Solarversia: The Year Long Game (59 page)

Jars of Skidz, Force Fields, DoppelGanger Scanners and a healthy array of weapons were now stocked in her arsenal. As she replenished her health back to maximum, the feeling of hopelessness slunk back to the shadows.

In the time it took Banjax to charge at the crack in the Eastdome and grab some of the items for himself, Nova reached the completed crossword puzzle and submitted it. Turning to face him once again, she selected a plasma rifle, touched the trigger and didn’t let go. A thick red stream jetted from its nozzle, but was easily deflected by one of the four shields he’d chosen. Banjax smiled, armed his eight free arms with the same weapon, and blasted her back against the perimeter wall.

Hunkering behind her shield, she looked to the crowd for inspiration, but none was forthcoming. Maxed out at one hundred items, there was no more space in her inventory; she’d need to make do with what she had. She frantically cycled through the items, desperate to know how she might survive against an opponent who was able to command six times the weaponry. She found a bumper supply of Growsome and drank one bottle after the other until she was as tall as the perimeter wall.

“Arty, how are you doing at your end? Am I in any danger? Have you worked out how to stop the program yet?”

“We’re doing everything we can — your rig’s been checked and it’s safe. There’s a password on the program, but it’s securely encrypted. The security team reckon that it would take half a century to crack it by brute force. MI6 are here. They’ve requested that you keep playing, while we get a better understanding of—”

“Quiet, infidel,” came Theodore’s voice. “Do
not
speak again. We’ve been playing by your rules for long enough. It’s time to play by mine.”

A great pile of jigsaw pieces landed in a heap in the stands and a new timer appeared on the screen. Nova locked eyes with the turquoise creature, who looked like he’d drunk some Growsome of his own. Standing twenty feet tall, they circled around each other while the crowd looked on helplessly. The Colosseum was less daunting from her new height and the death traps no longer affected her health score. The hot coals had been reduced to warm sand, the barbed wire to harmless strands of Velcro.

Banjax stood up on four leg-like tentacles. He raised the other eight about his body, four at each side. In each one, the same item glimmered: a Sword of Sadism. The blades and the jewel-encrusted handles sparkled. He looked like an Indian deity armed to the hilt. How was she supposed to defend herself against such a weapon? How was she supposed to defend herself against
eight
of them? A year’s worth of Combat training in the Simulator evaporated in an instant.

In seconds he was a whirlwind of blades spinning straight for her. She armed herself with two large rectangular shields. Almost paralysed by fear, it was all she could think to do. They collided and a colossal eruption of sparks sent both of them sprawling. He was quickly back on four legs.

“Arty, help me out here, goddamn it. If you can’t crack the password, at least tell me what to do. I’m dying out here, it’s ridiculously one-sided. I don’t know how much longer I can carry on.”

“You’re doing brilliantly. And we’re trying. Every single person in the Command Centre is working to help you. I was just about to tell you what to do; I needed to be one hundred percent sure, that’s all. Keep that same shield in one hand, but arm yourself with a Web Shooter in the other. Wait for him to start spinning. Don’t fire until he’s within a range of ten metres. Then you unleash hell.”

Nova made the switch and aimed at the centre of the approaching vortex. When Banjax got within range, she did as Arty had instructed. Her defence looked woefully inadequate — a piece of flimsy white string against the might of a bladed whirlwind. Nothing happened at first and he continued to advance towards her as quickly as ever.

Right up to the last second she was convinced she was going to die. It would be a virtual death like none before it, one that had real-world consequences. It would cause bombs to explode. More Sushis would die. It would all be her fault and she could do nothing more than tense her body and wince.

She pressed her body flat against the perimeter wall and watched through squinting eyes as Banjax suddenly came to a mummified halt in a mass of tangled webbing. Running to the timer, she submitted the completed jigsaw with a few seconds to spare. It was a picture of Theodore as a more advanced cyborg, behind him a terrifying horde of intelligent robots.

When he finally managed to cut himself free of the webbing, Banjax looked seriously pissed. He slapped his tentacles above his head three times, launching three puzzles simultaneously: a twelve-by-twelve Rubik’s cube, a huge Sudoku puzzle and a cryptogram. Five minutes started counting down.

