Solarversia: The Year Long Game (4 page)

Not the start she'd hoped for. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a long piece of flint. She grabbed it, sat forward and rammed the sharp end into the creature’s eye. It released her leg in an instant and plunged back into the lava, powered by its strong tail.

She made it to the top of the pit and turned to take in the scene. There were several hundred other players navigating the fiery assault course. To her left, less than thirty feet away, a guy was in serious trouble. A lavadile, longer than hers, had fastened its jaws around his legs. He thrashed around, trying to break free from its clutches as it pulled him ever closer to the red-hot bath. His arms spasmed with pain as it finally dragged him under. An even worse start than hers.

She arrived at the last obstacle, Nico’s Nets, feeling out of breath, though she hadn’t moved from the sofa all night. Virtual worlds could do strange things to the brain. She pinged Burner and Sushi to compare notes. They were further ahead and had managed to retain perfect health scores. How did that happen? Although Sushi and Burner were respectable gamers in their own right, they weren’t in Nova’s league, not close. She gritted her teeth and tried to concentrate.

Nico’s Nets were stretched across a path — all players needed to do was crawl beneath them to cross it. On the other side, a finishing line displayed a count of people who had completed the obstacle course — over forty thousand — and also a count of people who had lost a life tackling it — nearly three thousand. She did her best to put thoughts of death out of her mind and to remain calm.

The netting was plumbed in to the lava pit. An old man dressed in rags stood at the side and worked a brass stopcock covered in valves. He pointed at Nova and laughed. “Dare ye cross Nico’s Nets? If ye’s feeling cold, Nico will warm ye up.” He scowled and turned one of the valves to release several gallons of lava into the front section of hollow netting. A Dutch guy, halfway through, turned and screamed. Nova saw his health score decrease from one hundred to zero in the space of a few seconds. His avatar flashed a few times before disappearing. “Nico warmed that gentleman up, though some might say a bit too much. Who’s next?”

The mechanics of the game were obvious — when the nets were blue, they were safe to crawl under; when they were red, lava coursed through them. She watched a few more people attempt it, trying to discern any patterns or tricks. It took her a couple of minutes to work out a plan. She crawled halfway and paused. It looked safe — but she knew better than to continue. As expected, the old man turned the rusty valve on the far side of the stopcock. The netting in front of her turned red while Nico taunted some new arrivals behind her. When the netting ahead changed back to blue she scrambled like mad, and got through unscathed.

Just beyond the finishing line was a cube the size of her dad’s shed. The sides looked like they were on fire. It was a Corona Cube, like the one she had entered back in Castalia. Cubes like it were scattered all over Solarversia and acted as safe houses that avatars could stay in when players wanted to log out. While she was there, nobody could do her wrong.

She stood in front of the cube and chewed on her lip. It had been such a long day, and after a couple of glasses of cider, she felt a bit dreamy. But it pained her to know that Burner and Sushi were further ahead than she was. And she wanted to pick up Flynn already. She volleyed her display back to the lounge for a second. Her mum had fallen asleep in her chair; her dad must have gone to bed.

Volleying back to Solarversia, she walked up to the cube and passed straight through one of its faces as it turned transparent, content to have completed the obstacle course. This was a year-long game, not a piddly game of Monopoly. A marathon, not a sprint.

Up in her room, Nova got into bed and lay awake for a while. Fragments of Solarversia were juxtaposed with pieces of reality. The gooey purple mess in the centre of the Magisterial Chamber was supposed to be the Emperor? She’d already lost a handful of health points? Images flickered in her mind: the flying palace, the lavadile snapping at her foot, her revision books.

The last image wouldn’t budge. She only had three months until her exams, the ones that would determine the university she went to. If she made the grades she needed. They were exams that would affect the entire course her life, or so her teachers kept telling her. And now she knew something to be true, something she had hoped for, and dreaded, in equal measure. Solarversia was as addictive as she’d thought it would be.

