Chapter Three

Nova sat cross-legged on the sofa in the lounge and checked the Solarversia countdown clock for the hundredth time that day. On the night of the sleepover with Sushi, when they’d signed up to play, the timer had displayed what seemed like an impossible number of days to wait. Now, with the days and hours both on zero, and the minutes about to tick under fifteen, she felt ready to burst.

“How do you like your magic goggles then, love? Are they better than the old ones?”

“Much better, thanks, Dad. The resolution is out of this world. Not quite as good as actual reality, but not far off, either. And the skull pads read my brain waves, so I can control my avatar’s movement by the power of thought. Which means I don’t have to carry my haptic gloves around with me any more.”

“I understood the first bit, when you said they were better than your old pair,” her mum said. “The rest of it might as well have been in Chinese.”

It was quarter to midnight on the 28th February 2020, the day of Nova’s 18th birthday. Her parents had given the present she’d been longing for: a BoonerMax virtual reality headset. Resembling a pair of futuristic ski goggles, the streamlined latticework of gunmetal titanium encased more computing power than some families had in their entire homes.

Headsets like these allowed users to alternate their view of the world as they saw fit. Switched off, they functioned like a normal pair of glasses. In ‘augmented mode’, headsets displayed your immediate environment, but overlaid text, images and objects onto it, altering it in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Advanced headsets, like the Booners, were even capable of occluding objects, effectively rendering them invisible. Full virtual reality immersed users into entirely fictional worlds.

Nova removed her Booners, exhaled onto the rim and lovingly rubbed it with the sleeve of her jumper. Already, they were her favourite thing in the world. At the front of the lounge the Solarversia opening ceremony played on the TV. The final few floats of the parade pulled into the Olympic Stadium to complete a circuit of the track, cheered on by a crowd of eighty thousand people and watched by several hundred million more online.

The build-up to The Game had been impossible to ignore. Cities had been inundated with interactive billboards that flashed up the profiles of new entrants from around the world. These square-shaped profiles provided a snapshot of information about the player: their avatar name and picture, nationality, vehicle choices and, in Nova’s opinion, the most important piece of information of all, their number in the Player’s Grid.

The grid was comprised of ten thousand rows by ten thousand columns, with square number one bang in the centre. Numbers two to nine were positioned around it, and numbers ten to twenty-five around that. The numbers spiralled out like a snail’s shell all the way to one hundred million. It was common practice to scan the grid number of interesting profiles on billboards and flip into augmented or virtual mode on a headset in order to view the person’s position in the grid and check out their bio.

In the run-up to the start date, the marketing for Solarversia had become unavoidable and, to gamers like Nova, utterly tantalising. Characters from Solarversia kept popping up unexpectedly in augmented displays all over the world. She and Burner had participated in an event at Maidstone’s Mote Park, which had involved a bunch of geocached clues that led to the lake — where a fifty- foot dodectapus known as Banjax was found lurking. Displays like this had become tourist attractions in their own right.

Lots of people seemed to agree — Solarversia was the largest, most exciting thing ever to have been created in the history of the world. Burner’s brother Jono had gone so far as to attend a boot camp to train for it, lured, like so many others, by the large cash prizes for the top thousand places, and the promise of instant worldwide fame for those who made it further. Discussion of tactics and strategy had been endless, and tens of millions of pounds had been waged in bets. For Nova and her friends, the opening ceremony represented three and a half years of hype, excitement and trepidation.

Hearing the Solarversia jingle in her headset, Nova slipped it back over her head. All her old settings were already synced to her new Booners — it could only be a message from Sushi.

“Hey, birthday girl, have you checked out the fireworks cam yet? It’s seriously rockin’.”

“I’ve been too excited to do anything other than sit here and watch the clock count its way down to midnight. I can’t believe The Game starts in ten minutes. It doesn’t seem real. Send me the link.”

Nova switched to camera mode in her Booners. An array of video feeds appeared in her view, a thousand different perspectives available at the touch of a button, her gaze or the sound of her voice. She selected the fireworks cam by staring at the link in the message from Sushi. Half a second later she appeared to inhabit a 360-degree camera affixed to an aerial drone that hovered above the fireworks display in the stadium.

