Solarversia: The Year Long Game (8 page)

“That’s it, well done. I thought you lot looked brighter than the average group. Between them, these two machines save us thirteen minutes a day per arkwini. And with thousands of arkwinis aboard at any one time, well, you do the math.”

Nova watched the little arkwini who had just been readied for bed. She felt quite tender towards him, the way he put his head on the pillow, sighed with a sleepy smile, and fell fast asleep, despite the fact that he’d only been halfway through lunch when his day was brought to an end.

It was details like these — the way in which arkwinis genuinely seemed to lead their own lives, eating, sleeping and working — that helped immerse players in the Gameworld, engaging them on an emotional level and encouraging them to explore the rich, layered backstories of its peculiar inhabitants.

Nova was so intent on the little rise and fall of the arkwini’s chest and the room’s quiet snore that she failed to notice Burner creeping up behind her. He barged into her with his shoulder, aiming her at the Wake-a-nator. She staggered toward the machine, trying hard to retain her balance.

“You, miss. What do you think you’re doing? Stop right there. You’re not asleep, you stupid girl, you don’t need wake-a-nating. I command you to stop right now.”

Before she could stop, six pairs of mechanical arms and hands sprang to life and dragged her, screaming, into the machine. They brushed her teeth with vigour, pulled a comb through her hair and splashed water on her face. She couldn’t help laughing when little puffs of perfumed air blew in her face to dry her, and was almost enjoying the experience when she realised that the machine would at any second try to undress her of her ‘pyjamas’ and put her in an arkwini uniform. There was no way she was going to allow her avatar a moment of nudity in front of this lot. She slipped down to her knees and crawled forward on her belly until she was out of the machine and out of harm’s way.

“That was
not
,” Arkwal said, “part of the tour. I don’t know why I bother sometimes, I really don’t. You wait until the Emperor hears about this. He’s deducted health points from players in the past, you realise? It certainly wasn’t
my
fault, that much is clear.”

He stopped muttering, patted his suit down and then turned toward the group in an officious manner.

“Right then, it’s time for the next part of the tour. We’re heading through the skylight over there. No dillydallying at the back. And certainly no playing the fool,” he added with a glare in Nova’s direction. The group followed Arkwal out of the skylight and assembled around him on the roof of the cube.

“Earlier I mentioned the structure of Castalia, and the fact that abutting each face of the Magisterial Chamber there is a large hemisphere. The architecture of the palace is based on fractal geometry. On each of the six hemispheres are six smaller hemispheres, and from each of those, six even smaller hemispheres blossom. This regression continues indefinitely; hence its fractal nature. It’s the six large hemispheres that you need to know about. We were just inside the one on the roof — the Overdome. Next we’re going to investigate the Eastdome.”

Arkwal got the tour group to line up along the edge of the roof, which looked down on Alpha Island, from here a dining-plate sized ‘A’ in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He stood at one end of the line and bent over the edge so that everyone could see him. Glancing between Arkwal and the ocean far below, Nova felt quite nauseous.

“You might think that if you leaned too far over the edge, you’d plummet to your death,” Arkwal yelled along the line.

He held his arms out by his sides, put a leg out and stepped forward. Nova’s hands shot to her mouth; around her, the tour group gasped. But instead of falling to his death, Arkwal flopped over the side and confidently stepped onto the east face of Castalia, sticking out from its side like a nail in the wall.

“Well, you’d be wrong. Not sure if I mentioned it, but the Emperor’s a master of space and time. He can do funny things with gravity. He designed Castalia so that the six outer faces have a gravitational pull equal to that on Earth. You can walk around the outside of the palace, from face to face, without falling off. In fact, you couldn’t fall off if you tried. Takes a bit of getting used to, mind. Right then, your turn.”

Nova exchanged a worried look with Burner. They were so high that some of the birds below them looked nothing more than pulsing black dots. But as the group followed Arkwal’s lead one by one, her confidence grew. She reached out, grabbed Burner’s hand, and together, they flopped over the edge.

