Solarversia: The Year Long Game (47 page)

Instead of creating hundreds of new jobs, the Puzzles AI team was formed, led by Markowsky. His program was so productive that it put most of the four hundred original employees out of work in the space of a few months, leaving only a top-level management team to oversee progress.

Reading through the program’s technical specification, Arty couldn’t help but be struck by how similar its AI construct was to the program that powered Gogmagog. Its semantic intelligence algorithms sucked in tens of thousands of examples of each puzzle type, then learned to make its own. The artificially generated puzzles were freely distributed to anyone who wanted to play them.

Feedback was immediate and rich. Puzzles that never got completed were discarded. They were the bad apples. Puzzles that got played to the end, rated highly and commented on, were the good apples — ones the program’s algorithms used to inform and design the next generation of puzzles. It was a combination of natural selection and digital selection, a weird, symbiotic mix of the two. A year later Isaac released a new version of the program that created puzzles of such a high standard that human supervision was no longer required. He had literally written himself out of a job.

Behind him, Arty’s colleagues broke into another round of applause. The third round was called Bounty Hunter. It was a cruel one that Arty had devised after a thrashing at poker one evening.

The surviving hundred thousand players had started the round in the Northdome, the large hemisphere affixed to the northern face of Castalia. In each stage of the round, a celebrity spun a Tweel of Fate to select a subset of player numbers: primes, squares, triangular numbers and so on.

Once the subset had been chosen, members of the public had one minute to place bounties on the heads of the players they wanted to eliminate. A bounty could be as little as ten pence but there was no maximum, and once they were totted up, there was a short period in which players could offer to pay double the amount to cancel it out.

All the money went to the player’s nominated charity. Those who didn’t double their bounty were teleported to the Southdome, where a selection of the craziest circus animals lay in wait. The round would eventually excise a further 90% of Solarversia’s population, taking it down to ten thousand players.

Arty placed the trophy on his desk next to a row of Electropet versions of Emperor Mandelbrot and his entourage. He couldn’t stop thinking about what Andrew had said — the way in which the characters had influenced Markowsky and shaped his ideology. It was too surreal to take in.

Shortly after their visit to Legoland that morning, the FBI had released Markowsky’s details to the media, sparking a fresh wave of interest in the attacks. Following the recent success of Gogmagog, the authorities were coming round to the idea of coveillance. It wasn’t that they wanted people to approach Markowsky if they saw him on the street — quite the opposite. But they understood that the more eyes — artificial or otherwise — they had looking for him, the higher the chance he’d be caught. As Arty pondered whether Spiralwerks had contributed enough resources to the search effort, Hannah approached him with a serious look on her face.

“The surveillance team have flagged some suspicious payments coming in for the bounties. I suggest we start a bridge call straight away.” Arty looked at her for long while. Had her hair always been this grey? Had she always looked this tired?

“What do you mean … suspicious?”

“One player has been repeatedly targeted every time their number is available for bounty.”

“There’s nothing against that in the rules, is there?”

“You’re right. Except the number being targeted is 515,740.”

Arty’s eyes narrowed. “Why do I know that number?”

“It’s Nova Negrahnu, the Gogmagog girl. And the bounties being placed on her are huge — £121,212 every time, to be precise. They’re being sent anonymously via cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.”

Arty lurched forward in his seat. “Ask Carl to investigate the payments. Get as much information as possible. And get our friends at Legoland on the phone as soon as you can.”

Chapter Forty-Two

The common room was silent as the Tweel spun round its axis. It had been set in motion by Kiki La Roux from aboard the Disco Stick. He held his hands to his heart and begged for forgiveness from any loyal viewers the Tweel would inevitably select. His nails featured video clips of the players who had been killed only minutes before when thousands of ‘Multiples of Three’ had been selected for bounty and sent to their likely deaths.

Once the Tweel had slowed to a halt, the tentacle closest to Kiki became animated. The face peering out chanted the word ‘Evens’, breaking the silence in the common room with a chorus of groans. Everyone looked to Nova for her reaction. She cussed the number gods under her breath and tried to remain cool, calm and collected.

