Solarversia: The Year Long Game (38 page)

Jealous of their achievement, and trying to ignore her likely fate, she grabbed hold of her goggles and prepared for what might be her final few minutes of the Year-Long Game.

***

Flynn skidded perilously close to edge of the icy ravine, Nova only too aware that she’d misjudged the last corner. She was only halfway through her journey to visit Zettanja and was already wondering whether she’d make it. The Umbilicus at the Spaceport on Uranus had led to a localised instance of The Greasy Wrench, stationed within the basement. The only exit from the garage led to an underground path that wound its way downward, into the freezing interior of the planet.

Her initial excitement at seeing Flynn — who had looked cooler than ever, decked out in his winter tyres — had been dampened as soon as she’d started the journey. The thick metal chains on his tyres had helped her gain
some
traction on the treacherous roads of ice, but the twists and turns had proved to be challenging, regardless.

The last corner had freaked her out. Having just navigated a tricky chicane, she’d come face-to-face with a wall of ice that contained within it the frozen avatars of players who had lost their last life on the journey. Glimpsing the macabre display in her peripheral vision and thinking it was an obstacle to avoid, she’d banked hard left. Flynn’s left rear wheel had slipped off the edge, leaving a panicked Nova to clear the corner on three wheels. Tutting loudly, she resolved to pull herself together. She may have been a Krazy Karting expert, but she wasn’t immune to death.

The final ten minutes of the drive were less eventful, but no less stressful. At least she’d been prepared for the snowballs when they’d arrived, having read about them in the datafeed. Dead players threw them, hoping to earn some last-minute bounty money for knocking out potential winners. In this way, Spiralwerks gave an incentive to players who had gone out to keep interacting in the Gameworld. They were out, but still having fun and winning money.

With Flynn’s wipers on maximum speed and a lot of shifting in her seat to peer round the snowballs that hit her windscreen, Nova managed to cross the finishing line inside Zettanja’s ice cave with seconds to spare. She climbed out of her seat, gave Flynn a pat on the bonnet and prepared to meet her destiny.

In all, 641 people had arrived at the cave this hour to play the puzzle and a mere 192 of them would be leaving with their lives intact. When Zettanja and all around him had dissolved into the ether after his speech, a little girl standing in front of a wall full of doors replaced him. The only thing the girl had said since the puzzle had started was “My name is Lutty. Please help me find my name.” The words echoed through the empty chambers of Nova’s mind, as blank as Spee-Akka’s January canvas.

The doors behind the little girl were arranged in a five by five grid, which was topped by one additional door, sticking out on the top right as if somebody had ordered one too many. Each door was unique, both in size and colour, and Nova couldn’t help but wonder what it all meant. The medium-sized pink door had a large brass knocker in the shape of a gargoyle placed smack in its centre. The oversized yellow door was arched at the top and looked like it could do with a generous lashing of paint. And the green door, which was half the height of the others, was dotted with letterboxes, like it was greedy for mail. The only thing they had in common was the number ‘1’, but she couldn’t think how that related to the girl’s name.

One thing seemed obvious: twenty-six doors meant one for each letter of the alphabet. All she had to do was work out which door related to which letter, and then use that information to find the girl’s name. Half distracted by the number of safe spots, which had already begun ticking down, she opened the small green door. Behind it appeared another wall of doors, identical to the first save for one thing: the number on each door was a ‘2’. Further investigation revealed that the number on the door acted like a marker, telling her which ‘level’ of doors she was on. As the number of safe spots ticked below 100 she had a small brainwave.

Volleying an eye back to the lounge, she ripped some wrapping paper from Zhang’s hands and grabbed the closest pen. On the back of the paper she replicated the grid of doors as they appeared in the game, five columns of five rows, with a 26th door above the one in the top right-hand corner. Taking a gamble that the wall imitated the snail-like pattern of the Player’s Grid, she wrote an ‘A’ on the door in the middle’, a ‘B’ on the door above it, a ‘C’ to the left of that one, spiralling outward until the ‘Z’ of the door that stuck out.

