Solarversia: The Year Long Game (53 page)

They hadn’t been allowed any props or special effects this time, only the power of their arguments. The videos had been subjected to a global vote. Each dead player had one vote to cast and it had to go to a player from a country other than their own. Nova, unbelievably, had received enough votes to place in the top ten, and 750 million people had just watched the results.

As the nine other finalists approached her in turn, Nova did her best to congratulate them. Pedey Gonzalez, the woman who had fired the Shadow Sucker in Bouncy Baltimore, planted a firm kiss on Nova’s cheek and skipped off to join her family. Labelled The American Dream by the press back in the States, her confidence often bordered on arrogance, although Nova was never sure how much her attitude was purely for show. Next in the queue to greet her was Jools van der Star.

His avatar name, The Beanstalker, accurately described his physique. He was six foot four, but couldn’t have weighed much more than Nova herself. She craned her neck to look up at him and, in an attempt to put their rivalry behind her, offered him a weak smile and her outstretched hand.

He looked down at her, bearing an expression that suggested he’d discovered a piece of crusty dog shit embedded in the sole of his shoe, scoffed, and then brushed past, without uttering a single word. She turned to see him walk off in the direction of what had become her least favourite sound in the entire universe: Holly’s godawful laugh.

Nova patted herself down, quickly shook a few more hands and was glad to see Burner leap onto the stage. He grabbed her by the shoulders and spoke like he had only just processed the news himself.

“You’re a millionaire! A bloody millionaire! Unless you screw things up, a
multi
millionaire. And I’m best mates with you. This is the best thing that’s ever happened. You know what this means, don’t you? There’s no time to party. We need to get straight back to work. A week until the final round sounds like a long time, but it will fly by. I’ll start researching the other nine finalists. Strengths, weaknesses, that kind of thing.”

He flicked his visor down and went to work. Nova smiled, thankful she could count on him. Charlie was on the other side of the room being interviewed by someone from the BBC. She watched him for a while, glad that he too was part of Team Nova. He was no master of Science, quite the opposite. But as she’d come to appreciate during the Race to the Origin round, it was useful to have newbies around. His constant stream of questions had made her think more deeply about some of the mechanics of The Game, things she thought she knew well. Perversely, he’d made her a better Solo.

Just behind Charlie, her parents waved frantically as they caught her eye. They’d come to London for the day and looked to be the proudest people in the room. Since she’d started to place in the money positions, her dad had been far more sympathetic to Nova’s Solarversia obsession. She’d not seen him this happy in a long time. Her mum said he’d been applying for jobs almost non-stop for the last three months. No bites — not even an interview. He was glum at home, always muttering about being too old and out on his arse. It was great to see him with a smile on his face.

Ignoring the almighty kerfuffle in the room, her mind drifted to the other two people who had dominated her thoughts of late. Nothing more had been heard of Markowsky. Some believed that he’d drowned during his escape attempt. Others reckoned he’d gone into hiding, afraid to appear in public, and was in the depths of the South American rain forest.

Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, she was obsessed with him and his stupid manifesto, that much was clear. She’d been spending an unhealthy amount of time in Super Nova, the virtual cube, downloading information, reading forums and watching videos, and constantly fantasising about what she’d say and do to him if she ever got the chance.

She caught Charlie’s eye and nodded to him. He winked, knowing full well what she wanted to do now the result was in. Finally, she felt ready to visit Sushi. She’d apologise for the stupid fight and for her recent absence. But now she had something exciting to tell her, some news that would blow her away — she’d made the final ten and had done so by dedicating the sixty-second video to her.

She escaped the turmoil of the room and found a quiet alcove in which to make her visit. Brushing her hair behind her ears and thinking through what she wanted to say one last time, she launched the Soul Surfer app. It took her a few seconds to realise that something was different about the app. The ‘lobby’ — the app’s home area — had changed slightly. The default modules were all there, the training area, the forums and so on, but not the link to Sushi herself, the one that took Nova to her bench overlooking the Seattle skyline.

