Solarversia: The Year Long Game (39 page)

On the way to the kitchen Nova was stopped a couple of times by regulars who were keen to grab a quick selfie with her.

“Hey, it’s Nova, right?’ said a guy wearing a Batman onesie. “I’m doing a piece for the
Maidstone Wobbler
on the Final Million. You’re the last person in the whole of Maidstone who’s still in with a chance of making it. Jockey said you’d be here tonight. Could I get a quick photo? Preferably one of you and Zhang together? He’s quite the star.”

Nova paused. First the broken-down car, now all of these photo requests — and she hadn’t even started mixing the punch. But she wasn’t going to argue about Zhang being a star. She loved it when people recognised him and secretly hoped they might appear on Kiki La Roux’s show together one day. Though now she was so close to leaving The Game, her moments left in the limelight looked numbered.

“OK, but make it quick, I’m on punch duty. I’ll just grab Zhang. Back in a min.”

As she headed to the side rail, an unfamiliar jingle sounded in her Booners strung around her neck. She peered into the display and was surprised to see a message from Gogmagog. Hadn’t she turned the notifications off the other day after receiving all of those annoying alerts? She stopped to ponder this for a second, half distracted by the roar of an ogre being slaughtered somewhere. No, she hadn’t turned the alerts off altogether. She’d followed Burner’s advice and amended the settings so that the program only sent her critical alerts. She read the subject line: “
Gogmagog Critical Alert: Multiple Items of Evidence Related to the Holy Order. Urgent Action Required
.”

She looked back across the room to catch Batman’s eye. When she mouthed “one minute” to him, he nodded back and gave her a thumbs-up. The message contained four files. When she opened the first — a video file — her heart skipped a beat. The footage showed Burner talking to Jono. But then the picture went wild for a couple of seconds before ending with footage of people’s feet.

She screwed her nose up and watched it again. The metadata associated with the file stated that the video had been taken by Zhang a couple of months ago at The Commodore gaming cafe in Nottingham. It was the seconds leading up to her undignified departure from the Krazy Karting final. But what did that have to do with anything, and why had Gogmagog flagged it as critical? She remembered what Burner had told her, that the program was still in beta and prone to making errors. Perhaps it had got its wires crossed?

She scrolled down to the second item, another piece of footage with similar metadata. It was the first three seconds of the first clip, slowed down and overlaid with annotations. The wild footage was taken as Zhang span through the air. One second it showed Burner talking to Jono, the next it showed Charlie’s outheld hands as Zhang was released from his grip. Charlie’s face could be seen, changing from a smile to a grimace as a hand slammed into his shoulder. As Zhang left Charlie’s grip, he rotated in the air and captured footage of the person who had pushed them. His bracelet, decorated with a series of curly swastikas, was marked as being a critical piece of evidence. Nova felt her chest tighten. Who the hell was that?

She scrolled down to the third item, more footage taken by Zhang, this time at the Goose Fair in Nottingham town centre. It showed Nova and Burner reading a flyer. She thought back. That’s right, they’d bumped into the same guy who’d asked to take her photo at the Karting final. Raymond. He’d invited them to a New Year’s Eve party in Soho. As she and Burner had walked away, Zhang was still facing him and kept recording. He’d captured the guy mouthing something behind their backs. The program had automatically transcribed the lip movements and overlaid the text onto the footage in real time: “At the close of perfect vision, twelve lost souls advance our mission.” What the holy fuck?

The roar of elves and ogres dissolved into the background. All that existed was the pounding of her heart and the thoughts racing through her mind. It was all so fragmented. What did any of it mean? The implications were too large for her to take in. She looked up, ashen faced, at her would-be photographer. He was still looking her way, only he was no longer smiling. She quickly scrolled to the fourth and final item, inexorably drawn to it.