With no other clues in sight, and barely twenty safe spots left, she used her new chart to navigate through the various levels, using the only piece of information she had been given — ‘Lutty’, the little girl’s name. Starting with the ‘L’ on level one, and finishing with the ‘Y’ on level five, she walked through the final door — an ornate wooden beast that belonged in a medieval castle — to be greeted by big, bouncing letters that spelled out ‘Lutty’. The little girl was next to them, jumping for joy while the puzzle jingle played.

For completing Zettanja’s puzzle before Gori had sounded his gong, Nova was awarded an additional fifty teleport tokens. She threw off her headset, seized Zhang and swung him round the living room. It wasn’t the 4000-odd tokens she’d need to get to the other planets, but it was a pretty good Christmas present all the same.

***

Casey studied his reflection in the rusty old rear-view mirror he’d found in the Lockup a few days before and stashed under the pillow of his bunk. Although Frances had told him the bandages could come off his head, he’d taken to leaving them on. The thin strips of woven gauze seemed to help him to hide from the reality of his fucked-up situation.

Escaping to the bunk room to peel back the bandages and examine his appearance in private had become a daily ritual. The face would take some getting used to, that was for sure. A new face that
frowned
when he did,
smiled
when he did. Controlling his prosthetic arm with the power of thought, he combed through his hair with his fingers, tracing the delicate scars that crept up to the top of his skull.

He wondered what Mary-Ann would think. The image flashed into his mind again — her convulsions on his garage floor, the blood belching out of her crushed nasal cavity. She was gone. That was all that mattered. Was it the way she’d died, with her face caved in, that had motivated him to make this ultimate sacrifice to the Order? As if losing his own face was a form of penance for his sins.
A face for a face
. A life for a life too, because Casey Brown was dead. It was official. He was Elmer Sullivan now, the homeless guy they’d kidnapped, the guy whose face Casey now wore as his own.

He had to admit it, Frances was a brilliant surgeon. His new face fitted. Frankenstein’s monster had haunted his dreams during the week after his operation, but there were no screws or bolts poking out of his head. He thought he wore the face better than Elmer himself, at least now the bruising had gone down. The immunosuppressive medication had worked its magic.
The face had taken
.

What was strange was the way in which he found his new face easier to accept than his new name. What
was
a name, he wondered? How could such a little thing mean so much? Three little syllables:
K-C-Brown
. As Father hadn’t stopped reminding him, Casey Brown was dead. Whatever his name was, he was both more and less than a man. He had an arm that had been developed in a lab, a face that had developed in a different mother’s womb, lined and mottled by a life he hadn’t lived. He was special now, a cyborg, a half-thing. He was empty. Soulless. At least he still had a reflection.

He jolted forward suddenly and the mirror nearly flew from his hand. An attack of phantom pain in his amputated arm. The attacks were milder and less frequent these days, but hadn’t completely disappeared. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. In this way, he’d got the attacks under control, had learned how to endure them. He was at peace with his bionic arm. It was his mind that had been giving him most trouble.

How could he have brought that young woman to Father Theodore’s attention? Seeing her face on the night of the ceremony, understanding she was to be a target of attack, Casey had decided to abandon the Holy Order. The desire to get away from these people possessed him with the suddenness and intensity of his previous impulse to join them. They might have saved his life, Frances and Wallace, warding off his demons and retrieving him from the brink of suicide, but that wasn’t enough. Not for him to take part in these new attacks. And certainly not with Wallace gone.

Since that night he’d been planning his escape meticulously. He couldn’t go yet. Without an arsenal of immunosuppressive meds, he’d die. He would have to stick around for a few weeks until he’d snaffled a reasonable supply from the sickbay. Frances might have been absent-minded at times, but she was far from stupid. He’d been taking the occasional vial here and there, whenever her back was turned.

The plan itself was simple. He’d wait until his Brothers and Sisters at the compound were asleep, slip to the Lockup unseen, commandeer a kayak stuffed full of cash and begin to snake his way down the Mississippi through a convoluted series of interconnecting tributaries, avoiding the various lookout towers, booby traps and dead ends, to wind up on the main branch of the river.

