Solarversia: The Year Long Game (55 page)

“She looks like an Amazonian woman. Way too big for Bullit Burnski. Five-eight is as tall as I’ll go. Any taller and they start scaring me.”

“When you say ‘they’, I assume you mean women in the real world, rather than computer generated avatars? And from what I’ve seen in the six years I’ve known you, you’ll take pretty much whatever you can get your hands on.”

The three of them were camped on the floor by the bed, lounging on a jumble of pillows, cushions and duvets, studying a series of projections on the wall. Spiralwerks had revealed clues pertaining to the Grand Final every day that week: a crow, a circle, an old boot, a sword and then yesterday, an iron arm guard labelled a ‘manica’. Earlier that day the details of the final had been confirmed: gladiator versions of their avatars would face each other in a virtual battle to the death at the Colosseum in Rome.

“There’s something I don’t understand.” Charlie had brought up the avatars of the ten finalists and was glancing between them and an online gambling site. “The avatars they’ll use in the final are supposed to be identical. Players have kept their own heads so they’ll be able to tell who’s who. And the bodies of the five male avatars look different to the five female ones, for obvious reasons. But apart from that they’re the same height, weight and build.”

“It helps ensure the final is as fair as possible. I mean, look at the real-world difference in size between Ozwald and Nova. If they were using their normal avatars, Ozwald would pummel her into the ground with his fists, cartoon style. That’s why they made us practice Combat sims using avatars of the same size.”

“Yeah, I get why they’ve done it, makes total sense. What I don’t get is this.” He pointed to a table of gambling odds on the website. “If the avatars are identical, why aren’t the odds? Why do Ozwald the Destroyer and Pedey Gonzalez have the best odds, and Matas the Mole and Vera888, the worst?”

“Gamblers are doing what they’ve always done — using every scrap of information available to them. Take a look at this.” Burner dragged Ozwald and Pedey’s avatars to a blank section of wall and launched various video feeds alongside them. “These two were still violet belts when they reached the Final Million. They didn’t lose a life the entire year. Impressive stuff. Check out Ozwald’s highlights reel.”

The three of them watched Ozwald’s insane progression through Solarversia. Ludi Bioski had kicked him out of his Corona Cube at the same time as Nova and Burner, and his escape through a graveyard contained some of the best action they’d witnessed, most of it courtesy of a stunning range of Battle Axe combinations he seemed to have mastered.

In one scene he leapt off a tombstone, sliced an Obarian in half while he pirouetted through the air, landed with a commando roll and went on to hack a couple of Petrifiers to death before he made it to safety. Another scene showed him in the white half of the Decision Dome. As one of the ‘Majority Losers’ of the round, he’d been made to fight for his life, something he’d done with gusto.

“See what I mean? The guy’s a lean, mean fighting machine. He’s actually built like his Super Avatar in real life. Same goes for Pedey. She’s a real-life heptathlete and cheerleader. I doubt Nova would last more than a few seconds in a real-life fight against her. It’s stuff like this that gamblers are taking into account.”

“Watch out, Sofa Boy, you’re supposed to be providing me with moral support, not talking up the competition.”

“How come The Beanstalker and The Dump Truck are third and fourth favourites? Were they violet belts too?”

“Hate that guy,” said Nova, still smarting from the way Jools had snubbed her on stage.

Burner raised his eyebrows at Charlie before answering him. “Nah, they were green belts. As you can see, The Beanstalker looks like a lanky streak of piss compared to Ozwald, but people reckon he’s sneaky. Aside from his Karting win, he discovered a bug in the Tweel of Fate early on and used it to stockpile his inventory. Kept the secret to himself, the crafty bugger. By the time Spiralwerks fixed the bug, he’d collected enough teleport tokens to visit six of the Grandmasters, but they judged it to be their fault, not his, so didn’t penalise him. An unpopular decision, but you know what Solos are like. If you sent them on a quest to heaven they’d complain the clouds were too fluffy.”

“What about The Dump Truck?”

“Age thirty-nine, Malaysian, incredibly diligent. She’s married to money and doesn’t have kids. Regularly clocked up eighty hours a week during the year, placing her in the top centile by time spent in the Gameworld. Her persistence is admirable. She spent so much time guessing at hopscotch patterns that she discovered three of them — out of a total of a hundred. You can guarantee she’s spent a hell of a lot of time perfecting her fighting skills.”

