Solarversia: The Year Long Game (30 page)

They played using a weird variant of the rules that involved miniature versions of their planes flying reconnaissance missions to the other side of the board. Whenever a ‘family member’ was discovered, their profile square would light up and the avatar inside it would say their catchphrase. Nova never played it herself, but loved logging in to find that strangers had included her own profile square in their games, like she was shaping events remotely while she slept — even if she did cringe at the thought of her avatar saying her lame catchphrase out loud.

A far rowdier group sat in the corner by the open fire, hunched over a section of grid that had been turned into a board game called Lavadiles and Telescopes. It was played like Snakes and Ladders except that the winning square was in the middle, rather than one of the top corners. Players worked their way inward, having started on the outer ring. Kids usually played it, but this lot were about Nova’s age and had turned it into a drinking game.

Next up was a Romanian girl. She blew on the dice in her hands before casually chucking them into the fire. The flames roared into life, then morphed into a fire demon who held aloft the ‘six’ and the ‘two’ on the dice she had rolled. The girl howled in frustration as her mini avatar moved along the board, landed on a lavadile mouth, and slid down its slimy scales, four rings away from the centre.

Her companions chanted, “Drink! Drink! Drink!” while they each volleyed an eye to a cam in her real room in order to watch her drink the four fingers of beer she’d just forfeited. The girl was sprawled across a tatty mattress on the floor, clothes and dirty plates strewn everywhere. From her jerky movements it looked like she had already drunk her fair share of forfeits. The group cheered as she downed it in one, then booed as the captain gave the five-minute call.

Nova hurried onto the thunderbolt-shaped lift in the centre of the room to return to her seat. While wondering what puzzle Petanja had in store for her, she realised something important.
She felt on form
. And the thing about form, she reminded herself, was that it came and went. It would be stupid to waste it, reckless even. Petanja’s puzzle would be tough. He’d scalped a life from Burner a few weeks ago, and there was no way she was going to be his next victim. That settled it. She’d complete the puzzle now and then write the essay when she was buzzing from having solved it. Another quick handshake. It was a deal.

***

Nova whooped as she scudded around the penultimate gate with plenty of time to spare. In order to reach Grandmaster Petanja, she’d had to cross Jupiter’s gaseous surface by boat. As the planets got further away from the Sun, the Grandmasters got more difficult, both in terms of the puzzles they set, and in terms of the journeys you had to make to visit them.

This course, situated alongside the circumference of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a massive anticyclonic storm that had been raging for hundreds of years, had to be completed in under five minutes. The landing video aboard the SS Jupiter had shown, in terrifying detail, what happened to players unfortunate enough to steer their boats even one millimetre across the line that divided the red spot and the rest of the course.

As if she needed a further memo on the subject, some disastrous navigation by the guy in front rammed the message home. He’d been running out of time and taking increasingly large risks with the slalom gates, and had badly misjudged the final one. In trying to correct his mistake, he’d only served to exacerbate it, flipping his boat onto its side and performing a series of somersaults. That fiasco cost him sixty health points. Now came his landing.

Nova watched with clenched teeth as he tried to accelerate away from the line. Even at maximum throttle, his Sunseeker was no competition for the Spot, which was entangled at the quantum level to the enormous black hole situated at the centre of the Milky Way. He’d crossed the Spot’s event horizon and was now subject to its enormous gravitational pull. A small video feed appeared in the top corner of her display. It showed the rear end of his boat elongate as it got sucked into the swirling vortex. The guy soon joined it as he and his boat became a spindly soup of pixels, inexorably drawn towards the hole where he would soon be crushed to death.

She slowed right down to tackle the last gate, shaken by what she had just witnessed. Although she still had a life left, they were only two-thirds of the way through the Year-Long Game, and according to the people at Spiralwerks, the tricky bits were yet to come. Jono had crashed out for good the week before when a stray Asteroid Shower hit Morocco.