She couldn’t help but grin when her foot stuck safely to the side. Ahead of her the horizon appeared as a vertical line. The ocean wasn’t below her, it was to her right; the sky — filled with clouds whose face-like shapes had now been distorted by the wind — to her left. She walked back to the cube’s edge to flop onto the roof, seesawed back and forth between the roof and the east face for a bit, and then walked along the edge itself at forty-five degrees, pretending to balance like a tightrope walker.

When she got to the cube’s vertex she discovered that she could navigate three faces just as easily. She skipped from face to face, playing her own game of gravitational hopscotch. Then she knelt down, put her right hand on the tip of the vertex, used her left to spin herself around and slowly raised her body above her head so that she performed a spinning one-armed handstand on Castalia’s tip. She spun for a while, taking the world in from this unconventional angle, before she heard Burner shouting for her.

“Come on, Scotia, we’re on the move. You don’t want to get in trouble again.”

She lowered herself back down and ran to join the assembled throng who were gathered round Arkwal, standing by a skylight that looked into the Eastdome.

“The domes affixed to the four sides of Castalia all play extremely important roles,” Arkwal said. “The Eastdome and its counterpart, the Westdome, are the places where all of Solarversia’s game items are spawned before they’re won by a player somewhere. As you can see, keeping the items sufficiently stocked is a mammoth undertaking. Only the fastest, hardest-working arkwinis are eligible to work in the East- and Westdomes.”

Nova pressed her face against the skylight and gawped at what she saw. Inside, hundreds of arkwinis in forklift trucks and exosuits were hurrying around sorting, cataloguing and arranging a multitude of items in the largest warehouse she had ever seen.

Game items were stored in huge crates on shelves that reached right the way to the ceiling: teleport tokens, weapons power-ups of every kind. An arkwini sped toward the skylight in his forklift, performed a handbrake turn, hurriedly stored the box that he was transporting on the end of one of the shelves, removed the forks from under it and whizzed off back down the aisle.

A stamp on the side of the box declared that it contained sixty jars of Skidz. Within seconds the rectangular space below the content information on the box flashed into life. It displayed the profile information for a player who had just won a jar after spinning a Tweel of Fate somewhere, and the inventory number ticked down to fifty-nine. Hundreds of boxes and crates flashed in a similar manner until they were empty, whereupon they were replaced by a tired-looking arkwini. Arkwal took note of the wide-eyed expressions of the tour group.

“Don’t even think about trying to break in, by the way. There’s always one thinks they’re being original and clever. They get in their plane, land on one of Castalia’s faces and try to blast their way in, thinking that they’re about to pull off the heist of the century. Even if you managed to break into the dome — which is highly unlikely in the first place — the anti-heist mechanism would prevent you from escaping.”

Arkwal retrieved his telescope from his pocket, performed a few calculated twists of its cylindrical sections and then walked away. Nova went to follow him, and, finding that her feet were well and truly stuck to the ground, nearly fell over on the spot before reaching out to Burner to steady herself. Around her, everyone in the group had been similarly affected and remained glued in place until Arkwal shook his ’scope, reversing the mechanism.

“Remember — the Emperor’s a master of space and time. His palace, his rules. Next stop: the Underdome.” The chimp marched down the face of the cube, flipped himself ninety degrees forward at the bottom edge and disappeared to the underside of Castalia. Nova elbowed Burner hard in the ribs — revenge for the Wake-a-nator incident — and chased after Arkwal.

If walking on the side of the palace had been a curious experience, walking on its underside was stranger yet. Nova looked up to see Alpha Island in the Atlantic Ocean and down, over the edge of the palace, to the great blue sky beneath her. The crowd squealed with delight when a gull flew by, flapping its wings the wrong way up, looking nothing like a creature that should have been able to fly.

Arkwal hurried them into the Underdome. An enormous furnace took pride of place in the centre of the floor, gobbling down a blue gravelly substance that a team of arkwinis were shovelling into its fiery tank. Around the edges of the room, thousands of stacked crates formed erratic columns that stretched all the way to the ceiling and looked like they might topple over at any second.

Each bore the flag of a different country and was stamped with the imported contents it contained: foodstuffs, plants, vegetation, minerals, liquids and narcotics. A small army of arkwinis in warehouse overalls were driving forklifts piled high with crates, slotting them into gaps or starting new stacks.

