Solarversia: The Year Long Game (29 page)

The ‘Soul’ project had proved far harder than the ‘Body’ and ‘Mind’ projects. She’d made no progress whatsoever. It was strange. She knew
what
she wanted to say to each person on the list and she knew
why
she wanted to say it. It was the
how
that she had a problem with. How did you apologise to someone you had disrespected, someone you had lied to, someone you loved? What words did you use, what tone did you take?

Apologising to Burner was different; she’d been doing it for years like it was like a hobby. She’d say sorry, he’d tell her that she was an idiot of some description, and things would be back to normal within a few minutes. But she had no idea what to say to these other people, even the two she’d known her whole life.

She stared at the triangular sage-coloured face, scared to tap it. The deadline for calling Jockey was two days away, as Burner kept reminding her. It was difficult to know which she feared more: apologising to Jockey or not making the call and having to face her punishment. It had sounded funny at the time, having to be Burner’s servant for the week. They’d been a few pints in, and he and Jono had spent ages planning the kinds of things Nova would have to do if she failed to make the phone call: polish his shoes, iron his shirts, even brush his teeth for him, referring to him as ‘Lord Burner’ at all times. Now the deadline was so close, it was becoming distinctly less funny every time they mentioned it.

***

He’d never suffered one before, but Casey Brown was pretty sure that he was in the early stages of a panic attack. Did it even work like that, he wondered. Could you actually know something like that, or were panic attacks like epileptic fits, appearing without warning, rendering the victim helpless? All he knew for sure was that he’d made a mistake. A huge mistake.

Frances and Brandon, dressed in scrubs, were laying out shiny instruments, one after the other, onto a table laid with a pale blue cloth. A Medibot stood to attention beside the table, waiting for commands with the patience of a chopping block, the quiet whir of its circuits the only indication that it was switched on.

Casey eyed it with a feeling of unease as he remembered the way it — or one just like it — had put Ivan out of his misery after the accident in the Workshop. Sure, it was only following orders, but it’d followed them without the slightest hesitation and with astonishing accuracy. Perhaps its unquestioning, unfaltering mechanical nature was both a blessing and a curse. It had never sworn the Hippocratic Oath, requiring it to uphold ethical standards of the highest degree — of that, Casey was certain.

And here he was, in the small operating room at the back of Control House, waiting to become
one of them
. Not a Medibot per se, but something not quite human either. Part human, part machine — the kind of being that might one day be viewed as some kind of ‘missing link’, the halfway house that spanned the chasm to man’s transhuman destiny. What had he been thinking when he’d agreed to Father’s plan? What would Mary-Ann have said about all this? She’d have told him to get the hell out of there, that’s what.

A bead of sweat trickled down his neck, tickling him slightly. Was that supposed to be God’s idea of a joke, a bit of light-hearted, operating-room entertainment to keep the patient in high spirits? Possibly. God had joshed worse in his time. Only yesterday Casey had thought he would be ready for the operation. He was a man who’d been to hell and back, who was ready for any challenge you could throw at him. But lying there, watching Frances examine her scalpels and forceps, he realised that he was anything but ready.

As he felt more beads of sweat trickle and tickle their way down his face, he turned his head to look at Elmer lying on the gurney next to him. With the same oafish, spaced-out look he always had, he gave Casey a big smile.

“I’m going to be famous, a star of the screen. Who’da thought it? Lil’ old Elmer. More drugs, please, matron, the good shit. Only the best for old Elmer these days.”

Brandon turned to face them. He looked at Elmer, then at Casey, and made a circular motion with his finger around his temple.

“No more drugs for you, old loony tunes. You won’t need them in a few minutes anyway. You’re going cold turkey. For good. What about you, Case? How you getting on?”

“All good, thanks, bud,” Casey snapped back.

He wondered if he’d ever told a lie so large. It was alright for Elmer, he didn’t have a say in what was going on. Even if he did, Casey doubted he had the wherewithal to say anything of consequence. Christ knows what Frances had been pumping into his veins these last few days, the stupid homeless bastard.

