Solarversia: The Year Long Game (43 page)

Behind her, the feed from a cam on the white half of the dome was on display. On their side, the white half of Ludi Bioski had also hopped down a glass tunnel that had appeared when a section of dome flapped open. But instead of leading to the Portal, it led to a warehouse packed full of crazed circus animals. The majority losers were being forced to fight for their lives in front of a global audience.

The crowd in the common room laughed and jeered as the hapless losers were mauled, maimed, bitten and clawed. The animals seemed to take pleasure in working together to find new and novel ways of finishing people off. Arms were torn from bodies and rammed down throats, players were beaten to death with their own femurs. In a feat of mass gavage, a gaggle of players were force-fed a never-ending sea of blood until their innards exploded.

Nova volleyed back to the Portal’s entrance, even less enthused by the prospect of diving now she knew what the stakes were. As if performing the dive in front of a global audience wasn’t stressful enough, the carnival atmosphere around the hole made it impossible to concentrate.

Worse yet, a notification flashed in her display to advise her that Hollywood Rox had just completed a dive with a score 71.35, placing her in the top five percent. Nova cursed herself for following Holly’s progress so closely. She turned notifications off and hoped she hadn’t just felt the whisky take a turn for the worse in her stomach.

Doing her best to ignore her guts and the noise, she tried to get a plan together. Around the circumference of the hole, she could see thousands of other players taking run-ups, bouncing, twisting and somersaulting through the air. Others, who had stumbled, bumbled or crumbled, were screaming as they fell into the abyss.

Hundreds of arms had protruded from the Emperor’s base, each one holding a placard which updated frequently to display another profile square emblazoned with a diving score. Arms were darting around all over the place to show players their placards, criss-crossing one another, getting entangled and generally adding to the chaos of the situation.

A range of dives appeared in her display, along with their combinations. She wondered why the moves had been provided and then smirked as she realised something. They weren’t being tested on memory and skill, but rather memory, skill
and
psychological reasoning. There were twenty-seven dives in total — it was one of the longer modules in the Simulator — and the hardest ones were very difficult to pull off.

She pulled up her results from earlier in the year. Eight perfect scores on the easier ones, a bunch of moderately good scores on the intermediate ones and then a bunch of flunked dives — five of the hardest seven. The players flunking their dives around her had been guilty of one sin above all others — not pausing to think the challenge through. They’d seen the ‘back two-and-a-half somersault two-and-a-half twist pike’ at the top of the list and gone for it. A well-executed version of it
did
score very highly, after all. Except most of them were screwing the combo up, slipping on the board and falling to their likely deaths.

This was all about picking a dive of average difficulty — like the forward two somersault half twist pike — and performing it well. She selected it and followed the arrows that guided her to her board. It probably wouldn’t win her one of the prizes on offer, but that didn’t matter, reaching the Portal would be prize enough. Placing her feet in the marker spots, she did her best to get as much bounce as possible.

Once she launched into the air she writhed her body as best she could, following the combination on her display: a wiggle of hips, a synchronised wave of her hands, a shuffle of feet, and one final shimmy of the hips. She scored 45.65. It was way off the leading scores, but more importantly, way off the lowest ones too, comfortably placing her in the middle of the huge table of results.

Plunging into the black abyss, she joined the world’s largest virtual skydive. Lining the interior of the cylindrical hole were thousands of platforms populated by dead players, there to watch the spectacle and get a glimpse of friends as they rushed by.

She stood spreadeagled on the stage, rotating her arms to move about, doing her best to catch a glimpse of people, the sound of their cheers increasingly dopplered, until sight and sound became one fused blur of ecstatic perception.

