Solarversia: The Year Long Game (62 page)

Burner pointed to the stands where a section of crowd had been evacuated. A young woman spoke into a journalist’s mic, but did half the talking with her hands. She kept pointing, first at her own knuckle, then at Nova. A dozen policemen lined the route where a man in handcuffs was being escorted out of the stadium. Nova caught a glimpse of his face, half expecting to see Raymond. It was nobody she recognised, a lone stalker perhaps.

“What’s that on the headset?” The headset had fallen off Mr Negrahnu’s head and was lying beside him on the ground. Charlie retrieved it and handed it to Artica. Embedded in the rim was a tiny ceramic missile, a centimetre long.

Arty peered into the headset’s display. Handling it with care, he held the visor up to his face and used his eyes to navigate through a series of menus and selected to watch a replay of the last few minutes. A small crowd gathered around him and waited in silence.

Through the display he saw a shot of the spectators as the float drove round the track — people cheering, waving, boxes of popcorn and huge foam hands, objects here and there augmented with text and animation. The banners and posters had 3D letters that danced in time to the beat. Mr Negrahnu must have turned to read some lyrics emanating from the sound system, because the words of
We Are the Champions
filled the display. Then an alert popped into view, its letters red, its box flashing.
Gogmagog, critical alert
. The Gogmagog system pulled focus to a man in the crowd, shining a red laser at the float. The view switched to a cam on a drone showing that the red beam of light had settled on Nova’s jacket. The alert upped a gear:
Take immediate action
.

Arty handed the headset to a waiting agent and turned to Nova with a grim expression. “Your dad knew we were in danger. That’s why he launched himself at us. He threw himself in the line of that dart.”

As her dad was carried past her on a stretcher, Nova felt her legs give way a little. A thin line of blood was trickling down his neck, where another of the tiny darts had pierced his skin.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Arty leant back in his chair and watched Hannah as she navigated her way through one of Nakk-oo’s many maze-like suburbs. Usually so prim and proper, he loved how she turned into an excited little kid who squealed and shrieked the second she put a headset on.

“What am I looking at exactly? Don’t tell me it’s going to come to life like that picnic table did earlier.”

“We haven’t given them a proper name yet. They’re called ‘terminals’ for now. The design will probably change too. Go up to it and type in your player number. It’s safe, I promise.”

“If something jumps out at me again, you’re in serious trouble Arty, you understand? OK, that’s my number typed in. Woah, this is really weird. Where did Nakk-oo go?”

“You just left it. You’re now in a world within a world, nested one level deep.”

“This is screwing with my head. My movements are all back to front, like one of those trick cycles at the fair. I feel like I’ve necked a glass of wine and been spun on the spot.”

She held on to the real-world desk in front of her and continued to squeal as she investigated the alien landscape in front of her. Arty smiled. They’d received some great feedback on the concept of ‘worlds within worlds’. They weren’t sub-games as such, like Krazy Karting had been, but represented entirely new Gameworlds, with their own set of rules and their own objectives.

Along with the introduction of two new vehicles — submarines and private spaceships — these new features were part of the drive to create a Game in 2024 that represented a genuine stride forward in terms of the complexity of the overall experience. Given the number of competitors that had sprung up in the world of VR in the last couple of years, maintaining a creative edge had become vital to Spiralwerks’ success.

He swivelled round in his chair to face the giant screen at the front of the room. It had been configured to display the closing credits, which were designed to be a piece of art in their own right. They’d started the second the closing ceremony had finished and were scheduled to run until midnight on the 28th February 2024, the starting time of the next Game.

Unlike standard motion picture credits, which scrolled vertically, the credits of Solarversia spiralled their way out from square number one of the Player’s Grid, using the original set of player numbers, rather than the new ones. Solos had been asked to provide a ‘credits clip’ — a few seconds of animation that showed their avatar waving, cheering or goofing around.

The broadcast schedule was known in advance, and Solos all over the world had planned parties for the few seconds their avatar was in focus. Some were taking the event seriously and treating it like their very own film premiere.