Thoughts raced through Casey’s mind. He found a thimbleful of solace in the fact that the operation hadn’t yet happened. It wasn’t too late to put a stop to this nonsense. Grabbing hold of a bar on the side of the gurney, he raised his head to scan the room. He wiggled his toes at the end of the bed, their nakedness an awkward reminder that he was hardly dressed for an escape attempt.

What did escape even look like? He pictured himself performing a kung fu leap off the trolley and disabling Brandon and Frances with two deft moves. Nothing painful, he’d do Vulcan nerve pinches like Spock used to do in the old
Star Trek
films. He’d apologise as he pinched their necks, catch them as they fell and lay them to sleep on the floor while the Medibot looked on, blissful in its ignorance.

Then he’d dress, sneak out of the sickbay, tiptoe down the corridor to the backroom where they counted the money, grab a few bundles from the safe, leap through the back window and get away in one of the kayaks. He knew the Delta better than anyone by now. He could be in Mexico by the weekend, could start afresh. And he’d never breathe a word about the Order to anyone, they could count on that.

His daydream was interrupted by the Medibot as it beeped and hummed into life. It extended two additional arms, onto which Brandon placed the tray of instruments, and then trundled alongside Casey’s bed, its wheels ticking as they passed over the wooden boards. Casey wiped his brow with his forearm. He wasn’t breathing right and his entire body was soaked in sweat, making the johnny gown stick to it.

“Tell Father there’s been a mistake. I can’t do this.
Anything
but this. I’ve got other ideas. Better ones. Less risky ones. He’ll love them, I know he will.”

He was on his elbows, firing out desperate snippets of speech, first at Brandon, then at Frances, a condemned man clutching at straws. Using one of its main arms, the Medibot pushed him back down, pinning him to the mattress with the strength of a mechanical ox.

“It’s alright, Case. Everything’s going to be OK. Father warned us that you might have a last-minute attack of the nerves, it’s perfectly natural. Remember why you’re doing this, the bigger picture: man and machine joined for salvation. You were the best match — that kinda makes you the chosen one who gets to play a special part. It’ll all be over before you know it. There’s a good boy.”

Casey watched in horror as Frances held the syringe before her, flicked it a couple of times and gently squeezed the plunger to check that it still worked. As she thrust it into his forearm, Casey screamed.

“No, no, no. Take it out. Get Father. I’ve changed my mind. I
won’t
do it. Mother, please, I beg you, don’t do this. Look at the state of him, for Christ’s sake. I don’t care if he’s a match, he’s an old drunk. He’s damaged goods, broken beyond repair. We don’t go together. Get off me, you bitch.”

He stammered on for fifteen seconds or so, oscillating between rational request and profane petition. As he looked into Frances’ eyes, he could tell that under her mask she was smiling a kind smile. She never meant to hurt him. She was his mother, his and Brandon’s, mother to everyone at the Compound. And mother knew best. Wasn’t that the saying? His head lolled to one side. As his eyelids fought to stay open he saw Elmer again, gawping at him with the same moronic look, a daisy chain of dribble hanging off his chin.
My chin
, Casey thought as he lost the battle of the eyelids.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Nova stared at the flashing cursor. Her essay was due the next day, but the page remained blank, save for the title, which she’d typed out half an hour earlier:
A Comparison of Techniques for Mitigating Cognitive Bias
. She felt as enthused about the prospect of writing it as she did about the other thing looming over her — the long list of people she needed to apologise to as part of the ‘Soul’ section of her Super Nova project.

She’d gone down to the caves by the lake to seek inspiration, but had found temptation instead. She was sitting on a large rock by the craggy stone wall, and her Booners were sat on the next rock along. She kept glimpsing at them.
I should have never brought you with me
, she muttered under her breath. One last look-see, perhaps. She’d said that the last five times, but this time she meant it,
for real
. Five more minutes, and then she’d crank the essay out in one go. Playing Grandmaster Petanja’s puzzle would be her reward. A quick play, then the essay, then the puzzle. Her right hand shook her left. It was a deal, Nova style.

