Solarversia: The Year Long Game (60 page)

Banjax sneered at her. He held out two of his tentacles in front of his face. The grid of lights on his bionic armbands flashed into life, beaming a holographic image of a girl’s face into the space between them. As the face rotated into Nova’s view, she recoiled sharply. It was Sushi. Her long blonde hair was tied in a bun, leaving a willowy wisp to fall either side of her ears.

“Soul Surfer is another company blindly chasing artificial superintelligence, no thought spared for what would happen if they actually created it. As you know, I paid them a visit a few days ago and penalised them for being so reckless. I kept a copy of their data before I deleted it from their servers. This is your final chance. Join me, and I’ll resurrect your friend. Fail to do so and I’ll wipe the last year’s worth of your relationship for good.”

Nova stared at the face of her dead friend. The intense pain she’d felt in the days following the bombing came flooding back — the feeling that a part of her heart had been taken forever. She wanted her friend back more than anything in the world. She’d give up the championship and everything it entailed — the fame, the fortune, and the chance to be a game designer for real — in an instant, no thinking required, even if it was only a computerised version of her friend that she was being offered.

There was one big problem with the offer — it came from the guy who had taken Sushi from her in the first place. A crazy guy with a warped idea of how to make the world a better place. As much as it pained her to lose Computer Sushi, there were some things she’d
never
do to get her back. And joining Theodore Markowsky was right at the top of that list.

She took a deep breath and mentally steadied herself. It was torture not knowing how Arty was progressing. She needed to stay alive and she needed a plan. As she cycled through her inventory, searching for any item that might be of use, she noticed a white baton floating her way. When it got closer she realised that it was one of the spaceships that had been docked on the ISS. It flew past Banjax’s head, near enough that she was able to catch the pointed nose end.

“I already gave you my final answer. Here’s something else you can shove up your ass.”

She flipped the spacecraft in the air, caught hold of its elongated frame, pulled her leg into her body to draw Banjax closer, then swiped at him like a madwoman. He held his tentacles up to protect his head so their spherical ends drooped around him like a bunch of old daffodils clutched tight by the stems. Nova took aim and swiped straight through the centre of the bunch with the nose of the spaceship. Banjax released her from his grip and recoiled in horror. They both watched as the turquoise balloons floated off into space, trailing lines of slimy white pus behind them.

Banjax lowered his decapitated tentacles and smiled straight at her. A malevolent laugh escaped him. Then the raw, severed ends of his tentacles swelled. A new sphere was forming on each. They grew and grew, like balloons being blown, and then suddenly sprouted into pairs, like cells dividing. Two brand new spheres leered from each arm.

He swivelled them round so each faced Nova. In every tentacle, another version of Sushi’s head appeared. Her twenty-four faces pulled horrible, deformed expressions. Her friend was screaming in agony, howling in terror, convulsing in the depths of grief, all at the same time. One head turned to its neighbour and threw up a putrid green mess into its mouth.

Nova froze, unable to turn away from the spectacle in front of her. Theodore’s voice had changed again, as if he had mixed nine parts Banjax to one part Sushi. Whatever he, she or it was saying, Nova couldn’t hear. Her body wanted to shut itself down, to escape the writhing horror that approached her.

She brought her hand up to her face, wanting to pull her visor free of her head. She had had all she could take of Theodore’s game, had reached the end of the line. With less than a minute left on the clock, it didn’t matter anyway. She was defeated; he had won.

As her hand moved closer to her face she saw that she was still holding the spacecraft. Inside it, through one of the windows, there was movement, two arkwinis frantically waving their arms. They weren’t wearing their usual little spacesuits. Instead, they were clothed like Burner and Charlie. She managed a weak smile and wondered whether she was dreaming or dying. Then she realised, these weren’t arkwinis in her friends’ clothes. It was them, it was the guys.

Each of them held up a large white card. Charlie, standing on the left, held a card displaying a vertical line. Burner, standing on the right, held a card displaying a circle. A vertical line and a circle. They kept pointing, first at their cards, then at her. She was the number ten? Was Burner trying to communicate with her using binary? She stared at the two of them. What on Earth were they talking about? Maybe they weren’t talking about something on Earth. Nova was in deep space. Orbiting Jupiter to be precise. One of Jupiter’s moons was called Io. I-O! Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that it was headed her way.