Confused, she navigated to her messages. Waiting in her inbox, marked as being of high importance, was a message from Charlotte Applewhite, Soul Surfer’s CEO. “Dear Soul Surfer, it is with profound regret that I write to you today. Thirty hours ago our website and the Soul Surfer application were taken offline by a sophisticated hacking attack carried out by a group of cyber terrorists known as the Holy Order. The outcome of the attack pains me beyond words: they deleted forty thousand Souls from our database before we were able to regain control of our systems. I’m heartbroken to inform you that Sushi Harrison was one of the Souls affected.”

She reread the last few words a dozen times. “One of the Souls affected.” What was that supposed to mean? Affected how? She navigated to the forum and did her best to take everything in. People were using words like ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’, and were generally baying for blood. The more lenient users were calling for Mrs Applewhite to resign; others wanted her charged with culpable homicide.

Finally she stumbled upon a long article by Soul Surfer’s CTO, explaining in laborious detail the implications of the attack. It came down to a matter of backup. All that existed on the company’s servers were the ‘kernels’ — the original, unmodified algorithms that represented the dead people who had signed up. Nothing else was saved. It meant that all and any changes to the algorithms had been wiped.

She fumbled the headset to one side, gasping for breath. This couldn’t be happening. Burner. He’d know what to do. As she rushed back to the Grand Room, desperate to see him, she bumped into her dad, coming the other way, a look of joy still plastered across his face. He wrapped an arm around her back and hugged her proudly.

“There you are, love. I’m just popping to the washroom, and then it’s drinks all round. Your mother spotted one of those magnums of champagne behind the bar. Let’s push the boat out, shall we? It’s not everyday your daughter becomes a millionaire.” Against her will, Nova’s shoulders had begun to shake. “What’s the matter, love?” He pulled away from her to study her face. “You look awful.”

“It’s Soul Surfer. Sushi’s gone.”

He looked at her as if he hadn’t heard her words — as if perhaps she’d spoken in French.

Smelling the alcohol on his breath, Nova pulled back from his embrace. “Dad — Sushi’s had her memory wiped. She’s been deleted.”

“Come on, love, buck up. The website must have crashed or something. You can visit her later and buy her a bottle of computer bubbles. You’ve just won a million squid, Nove.” He raised her hand in his and shook them in jubilation. “A million bloody squid!”

“You’ve been drinking and you’re not listening. It’s not all about money. you know.”

“Ha,” he said and laughed. “Wait ’til you’re my age, you’ve got a family to look after, and you’ve been out of work for a year. Then tell me it’s not all about money.”

“Dad, listen to me. Sushi’s gone. I’ve lost her again.”

He gave her a serious look. “It’s not like she’s not a real person though, is it? Computers don’t have souls, that’s just a clever name for the app.”

“How would you know? You’ve never visited her.
Don’t
tell me she’s not real.”

“Now you’re being silly. It’s just a computer game, however clever it is.”

She felt winded. A
computer game
? “How could you be so fucking insensitive, Dad? Maybe you don’t know what it’s like to lose a friend because you haven’t got any to start with.”

He reeled a little, taking a step back in the corridor and momentarily seeming to lose his balance.

“For a girl who’s nearly nineteen, you can be very rude and very childish sometimes. You need to spend some more time in the real world, that’s your problem.”

He stormed away down the corridor. Tears welled in her eyes and started rolling down her cheeks. If Computer Sushi wasn’t real, why did she feel distraught? The last ten months of their relationship had been deleted forever. She’d been taken from her all over again.

And this time, they’d parted on bad terms.

Chapter Forty-Six

Casey’s hands shot to his skull as it spasmed with red-hot electric pain. It felt like someone had poured lava-coated wasps through his earhole and then booted him in the face to make them angry. When the pain finally subsided, he fell into Theodore’s embrace, trembling and gasping for breath, while the graphs and monitors on the wall of the Epicenter displayed the cold hard data his suffering entailed.

“It’s OK, son, it’s over now, that understood? I don’t like having to do that, you gotta trust me when I say that. That was only a small shock and it was for your own benefit. Look at the graph on the left of the wall and you’ll see what I mean.”