A woman in Sweden had bought a red carpet, rolled it out from her front door and hired a ton of paparazzi to greet guests in style. She made everyone watch her highlights reel before having the party of her life — and now Solos everywhere were concocting ever more extravagant events in a bid to outdo one another.

Arty glanced from the endless procession of waving avatars to Carl’s empty seat and once again, he felt sad. Although it had been generally agreed — by Solos and those in the gaming industry — that Solarversia had been a huge success, it had also been agreed that the way in which it had ended had been close to a disaster.

The investigation into how Markowsky had managed to hack his way into the back end was both time-consuming and extremely stressful. Carl, who as Chief Technical Officer was ultimately responsible for security, had had a nervous breakdown and was on leave. And there were times when Arty thought he wasn’t close behind.

He swivelled back round to face Hannah, put his mug of tea down on the desk and picked up an Electropet Gorigaroo. As he gently squeezed its stomach, Arty reflected on the teamwork that had got Spiralwerks through the year. It wasn’t just about the incredible amount of hard work that had been put in by Spiralheads, as invaluable as that had been.

In large part their success rested on the numerous partnerships they’d developed in the previous few years. A lot of the technology was provided by outside companies, many of them based in London. He shuddered to think what would have happened at the closing ceremony if they hadn’t partnered with Max and Maurice, the creators of Gogmagog, not to mention the companies that supplied the drones and the cameras.

The increased size and complexity of the next Game would mean having to strengthen those existing partnerships and forge plenty of new ones. Only yesterday he’d been on the phone to Nova Negrahnu, discussing her ideas ahead of her visit to the office. He was very interested in one of her suggestions: to let Souls play the next Game.

The notion of visiting a computerised version of a departed loved one had become commonplace for many people. It sounded like many of them wanted to take those relationships to the next level. The technology to create an avatar from photos and video footage alone was already in place; it was the small matter of implementing it in a respectful, considerate way.

He took a sip a tea and pondered the thought. On paper the idea sounded ludicrous. Though the craziest part to Arty was that the idea no longer seemed so crazy.
What next?
he wondered.

***

Once Nova had finally built up the courage to revisit Soul Surfer a few weeks after the Grand Final, she was amazed at the speed in which she was able to reconfigure Computer Sushi. Partly it was due to the algorithms that made Souls appear human — they’d been greatly improved since Nova first used the app. But it was also due to her familiarity with seeing her friend in a computerised state and her previous experience in tweaking Sushi’s settings to make her the person Nova remembered and loved.

What Nova had specifically chosen
not
to do during the configuration process was provide Sushi with access to real-world news sources beyond the date of the terrorist attack that had killed her. Soul Surfer had gone to great lengths to provide users with such functionality so they could reintroduce events to their loved ones when they felt ready to do so.

In Nova’s case, it was nothing to do with not feeling ready — it was that she wanted the two of them to watch her highlights reel together so that she could experience the excitement of it as if for the first time. For the past three hours they had been watching clips from her reel. Sushi had hundreds of questions about each one and the two of them obsessed over every last one of the decisions she’d made.

Sushi had just spent the last minute screaming with joy and running around her bench, having watched Nova correctly answer the last question in Arty’s Answers to knock out Holly and send Nova through to the penultimate round. Finally, Sushi slumped back onto the bench, shaking with excitement and out of breath.

“Oh. My. God. This is getting ridiculously redonculous.
Every
time I think you’re going to crash out, you end up smashing it for six. I love the way you knocked Holly out, but this is getting too much. I honestly don’t know what might happen to my algorithm if you end up winning. I think I might go into meltdown or something. Tell me right now. Do you end up winning?”

“That’s the bazillionth time you’ve asked. You’re going to have to wait to find out.”

“The ninth time actually. But who’s counting? Other than me, I mean.”

Nova giggled. It felt great to have her friend back. She wasn’t identical to the original Computer Sushi, at least not yet, but she was about 90% of the way there. And seeing how Nova had thought the original Computer Sushi was about 70% identical to the real one, she figured Computer Sushi 2 — the name the girls had settled on for the time being — was about 63% identical to the real one. Which was 63% better than not having her friend there at all.