The distance to the core of the planet was 1,161 km, a journey that would take her 70 minutes to complete. During the fall she was free to flip, tumble and play with the half million other skydivers, and after falling for a few minutes she handed her headset to the crowd to let other people experience the ride. She had no idea what the other Minority Winners had planned by way of celebration, but she, for one, was going to party like her life depended on it.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Despite the fact that he’d been in the
Risk
room dozens of times before and knew of its inclination to materialise horses, cannons and soldiers, when a holographic horse cantered out of the wall halfway through the meeting, Arty nearly jumped out of his seat.

He faked a minor coughing fit to cover the startled gasp that had escaped his mouth and settled himself back in his chair. Did Spiralwerks really need this meeting room theme now that they‘d stumbled into, and were losing at, a real-world game of global domination? The Holy Order seemed to have achieved the upper hand before Arty even knew that Spiralwerks were playing. One false step and they could be crushed out of existence.

Unless this strategy meeting proved effective. That’s what these talks were intended to avoid. Here he was, Field Marshal Artica Kronkite, with his general, Carl Stedman, talking tactics with potential comrades, the co-founders of Cerberus, the company behind Gogmagog. Carl leaned forward in his seat, eyes narrowed, listening to Max articulate the technical details of the software at machine-gun speed.

“It’s takes all of those inputs — forum posts, tweets, Facebook status updates, photos, video feeds — and runs them through hundreds of proprietary semantic analysis algorithms, which compute the probability of danger for every set of related artefacts. Most clients don’t tweak the algorithms, though you have the ability to. We’ve refined the machine learning software to such a degree that the automatic tweaks it makes are far superior to manual ones.”

“If we did install Gogmagog, we’d want full control over the algorithms. I’d want to know how the software works, down to the smallest level of detail.”

“That wouldn’t be a problem, Carl, full training would be provided.”

As Arty listened to the pitch, the tension in his stomach abated somewhat. He couldn’t help but be impressed by these guys. Barely twenty years old, the two of them had dropped out of university to run their business a matter of months ago and had already taken calls from Downing Street and the Pentagon. They looked every part the hipster founders with their long, manicured beards, the matching caps sporting the Gogmagog logo, and the expensive tweed jackets. Max, who was six foot six, did most of the talking, while the diminutive Maurice interjected the occasional sage contribution.

“After what we saw here on New Year’s Eve, we’re sold on the computational aspect of the software,” Carl said, to enthusiastic nods from Arty. “But there are two questions in my mind. The first regards the attacks that evening that
were
successful. The three people who
did
die. I appreciate that Gogmagog can’t be everywhere, and analyse everything at all times … but do you know why it failed to prevent those attacks?”

The critical alert received by Nova and Burner on New Year’s Eve, and the subsequent analysis by MI6 and the FBI, had prevented seven of the twelve attempted attacks. But the other five had gone ahead as planned, targeting high-level employees at three tech companies, and a couple of US politicians.

Unsurprisingly, the press about the attacks had led to a surge of interest in the anti-terrorist preventative technology offered by companies like Cerberus. The topic of coveillance, where the public work in conjunction with the authorities on matters of national and international security, was trending everywhere, lauded by some, vilified by others.

“There’s a clear reason why we chose a three-headed beast for our company mascot: it’s a reminder to us all that many heads are better than one. Clichéd as that may be, it’s also true. The times when national security forces could work alone, without public input and consent, are over. ‘Input’ is the crucial word here. The software is only as good as the amount of information being fed into it.”

“We need more heads, so to speak,” Maurice added.

“If more people had been using Gogmagog before the New Year, some of those attacks could have been averted too. It tears me up that it’s taken something like this to garner so much interest in our work … but it’s clear how important this type of technology is, and how companies like yours stand to benefit.”

“That brings me to my second question. I get that the results are directly proportional to the amount of information being fed in.” Carl motioned to the sales literature adorning the smartwalls of the meeting room. “But the more information we feed it, the more servers we need to bring online, the higher our costs. And the kind of costs you’re talking about amount to a serious proportion of our annual IT spend. Those heads don’t eat for free.”