Chapter Five

Nova hadn’t eaten breakfast cereal in years, but she’d persuaded her mum to buy the box on the kitchen table because of the tie-in with Solarversia. It was corporate sponsorship deals like this that had enabled The Game to be offered for free. Companies had been given the opportunity to sponsor Gameworld quests, at a price determined by the quest’s size, location and importance.

When asked in a poll, the majority of players had confirmed that the corporate sponsorship model was the preferred form of monetisation, over alternatives like ‘pay-to-play’. Some companies had even won plaudits for the creative way in which they’d showcased their products and services in VR, and had plans to replicate them in the real world.

The company that made Flakeroonies had sponsored a large quest aboard the International Space Station, and their cereal boxes had reflected a space theme for the last few months. Prodding at the soggy flakes with her spoon, one leg hugged to her chest, Nova found her mind was still occupied with thoughts of the night before.

How would she find enough time for revision? She should breeze psychology, her best subject by far. But sociology and English? Not so much. She’d probably do what she always did — wing it — and without trying too hard, scrape into Hull University. But she never felt she’d had much chance of getting into Nottingham, where Burner was hoping to join his brother, Jono, and it was looking even less likely now The Game had begun. The truth was, revision held very little appeal compared to the excitement of the virtual world.

She flicked her Booners down and looked at the cereal packet. Flakes started to rise out of it as if magically unbound from gravity. When she touched them with her spoon they floated across the kitchen toward the fridge. If she flicked them they popped. Those she didn’t jab, flick, poke or in some manner interfere with landed on the kitchen table, which, to Nova, looked like the cratered surface of the Moon.

An arkwini in a spacesuit poked his helmet round the side of the packet, twitched his little chimp nose a couple of times like he was sniffing out danger, and then scampered out from behind it, followed by several others. Each arkwini held a garden implement of sorts — a rake, hoe or mechanical blower — that they used to gather the fallen flakes into piles.

When the piles had grown large enough, another arkwini appeared, pushing a wheelbarrow, which he used to transport the flakes to the futuristic conveyor belt illustrated on the side on the box. He emptied the flakes onto the belt, which transported them to a fish tank where they were devoured by a twelve-armed octopus. Her goggles had transformed the kitchen table, and the objects on it, into a moving, living scene. This was augmented reality, a halfway house between boring, everyday consensual reality and the wild, anything-goes virtual kind.

Mr Negrahnu stood in the doorway, paper in hand, shaking his head while he observed his daughter prodding thin air and muttering to herself. “You do realise, love, that you’re sitting there, talking to a box of cereal?”

Nova volleyed an eye back to the kitchen. “Morning, Dad. Floating Flakeroonies. I’m helping the arkwinis feed Banjax, the dodectopus. He gets hungry.”

“Right. Course he does. Sorry to have interrupted you hard at work.”

She flashed him a snarky smile. People who stuck with consensual reality through choice were either weird or old. Usually both.

“Feeding this Tampax creature, it counts towards your grades, does it?”

She had to force herself not to snap back at him. “We agreed that I could do what I want this weekend. My birthday, the start of Solarversia, remember? You just wait ’til Monday. My books won’t know what hit ’em.”

“You’ve seen this lot, I expect?” He gestured towards the TV. “That’s what happens when people lose their jobs.”

On the news, clips released by a terrorist organisation known as the Holy Order were playing. Footage of workers on assembly lines was spliced with scenes of robots doing similar work. Graphs displayed exponential increases in computing power, electronic memory, data transmission speeds, and a whole host of other variables over the last fifty years.

An image of a book entitled
The Sacred Singularity
appeared on the screen. Released by the Order a few months ago, it detailed their beliefs about artificial superintelligence: that it was on its way, that an ‘unfriendly’ version would spell the end of humanity and that the ‘friendly’ version they were working to develop would change everything for the better. Their manifesto made clear that everyone needed to join them in their endeavour, or face the consequences. No other method of evangelism was as compelling as bombs or guns, they claimed.

“You’re not suggesting they’re right?”

