Solarversia: The Year Long Game (6 page)

Instead of rushing to do something else straight away, she took a moment to take everything in. There was activity anywhere she cared to look, a sea of pulsing, throbbing motion so intense it felt quite dizzying. Even the ground she stood on — an object so dull and lifeless in the real world — was animated in a way that made it look like it possessed consciousness. The tessellated hexagons changed colour as she trod on them, and, as her datafeed now informed her, had also been programmed to react to certain commands.

She dragged her foot along like she was collecting autumn leaves and watched a wave of colour fan out from under her until it met hues flowing in the opposite direction, kicked, scuffed or punted by another player. The colours collided, rebounding and fracturing into a dozen new streams, giving rise to a chorus of chimes and jingles.

As she stared at the ground in awe, wishing pavements were like it for real, the datafeed informed her about several dozen variations of hopscotch that could be played, as well as a rumour — which had gone viral two hours ago — that certain combinations unlocked prizes. She found a list of patterns that were affiliated with charities and picked one.

Tapping out the sequence unlocked a red cross and sounded a jingle — the company sponsoring the pattern had just donated ten pence to the British Red Cross. There were thousands of partnerships like it across the Gameworld, and exercises varied in complexity. Small tasks like that one were usually linked to minor monetary contributions, but she’d heard of other ventures that required a lot more commitment.

A short way in front of her, a couple were gazing upwards, pointing and smiling. The sky was violet, rather than blue, and cast a surreal, diffuse glow over the land. Following their line of sight, she quickly spotted what they were looking at — giant puffs of white cloud, shaped like faces. Far beyond them, numerous aircraft — miniscule from her vantage point on the ground — performed aerobatics, looping, rolling and spinning.

“Did you get your plane yet?” the guy called out to her.

“I only got my car a short while ago,” she said with a proud nod in Flynn’s direction.

“You’ll need to do fifty miles without crashing before you can collect your boat from Dockingtons. Once you have your boat, you’ll be able to cruise to Tristan da Cunha to collect your plane. If you can complete the flying sequences, you can make a cloud in the shape of your face. The one that drifts furthest wins a prize!”

Nova smiled. She thought of herself as a Solarversia expert, yet the world was so large and complex that she learned something new about it all the time. She focused on the exhibitions around her again and plumped for one she’d heard lots about: the Tweel of Fate. As she crossed its boundary, the players around her disappeared. It was a phased zone; numerous people could inhabit it simultaneously, but it would appear to them that they were there alone.

Like Corona Cubes and Teleport Machines, Tweels of Fate were everywhere. They were modelled on Banjax the Dodectopus, and looked like the kind of roundabout you might find in a children’s playground.

Nova grabbed hold of the tentacle nearest to her — which, rather than tapering to a point, ended in a bulbous sphere — and gave it a big push.

The Tweel spun round its axis for ten seconds or so, then came to a shuddering rest. The turquoise tentacle that landed closest to her began to squirm and writhe, like it been rudely awoken, and then looked up at her. Its spherical end, which had the face of a wizened old man, opened its puckered mouth and spoke.

“Your fate for today is to receive three teleport tokens. Use them wisely.” The tokens registered immediately in her headset, while the tentacle lowered its face and solidified once more. It wasn’t a bad outcome for her very first twist of fate.

Pleased with her progress, and keen not to use too much of her birthday credit in one go, she volleyed an eye back to Fragging Hell and glanced around until she spotted Burner back in the main room hunkering over a plate of a chips and a burger. Realising that she was pretty hungry too, she located the nearest Corona Cube, logged out, and sauntered over to join him.

“I picked up Flynn, a handful of speed points and four teleport tokens. Pretty good, huh?”

“Still miles behind me then. Not that a mere mortal like yourself should ever compare themselves to the Master of the Solarverse.”

“Whatever; it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” she said, trying hard to feign nonchalance. “How’s your revision going, anyway?”

“Maths and further maths should be alright. I could probably do computer studies with my hands tied behind my back. Electronics is awesome — did I tell you, Jono’s asked me to send him the aerial drone I built for my coursework, reckons his professor wants to take a look? Physics, on the other hand. Don’t talk to me about bloody physics. What about you?”

