Solarversia: The Year Long Game (23 page)

“His show is set on his virtual spaceship, the Disco Stick.”

“I think I blocked that detail out. It’s shaped like a penis, right?”

“It’s the whole shebang. You’ll be located in the right bollock, while his harem of one hundred and fifty eunuchs slouch around in the left.”

Arty stared at the trippy images and video clips playing on the walls, trying to take it all in.

“Look, you’ll be fine. And it will be great for us. Kiki’s cooler than a polar bear. Oh, yeah, one last thing. Don’t look at his fingernails.”

“Why not?”

“He plays video clips on them, usually of a pornographic nature. They’re really long, so they can capture your interest. And he makes a laughing stock of interviewees who get too interested. Gives them virtual boners, that kind of thing. The terms and conditions of appearing on his show give him full creative control over your avatar while you’re on board. He’ll probably try to embarrass you.” She checked the time and handed him his headset. “Have you got all that? The interview starts in thirty seconds.”

“Electropets and eunuchs. He sounds like a polar bear. Don’t look into his eyes. Takes place aboard an interstellar schlong.”

“That’s the gist of it, yes. Take every comment with a large pinch of salt. Don’t let him faze you. And remember, I’ll be here the whole time. I can give you prompts via your earpiece and you can volley back to the meeting room if you need more help. Get your headset on and your brain in gear. We’ve got ten seconds.”

Arty materialised on a fluffy white cloud, sitting next to Kiki, and prepared himself for anything. He’d been in hundreds of virtual rooms in his time, but none quite like this. It was a circular room, the size of the larger meeting rooms at Spiralwerks, and all around him a menagerie of wild animals were on the loose. A troop of monkeys chased each other’s tails, a scurry of squirrels scampered around futuristic furniture, while a gaze of racoons slumbered in the corner on bean bags, sucking on hookahs.

Over in the corner, a band of giant pandas struck up the show’s theme tune. Sparkly musical notes emanated from their instruments and floated around the room until they were hoovered up by the pink elephant Arty had seen during his crash course. When the music died down, the animals seemed to relax, as if the volume had been the source of their energy. Kiki stopped bopping in his seat and turned to face one of the floating spherical cameras.

“My name is Kiki La Roux, and I’m Shooting for the Stars! This week we’re taking a trip with none other than Artica Kronkite, the brains behind Solarversia, The Game we all love to love! Artica, welcome to the show, honey.”

“Hi, Kiki. Thanks for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here, aboard your … spaceship, with all of these delightful animals.”

“Did you hear that, my lovelies? He said that you were delightful. Isn’t he a blast, ladies and gentlemen? Artica, I have so many questions for you and so little time. I’m going to need some help from my one-armed bandit. Rambo, do your thing, honey.”

The pink elephant attached his trunk to the coin slot of a fruit machine and emptied into it the spangling quavers and crotchets he’d hoovered up. The musical notes tumbled noisily into the machine, jangling and tinkling like melodic coins. Once there was ample credit inside, Rambo yanked the arm-shaped lever, sending the machine into a frenzy of noise and colour. When the spinning reels came to a halt, the images on the central row displayed Emperor Mandelbrot and his entourage.

“Let’s talk about the Emperor. What a fascinating individual. Where exactly did he come from? How old is he? When, why and how did he contact you? And where
does
he shop for clothes?”

“Well, Kiki, that’s a lot of questions. Great questions, I might add. All we know is that he’s from a solar system within the Milky Way, but he hasn’t been more specific than that. Apparently that’s standard protocol for a species like ours playing their first game. We’ve never received a straight answer about his age, although Arkwal implied that he’s in his tens of thousands. It was Arkwal who contacted me — about ten years ago — via email, would you believe? He asked whether Spiralwerks wanted to help host a year-long game. He reckoned he’d contacted lots of people, but we were the only ones who bothered to reply. I asked how it would work, and he told me about the planets, the Player’s Grid, Castalia and so on. It sounded like it could be a lot of fun, so we said that we were game. No pun intended.”

“Oh, my lord, you are a tease, Artica. Will you just listen to him, ladies and gentlemen? A creative mastermind and a comedian to boot. It’s an enchanting little story, and I’m sure your players believe every word. ‘A species like ours’, indeed. I’m Kiki La Roux, and I’m Shooting for the Stars. Rambo, do your thing.”