It was a blurry photo taken by Zhang a few minutes ago — a photo of Batman, or at least, a person dressed in a Batman costume. And there, on his wrist, was the same bracelet. It was Raymond, a guy clearly involved with the Holy Order. She took a huge gasp of air, unaware that she’d been holding her breath. Please God, this wasn’t happening. She lowered her headset and risked one last look at the caped crusader. His camera was gone, in its place a remote control. His brow was furrowed, his lips moving. “At the close of perfect vision …”

***

Arty slid across the bonnet of a yellow taxi, landed on his feet and kept running across the busy New York street into the path of oncoming traffic. Behind him, shots rang out. A bullet ricocheted off a traffic light close to his head, another smashed the windscreen of the dump truck he had just ducked behind. He pulled out a loaded Time Whisk, span round to fire a shell, then continued on his way. Five seconds of reversed time would give him the breathing space to formulate a new plan. Even against the best player in the company.

It was the Spiralwerks’ New Year’s Eve party, an evening when Spiralheads got to play their own games. This was Grid Runner, one of the company favourites, where the odd-numbered players on the Employee’s Grid faced the even numbers. Each player was assigned a random selection of items, the game algorithm ensuring that the overall split between the teams was fair. At the start of the game, the teams got teleported to a random location within Solarversia. One team had to reach a nearby trigger, the other had to stop them. If Carl, the last of The Wizballs, could stop Arty, the last of the Bomb Jacks, getting to the trigger, his team would win for the fifth year running.

Arty weaved in and out of the traffic trying to avoid whatever was fired at him. It looked like Carl was out of classic ammunition for now — spider webs had replaced the bullets. One whizzed straight past Arty’s head and ensnared a pedestrian, pinning them against the mermaid logo of a Starbucks’ window. Every attempt was closer than the last. Carl loved playing to a crowd, building the suspense, letting his opponent get ever closer to the trigger before finishing them off in style.

As Arty rounded the corner into Broadway he spied his target at long last — the shiny trigger at the top of the steps that led to the Coke sign in the middle of Times Square. As he locked onto it and started sprinting down the street, the rest of the Bomb Jacks cheered him on from the surrounding office blocks. With less than a hundred metres to go, this was already the closest game of Grid Runner in the company’s history.

Bam! A great shot by Carl snared Arty’s right side and sent him tumbling to the ground. His real-world body convulsed. BoonerMax had released a line of haptic bodysuits the previous week. Spiralwerks had ordered several dozen for Spiralheads to try out during the Christmas party and were planning to dress players in them during the Grand Final. Arty howled in mock pain. The tactile feedback he’d experienced hadn’t hurt him, but when combined with the virtual action going on around him, it was easy to get carried away.

He looked down at the webbing. It would last for ten seconds — more than enough time for Carl to reach him and win the game. With his free hand, Arty fired off the last shell from his Time Whisk. Carl saw him do it and dived to his left, behind a beat-up Oldsmobile. He nearly made it too. Only the tip of his left shoe remained inside the radius of the mangled cone of time as it reverberated down Broadway.

As the cone touched his foot, Carl experienced five seconds of time in reverse. He uncurled from a ball on the floor, flew feet-first through the air, landed on the street and ran backwards, away from Arty, while the webbing dissolved. The trigger was fifty metres away, and the game was back on, sending spectators from both sides wild.

As he approached the steps, Arty wondered what Carl was up to. He could see him in his rear-view cam, but he wasn’t chasing after him and didn’t appear to have a weapon pointed in his direction. A few metres later, he discovered why. At first Arty slowed down to a jog. Then he stopped halfway up the steps and turned around, a dreamy expression on his face. His pupils were spinning and his mouth was hanging open like a cartoon dog, his tongue lolling about, spooling spit onto his chin.

The cheers from Arty’s teammates turned to gasps and boos. His arms rose either side of him as he skipped back down the street. Carl had saved the item for the very last moment, classic showman that he was. The Pipe of Hamelin could be used to lure other players toward you, for the ten seconds that its musical powers lasted.

If he didn’t act fast, it would all be over. Although he was incapacitated by the music, he could still cycle through the items in his inventory. Most of them were useless in his current state: a jar of Skidz that he wished he’d used earlier, a Sword of Sadism that was best suited to hand-to-hand combat, and a load of other items that required the use of his limbs. It was no good. Carl was going to win for the fifth year running. And he’d been so close. It would mean months of abuse in the staff canteen from The Wizballs and Carl waving the trophy at him from across the office.