His valiant escape through the flaming town of Marrakesh had made for nail-biting viewing and gone viral, at least within Solar Soc, the university’s Solarversia Society. He’d escaped the worst-hit parts of town and been legging it to the closest Greasy Wrench when a Type Four asteroid had hurtled down the street toward him.

Nova, who had been watching a real-time video feed of his escape from the Hu Stu bar, recited the thirteen-move combination out loud as she’d willed him on. In the event, Jono stumbled on the tenth move, and the asteroid slammed straight into him, leaving two smoking stumps of leg in its wake. What a way to go. At least his Death Party had been fun.

Pushing thoughts of death to the back of her mind, Nova concentrated on the home straight. The finishing line, which she crossed with twenty-five seconds to spare, was strung across the entrance to a dark cave. The change in lighting was accompanied by a change in acoustics: the hum of Bruno’s engine amplified as it echoed off the cave walls. She pulled up to the Dockington’s jetty, waited for a peg to droop down and attach itself to her craft, and then followed a sign that instructed visitors to climb a rickety wooden ladder propped against the steep cave wall. It led to a mezzanine level where Petanja sat cross-legged in his circle. His green robes fluttered in the wind as it streamed through the cave entrance, powered by the mighty Red Spot in the distance. She sat down and awaited the next o’clock.

“ … Any evidence of cheating will be reviewed by a panel of judges, and is punishable by the deduction of a life and possible suspension from The Game itself. There are no exceptions to this rule for this puzzle. There are 6,390 players for the 4:00 p.m. puzzle today, and 3,195 safe spots. Please note that this puzzle is culturally specific and will relate to an aspect of your own national culture. Good luck, and remember these two things. First, use not a dirty mirror, if your warts you wish to see. Second, There Can Be Only One!”

As Petanja and his circle faded into nothingness, Nova found herself in a large stock cupboard lined with rows of shelving. She’d played plenty of Puzzle sims that had been restricted in one way or another, but as every Solo knew, tackling them in the Simulator Booth was very different to tackling one for real, when one of your precious lives was at stake.

A note on the wall above a wastepaper basket said “Find the defective product and put it in the bin.” She glanced up and down the room. There were dozens of rows of shelving and five shelves in each row. Each shelf held hundreds upon hundreds of identical porcelain figures. In endless repetition, she saw the same little man, six inches tall, playing his flute, the kind of figurine you found on tacky seafront market stalls. “Defective, defective, defective.” Nova repeated the word, as she tried to get to grips with the task at hand.

It took her far too long to pick a figure up in order to examine it, mistakenly believing that the rules were similar to the ones that governed the Lavadile puzzle, where touching a wrong scale had meant the immediate loss of a life. Realising her mistake, she grabbed the nearest two and scrutinized them from head to toe. Each figure was of a young man with brown hair, playing a silver flute. He wore a blue suit, and was glued to a circular base, with one leg in front of the other like he was walking. The problem was that the two figurines were identical, down to the smidgen of hardened glue that poked out from the side of the heel of the shoe. Did the glue mean something, or was it an attempt to faithfully replicate such a tasteless piece of tat?

Growing increasingly frustrated with her total lack of progress, she growled as she noticed the number of safe spots tick down. It was preposterous; people had to be cheating to solve these puzzles so quickly. Her stomach rolled as she remembered Burner’s failure to solve Petanja’s puzzle, something to do with different coloured bears in a tearoom. She berated herself for even thinking about it while the safe spots counted down in her own puzzle. As the number ticked below 3,000 she held her hands up and wiggled her fingers, as if attempting to tease inspiration out of thin air. And then the gong sounded. What had changed?

She ran up and down the aisle, desperate to find out. The number ticked below 2,500. The walls were the same, the ceiling and floor were the same, the notice and wastepaper bin were the same.
The base, you stupid girl
. She grabbed the nearest figure and upended him. There it was, a new stamp. But what the hell did it mean?