“Who can tell me what the flag is on that crate? Very good, madam, it
is
the Russian flag. As you can see from the stamp on its side, the crate contains two hundred kilos of beluga caviar, a favourite of the Emperor. Whenever he hosts a Year-Long Game on a new planet, he always samples everything it has to offer. He’s still hoping to find something as tasty as the sautéed Petrifier brains his mother used to make. They have, what you lot might refer to as a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’. Now if you’ll follow me, we’re off to meet the Chief Molecular Gastronomer. Feel free to ask questions as we go. But keep your mitts off the food.”

Nova quickly spotted the arkwini that Arkwal had referred to. A pair of yellow rubber gloves and a chef’s hat that doubled his height complemented his bleached white lab coat. He clutched a clipboard close to his chest and strode the length of the open-plan kitchen like he owned the place. Following close behind him were a gaggle of junior chefs carrying various kitchen utensils.

The Gastronomer stopped beside an oversized wok that contained a bubbling brownish paste and leaned over to inspect its contents. His large nostrils twitched as he wafted its aroma towards his face. One of his shadows handed him a ladle, which he used to taste the concoction. He swilled the paste from cheek to cheek, then spat it out.

“Add two pounds of chicken livers, seven ounces of margarine, and simmer for three hours,” he shrieked in a German accent at no one in particular. He scribbled something on to his clipboard and an arkwini ran off to do his bidding. The group fell in once more around Arkwal.

“The Emperor consumes five to six metric tonnes of produce every day, washed down by one of several cocktails. His current favourite is the Panama Pooky, which consists of Cognac and white crème de cacao. Here on Earth you’d usually garnish it with nutmeg; the Emperor prefers a clove or six of garlic.”

“A clove or six of garlic?” a well-dressed French woman asked. “Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.” She smirked at Arkwal, delighted with her remark.

“I trust you aren’t questioning the Emperor’s taste, madam, especially not while you’re a guest aboard his palace. He’s been known to eat an old baguette or two in his time.” Arkwal gestured toward to the furnace with a nod of his head. “Unless there were any other, less inane, questions, that concludes the tour of the palace.”

“What about the North- and Southdomes?” Burner asked. “We never got to see those.”

“A sensible question for a change. The North- and Southdomes are used in one of the final rounds, so you’ll get to see them then. Although it’s highly unlikely that any of you will make it that far. You know, statistically speaking.”

“Excuse me, Mr Arkwal,” Nova said. “That teleport machine over there, the one being guarded by a bunch of arkwinis. The signpost is bare. Is it special in some way?”

Arkwal rubbed his hands together slowly. “Yes, you could say that. Every other teleport machine is bidirectional, you see. You can teleport from one to the other and back again. The machine you asked about has been programmed differently. It allows the user to teleport
anywhere
in Solarversia. The destination isn’t restricted to other machines. And that, good people, really does conclude the tour.”

Arkwal flicked his telescope. Seconds later, Nova found herself back in her Corona Cube. She removed her headset and looked out of the window of the train. It was stopped at a station, and through the PA system, apologies were being made for the delays due to leaves on the line. She wondered how long they’d been stationary without her noticing, and wished that she, too, were a master of space and time.

Chapter Nine

Nova waited patiently in the Portland Building with a bunch of other hopefuls for the only item on the day’s official itinerary she deemed worthy of her time — an introduction to Solar Soc, the university’s Solarversia Society.

She’d already had the exclusive ‘Burner Tour’ of campus, which had introduced her to all the stairwells, alleyways and student bars where he and Jono had got drunk, smoked blunts, and been indecent with dodgy-looking second years. And though she hadn’t seen any of the lecture theatres, facilities or halls of residence, she’d fallen in love with the place, and was already wondering how on earth she would get the grades she needed in order to be accepted onto a course there.

Next to her, Burner was waxing lyrical about university life to some of the other attendees. Three spotty youths from Manchester hung on his every word. She enjoyed the way he could work a crowd, but had heard the stories about Jono, smoking weed, and the gliding club a hundred times. Usually stories that combined all three.