Max launched into what sounded like a well-rehearsed comeback about the value of life and liberty versus that of cash money, but Arty could barely concentrate. The same thought that had been plaguing him since the start of Solarversia was back. Why were Spiralwerks at the top of the Order’s corporate hit list? Why them and not one of the hundreds of other companies investing heavily in technology? After all was said and done, and though he’d never admit to this heresy in public, Solarversia
was
just a game. The attacks frightened and worried him. He only hoped that MI6 were getting somewhere with the captured cult members, before the Order could strike again.

***

Nova waited for Charlie to fall asleep on her bed before she traced the stars of the newest constellation. When the face of the Corona Cube became transparent, her display indicated that she should grab hold of the nearest vine and swing from one to the next to traverse the length of the Magisterial Chamber.

She came to rest in the southwest corner where Gorigaroo usually resided. He wasn’t there, but the surface of his gong had transformed into a screen, and on it a thick, lush jungle came into view. Hoots and calls were heard as the picture moved through a web of leaves and vines before coming to rest on a caterpillar, perched on a wiry branch. The caterpillar stopped munching on his leaf and turned to address the group of players who were watching him.

“Once upon a time, in the tropical rainforests of Nakk-oo, an almighty commotion caused the animals to stop what they were doing and seek out the source of the upheaval. A crowd assembled between trunks and branches to see what had appeared. In the middle of the throng, leaning against dense, tangled vegetation, was a shiny golden disc, shoulder-high to an antelope. Nobody could agree on who had discovered it, quite what it was or who it belonged to. At the anteater’s last count, seventeen different species had claimed it belonged to them, and the number was rising by the hour. The one thing every animal
could
agree on was that such a magnificent object would certainly possess magical properties and bring great fortune to whoever owned it.

“The tigers, who everyone knew were the handsomest animals in the kingdom, claimed that the god of beauty had left it there for
them
, so that they could admire their looks in its reflective surface all day long. ‘Just look at our beautiful coats, the symmetry of our patterns and the way our green eyes twinkle in the disc. Qetesh the Sacred works in weird and wonderful ways. He must have sent us this hallowed mirror from the Promised Land.’

“‘Enough of your conceited nonsense,’ piped the parakeets. ‘It looks just like the Sun, that’s plain for all to see. As the guardians of the sky and the ring bearers of heaven, Krakatoa the Boundless, god of Sun and stars, would have left it here for us as thanks for our tireless service in Her realm all these years.’

“Just as another argument broke out, an elephant approached the disc and struck it with his powerful tusks. ‘Hear me now,’ cried the elephant. ‘Everyone knows that we are the most musical animals in the kingdom. You can hear the call of our trumpets from one side of the jungle to the other. Listen to how the disc vibrates when I strike it — you will never find a more perfect accompaniment to our music. Belvedere the Harmonious has surely answered our humble prayers by giving us this instrument to play.’

“After endless hours of bickering, the animals could agree on one thing only — that a competition was the fairest way to decide ownership of the disc.

“‘It should be a short race across the plains,’ the cheetah said. ‘The first animal to cross the finishing line will win the golden saucer.’

“‘We agree that it should be a race,’ the horse said slowly, ‘but let us run over a long distance. The competition needs to be worthy of the prize, and not one that ends so soon after it has started.’

“‘Of course you’ve both suggested races, you’re the fastest animals in the kingdom,’ said the Petrifier. ‘But the disc looks heavy. This should be a competition of strength, not speed, for the victors must be able to take their prize with them when they win.’

“And so the discussion continued. It wasn’t until evening fell that the animals, tired of their quarrelling, decided to ask the opinion of the Waterfall of Wisdom, an ancient being known for her impartial point of view. Every species delegated a member to represent them in the matter, and all the chosen animals travelled together through the dark green jungle, taking it in turns to carry the yellow enigma upon their backs, in their beaks, or over their heads.

“Arriving at the waterfall, they hurriedly related the story of the disc, each species once again articulating their own worthiness.