She tapped her thrusters to rotate her body slightly and then, just as Banjax was about to reach her, she spun on the spot, steadied herself and with all her might, booted the moon straight at him. It struck the centre of his body and kept moving, unimpeded. With Banjax’s great body sprawled around its surface, the moon spiralled ever faster towards the great gas giant.

The explosion, as Banjax struck Jupiter’s Red Spot, was the most beautiful thing she had ever witnessed. Io was a crucible, an aggregation of volcanoes — the most geologically active object in the Solar System. As the moon collided with its planet, each volcano began to erupt. Megatons of fiery molten lava spewed onto the beast, pummelling him with an endless, boiling ocean of fire.

And then Banjax’s body seemed to warp, distorting horribly into a swirling nothingness at the heart of the Great Red Spot. He was being sucked into the cyclone. First his head elongated and was pulled in, and then each of his tentacles, drawn together as if they were being clutched by a great hand intent on squeezing the life out of them. Bobbing on their tips were the twenty-four demonic Sushi heads. Nova watched in horror as they stretched and narrowed and disappeared into the darkness.

And then there was stillness. Nova glanced at the countdown timer in her display. It had stopped at twelve seconds.

The madness had finally come to an end.

Chapter Fifty-One

Nova was shaking so much that it took three security guards to help her out of her rig. The real world was even more surreal than the virtual. There was so much to take in, her senses felt like they were under assault. Dozens of drones hovered overhead, their lenses zooming in and out to get shots of the Solarversia Grand Champion.

Footage of the final few seconds of the fight against Theodore played on the giant screens around the stadium. Lasers danced in time to thudding electro beats. Even the towering Electropet characters seemed to nod their heads and gyrate their limbs in time to the tune. She barely noticed the bitter February breeze as it whipped through the arena, the medics checking her over, or the attendant who helped her into a Spiralwerks jacket.

One of the guards said something to her, words she was unable to process. She looked at him blankly until he pointed to the stands. Artica Kronkite, illuminated by a large spotlight, was leading her parents, Burner and Charlie to the arena. They ran across the track to a fresh eruption of applause. She hugged them in turn, and then as one. Tears rolled down her cheeks, though she wasn’t aware of laughing or crying. Finally she turned to Arty. He signalled to someone in the stands. The drones backed away from them before he joined their group huddle.

“You did it, champ. You enabled us to crack the password. It was a verse from the manifesto with exactly 144 characters.”

“One four four? That’s twelve by twelve … of course.”

“Once we got into the program we uncoupled the bombs from the puzzles, but we didn’t want to pull the plug in case Theodore had programmed something we’d missed. MI6 asked that we leave you playing until we’d either gone through every line of code, or you’d defeated Banjax. That’s when your friends had their brainwave.”

“I remembered the Red Spot on Jupiter, and Charlie wondered if you might be able to use one of its moons to send him there.”

Charlie, more excited than she’d ever seen him, piped up. “We weren’t sure how to communicate with you given that Theodore had cut the comms link. The gaming team reckoned it would take a few minutes to re-establish it, and we didn’t know what would happen if we tried to interrupt you in the real world. I thought about the Arkwini astronaut that you keep on your shelf at uni, the one you won in the darts. I asked if we might be able to use the arkwinis to help us.”

“Then I remembered our tour of Castalia. The Underdome’s got that special teleporter, the one with the bare signpost that allows arkwinis to teleport absolutely anywhere. Total and utter genius,” Burner said with a huge smile.

Arty patted the boys on the back and then looked at Nova with a sombre expression. “I’m afraid I don’t know what happens now. The end of The Game was supposed to lead into the award ceremony, and the victory parade from there, but Theodore’s attack has totally thrown us. MI6 won’t let anyone leave until they’re a hundred percent sure the stadium’s safe, and most of my staff are pretty shaken. What about you, Nova, do you feel up to the prize ceremony? You’d have a pretty good excuse if you wanted to go and lie down instead.”