Steadying himself against the older man, Casey looked at the readout. The shock he’d just received represented a mere five percent of the total power available to Theodore. Below it were the figures for his previous two shocks. The one he’d received at the shooting range had registered ten percent, and the original shock, a week ago at the Epicenter, had been closer to twenty percent. Father pulled him close and stared deep into his eyes.

“I promise you that I get no pleasure from hurting my children. I’m not gonna feed you some line about these shocks hurting me as much as they do you; we’d both know that to be some vile bullshit. But it’s my job to ensure you do your job. That makes me your commander as well as your saviour. And I’ve always found punishment to be a more effective incentive than reward. You don’t want me to punish you again, do you?”

“N-no, Father, of course n-not. I b-b-belong to the Holy Order, and I’m r-ready to do your bidding.”

“There’s a good boy,” Theodore said, ruffling Casey’s hair. After the searing pain of the charge, simple human contact felt good. He hated himself for liking it, needing it. “It’s time to talk you through some logistics. You fly out tomorrow. In the morning an unmarked self-driving car will take you to Dallas/Fort Worth airport. From Heathrow you’ll go directly to your hotel, where you’ll get a good night’s sleep, leaving you nice and refreshed for the Solarversia closing ceremony on Saturday. Got all that so far?”

Casey offered the most sincere smile he could manage and hailed the Magi in his head. Other than the chart showing the electric shocks he’d received, the wall was full of information relating to his mission. The tickertape of words relating to his thoughts was gone, presumably working in the background somewhere. He wondered how sophisticated the mind-reading technology was. Could it discern that his smile was fake? Was it reading every one of his thoughts, including ones like this, when he wondered what it knew?

“While you’re at the hotel you’ll receive a package containing three special darts. They’re self-directing like the ones at the range, but are even more special than that. The tips contain nanoengineered blood cells that are programmed to put down roots once they reach the brain of the host they’ve been exposed to. They’ll perform a similar function to the electrodes in your brain, but without the need for a messy operation. If the Magi is to reach its full potential, it will need to colonise a diverse range of organic brains, helping it to assimilate human value systems of all varieties.”

As Theodore pulled away from him, his face lit up. He twirled a finger in the air and brought up a new set of screens on the wall, one of which displayed news from Solarversia.

“I don’t mean to alarm you, but there’s been a slight change of plan. You’re still going to target Spiralwerks’ CEO of course, and since he survived the attack on New Year’s Eve, that will be Artica Kronkite. Having the resources of a company like Spiralwerks at my control will ensure the Magi goes on to become the sole superintelligence on the planet. But I learned some rather interesting news last weekend.”

Theodore gestured to a news clip that displayed the rotating avatars of the final ten players, alongside a paragraph describing the video they’d submitted during the penultimate round.

“Our friend Nova Negrahnu managed to scrape into the final ten. Dedicated her little video to her dead friend. Ain’t that sweet? She’ll be there at the stadium on Saturday. It’s funny. Only a few weeks ago I wanted her and Mr Kronkite dead. But I’ve come round to the idea of bringing them onboard — we can harness the power of their brains for the good of all mankind. That means you have two people to shoot during the inevitable mayhem.”

“I’ll t-try my best, Father.”

“I believe you will. There’s one other thing before I have you escorted back to your room. You’ve been thinking about using the trip to London to escape. No, no — no need to apologise. Tricky things, thoughts, the way they pop into your mind all uninvited. The important thing is that you’ve not been dwelling on such thoughts. But still, I want you to be under no illusion. The shocks I’ve been giving you work just as well remotely, and that includes being aboard a plane. You’ll receive a shock every hour that you’re awake. They won’t be big ones, just a couple of percent. Enough to keep you on your toes is all. I advise you to remember the pain of the first shock once you leave here. It would be a stroll in the park compared to the one you’d receive if you betrayed me. You’re dismissed.”

Casey turned to follow the ’bots back to his room. And this time, he didn’t bother with a fake smile.

***