Rockets exploded around her, some so close that she instinctively jerked away from them, while Crackling Comets zoomed past her face, leaving behind glistening tails of multicoloured light she couldn’t help but try to touch. She breathed deeply through her nose, trying to smell the sulphur that hung thick in the air.

Mr Negrahnu peered over his newspaper. “Has it started yet?”

“As I’ve mentioned several thousand times, it starts when the counter hits zero. You’re worse than a little kid.”

“Says the person sitting there oohing and ahhing like there’s something wrong with their brain.”

She volleyed one eye back to the lounge and glared at him. “I’m oohing and ahhing because I’m floating in the middle of a fireworks display. Take a look for yourself. TV — sync to Booners.”

The TV switched channel to mirror the view in her headset. Mr Negrahnu leaned forward in his seat and peered over the rims of his spectacles.

“OK, I’ll admit it. That’s pretty cool.” He watched a couple of rockets explode into a shower of light before retreating to his crossword. Nova exchanged a wide- eyed look with her mum. It wasn’t often that her dad made a complimentary remark where modern technology was concerned.

She glanced at the countdown. Seven minutes to midnight. Still enough time to check out some of the other views. Once upon a time people hopped channels. Then they surfed the ’net. These days they volleyed cams. She chose one positioned on the lead float, which had just completed its lap of the track.

Its crew had stripped down to T-shirts despite the cold February air, their bodies warmed by a cocktail of rum and dance. Steam rose from their backs while the float’s chunky sound system doled out electro-flavoured sonic booms. Her kind of tunes. Around the stadium mighty lasers fired beams at huge disco balls, which diffracted the light into millions of sparkling shards.

The sound of a gong reverberated around the stadium, causing the crowd to erupt into a fresh chorus of cheers. Nova switched off cam mode, perched her Booners back on her forehead and rubbed her hands with glee. The digits on the timer were counting down the final 60 seconds — the Year-Long Game was about to begin.

***

The central podium in the Olympic Stadium was bathed in light. A holographic chimp dressed in a smart suit flickered into view. He climbed the stairs at the front of the stand, followed by a group of holographic monkeys half his size, who lugged a wooden cargo crate between them. They pushed and they heaved and they strained, willed on by every person watching.

“Come on, arkwinis, we’ve waited long enough,” Nova said from the edge of her seat.

“Ark-whatnies?” Mr Negrahnu asked.

“The chimpanzee in the suit is called Arkwal, and the little ones are the ‘arkwinis’.”

The arkwinis placed the crate to the right of the larger ape and then waddled back down the steps and out of view. Arkwal leaned in toward the microphone.

“Alright, Earthlings?” He wouldn’t have sounded out of place tending a market stall in the East End. “Thank you for accepting Emperor Mandelbrot’s invitation to the Year-Long Game. To win, you’ll need a combination of skill, luck, insight and creativity. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Everyone starts The Game in the same place: Castalia, the Emperor’s flying palace.”

Arkwal paused to look around the stadium, eyes narrowed, as if searching for someone or something in particular. He reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved what seemed to be a red baton. With a flick of his wrist, the baton extended into a full-length telescope, the height of an arkwini.

The spotlight followed him as he walked up to the wooden crate. He tapped it with the telescope then stepped away as it collapsed outward, revealing an object shaped like a miniature space shuttle with streamlined cylindrical thrusters pointed at the heavens. Arkwal stowed the compressed ’scope back in his pocket, strapped on the jetpack and clamped his thumbs down on the thrusters.

The stadium erupted with sound and light as the holographic jetpack roared into life, firing a wild array of sparks down at the podium. He looked skyward, saluted the crowd and blasted off into the heavens. Nova flicked her visor back down. Every gamer knew that flying was far more enjoyable when you were totally immersed. The top of her display transformed into a dashboard that displayed a whole host of counters and instruments, including the distances from various landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and their destination, Castalia, the flying palace.

She stuck her arms out in front of her and tilted left and then right, mimicking Arkwal’s motions as she followed him through a virtually rendered night sky. Headsets like hers used voice and thought commands combined with special audiovisual processing to move her avatar around in the virtual world. When she held her hands out in front of her, the camera on her headset translated her movements into the virtual world in real time. Digital natives like Nova, Burner and Sushi could move around in the virtual world as adeptly as they could in the real, running, jumping and fighting their way through whatever game makers threw at them.