Only thirty metres separated them. Arty skipped back down Broadway like a drugged-up loony, unable to change his course or snap out of his state of hypnosis. He scrolled through his inventory frantically. Aha! There was something he could actually use, an item that didn’t need to be fired or manipulated. He activated the DoppelGanger Scanner and hoped that he still had control over his eyes. It worked. The little beauty.

For the next ten seconds he glared at pedestrians, scanning them from head to foot with his eyes, turning them into cloned versions of himself. He knew the item existed — he had a vague recollection of helping to design it a few years ago — but he didn’t know its precise mechanics. It worked just as he had hoped. The cloned Artys were subjected to the lure of the Pipe in the same way he was. Within seconds he’d scanned dozens of people, all of whom now crowded round Carl with the same dopey look on their faces. Arty kept cycling through his items. He had given himself a brief respite but needed to follow it with something, and fast.

Carl became so engulfed in a sea of Artys that he stopped playing the Pipe.

“Help me identify him then, Wizballs,” he shouted. Without missing a beat, the Bomb Jacks started calling out random locations: “Behind the steam vent! Up on the fire escape!”

The confusion gave Arty just the chance he needed. He leapt forward, knocked the Pipe clean out of Carl’s hand, threw down a jar of Skidz and then sprinted back toward the trigger. Arty’s team resumed their cheers while Carl flailed around behind him. Every item he tried to use was hampered by the slippery surface — he couldn’t stay still long enough to aim properly.

Arty ran up the steps, a huge smile across his face. Keeping one eye volleyed to his rear-view cam, he kept track of Carl, slipping and sliding all over the place, and joined in the Chant of the Odds, “One, Three, Five, Seven, Send the Bomb Jacks up to Heaven!” He was about to take the 2020 Grid Runner title and be the toast of Odds throughout the company. He’d get to keep the trophy on his desk — a solid platinum latticework, along whose top edge ran a man and a woman — and be the one to tease Carl throughout the year for a change.

And he would have made it, of that, there was no doubt. He would have pulled the trigger if the SWAT team hadn’t crashed straight through the sixth storey windows at that very second, sending glass shards flying everywhere and a terrified bunch of half-drunk Spiralheads diving for cover.

***

The SWAT team entered the room from every conceivable angle, smashing through windows and buckling the doors clean off their hinges. Arty ripped his headset off in one swift movement and froze for a couple of seconds as the dark, marauding invaders swarmed toward him, his brain unable to ascertain which reality he was in: the virtual or the consensual. By the time it had computed its answer — that this was, absolutely, resolutely occurring in everyday reality, the team were already upon him, bundling him under the nearest desk, out of terror’s way.

While he lay in the foetal position, whimpering like a baby, the SWAT team made quick work of their targets — two clowns and a magician who had been due to start performing once the Grid Runner trophy had been awarded. As part of the evening’s entertainment, they had been waiting in the
Settlers of Catan
meeting room, applying makeup and getting into their vaudeville costumes. But also, as it turned out, securing ceramic knives in their hidden holsters — weapons that had evaded the security gates in the lobby.

Three shots were fired in quick succession. There was a flashing of handcuffs, a zipping of body bags and a lot of shouting. The whole thing was over in minutes. But it was the news they gave him afterwards that had really shaken him up. He — Artica Kronkite — had been the target of the planned assassination. Those ceramic knives had been intended to break his flesh, to spill his blood. He’d been only minutes away from certain death, and not the virtual kind.

He looked round the room and surveyed the destruction before him — the smashed windows, the upturned seats, the blood smeared down the rear wall of the meeting room — and found himself imagining his body there amongst it all. He was still in shock when the agents in dark suits asked if he would come with them to see what help he could offer with their investigation. Nodding numbly, he grabbed his jacket and noticed the figurines from the Grid Runner trophy lying in a pool of shattered glass on the floor, desolate and broken.

***

Another minute ticked by on the wonky clock above Nova’s head in the police interview room. Another sixty seconds spent
there
, staring at Officer Dibble’s waxed facial hair and answering his repetitive questions, rather than at Fragging Hell, where she desperately wanted to be. The events of the evening were on loop in her mind: Raymond, dressed as Batman, asking for a photo with Zhang, the critical alert from Gogmagog, that remote control cradled in his hands.