“Made with CRS.” Things were made
somewhere.
Usually China. Or they were made
with love
. But she’d never heard of something being made with ‘CRS’, and couldn’t think how the letters related to the United Kingdom. The
Council of Royal Surgeons
, maybe? She didn’t know whether such a thing existed, or how it could possibly relate to the little flute player even if it did, but it was the only thing she could think of.

Her panic intensified. She couldn’t stop looking at the dwindling number of safe spots. Perhaps ‘CRS’ was one of those things that everyone in the entire world knew about except for her. Like the time people had been discussing the ‘Arab Spring’ at school and she’d asked whether it was similar to an ‘Indian Summer’ and they’d laughed in her face until she cried.

Her heart raced. It was time for a pep talk. She was a puzzle master, and there was no way Petanja — stupid name for a start — was going to defeat her. Sometimes it was funny the way the brain worked. She whistled before she was aware of any conscious desire to do so. It was as if her brain knew how urgent the situation was and acted first, to save time, then followed up with its reasoning afterwards.

The instant the sound left her lips, the entire room erupted with the mellow piping of a thousand flutes, echoing her whistle. ‘Made with CRS’ was ‘Made with Cockney rhyming slang.’ The man was playing a flute, and wearing a suit. The only thing missing was a whistle:
Whistle and Flute — Suit
. That was the culturally specific knowledge she needed — and she knew it. Yes!

But how did it help? The little guys repeated the tune you whistled. So what? The number ticked below 1,000 and she could already feel her euphoria ebbing away.
Find the defective product
. It had to be a figure whose flute was broken. But in a room of thousands how could she locate him? She whistled again while looking round: 750 and counting.

Another whistle, another frantic search. Where was the gong when she wanted one? Another whistle, this one longer as she walked up and down the aisle.
That was it
. Three things happened simultaneously every time she whistled, but the other two had been imperceptible at first.

She took a deep breath and let out the longest whistle she could manage. 500 spaces. The men started playing their flutes that very instant, but it took a couple of seconds for the lights in the room to dim and the little blue lights to appear at the end of their flutes. She wasn’t going to locate the defective guy by sound, but by sight. When the number ticked below 250 she wanted to scream rather than whistle.

What would Sushi advise?
Less haste more speed
. Nova halted her frenzied search at once. Method, not madness. Deep breath, whistle, side step along the row, examine each shelf in turn. Ignore the number of safe spots, even if they did just tick below 100. Next row, rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Gotcha! At last she found him, tucked away at the back of a shelf in the middle of the room. While the blue lights on the flutes around him flared into life, his own instrument remained unchanged.

She snatched the little fella clean off the shelf and darted round to the wastepaper bin as fast as she could. 50 and counting. She slam-dunked him hard into the bin, wanting to break his sorry ass. As the melodious jingle of victory sounded, she let out a victory cheer. She had just completed Petanja’s puzzle with fewer than twenty spots left.

Chapter Thirty

Nova removed her Booners and placed them on the rock next to her. Since her first visit to the caves on the night of the
Star Wars
party she’d been back regularly. It was beautiful and peaceful there; these weren’t qualities she associated with the hustle and bustle of halls or lecture theatres. Sometimes she sat and talked to Sushi, sometimes she played. Sometimes she just sat there, doing nothing at all, just
being
. And sometimes she disappeared into an augmented wonderland.

When she turned on the Forest of Fun augmentation, the real-world leaves on the trees overhanging the caves became imbued with jokes, just like they did in Solarversia. She’d wait for one to fall from its branch and make a stab at its punchline, awarding herself points for accuracy.

Her favourite augmentation was a simple one: player watching. She liked to mark out the gravelly path that ran in front of the caves as the augmented zone, and would sit back and watch as players from around the Solar System travelled up and down it, some on joyrides, others running for their lives, fleeing from one of the increasingly common monsters set out to kill them.

These augmentations made the real world more magical, more like the way it had seemed when she was little. That morning’s White Dwarf had mentioned a crowdfunding campaign where the residents of a small town wanted to repave the high street with hexagonal tiles that worked like the ones in The Game. She hoped it would be successful. She loved it when the virtual world spilled over into the real.