“Download everything up to 7 p.m. on Saturday 20th February. This round was called the Sixty Second Solicitation. What an absolute nightmare. As if the Show and Tell round didn’t stress me out enough. For this one I had to record a minute-long video that persuaded people to vote me through. It was terrifying.”

Sushi’s eyes flickered at a hundred miles an hour while she processed several terabytes worth of information. Once up to speed, she sat in silence for a few moments. They’d been playing a game where Sushi tried to guess what was going to happen next — whether Nova would kill or escape from the chasing circus animal, whether she’d successfully complete the Combination or answer the question, or how soon she’d solve whatever Puzzle she faced at the time.

“Let me think about this. I would have said your parents got a mention, obviously. Charlie, not so much. You’d only been together for forty-seven days and fifteen hours when you recorded your video. The Nova I think I know wouldn’t have seen that as grounds for inclusion in a video as important as this. I reckon you would have mentioned the money for sure. You would have gone into ‘psychology mode’ and tried to second-guess the voting populace. Then there’s me, of course. I was your best friend in the world while I was alive, then there was all that stuff with my tragic death and the fact that we’d declared ourselves to be Solarversia Sisters … given all that, if you
didn’t
mention me you can get the hell out of Soul Surfer and not come back.” She paused. “That last bit wasn’t too harsh, was it?”

Nova cracked up. She loved it when Sushi got all accurate with her timings and threw them into the conversation like it was totally normal. She loved more the genuine feeling she had that Computer Sushi 2 was actually self-aware to some degree — a self-awareness that included the fact that she was a computerised version of her old real self, able to make references to that fact, to even make light of it. It was so
Sushi
of her.

“Your predictions have been getting increasingly accurate. I swear, if you’ve been cheating, I’ll tweak your algorithm to turn you into everything you once hated and then leave you here to stew for an eternity.”

“No cheating, I promise. This round’s different. I’m not just guessing at which of several possibilities came to fruition like in some of the other rounds. This one involved you baring your soul to the world. This was the Nova I knew. Obviously I’ve got no idea what you actually said — which words you used or the you used them in, but I reckon those are the likely topics you covered.”

Nova nodded her head in amazement. “This is the first time I’ve watched it since the day at the Trumpton when they counted the votes. I can barely remember the words I used either, but I know that you’re spot on. Here goes.”

Nova gave the command for the app to start the video. It was a close-up shot — just her head and shoulders, and the grey curtain of the recording booth. She’d swept her hair back into a ponytail and gone for minimal makeup — a dash of mascara and some neutral lipstick. She self-consciously blinked into the camera a few times and then started talking.

“Hi. My name’s Nova Negrahnu and I’ve got sixty seconds to persuade you to vote for me. If I’d recorded this video a year ago it would have been very different. I’d have tried to impress you with my knowledge of the Science, I would have told you about my lifelong desire to be a game designer and I would have reeled off a whole list of stuff I wanted to buy with the prize money. But a lot can happen in a year. A lot
has
happened, both to the world and to me personally. So I’m no longer going to speak about the Science. Everyone still in at this point is a master, to some degree. What I want to talk about instead is what I’ve learned. I now know what’s most important in life — our relationships with our loved ones, something I’ll never take for granted again. My parents have been hurting a lot these days because my dad’s been out of work for a while, so whatever I win, I’m going to give some of the money to him to help get them back on their feet. I’ve also learned what it feels like to lose someone you love, to have them taken away from you. I lost my best friend, Sushi Harrison, in the terrorist attacks last April. When we first heard about Solarversia we declared ourselves Solarversia Sisters and promised to split any winnings. When she died, I thought I’d have to go it alone. But I haven’t. I’ve learned that even if There Can Be Only One, one isn’t enough. I’d never have got to where I am in The Game without my friends and the support I’ve had at uni. I’d never have helped to locate the Holy Order without Solar Soc. And I wouldn’t have got through the stress of it all if I hadn’t been able to visit Sushi’s Soul in Soul Surfer. So I want to dedicate this video to her, because I’d be nowhere without her.”