Each time Kiki repeated his catchphrase, in his effeminate voice, the word
I’m
seemed to stretch out a little longer, like a sequinned lounge singer draping herself slowly over a glossy grand piano. While the machine was in motion, his dreadlocks came to life, dancing around his skull, and his skin became a pale blue colour.

When the reels came to rest for a second time with pictures of his own face, Arty tensed up, anxious of what was to come. He volleyed one eye back to Hannah, who gave a thumbs-up and said into his earpiece, “Arty, you’re doing OK, relax your shoulders, this is normal behaviour, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Spiralwerks looks like a fun place to work, Artica. Not quite as fun as the Disco Stick, but then, where is, right, boys?” From the left testicle came the sound of giggling eunuchs. “I’ve heard a rumour that employees are banned from playing The Game; is that right? Was that your decision? Are you jealous of us folk who get to play? Oh, and by the way, how do I get an extra life? I’m on my last, wouldn’t you know?”

“Ah, Kiki, no extra life, I’m afraid. Not for you, not for anyone.” Kiki pouted sulkily at the camera, then flicked his locks with a grin. “Spiralheads have always been banned from playing the games we make. That was one of the company’s first rules. We still manage to have some fun though. There’s an ‘Employee’s Grid’ that’s kept separate from the ‘Player’s Grid’, and we get to play our own games, some of which influence the Gameworld. For example—”

“You influence the Gameworld, Artica? You haven’t been killing people off, have you?”

“No, no, no. We don’t influence events or anything that happens to the players. I want to make that clear.” He volleyed back to the meeting room and saw Hannah motioning for him to back-pedal. “I’m talking about creative influence. Take the Krazy Karting final later this year in London. At our summer party, a few weeks before the final, we’ll get to play games that will influence the design and layout of the track. We might even leave our mark somewhere. I was thinking of dropping some of my own photos onto a billboard at the side of the track, or if I win one of the games, I could get to choose the position of a hidden item. These additions are like in-game Easter eggs for players to find later on, once the world is opened up to explore when The Game comes to an end.”

“Don’t you just love Easter eggs? Although nothing’s so good as the hunt.” He winked at Arty and turned to the camera with a flirty shrug. “You mentioned the Karting final, Artica. I’ve already reserved my viewing spot; the Disco Stick is going to be stationed above Mayfair. My money’s on Jools van der Star, the Dutch driver. I’m a big fan of his pole position. He’ll be on the show in a few weeks time, one for your diary.”

The interview continued in a similar vein for another twenty minutes. Arty did his best to go with the flow. He fielded questions on the Planetary Puzzles, the Earth Force Field, and Pluto’s Portal of Promise. Just when he was starting to relax into the feel of the show, Kiki ordered Rambo to do his thing one last time. This time the reels came to rest with pictures of curly swastikas. “Don’t worry, this is the last set of questions,” he heard Hannah whisper. “Keep your cool.”

“I’m sorry, Artica honey, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask about the Holy Order. Why exactly are they targeting the good people at Spiralwerks? You haven’t done something to annoy them, have you?”

“It’s the same question we’ve been asking ourselves. We see ourselves as good corporate citizens, making games that bring joy to many millions of people around the world.”

“I believe they even managed to target the mayor while she was visiting your office? Is nowhere safe anywhere more?”

“Listen—” Arty stopped and took a deep breath, aware that he’d been about to launch into a defensive tirade unsuited to the satirical nature of the show. “It’s a serious business, Kiki, the stuff that’s occurring. The blasts in the States were devastating. Other events — the griefing attack, the video nasty — might appear frivolous on the surface, but beneath them is a very twisted belief system that’s led to a great many lives being destroyed. Trust me, we’re doing everything we can to work with the authorities to help bring these people to justice.”

“Well, I only hope they do catch them before more damage is done. Anyway, enough of all this serious talk, let’s have some more of that fun you mentioned. It’s time for a viewer question.”

Arty smiled uncomfortably while Kiki grabbed a musical note that had been drifting overhead and held it to his ear. He caught sight of Kiki’s hand. His nails were five inches in length and displayed the kind of material that Hannah had warned him about.