Cams in the room were broadcasting the event around the globe, so that people could experience the drama with her. That meant that whoever was placing these ridiculous bounties on her head was likely to be watching her every move. And there was no way she was going to give them the satisfaction of watching her squirm.

A minute later, when the same bounty of £121,212 flashed above her head, the crowd booed their disgust louder than ever. She heard Burner swear like a trooper, and Charlie appeal for calm. The bounty was huge. Ten times larger than the bounties on the heads of unpopular celebrities, the kind who were as vacuous as they were untalented.

The bounty’s consistent size and numerical structure — the number twelve, repeated thrice — suggested only one plausible explanation: she was being attacked by the Holy Order. What niggled her most was that the first three digits of the bounty, ‘121’, had been her lowest unique number in Grandmaster Brontanja’s Puzzle, which she’d been inspired to choose when thinking about Sushi. First they kill her. Then they dance on her grave. It only made Nova more determined to survive the round.

As the seconds ticked down to the next phase of the round the room quietened again. She waited for her inevitable inclusion in the group of players who would be teleported to the Southdome. At least the unpopular celebrities with large bounties on their heads could afford double the amounts and cancel them out.

Nova might have had the support of hundreds of people, but the vast majority were students, eking out their meagre allowances on pot noodles and cheap lager. There was no way Team Nova could raise close to quarter of a million pounds between them; no way she would even ask such a thing of them, not after everything they had done for her.

More frustratingly, she knew that a rich daddy’s girl like Holly
would
be able to cancel the bounties being placed on her head. According to Charlie, Holly’s dad was so rich he’d forked out several grand for her player number — 24,442 — because she thought it ‘had a nice ring to it’. She was down at Rutland Hall right now, playing the round from there, although Nova had purposely turned off notifications so as to not be distracted by her.

When the ‘Double or Quits’ phase ended without her having raised the funds required to cancel the bounty, nobody was surprised. She consoled herself with the knowledge that the charity Charlie had suggested she nominate — one that helped install solar arrays in developing nations — would soon receive another six-figure windfall.

She had ten seconds until her visit to the Southdome, and she used them to cycle through her inventory. Her health stood at a paltry thirty-one points. She had lost a huge number on her first visit to the animals when an Obarian had caught her off guard. As for items, she had seventy-nine left in her inventory, including a solitary Force Field, previous visits to the southern hemisphere having depleted her supply. She cracked her knuckles one last time and switched on the noise cancellation mode in her Booners. Solarversia was now more than just a game.

The roof of the Northdome sparked and buzzed as it warmed up. Dozens of arkwinis used cattle prods to herd the unlucky even-numbered players — all 800 of them — into the centre of the room. The ground they walked on was the reverse side of the northern wall — the one that accommodated the Player’s Grid. Viewed from the side, it looked like players were defying gravity, sticking to and walking upon a vertical face.

When the round started, the Northdome had been a semi-phased zone. The floor space — a hundred metres squared — hadn’t been large enough to accommodate all hundred thousand players who had started the round. It meant that avatars had appeared in a semi-transparent state, able to walk through one another, if not the walls themselves. Experience of what awaited them in the Southdome meant the novelty had soon worn off.

Toward the edges of room stood the odd-numbered players and those even-numbered players rich enough to cancel any bounty that may have been placed on them. She knew what they were thinking:
rather her than me
. It was a predictable and therefore forgivable reaction. For survival of the fittest to work, you couldn’t spend too long mourning the dead. It was just that in her case, it felt like she was a victim of
unnatural
selection, the evil twin of the natural kind.

As the electric crackle of the teleport generator hummed into life, she peered up at the domed ceiling and wondered which direction the lightning bolt would arrive from this time. It landed with an almighty crack, like the lash of a giant electric whip.