“What do we know about these next three?”

“Darth Malaki was a red belt. Had a fairly standard year. Like Ozwald, he chose ‘white’ and had to fight his way into the next round, so his odds improved somewhat when the Colosseum format was announced. Captain Moreno’s from Mexico and at seventy-three he’s the oldest contestant. Can’t write him off though. I don’t know if you’ve seen him around the hotel, but he’s spritely for his age. Looks about fifty. He caused some hoo-ha during Arty’s Answers. Took ages to give his answers, kept stalling and asking for questions to be repeated. Somebody kept coughing in the crowd too, people reckoned he was getting help. Not that anything was proved. As for Astrid the Unbeatable, there’s not much to say about her. Norwegian, blonde, fit as you like. She won the Show and Tell round with her HelloCopter, but that hardly qualifies her as an expert in Combat.”

“Why do you reckon Nova’s ranked all the way down in eighth?

“Because people haven’t met me in real life, and have no idea how gangsta I am, that’s why.”

“More realistically, I’d say it concerns her red belt and the way she scraped into the Final Million. Her highlights reel shows her inventory filling up with items left to her in wills because of the excitement on New Year’s Eve. They reckon she qualified because of people being sympathetic to her cause, and would have crashed out otherwise. Which is probably right.”

“This is your last warning, Sofa Boy. Put a sock in it.”

“What about Vera888 and Matas the Mole? Why are they in ninth and tenth?”

“Vera’s a small, middle-aged Chinese woman who lost two lives early on and had a shedload of narrow misses after that. Watch this.” Burner maximised a video feed showing one lucky escape after another: a collapsing building that missed her by inches, a huge pile-up on an autobahn in Germany from which she walked away with one health point — only to spin a Tweel of Fate and receive a health pack — and six different occasions when she’d used a teleporter that had had a TeleTrixis device attached to it, but been given easy Combinations to execute. “The old dear’s luckier than a dog with two dicks. She became something of a viral legend in China when people started claiming they’d been lucky in real life after bequeathing her their items in the Gameworld. You couldn’t make this stuff up.”

“That leaves Matas, the young Lithuanian guy. What’s his story?”

“Jesus, have you seen him round the hotel? He’s got less charisma than a dead cockroach. When us finalists were introduced on the first day I thought he was someone’s kid. He’s the one person I think might be an easy target.”

“I don’t know about that,” Burner said, with a shake of his head. “He’s something of an anomaly, this guy. He won the Race to the Origin round and prides himself on his Puzzle skills. Keeps his sim stats private so it’s impossible to know how much Combat training he’s had. I keep telling her: always watch the quiet ones.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Arty took his gloves off, blew into his hands, put the gloves back on and then took them off again. He peered into his headset, flicked through a few cams and then put it back down on the seat next to him. It was torture. So much was happening, he couldn’t decide what to focus on. If he watched in VR, he found himself endlessly cam-hopping; whenever he watched what was going on in the stadium, he was scared of missing something in the virtual world. Hannah, in the seat next him, propped her headset up on her forehead, put her hand on his arm and gazed at him with a forlorn expression.

“Relax, Arty, what do you think the replays are for? You were enjoying the real-world spectacle earlier, so stick with it for a while. You’ll have a lot more fun if you don’t try to see everything at once, trust me.”

“Thanks, Hannah, I know you’re right.” He smiled and placed a hand on the headset, subconsciously making sure it was safe on the seat in case he wanted to use it. Within a minute he was fretting again.

“What about the weather, surely that’s ruining it for everyone? I’ve got my thermal vest on, two jumpers, my ski jacket, and I’m still cold as brass monkeys. Why did people listen to me when I proposed leap day as the start date? ‘Ooh, that’s a great idea,’ everyone said, ‘they only come every four years, it’ll be more exciting than Christmas’. Idiots, the lot of us. We’ll start the next one in June. Or move somewhere warm.”

“Will you please put a sock in it? It’s too late to be worrying about things you can’t change. If you can’t enjoy yourself, at least let me try.”