“I’m not suggesting anything. People lose jobs to robots and artificial what-nots, which means they can’t support their families, so they get angry. As for this lot, God knows what they’re harping on about with their ‘singularity’. All this change is driving people mad. They don’t know who they are any more. Without work to do they’re losing their identities. That’s all I’m saying.”

After working for twenty-three years at the local medical centre, Mr Negrahnu had been made redundant. In all that time he’d never called in sick, and had only been off twice for compassionate leave, a day each for his parents’ funerals. He’d been looking forward to the carriage clock employees got after twenty-five years. Not so much for the clock itself, but rather what it represented — his years of loyal service. Instead, he’d received fifteen minutes in a room with a new area head, half his age, and a stern-looking woman from HR. His job — to analyse scan results and medical images — could now be performed by an artificially intelligent program at a third of the cost.

“You know they’re threatening to blow entire companies sky-high?” Nova asked.

“I don’t agree with terrorism. I’m just saying that this is a direct consequence of millions of jobs being flushed down the bog.” He shook his head, put his newspaper down on the table and ruffled her hair.

“Ugh, Dad, mind my barnet.” She smoothed her hair back down and jabbed at another Flakeroony, which began to drift lazily, like a snowflake, onto the table. She watched it melt into the surface of the newspaper, which was open on the jobs’ page. One or two ads had been circled in red pen; others had asterisks next to them. She read down the list. These were jobs way beneath her dad’s abilities, jobs he never would have applied for earlier in his life.

The salaries advertised here didn’t come close to what he’d been earning as a medical researcher. And he was a proud man. Everything he did, he did for the family, for her. And what did she know, at her age, having never had a proper job, not one that needed to support a family, nor one that had been replaced by a few lines of code? She averted her gaze, feeling like a spoilt child.

Her headset flashed with a message from Burner, “At Fragging Hell, where are you? Already rammed. Not many spaces left.”

She flipped her Booners up and took her bowl of cereal to the sink. Now that was a better thought than these real-world concerns. Solarversia was calling.

***

“Are you ready, furball? Fragging Hell, here we come.”

The furball was stowed in the passenger footwell of Nova’s car, playing with the discarded plastic shell of a Kinder Surprise toy. He looked at Nova and made a clicking sound with his tongue. His name was Zhang, and her parents had given him to her on her 17th birthday. The tag on his ear identified him as a first generation Electropet, one modelled on the ring-tailed lemur.

Electropets were animatronic toys, designed to provide companionship to adults and children alike. Their features and movements were so realistic that it was hard to tell them apart from the real thing. At least, it was from a distance. Up close their mechanical joints were visible through their coats, as were their orange eyes, which doubled as cameras, and the tags on their ears.

Zhang had arrived with the standard factory settings. New owners were supposed to tinker around until they found a temperament that complemented their own. On day one Nova had ramped up his ‘playful’ setting to maximum and, deciding that he was perfect like that, hadn’t changed him since.

Her Booners guided her all the way to a reserved space on the third floor of the Medway Street car park, then, with Zhang parked on her shoulder, she walked through town. When they arrived at Fragging Hell he hopped onto the side rail to join some other Electropets — a sloth he knew and two monkeys he hadn’t met before. A couple approached the rail and took a selfie with him, before he took one with them. Nova loved getting home to find crazy pictures of him posing with random people. It was further proof that he lived his own little life.

She scanned the cafe for familiar faces. This place was her second home, always heaving with excitable gamers swapping war stories. Horrible paisley carpet and strips of fluorescent spot lighting separated banks of monitors and VR headsets. Not a single space was free, worse even than the usual midday Saturday crush because The Game had begun. The people she was here to see were likely to be found at the bar. She caught Jockey’s eye and went over.

“Miss Negrahnu, a pleasure as always. Congratulations on the big one-eight for yesterday.” Jockey wore one of his trademark vests, a knitted number with a diamond pattern that fitted snugly round his potbelly. He often stood with his hands on his stomach, as if he was subconsciously pulling it inward, though the effect actually made him look even more like Humpty Dumpty.