She accelerated to a speed that blurred her surroundings beyond recognition, leaving the figure of Arkwal as the one thing that remained in focus. Before long, she watched as he deployed a giant parachute, slowed to cruising speed, and then ejected the device. It fluttered away, a new passenger on the South Atlantic trade wind express. A short way ahead of them a floating palace was coming into view.

***

Arkwal hit Castalia at such a high speed that he smashed straight through its north face, showering bricks, debris and dust everywhere. He skidded along the marble floor of the Magisterial Chamber for fifty metres or more, and then slowed to a halt. He picked himself up and brushed himself down, and stopped for a few seconds to examine his elbows, which had taken the brunt of his crash landing.

The Chamber was an enormous cube, the length of a football pitch in every direction. Hanging from the ceiling were thousands of multicoloured vines of varying length, some of which were swaying from side to side, following the recent disturbance. Still coated in a smattering of dust, Arkwal took his position in the centre of the room. With his arms outstretched above his head, he yelled, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Gorigaroo, master of the gong.”

Far away on the other side of the chamber, a figure with the head and powerful upper body of a gorilla and the abdomen and mighty hind legs of a kangaroo could be seen, swinging from vine to vine. As he reached the southwest corner of the chamber, he let go, landed briefly on the marble floor and bounced up again, high into the mess of tangled creepers overhead.

Finally he came to rest beside a golden gong suspended by several of the vines. He pulled a wooden club out of his pouch, leaned back, and then struck the gong with immense force. When the sound waves reached Arkwal, they troubled the floor around him, causing the patterned marble to vibrate.

He bent his knees, leapt up to the closest vine, swung away from the pulsating ground, let go to perform a somersault, and landed at the edge of what was now a circular hole in the centre of the room. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for me to introduce His Royal Highness, Emperor Commissaire de Spielen, von Unglai D’Acheera Nakk-oo, Mandelbrot!”

Slowly, something rose through the hole in the floor: an amorphous blob perched upon a circular dais. As it passed into the room, the blob began to bubble and shake. Suddenly an enormous fist protruded from the jelly. It unfurled slowly, and Arkwal hopped into its palm and sat himself down. He flicked his wrist to extend his telescope and rested it between the thumb and index finger of the giant hand.

The telescope faced the north wall of the Magisterial Chamber, the facade of which was already in the final stages of repair, being reclad in marble by a team of diligent arkwinis. Satisfied that the work was being done to the highest standard, Arkwal nodded his approval.

Meanwhile the amorphous gloop continued its metamorphosis. Other body shapes appeared, each one made of the same gooey substance, which looked mauve from one angle, purple from the next. The centre of the circle bubbled with the greatest intensity and rose fast, at first resembling a volcano and then, as it reached towards the ceiling of the room, a totem pole.

Hundreds of mouths burst into view up and down the length of the pole, each formed in its own peculiar way. One contained dozens of teeth pointed at vulgar angles and several tongues, which took it in turns to lick one another. Another contained only a tongue, as long as a hockey stick, that whipped in and out of surrounding mouths, as if it was scared of being bitten if it stayed in place too long.

A small but perfectly formed set of lips near the top of the pole started to sing. It was an anthem of sorts, sung in the sweetest soprano, and its chant began to spread down the pole like a Mexican wave, with mouth after mouth joining in harmony. The lower the mouth, the deeper its voice. As the mouths sang and their anthem reached its crescendo, the newly repaired north wall of the chamber began to crumble, revealing behind it a grid of millions of tiny squares, bathed in a warm violet light.

“I’m happy to announce that the Player’s Grid is in place,” said Arkwal, now standing in the middle of the giant fist, his arms extended above his head in a triumphant gesture. “The Year-Long Game can begin. Emperor Mandelbrot has asked me to wish each of you the very best of luck and would like to remind you that There Can Be Only One!”

****************************************************

Full book available on Amazon here:

https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B00ZFF6NVK

Chapter 4 coming tomorrow