Arty clamped his fingers under his armpits and gazed over the eighty thousand cheering spectators there at the Olympic Park to watch the closing ceremony live. Were they enjoying themselves? They sounded like they were. What about the people experiencing the event virtually? Semantic analysis of social media feeds from around the world showed the overall sentiment was positive and that people were excited.

He wished he could share in their joy. Instead, his brain was in warp mode. When he wasn’t worrying about which view he should be watching, or complaining about the cold, he was cycling through the long list of things he knew could go wrong, mentally ticking each one off as he remembered how they would deal with it.

Security had been the number one priority: for the finalists, the spectators and his employees. Everyone there had been subjected to facial recognition software upon entry and scanned for guns and knives. Every official cam in the stadium — over a thousand of them — had the latest version of Gogmagog installed. A hundred or so drones hovered at varying heights, surveying the crowd in real time. And in the spirit of coveillance, every one of the cams was publically accessible. People would pick up on anything the machines failed to spot.

He and Hannah sat in the Royal Box. Behind them, a broadcasting suite had been converted into a command centre where hundreds of Spiralheads monitored thousands of dashboards. The atmosphere was frenzied: the Grand Final was expected to exert the largest strain yet on their servers, even larger than the opening ceremony. He checked his datafeed for what might have been the hundredth time that evening.

“There’s only one point two billion people watching. Our broadcast specialists reckoned there’d be one point five at this stage. That’s twice the population of Russia who haven’t bothered tuning in. Jesus, this is a disaster.”

Hannah volleyed an eye back to the stadium, bit her bottom lip and slowly shook her head.

“Why aren’t
you
stressed about this? This is your bag, the viewing numbers, not mine. You’ve lost two Russias. Where have they gone?”

“Ooh, look,” said Hannah, “Gori’s about to strike his gong. Only ten minutes until the finalists are led out. Having the entourage here like this was a stroke of genius, people love them.”

Spiralwerks had commissioned the Electropet corporation to create giant replicas of Emperor Mandelbrot and his entourage. They walked, scuttled or were driven around the running track, interacting with the crowd in their own unique ways.

Gorigaroo had been marking time with his gong, counting down the minutes to showtime. Ludi Bioski worked his magic on a real Orbitini, controlling the music, the laser show that accompanied it, and several hundred drones, which flew about delivering mystery goodie bags to people in the crowd.

Spee-Akka had adopted her usual meditative posture and was being driven around the track on a float. Upon the large digital canvas on her easel, she simultaneously painted hundreds of individual spectator portraits. Each one appeared in miniature within the floral edges of February’s portrait on Castalia’s ceiling.

Banjax was there in the form of a Tweel of Fate. Members of the public were being called up to spin his tentacles for real, winning themselves a whole host of prizes. And Arkwal strode around the track, waving to spectators and ordering around arkwinis who played the fool.

Arty leant in to Hannah. She had her headset on and was peering at the sky.

“I still find it difficult to believe that we’re here. At the end of the year, I mean, the last day of The Game. A hundred million to one; the largest knockout game in history.”

“Sorry, Arty, I was miles away. Castalia just arrived in Rome. A bunch of arkwinis grabbed its tubes and tied them to one of the Colosseum’s arches. Top marks to the team, it looks superb. If you’re still cold, you should be watching events unfold there. It was a good idea of Carl’s to have the virtual battle take place in the sunshine.”

Arty put his headset back on and was heartened to find that Hannah was right. Strangely enough, the midday sunshine of the virtual world
did
make him feel warmer. He relaxed into his chair and resolved to pay no heed to the endless stream of concerns his mind could produce. If he ignored them long enough, they’d probably stop of their own accord.

And besides, the one-minute gong had just sounded. The Grand Final was about to start. He wouldn’t have missed it for the Solarverse.

***

The roar of the crowd in the Olympic Stadium was barely audible in the changing room where Nova and the other finalists were getting ready. They’d been clothed in skintight haptic bodysuits, matte black except for the flags emblazoned across their upper arms and the profile numbers stretching across their backs.

Aside from making the group look like a team of highly trained Navy Seals, the bodysuits were designed to take the gaming experience to the next level. Whenever Nova received a blow during combat her suit would vibrate and shock her: the harder the hit, the harder the shock.