shithole anyway,’ and stormed off.”

“You were being a total bitch.”

Nova paused. “Brutal. But yeah, you’re right. I haven’t been back since and he probably thinks that I really meant it. But I haven’t finished telling you about the train wreck that my life is. The same evening the frickin’ police came round to speak to me. A couple of guys had actually gone to check out one of the locations highlighted in the search results from Project Drone. They trekked to a hill in the middle of Arkansas and found a weird pole that had been identified by one of the drones. It had carvings all over it, which are similar to some of the symbols in the manifesto. At the bottom of the hill they found a ditch containing two dead bodies. I’m not fucking kidding.
Bodies
. It’s all over the news. Apparently the FBI have gone ballistic. Reckoned they had leads of their own, and this has blown all of their good work, the terrorists are going to know they’re on to them, and it’s all my fault, blah, blah, blah. They also told my parents that I might have endangered myself. It’s not like I used my real name on the forum, I’m not stupid.”

Sushi stared at her friend in disbelief.

“Oh, yeah, there’s more. We can safely say that my folks know how I got hold of the cash in the first place, and that I spent it on a bunch of drones trying to find some terrorists, rather than helping them out with the bills. So they are absolutely delighted with me. Once the police had gone I told them I was sorry and Dad said ‘Sometimes, Nova, sorry isn’t good enough.’ Which was nice, because I wasn’t feeling shitty enough about my life already.”

“I’m sorry, Nova. About everything that’s happened. But also because I’m not entirely sure how I would respond in a situation like this.”

Nova shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t think a living Sushi would know how to react either. I’m not sure I know myself. It wasn’t the kind of situation that ever came up when you were alive.” She waited to hear Sushi respond, but instead her friend sat there, shaking her head.

“Here, have some more feedback. You would have giggled at that. Anyway, if my life wasn’t screwed enough by this point, I get a call from Burner. He had a visit from the police too and had a massive go at me. Obviously I ended up arguing with him. So that’s another relationship I’ve messed up. Jockey, my parents and Burner. Oh, plus the FBI and the police. Please remind me if there’s anyone I’ve failed to offend in some way. My only friends in the world are a computer program that pretends to be my dead best friend, and a robotic lemur with the mental age of a three-year-old.”

This time Sushi laughed but stopped abruptly.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I judged that you meant that to be funny. I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“It’s OK, you were right. You would have laughed your ass off, exactly like that. It’s just that I’ve never missed you more than at this moment, and I wish with all my heart that you were still alive.”

Nova removed her headset and buried her face in her pillow. She’d been wrong about one thing. She had plenty more tears to cry.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Leaning against a gnarly old tree stump, Casey watched a mean-looking alligator slide into the water. He wondered if that was the one who’d taken Father’s arm. Father was one hell of a survivor. When Casey lay awake at night, obsessing over what had happened to Ivan or Wallace, he tried instead to imagine Father finding the Sub, battling the ’gator and being visited by the Magi. Then his thoughts would drift once again to the event that changed his life.

He’d been working on a project in his garage at home, installing some code in a robotic baseball machine he’d built from spare parts. The robot had learned to throw the perfect pitch and could deliver 43 of them in under a minute.

The music had been blaring, and he didn’t hear Mary-Ann coming. She was on the phone to her sister — always on the phone, that girl — and probably wasn’t paying attention. The robotic arm, which had been jackhammering back and forth at 43 rpm, crushed her windpipe with the first blow and smashed her nose into her skull with the second.

He remembered collapsing to kneel beside her as blood spewed from her mashed nasal cavity. She wheezed a few painful breaths, her hands clasped in his, the grip ever weaker, until she lay there, unmoving, dead. It was that final image of her, his beautiful, sweet Mary-Ann, lying there, destroyed, that still haunted him to this day. He replayed the incident in his mind for, what, the thousandth time?

Why could the ending never be different?

Once he was sure she was dead, he panicked, got into his Chevy, and drove for six hours straight. Checking into a rundown motel, he spent the next few weeks playing online poker, drinking and staring at a crooked picture of the Virgin Mary, which hung on the wall at the end of his bed. By the third week his mind was set on suicide.

Exhausted and half smashed, he’d gone online to search for ways to end it all, wanting to find a method that was guaranteed to work. Hanging appealed. The ceiling in the bathroom in his room at the motel was unusually high and there was a thick pipe which ran across it that he was certain would take his weight.

He joined a forum devoted to the topic and asked about knots, wanting to ensure he got the noose right. A few people replied to him: a couple of forum regulars, an oddball who wanted to watch him to do it, and a woman with the username ‘Zoro’, who professed she wanted to help him. There was something about the no-nonsense language she used, and her unbridled optimism for the future that appealed to him. She didn’t come across like your average busybody Samaritan, and he liked that.

“Why would you want to kill yourself?” she asked.

“I told you. I killed the love of my life. I’ve got nothing to live for.”

“Always something worth living for. Always.”

“Oh, yeah, like what? Name me one thing.”

“Listen, I’m not going to pretend I know what hell you’re living through right now and I’m certainly not going to sit here and patronise you with a list of stuff like rainbows, babies and kittens in some inane effort to cheer you up. I also want to acknowledge that killing the love of your life is a shitty situation to find yourself in. But I firmly believe that it’s
always
worth fighting for a better future.”

“What future? I don’t have one, not without Mary-Ann.”

“The future doesn’t exist as some predefined construct, something set in stone by God at the start of time. It exists as an unmanifested spectrum of possibilities. You were looking forward to
one
of those possible futures with Mary-Ann. I’m guessing it might have been a wonderful future you ended up having together. Again, it’s shitty that it didn’t come to pass. But it will only ever remain one of an infinite number of futures that could have played out for you. Are you seriously going to tell me that there’s not a chance that one, or even several, of the other possible futures might also be wonderful for you? Because if you do, I’ll tell you you’re full of shit.”

“Well, you certainly have a way of talking to a guy who’s on the edge, I’ll give you that.”

“I know I’ve never met you, but I’m sure that if I did, I’d get to like you. And that’s enough reason to spend my time talking to you to help discover a future you might be interested in experiencing. Would you do me the honour of hearing about the future I’d like to create?”

“I guess I’ve got nothing to lose.”

That weekend, following several hours of dialogue with his new online friend, he looked at his motel room and finally saw it for what it had become. It was disgusting. The floor was littered with empty cans, bottles and discarded pizza boxes. His clothes stank, he stank. He showered and washed his T-shirt in the sink, shaved for the first time in weeks, tidied the room, opened the curtains. A shaft of sunlight struck the wall at the end of his bed, forming the shape of an arrow that pointed at the crooked picture of the Virgin Mary, the tip of light precisely connecting with Mary’s heart.