“Let’s just say I’m doing enough to get a place at Hull. Nottingham’s looking unlikely. Sometimes I wish I was a total geek like you. Although revision’s a bit overrated, don’t you think?”

A better poker player than Burner would have spotted her bluff a mile off — the brush of the hair behind her ears, the lack of eye contact, and the try-hard laugh. She hadn’t even opened her books.

Chapter Seven

Arty looked down at the sword in his hands. He loved the way that the jewels in its handle sparkled; sometimes he thought he’d like to own one for real. It was an item known as the Sword of Sadism, and as one of the most powerful objects within Solarversia, only a few hundred of them would ever be in circulation at any one time.

He moved his thumb from the yellow topaz up to the blood-red ruby, circled it back across the string of pearls and ended up on the pink sapphire. This was the combination that initiated the weapon’s power move, the one that could defeat the toughest of monsters.

As his thumb came to rest on the sapphire, the jewels glistened brighter and a melody played. Now the sword moved, rotating Arty’s avatar on the spot until he became a human whirlwind. When he finally came to rest he gave a series of commands that allowed him to enter third-person perspective so that he could watch his avatar perform the move in front of his eyes. He knelt down and studied the power move from below, zooming in and out, cocking his head to one side or the other.

He removed his goggles and found himself back in the office. Twirling a clump of shaggy hair round his finger, he pondered the problem. Something looked wrong with the whirlwind from that angle — it looked more like a grey fuzzy beard than a scary tornado — but he struggled to explain how it was occurring. A bug in the code had been raised by the tech team a few days after the start of The Game and now, having been fixed, it sat with Arty for sign-off.

The feeling that players were
present
within the Gameworld was all-important to Spiralwerks — it was small glitches like this that gave the game away, and as Creative Director, as well as the CEO, it was Arty’s ultimate responsibility to sign off everything in it. The original glitch was definitely smoothed out, but something still wasn’t quite right.

He saw one of the guys in the technical team frantically wave in his direction and headed over. A minor problem like the strange-looking whirlwind could always wait. The team were crowded round Carl Stedman, the company’s Chief Technical Officer, who looked and sounded extremely stressed as he ran through a checklist.

“Carl. Guys. What’s the problem?”

“We’re being griefed. It’s a big attack. About thirty minutes ago the surveillance team received an alert highlighting a potential traffic issue at Ripley’s Junction on Alpha Island. A group of players arrived there around the same time and parked their cars bumper-to-bumper, hemming in thousands of others. The players who parked their cars got out of them, joined Conga World, and haven’t been seen since.”

Griefing was the gaming equivalent of trolling, an activity whose reward lay in the frustration of others. Griefers, usually organised in clans, harassed other players and sought to exploit aspects of the Gameworld in ways unintended by the designers. As quickly as the engineers came up with ways to block them, they would pop up to cause havoc somewhere else.

Arty put on his goggles and circled Ripley’s Junction from above, surveying the scene like he was in a helicopter.

“Those tailbacks go on for miles. Do we know how many players have been caught up in it?”

Carl jutted his jaw out and scratched his tightly curled brown beard. The dark bags under his eyes were a permanent feature of his face, making him look like he hadn’t slept in over a week.

“Fifteen thousand at the last count. Players are going mental on social media, as you might imagine.”

“Who’s responsible?”

“Nobody’s owned up yet. Some of the usual suspects have gone online to declare their innocence.”

“So what are our options? We need to act before it escalates any further.”

“Depends how organic we want the solution to be. We could zap everyone to the nearest Corona Cube. But it’s difficult to tell without further analysis which players were part of the original attack. It looks like loads of people got caught up in it, and have left their vehicles in frustration. If they’re in the middle of a quest, about to win a special item, and we mess with them, the fallout will be awful. If we go for a totally organic solution, like sending arkwinis out in tow trucks, it could take half a day to clear up.”

Arty removed the goggles, gazed at a sign above one of the workstations, which read ‘The Only Good Bug Is a Dead Bug’, and sighed. Why couldn’t people play nicely?