Before Nova could move, the entourage retaliated in the same way as before. Gorigaroo struck his gong and Ludi Bioski played his Orbitini. Castalia, which was now lying on its side, punctured and held in place by several of the Colosseum’s support columns, exploded through the uppermost Westdome, showering an abundance of items into the arena.

It took Nova a few seconds to comprehend what the crowd were urging her to do. Once she maxed her inventory out at a hundred items, she would no longer be physically able to pick up any other item. Instead, they were advising her to use the items in her inventory and replace them as she went. She scanned through the list and lobbed anything at Banjax that looked like it might impede him: a Jar of Skidz, a can of Bugz and a Musical Chair.

He immediately erected a rectangular Force Field to block the items and, catching on to the idea, jettisoned some of his own. She saw him activate his Turbo Boosts and followed suit. The two of them whizzed round the arena like tornadoes, grabbing every bottle of Growsome they could find. This time the change in their sizes was exponential. When they came upright again, armed like tanks, the Colosseum looked like a fallen Frisbee at their feet.

The ensuing tangle was a fight of titans. Banjax knocked her into the Mediterranean, causing a tsunami that swamped Sardinia. Nova threw him into Spain. He belted her all the way to Russia. They were so large, their skins so tough, that ordinary beatings no longer affected their health scores. Around the globe they went, crushing buildings, destroying nature reserves, altering the Earth’s plate tectonics whenever they landed.

After a few minutes of wrestling around the globe, her headset flashed to indicate that the puzzles had been completed — she needed to get back to the Colosseum to submit them. Inferring her sudden change in temperament, Banjax extended his tentacles in every direction. He was a twelve-armed keeper protecting his goal. And Nova needed to score in the next thirty seconds.

She darted to her left and was blocked. She looped back round and tried her right. Again Banjax thwarted her attempt to pass him. He laughed at her, and thumping his tentacles into the Pacific Ocean, sent walls of spray into the air. She had fifteen seconds to do the impossible.

Instead of running at him, she backed away from him, drawing him towards her. Her trot turned into a run. As she reached full speed, she sprouted some Winged Beauties and circumnavigated the globe in the other direction. She arrived back in Europe alone. Getting down on her hands and knees, she submitted the completed puzzles. Three more tick marks. On the horizon she could see a blur as Banjax approached at top speed.

“This is killing me, Arty, give me some good news. Tell me this is a bad dream. I’ll take anything at this point.”

“I need you to keep doing—”

Banjax skidded to halt, ploughing several mile-long furrows through the centre of Rome in the process. “Enough! I thought I told you to keep quiet. Remember whose game this is.”

Suddenly the background noise of the Command Centre dropped out. “Say goodbye to your friends,” said Theodore darkly. “You’ve had enough of their feeble input. Though they can still hear us. I want them to hear you weep when you witness the death and destruction that your weakness caused. I’ve also had enough of the crowd completing the puzzles for you. This is Solarversia, and that means The Game needs to evolve. Playtime is over. Let the real fun begin.”

He raised a pair of tentacles in the air once more, but didn’t stop slapping them together until all six of the final puzzles had been kicked into motion.

“Theodore, no … not all six at once. I’ll do anything, please stop this madness.”

Nova remained on her hands and knees. In the miniature arena she saw that the countdown timer had been set to three minutes. If she didn’t act soon, countless people were going to die, but without the comms link to Arty, she felt helpless. A video feed flickered into the corner of her display. What was she seeing? When the image finally resolved itself, the small amount of air that remained in her lungs was cruelly sucked out of them, leaving her gasping for breath.

It was her parents, cowering in fear. Around them other people were doing the same thing. They must have been the guests of the other finalists. Fifty or so security guards surrounded the VIP area, all eyes on the package underneath the seating area. The bomb inside the stadium had been under their seats all along — it was
their
lives that were in danger, not hers. Before she could ponder their fate further, Banjax was upon her. He struck her with several tentacles at once, booting her so hard that she soared into the sky.

