Nova stood by the platform gate at St Pancras railway station and cursed Burner

under her breath. She hated being late. If Sushi was the yin to her yang, Burner was

the chalk to her cheese.

“If he doesn’t get here in approximately three—” she started saying to herself,

and then, with a frantic wave, “Burner — over here. Burner, you boggle-eyed twat!”

She lowered her voice as a woman with young children strolled by. They ran to

the nearest door, edged their way up the train to their carriage and then fell into

their seats panting as the whistle blew, Burner’s cheeks red as snooker balls.

“Why do you always do that to me?”

“Like to keep you on your toes is all,” he said, still catching his breath. “Did you

hear about Arkwal’s parachute — the one he used to slow himself down?”

“No. What about it?”

“Some dude from Australia found it. Instead of sailing to Tristan da Cunha to

get his plane like the rest of us, he went in search of it. Found it and won himself

ten grand. Just like that.”

“Son of a Gunter! Why didn’t we think of that?” Prizes were being won all over

the place, for all kinds of things. Several people had won prizes for unlocking

hopscotch patterns in the tessellated tiles on the ground. A woman from Uzbekistan

had won five grand just yesterday for spinning a Tweel of Fate in a certain way,

like it was the combination dial on a safe: twenty-nine rotations clockwise, two

anticlockwise, twenty clockwise, dialling out the date The Game had started, the

29th February 2020. And now, ten large ones had been paid out to the person who

found a discarded piece of nylon in the ocean. What else might she have missed?

She looked out the window as the train jolted into motion.

“Did I tell you Jono’s latest theory? Reckons there’s an EFF switch at the North

Pole.”

“No offense, but your brother’s hardly the most reliable source of information.

Wasn’t he the one who reckoned you could get additional spins of the Tweel of Fate

if you chanted ‘Solarversia’ three times into one of the tentacles? What a wally.”

“You were the wally who tried it.”

EFF was the abbreviation for the Earth Force Field, the mechanism preventing

players from exploring the rest of the Solar System. Ten switches were hidden at different

locations on Earth, with a £100k bounty attached to each of them. Once all ten had been

triggered the field would turn off, enabling players to travel to the International Space

Station, where they’d be able to board spaceships to the moon and beyond.

The EFF was also the cause of Solarversia’s warm violet light. As the power of

a Force Field wore off, its glow cycled through the colours of the rainbow, from

violet through to red, before disappearing entirely. Triggering the EFF switches

would cause the light of the whole sky to change colour, a signal of epic proportions

that solar travel had edged that bit closer.

Nova logged on and prepared to rejoin the game world where she had left it —

in New York. She’d collected Bruno, her hovercraft from the Lotus Bay dockyard,

and then sailed to Tristan da Cunha, the closest island, to get Hawk, her biplane.

She’d always wanted to visit The Big Apple, and Solarversia offered the additional

thrill of landing her plane in Central Park. But as she entered the Corona Cube, she

noticed something different about the ceiling. There was an additional constellation

between the previously existing two.

“Hey, Burner. Have you seen this? The Telescopium Constellation in the

Corona Cube?”

“Oh yeah, that’s new. It definitely wasn’t there last night. Shall we check it out?”

She traced the stars with her finger and the Corona Cube melted away to reveal

a huge domed room bustling with other players and arkwinis. Arkwal was standing

on a bench at the side of the room, leaning on his telescope like it was a walking

stick, in a pale blue suit decorated with hundreds of white question marks.

“Welcome to Castalia,” he said. “Nothing like it exists on Earth, nor could it,

given your current level of technological development. Are you ready for your grand

tour? You’ve already seen the Magisterial Chamber, the cubic room that forms the

core of the palace. Affixed to each of its six faces is a hemispherical dome. We’re in

the Overdome, the topmost hemisphere, which is the arkwinis’ living quarters. So,

welcome to their humble abode.”

The arkwinis and all the other members of Emperor Mandelbrot’s entourage

were Non-Player Characters, controlled by artificial intelligence rather than any

employee of Spiralwerks. Players could interact with them to a degree, as long

as the topic of conversation remained within the realm of the Game. They were

remarkably advanced, Nova thought. She would sometimes forget she was talking

to a program — a few hundred lines of code — rather than a sentient life form.

Nova glanced around her. One edge of the dome was lined with dozens of teleport

machines that seemed to be constantly in use, beaming arkwinis into, or out of,

existence. She loved how they weren’t quite tall enough to reach the teleporters’

keypads and had to climb up the handles of the machines, cling on with their tails

and swing down towards the keypads with their long fingers outstretched.

“The first stop on the tour is the dormitory, just beyond the dining area. Some

of the little ones will be asleep, so keep the noise down.”

The group followed Arkwal’s lead into the dorm and assembled along the foot

of the longest bed Nova had ever seen. Tucked inside its duvet were dozens of

snoring arkwinis.

“As the General Manager of Castalia, I run a tight ship. Or, perhaps that

should be, tight palace. There’s a lot of work for us to do around here. Emperor

Mandelbrot’s Magisterial Chamber contains ten thousand square metres of marble

to keep clean. Those vines are a nightmare for dusting. That job alone keeps thirty

arkwinis busy round the clock. The surface architecture of Castalia is based on an

intricate fractal pattern — designed, I might add, by the Emperor himself — and

stretches over many, many square miles. It’s tiring work, keeping the place clean

year round. Which brings us to this,” he said, motioning to the bed. The mattress

was shaped like a caterpillar track on the side of an army tank. At each end of the

bed the mattress curved back round on itself, creating an elongated oval shape.

Dozens of wheels kept the mattress slowly rolling around the oval.

“The beds here are as long as a bowling alley and sleep up to fifty arkwinis at any

one time. To ensure we’re as efficient as possible, we use Sleep-a-nator machines.

When an arkwini has finished his shift, had something to eat, and is ready for bed,

all he needs to do is walk into one of those machines at the far end of the bed, the

one with the big ‘S’ painted on its side, and the machine will do the rest. It’s best to

see one in action. Ingenious they are. You there. Yes, you. In the machine.”

An arkwini, who’d been eating his lunch in peace, started to remonstrate,

then, thinking better of it, reluctantly put down his sandwich. The machine looked

like an airport-security metal detector, but instead of beeping when it detected

its occupant, it seemed to come alive. Mechanical arms and hands appeared and

stripped the arkwini of his clothes, squirted him with soap and water, scrubbed

him down, and passed him underneath a fierce blower to dry him. Then it dressed

him in a pair of pyjamas, brushed his teeth and gave him a little pat to send him

on his way.

Calmly, the arkwini stepped out of the Sleep-a-nator and joined his colleagues

in the oversized bed. At the other end, the mattress was wrapping back around

on itself, while the end of the duvet was being lifted off the bed by another pair

of mechanical hands. An arkwini who had been sound asleep plopped off the end

and landed on a crash mat. He stood up, yawned, stretched his arms, and walked

towards another machine, which had a large ‘W’ on its side.

“The Wake-a-nator?” one of the tour group ventured.

“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.

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

Full book available on Amazon here:

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

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Chapter 9 coming soon!

p.s. Did you spot the Ready Player One reference? :-)