It’d been Wallace who had warned him about the booby traps when he first showed Casey around the Compound, and Wallace who had pointed them out to him on their trips into town. With his friend gone, Casey had been free to explore the Compound’s layout in more detail. He’d spent countless hours working out a route in minute detail in order to avoid the worst of them.

The escape meant more than freedom. It would be a tribute to Wallace, whose life he would remember and celebrate. He would escape with plenty of money. Enough to share with Wallace’s family and with Mary-Ann’s family. He’d send it discreetly, possibly even make up a story to explain their sudden good luck.

The thoughts of escape and redemption had been the only thing keeping him sane during the weeks of endless pain, medication and physio. He tilted the mirror at an angle that enabled him to study his new smile. Another attack of phantom pain took him by surprise. He heard the crack before he saw that the spasm in his arm had caused him to clutch the mirror tight enough to break the glass.

He stared at himself through the newly fractured shards. Fractures suited him.

Chapter Thirty-Six

On the freezing cold walk from Burner’s car to Fragging Hell, they talked through Nova’s predicament for the hundredth time. She still needed to get to Neptune and to Pluto, and now had six hours before her time ran out and a grand total of 237 teleport tokens to play with. Data feeds were awash with speculative strategies.

Some players were teaming up to take on the crazed circus animals. A defeated Huntropellimous was worth 250 teleport tokens, although players would need to split the bounty between them. Others formed into ‘Will Groups’, bequeathing all of their items to a designated player before committing ‘last life suicide’, hoping that the combination of their items and tokens would be enough for the chosen one to go all the way.

Nova had contemplated a few such deals being advertised on the forums, but only in a half-hearted way. She was already in a Will Group of her own, and had been from the start. It wasn’t so much that her Solarversia Sister would have a problem with it — Sushi would likely back any decision she made. It just didn’t feel right, some stranger joining them after all they had been through together. No, she would make the Final Million on her own or not at all. While she contemplated the impossible predicament she was in, a worried-looking couple called over to them.

“Guys, you wouldn’t be able to help us out, would you? Our car won’t start. It does that sometimes, needs a good push is all. And my wife here,” the man said, gesturing sympathetically to the woman at his side, “has injured her back.”

“Lifted a heavy box without bending my knees.” She placed a hand on her coccyx and winced in pain. “I’m such a fool.”

The guy looked at his watch. “We’re in a bit of a state. The plan was to be in Cambridge to see the New Year in. By now we should halfway up the M11, but as you can see, we’re stuck here.”

“My brother’s over from Spain,” the woman added. “I’ve not seen him in years. You couldn’t spare a couple of minutes to help bump-start it, could you?”

“Of course we can. Might help warm us up too.”

“You’re a couple of real-life good Samaritans. Here, let me hold your toy while you push.”

Nova handed Zhang to the woman and joined Burner at the rear of the car. It took five attempts before the old Volvo chugged into life, its dirty exhaust belching a pungent cloud of smoke straight at them. The four of them cheered when the engine revved. They exchanged good wishes for the year ahead before the couple sped off, waving out of the windows.

“First we help those guys, now we’re going to sacrifice precious drinking time helping Jockey out.” Burner waved one last time as the car drove out of sight. “She was wrong, we’re not good Samaritans, we’re a couple of mugs.”

Entering the warm confines of Fragging Hell, the two of them exchanged a look of relief. A shiver coursed down Nova’s spine as her body shook off the cold. The place bustled with regulars blasting aliens and storming enemy castles, and the gamer smell was stronger than ever. She popped Zhang on the side rail, and they headed to the bar. Jockey greeted them with a wide grin and a hearty handshake.

“You made it then, fantastic. We’ll be packed to capacity, it should be a storming evening. Nova, I’ve got you down to make the punch; everything’s ready for you. Burner, you’re in charge of setting up the disco. Lots of equipment and loads of leads, should be a doddle for you. With any luck we’ll be finished in an hour and can get down to some serious partying.”