“OK, listen. I’ve got another meeting starting now. Ideally I’d like this dealt with using organic methods. Set up roadblocks to prevent the problem spreading. Get every spare arkwini on the case. And offer some small incentive for players to get to a Corona Cube of their own accord. Get one of your guys to ping me a report every fifteen minutes; we’ll play it by ear.”

Arty strolled to the lift checking his emails in his glasses. Before the lift doors could close he heard Hannah McCreadie calling his name. Looking flushed and sounding out of breath, she held a hand to her chest while she spoke.

“Thanks for holding the door, Arty. Something urgent has come up.”

“The griefing? I know, I was with the team just a second ago.”

“No, it’s worse than that. It’s about the Holy Order. MI6 have been in touch, the threat level has been upgraded to ‘substantial’. That means, and I quote, ‘An attack is a strong possibility’.”

Arty’s upper body slumped an inch forward like somebody had just powered him off. Being attacked in the game world felt hard enough. Having MI6 involved took it to a whole new level. The questions he had asked himself a hundred times reared their ugly heads in his mind again. Who the hell were the Holy Order? And why were Spiralwerks top of their corporate hit list?

***

The scenery hadn’t changed much in the last couple of hours, but Casey couldn’t get enough of it. He’d lived in the same tired city his whole life, where he’d fed his eyes on a diet of scrappy billboards and stark grey buildings. Out here in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, a place of peace and serenity, the air was so luscious that every breath was a treat.

Save for the occasional alligator, he and Wallace, in their kayaks, seemed to be the only things that moved. Right now his only problem was his hands, which throbbed after several hours of paddling upstream. His initiation ceremony ten days earlier was a distant memory. It felt so far in the past already that whenever his bones ached and his muscles spasmed he had to remind himself why.

Wallace turned to Casey and pointed the way, then changed course to glide past some creepers that hid a narrow channel from the main tributary. The men continued for some way, through vines and past bushes, steering a path that Casey knew he’d be incapable of retracing even if his life depended on it, until finally they drifted into a clearing.

“It’s something, ain’t it?” Wallace said, noticing his companion’s dazed look. “Took us years to build, and it ain’t even finished, not close. Welcome to the Compound.”

Rising out of the swampland was a village on stilts, formed of a series of camouflaged buildings and wooden gangways that blended uncannily into their environment. They pulled up beside a steel ladder affixed to a small jetty. Casey used it to steady himself while he scanned the surrounding bogs. In the background an army of spring peepers emitted their sleigh-bell-like chorus.

“Do you ever get used to the mosquitoes?” he asked, slapping his arm for the umpteenth time.

“After a while they bother you less, but I’ll get you some spray.”

They climbed the ladder and helped each other drag the kayaks onto the jetty. Wallace pulled a pack of Chesterfields out of his jeans and sparked one up with a flick of his golden Zippo before continuing the tour. “The layout isn’t as confusing as it looks: it consists of four buildings and the Sub. You see that camouflaged marquee? That’s the Ceremonial Lodge, reserved for special occasions. The grey building in the corner is known as the Workshop, the place we build and repair stuff. The long building with the round windows is called Control House. It’s kind of like the nerve centre of the organisation. In all there’s over a thousand of us, in twenty different countries, spread around the world.”

“It’s a global network then?”

“Yessir. And growing fast. Intelligent folk — like yourself — know we’re on to something. Mankind’s about to lose its place at the top of the food chain. There’s no harm in having a little respect for the beings that are going to replace us. You made the right decision by joining us, put it that way.”

Casey grinned at him. The past year was full of bad decisions. It felt good to know that he was finally making some good ones.

“The other building you can see is the Lockup. Let’s stash the kayaks there, and then I’ll show you to your bunk.”

Casey slung his sack of possessions behind his back, used his chin to clamp it against his shoulder, and then pulled the kayak behind him with trembling arms. Their morning had begun at 5:00 a.m. with the smell of coffee boiling over kerosene, and though Wallace had encouraged him to rest for days, he felt exhausted. The thought that there was a bunk somewhere for him gave him the strength to keep going.