Nova raised her eyebrows at him. “I haven’t been flung halfway across the galaxy to go and lie down somewhere. I’ve been dreaming of this moment for years — please don’t change anything on my behalf.”

Arty nodded, turned away, and spoke into his earpiece, “Cue the ceremony.” In the centre of the arena two large semi-circular sections of track rose a few inches off the ground and moved apart to reveal a hole, out of which rose an Electropet Emperor Mandelbrot. A winners’ podium was pushed alongside the Emperor’s dais to where Nova, Ozwald and Jools van der Star were led.

The crowd cheered as the screens displayed the highlights for each of them in turn, culminating in van der Star being ruthlessly torn apart by the Obarians, and Ozwald getting bisected by the Huntropellimous. Nova watched her highlights reel in awe. Her initial game of Paper, Scissors, Stone seemed like a lifetime ago. She watched herself just missing out on the Earth Force Field trigger in Bouncy Baltimore, and her success throwing the twig twogs to lure Travinsky back to his musical tree.

She saw the chase through the department store and the ride she and Burner had hitched with Pedro on his Winged Beauties. She watched spellbound until finally, she saw herself floating in space, her legs entangled with Banjax’s tentacles, Sushi’s numerous heads haunting her every move.

Theodore’s offer echoed through her mind. The knowledge that she’d been given an opportunity to resurrect her friend — and turned it down — felt like a weight, crushing her soul. She wouldn’t have accepted his offer in a million years, but her refusal left her feeling empty inside. Did she have the energy to start over with Sushi, she wondered? A shiver went down her spine as she watched the beast spin towards the Red Spot, where he was devoured by lava from a hundred volcanoes.

The crowd quietened as Arty projected his voice into the crowd. "Ladies and gentlemen, I’m not quite sure how to … the events of this evening … things should be different.” Looking like he might break down and cry, he stopped talking and took a few moments to pull himself together. “As you all now know, the events of this evening turned out to be very different to the ones we had planned. A certain group of individuals, for reasons that don’t make sense to the average person, felt compelled to endanger the lives of countless people around the world. The courage and tenacity displayed by my colleagues tonight meant that crisis was averted. From the bottom of my heart, I’d like to thank everyone at Spiralwerks. You fared so well under pressure, it will never be forgotten. I’d also like to thank the many security guards and agents who unfalteringly risked their lives for others. And to you, the people in the crowd — here at the stadium and around the world — thank you for coming together to solve the challenges that were thrown at us. One of those affected tonight, perhaps the most courageous of them all, told me she wanted the prize ceremony to go ahead regardless of what happened here tonight, and for people to celebrate the end of The Game, as it deserves to be celebrated. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for your Grand Champion, the one, the only, Super Nova 2020."

With the crowd going wild around them, Arty presented each of the three winners with their prizes. Nova leaned forward so that he could place a flowery lei around her neck and then shook the hands of Ozwald and Jools. Van der Star pursed his lips and nodded his head at her. It was enough. She nodded back, and turned her attention back to Arty.

“Here’s your cheque. That’s a pound for every ten people you beat,” he said with a wink. Holding the oversized cheque above her head, she showed it off to the crowd. There were wolf whistles, whoops and loud applause. She bowed self-consciously a few times, felt herself blush a little and was pleased to see that attention had turned to Electropet Arkwal, now lumbering towards her. Arkwal leaned down and placed a long, rectangular box onto the table in front of the podium. Inside were nine intricately patterned spheres. Arty picked the closest sphere and held it out in front of her.

“Each globe represents one of the planets in the Solar System. You can program your own command later, but for now your catchphrase works. You just need to say it out loud.”

She leaned forward and said “Supernova’s a Blast.” Suddenly she didn’t hate her catchphrase anymore. It was true — she had
blasted
it. A small hole appeared at the top of the sphere, out of which a hologram was projected. It was the Killanja, Mercury’s Grandmaster, wearing his white robes, rotating in the space above the sphere.

Memories from the Planetary Puzzles came flooding back: the way she’d pole vaulted away from Jumping Jacks restaurant to escape the flood, the time she found the little figurine whistling in the stockroom cupboard. Already, the spheres were among her favourite things ever.