She arrived in the centre of the Southdome directly opposite where she had just been standing, as if reflected in a mirror. Teleportees ended up within a circular area at the centre of the square floor, which was bound at its edge by a violet-coloured Force Field, holding back the animals, who stood hugely, menacingly behind it, awaiting the moment the field would dissolve.

This would be the eighteenth session of the round, and the fifth one Nova had participated in. The short reprieve provided by the Force Field was the same each time: a mad scramble to surround yourself with as many other players as possible, putting them in the way of you and the beasts. After a lot of pushing and shoving — and Nova wishing that it
was
possible to fight other players — they settled in a series of concentric circles facing the animals.

She found herself next to a muscular American guy wielding a gruesome-looking double-headed Battle Axe, stained red from previous use. His fight stats looked impressive. Being next to him was a minor consolation for ending up in the outermost ring, closest to the animals. Her weapon of choice was a Marsden Flamethrower, a contraption first used in the Second World War. Strapped to her back was a tank that contained 18 litres of fuel, pressurised by nitrogen gas. In her hands she gripped a gun-shaped tube. The Marsden drank like a fish — eighteen litres sounded like plenty of fuel, but it was only enough for three individual spurts of flame.

The Force Field cycled through its colours and then disappeared entirely. The minute of hell had begun. At the left of her peripheral vision Nova saw a Huntropellimous clatter towards the circle of players. Behind her somewhere she heard the strangled cry of an Obarian. But charging straight at her was a mighty Petrifier, a bipedal bullock whose enormous twisting horns were tinted with a poison powerful enough to kill her in seconds. When it got ten metres from her, she fell forward into a kneeling position and clamped her trigger finger down hard on the fuel throttle.

The Marsden took half a second to unleash its horizontal inferno, which slammed straight into the Petrifier’s torso, engulfing it in a sea of flames. When it got near enough she heard the American say, “I’ve got it from here,” before he executed a spinning combo with his Battle Axe, landing a fatal blow to the beast’s head. She checked her display. Two goes left on the Marsden. Forty-seven seconds to go.

“Hey, you wanna go back-to-back with me?” Nova asked the American guy. Players had used the stance in earlier rounds with great success.

“Thought you’d never ask. I’ve got a couple of Force Fields left, what about you?”

“Just the one. And only two goes left on this thing. Let’s back away from the Huntropellimous. Its armour plating is flame resistant.”

“Roger that. Quick — to your left!”

Nova spun left and saw nothing. Before she could ask what he was talking about, an Obarian tore past and took a chunk out of her right shoulder.

“Sorry. I meant the other left …”

She was about to give him a load of grief when he erected a Force Field over the two of them.

“I’m sorry about that, I didn’t have much time to think. I only saw it at the last second and ended up batting it away with the edge of my axe. Hope you didn’t take a big hit.”

“Lost six points. Down to twenty-five. How long do we have under here?”

“I used the longer of the two fields — twenty seconds. Was gonna save it to last, but thought I owed you one.”

“I appreciate the gesture. We’ve got fourteen seconds to get our act together. Then we need to survive ten more seconds before we get beamed back to safety.”

Nova scanned the room for ideas. It was total carnage wherever she looked. On the far side of the dome a Huntropellimous dangled its new playthings for a while — two people impaled on its claws — before slamming their heads together until they exploded, showering blood and brain onto the ground.

Only metres away, she watched helpless as a Petrifier charged someone from behind at full speed, her warning shouts drowned out by screams, roars and the metallic clash of weapons at work. The Petrifier’s left horn tore straight through the guy’s back and out of his rib cage, bringing his still-beating heart with it.

Over to her right she spotted an Obarian slam into an old woman at full speed, decapitating her in the process. One of its friends clamped down on her spinal cord and unceremoniously yanked it out of her body while she slumped to the ground.

To her left, a woman was kneeling, clutching her throat with all her might, like she was trying to strangle herself. As her hands loosened and fell away from her neck, Nova saw the cause of her distress. An Acoo-Stickular exited her body through her mouth, quickly retaining its full speed of 75 mph.