“Jacques from Marseille, France, wonders what you’d look like in a mankini. What a fabulous idea.”

With a click of Kiki’s fingers, Arty was suddenly wearing nothing but a lime green thong, with straps like braces over his shoulders. He placed his hands over his crotch and did his best to strike a look somewhere between amused and disapproving.

“Do you like to dance? I do, especially in the summertime, when the weather is hot. I love to strut my stuff, gyrate my hips, shimmy on down. Artica, we’ve loved having you on the show, haven’t we, my lovelies? I’m Kiki La Roux, and I’m Shooting for the Stars!”

With one last click of his fingers, Kiki set the room in motion. His band started back up while the menagerie of animals resumed what they’d been doing when Arty first arrived. Kiki reached out a hand to Arty, who found himself getting off the cloud and involuntarily thrusting his hips in time to the music and clapping his hands above his head. He removed his headset, breathed a sigh of relief and looked at Hannah, who was biting her lip and doing her best not to laugh. The screens round the room displayed him, in his mankini, gyrating around the Disco Stick. As the closing credits appeared on the screen, Kiki’s eunuchs were released from the harem and streamed through to join in the dance. Several pairs of hands pulled Arty back onto the fluffy cloud before one of the eunuchs mounted him.

“Don’t look so worried. This is fantastic publicity.”

Arty ran his hands through his hair and gawped at the eunuch riding his avatar. He’d never understood the way publicity worked and, after today, he wasn’t sure he ever would.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The outward leg of the day-long journey to Venus was about to come to an end, and Nova was glad she wasn’t in one of the gaming simulators for the final descent to the surface. The dense atmosphere, consisting mostly of carbon dioxide, rocked the spaceship hard, and she felt giddy enough in the backseat of the car, especially when she tried to concentrate on the landing video. After the debacle with Killanja on Mercury, she’d chosen to travel there by spaceship, rather than teleport directly. There would be no more hasty decisions taken while she was hung over and excitable.

Space travel had become possible at the end of April when a Chinese player called Johnny Wong had triggered the tenth Earth Force Field switch at the Great Pyramid in Giza. That had enabled players to fly to one of the many floating platforms, access the near-Earth spacecraft and reach the International Space Station. The completion of the quest aboard the ISS had unlocked far-Earth spaceships able to reach the Moon.

Once the Moon quest had been completed, the Moonbase was opened, and along with it, a series of mega hangars that hosted the construction of the Planetary Spacecraft, each named after the planet they primarily served. Hundreds were built for each planet, and with a capacity of five thousand passengers and a regular timetable that saw them depart and arrive every fifteen minutes or so, they allowed players who couldn’t afford to teleport to navigate the Solar System in style.

“Venus is the hottest planet in the Solar System, with a surface temperature in the hundreds,” the astronaut Arkwini in the landing video explained. She was looking forward to finding a place to display the Electropet version of him she’d won in the darts in her new room at uni. “At the Spaceport you’ll be issued with a spacesuit capable of withstanding these enormous temperatures, which is to be worn throughout your pilgrimage to Grandmaster Meganja. Without it, you’d fry in an instant, so don’t try to take it off. This is an incredibly hostile planet, and we don’t recommend leaving the Spaceport other than to face Meganja. We land in three minutes.”

Disembarkation from shuttle to Spaceport via a series of connected tubes and elevators took less than five seconds, one of the advantages of the virtual world. Like most of her fellow passengers, Nova opted to go straight to the fitting rooms where an astronaut Arkwini issued her with her kit. She checked herself in the mirror and wished she owned such an outfit in real life — a tight-fitting silver suit stamped with her name and number. Her avatar looked hot, and she wondered whether it was time to update her real-world look with a bit of Spacepunk.

She closed the visor on her helmet to find that it displayed a prominent temperature gauge in addition to the usual datafeeds. An overlaid map directed her to the Umbilicus, the section of the Spaceport that led to the outside via a series of short, fat tunnels connected by bullet doors that snapped open and shut faster than the human eye could register.

As she made her way through the Umbilical chambers with a handful of other players, she realised something odd. One of the players was in what Burner called ‘stealth mode’ — playing as a Smarty, the female of the two Generic Avatars. But it was the appearance of the other four players as she walked alongside them that sparked her realisation.