Her gaming rig span her round so fast she nearly blacked out. The readout showed that she’d been exerted to three-g of acceleration. In the Gameworld, the blue sky soon turned black. Earth retreated into the distance and the Moon grew larger. Although the spinning soon slowed, she found that she was unable to control her movements. There was no ground beneath her, no walls or surfaces to push against.

Somehow Banjax
could
move with purpose: he managed to catch up and batter her once more. She careened into the International Space Station, sending several hundred spaceships spinning into deep space. As she spiralled away from him, passing the Moon on her way, she noticed something different about him. His outline was illuminated. He had a ghost-like aura, almost as though he’d been set on fire.

That was it — he’d strapped a jetpack on. She cursed herself for not thinking of it and quickly found one in her huge inventory, but before she could power away from him, he belted her at speed. She tumbled further into space, passing Mars. Earth grew tinier still. All seemed hopeless, beyond despair. There was no way she could beat him on her own.

Then a thought occurred to her. She hadn’t won Solarversia on her own. Like the gorilla and the kangaroo in Gori’s story, she’d only made it this far due to teamwork. She didn’t need to fight Banjax on her own; she needed to work with everyone else. If they couldn’t help her right now, what did it matter?
She could help them
. If anyone was able to provide Spiralwerks and MI6 with information about Theodore and the Holy Order, she was — she’d been obsessing over him since Sushi’s death. Similar to Project Drone, this situation was a puzzle that needed solving. Energised by a strand of hope, she hit her jetpack thrusters and blasted away from Banjax, deeper into space.

“Arty, if you can still hear me, I need you to listen. I don’t think there’s any way I can get back to the Colosseum in time to submit those puzzles. I haven’t even looked at them yet. We need to crack the MetaMyth password, it’s our only hope. You said it would take fifty years to crack by brute force. We can do better than that. Theodore’s obsessed with meaning and myth, especially in relation to the world of Solarversia. Tell the security team to restrict their password attempts to words and phrases from his manifesto and the Gameworld. And get them to prioritise passwords whose lengths are multiples of the number twelve.”

Using her jetpack, Nova managed to control her trajectory as she approached Jupiter. It looked so majestic, so real, that she had to tear herself away from its beauty to concentrate on the weapon of mass destruction that was fast gaining on her. With a jetpack strapped to each tentacle, he soon caught up.

“Why are you doing this?” she yelled, firing a Time Whisk towards him. He dodged it and knocked the whisk from her hand. “How can you claim to be the saviour of mankind when you deal in death and destruction?” She aimed at him with her Web Shooter. Again he smashed it free of her grasp, cackling as he did so. He reached out and grabbed her leg, then pulled her slowly toward him.

“Why? Because There Can Be Only One.” He raised a tentacle and pounded her in the gut. Another tentacle rose and smashed her in the face. Her health score ebbed down while her body took a pounding from the haptic bodysuit.

“What’s that got to do with killing loads of innocent people?”

“You exaggerate. What are a few people here and there? What’s a few hundred? Listen to me, Nova. Artificial superintelligence is almost upon us. The implications are enormous. And it’s likely that one — and only one — of these superintelligent beings will ever come into creation. As a Solo you can relate to that, right?
There Can Be Only One
! It’s imperative to the survival of the human race that we create a friendly ASI — the Magi.”

“And how is this—” He pinned both her arms behind her back, spun her round, kicked her away from him and caught her again — “How is
this
supposed to be
that
?”

“I tried the peaceful route for a long time, Nova, believe me. Nobody listened. People are listening now. A couple of billion to be precise. The cost of a few dozen lives will be seen as the bargain of the century when historians study this event in the future. It will be seen as a turning point in our destiny, the moment we collectively decided to consciously evolve. We can’t have every little tech company in Silicon Valley going their own way. Come to me, Nova, join the Holy Order. Take your rightful place at my side. You and everyone else who’s watching, you all need to know. I’ve almost created friendly superintelligence. I’m nearly there, closer than you imagine.”

“This is your idea of a recruitment drive? You can shove your ‘rightful place’ up your dodectapedal ass.”