She slipped the headset on and found herself back in the games room aboard the SS Jupiter. Planetary Spaceships had been designed by Spiralwerks to follow the theme associated with the name of the planet, and the SS Jupiter was her favourite. In Roman mythology, Jupiter, or Jove, was the god of sky and thunder, so the spaceship’s sumptuous games room, which had been furnished with ivory thrones, velvet ottomans and open fires, played a thunderstorm sound effects track non-stop, while the ceiling displayed real-time high-res footage of the actual planet Jupiter.

Spaceships could transport up to five thousand players at one time. Most people boarded one, logged out of Solarversia and didn’t log in again until they’d arrived at their destination planet a number of days later, depending on its distance from Earth. Games rooms had been included for those, like Nova, who wanted to keep playing the whole time.

The circular room was surrounded by a single spiral bookshelf that started at ground level and corkscrewed its way up the wall until it hit the ceiling. A few minutes ago Nova had superimposed the conga line onto the spiral bookshelf. The little people swerved in and out of the ornaments that lined the shelves, waltzing past the works of Dickens, Vonnegut and Bronte. It was a cool feature that some of the exhibitions had, allowing players to superimpose their contents wherever they wanted, including surfaces in the real world.

Her datafeed informed her that at that very moment, 156 people were superimposing the line onto a surface somewhere in either the real or the virtual world. She volleyed into the headcam of a girl in Chile who watched the line as it progressed along the twisted branch of an apple tree in her backyard, then to a camera in the lounge of a flat in New York where a couple of exhibitionists had superimposed the line around the leopard skin rug they were making love on.

She loved that the line was still going eight months after the start of the game. When she’d spun a Tweel of Fate the other day, Banjax had informed her that the maximum number of people in the line at any one time had been 490,338. He did that sometimes, when you spun his tweel — gave you a random factoid. It was better than having him steal your items or teleport you somewhere you hadn’t asked to go.

Before she could decide which cam to check out next, a crackling voice boomed over the spaceship’s loudspeakers.

“This is your captain speaking. Please note that we will soon be entering Jupiter’s atmosphere and will need to prepare for descent. In fifteen minutes time you will be asked to return to your seats, over.”

Glancing at the time, she saw that her five minutes were already up. Which was ridiculous. She twitched her nose while she weighed up her options. The captain
had
mentioned fifteen minutes until the descent. It made sense to start the essay
then
, instead. In a way, it was like Jove himself had made the suggestion. Fifteen more minutes, and then she’d whip the essay into submission.

She left the bookcase to join a small crowd watching a middle-aged Norwegian man standing in front of two large floating images. The left one displayed a section of the Player’s Grid, with his own profile square situated in the middle. The right image was a picture of somebody’s face. He was playing the Grid Memory Game, and had achieved a score she could only dream of getting. The game was simple — you needed to recall details of the people located in the vicinity of your own square.

The difficulty level determined the level of detail you needed to recall. In easy mode you were shown a face and needed to point to the person’s square within the grid. In intermediate mode, the one she usually played, you needed to point to their location but also get their name right. Nova was a 49er in that mode, which meant she had completed a 7 by 7 grid. Burner and Jono played the game on hard mode, where you needed to know the person’s nationality as well as their name and location. Burner was a 144er, while Jono, who was on the university team, was a 576er, having once completed a 24 by 24 grid.

The next picture, of a gaunt woman with rollers in her hair, appeared floating on the guy’s right. He took one look at her, twirled his finger in the air a couple of times, and pointed to a square on the left screen. A jingle sounded and three points were added to his already gigantic score.

“Susana Pasquel,” he enunciated, to the delight of the crowd. Another three points. “Peru.” Four more points: three, plus a bonus for getting all of her details correct in under ten seconds, bringing his score close to 18,000. He was halfway through a huge 63 by 63 grid. If he completed it, he would regain his rank as one of the top hundred players in the world. Nova shook her head and snorted with glee as she watched his display of brilliance.

Behind her, two women were seated on thrones opposite one another, either side of a partition. They played another grid-based game, known as Happy Families. The rules were similar to the game Battleships. At the start of the game each woman had chosen ten groups of ten squares — their families. The aim of the game was to locate the opponent’s families.