At 2:37 a.m. Zhang raised his head, extended his arms and stood up. His eyelids snapped open and the microscopic servos that powered the lenses in his pupils adjusted to the dark of the room. As he walked forward, his tail detached from the power socket, freeing him to jump onto Nova’s bed. He sat by her head and gently rocked her awake. She looked at the time and let out a groan. She was so warm and snug, she almost told Zhang to go back to sleep and leave her alone.

But she was also curious to see what was going on. There was a feature within Solarversia that alerted you if a new quest appeared within a specified radius of your vicinity. The alert told you the location of the quest and the skills required so you could decide whether or not to log in and travel there to attempt it. Burner had installed a programme to monitor these alerts while she was logged out. If an interesting one appeared, it wirelessly activated Zhang’s built-in alarm. She’d instructed Burner that she only wanted to be alerted between midnight and 7 a.m. if the prize was greater than ten grand.

With a mixture of exhaustion and excitement, she quietly slipped her Booners on. According to her datafeed, the fourth Earth Force Field switch had just been discovered in nearby Baltimore, Maryland. Useful skills included advanced flying, jumping and climbing. Prize money: £100,000. Burner’s programme had worked. Amazing. She’d buy him his own gaming rig if she pulled this off.

She left the Corona cube in downtown Philadelphia and whispered, “Baltimore. Fastest route. Ignore all quests and exhibitions.” The Route Planner mapped her path to the closest Right Flights airport, but made one suggestion. A fellow player was running to the airport, having written off his car in a quest gone wrong. She’d already ticked off the ‘hitchhiker item’ from that month’s Bucket List, but Solarversia was designed to make the world a better place and encouraged collaboration and teamwork, at least in the early stages.

She checked his profile to see how well he was doing. It was customary to tip a teleport token to people that gave you lifts — it was the only type of item that could be exchanged in this way — but if the guy was in a hurry, she wondered if she could get more money out of him. After all, Nova was more interested in one of the ways in which Solarversia mimicked the real world: survival of the fittest. Why help him if there wasn’t something in it for her?

His profile came up blank. He was a ‘Marty’, a male player using a Generic Avatar. For whatever reason, he didn’t want people to know who he was. Nova wasn’t fond of the feature; it allowed people to hide behind a veil of anonymity.

“Nah,” she said to the Route Planner. “Let him run. He could probably do with the exercise.”

She arrived at the airport thirty-seven seconds later. Right Flights worked the same way as Greasy Wrenches and Dockingtons — a copy of her plane was stored at each one. She could land, park or dock anywhere in Solarversia, teleport to the other side of the world, and her vehicles would be waiting for her at the local depot.

Right Flights resembled giant helter-skelters that had to be approached by car. As soon as Flynn hit the slide that wrapped around the enormous tower, he started to morph into Hawk, her plane, and Nova soon found herself sitting in his cramped cockpit instead of the dune buggy.

The Hawker Demon biplane had been developed for the Royal Air Force during World War Two, but like all of Nova’s vehicles, Hawk had been modified with a series of blue neon lights to give him the Tron look. She re-familiarised herself with the controls while Hawk gained momentum, spiralling up the tower. A few seconds later he shot out the top, launching at full speed into the sky.

She spent most of the journey volleying the public cams of the players already in Baltimore in an attempt to a devise a strategy. The switch had been hidden on the steeply pitched roof of Commerce Place, the fourth tallest building in Baltimore. Along with nearby Phoenix Shot Tower, a red brick building that looked like an old chimney stack, it was one of the only two buildings in the city that remained stable. Every other building, sidewalk and structure had been transformed into an inflatable object. Baltimore was a giant bouncy castle and Solos were flying all over the place in the diffuse indigo glow of the Earth Force Field.

Most weren’t bouncing anywhere near as high as the tower. She kept seeing people take run-ups, bounce into the air, slam headfirst into one another and collapse in a pile on a street. Health points were dropping like loose change from a tattered pocket. Other players bounced to reasonable heights, but in the wrong direction, and were flung further and further from Commerce Place with each leap they took. And driving wasn’t an option. The nearest Greasy Wrench was already inundated with mangled vehicles.

Those who made it to the tower faced other challenges. Ludi Bioski had been busy. He’d coated the bottom half of Commerce Place in Skidz, a slippery ice-like substance that made it very difficult for players to get any purchase when climbing. A number of players had discovered a nearby quest at War Memorial Plaza, two blocks away, and won themselves pairs of spiked climbing boots. She watched a Canadian woman in crampons clear the slippery bottom half, only to grind to a halt shortly afterwards when one after another of her limbs adhered to the building, leaving her wiggling her bum and shaking her head in frustration.

Others became glued to the tower in a similar manner, trapped like flies in a web. The more they struggled against the building, the more they become helplessly stuck to it. Nova’s datafeed advised that Bugz had been sprayed all over the top half of the tower, and players were already wondering which items could be used to help clear it.

Another strategy was air travel. Nova watched numerous attempted flyovers as avatars leapt from their planes at opportune moments to land on the pyramidal roof. It was the only part of the tower not covered in Skidz or Bugz. If they could land successfully, they could climb to the apex of the tower where the switch was based. Easy.

Except for the fact that disgruntled players who had bounced their cars into oblivion had climbed up the other solid building, Phoenix Shot Tower, and were hampering the pilots. Six heavy-duty Gatling guns had been installed on the ramparts and were aimed at Commerce Place. For players who couldn’t get to the airport, gunning down the opposition was an appealing second best. Prizes were being awarded for every plane shot down — according to Nova’s datafeed, seventeen and counting.

She circled the tower from a distance, weighing up her options. It looked best to approach Commerce Place from the southwest, hidden from the sight of the guns. Other players were already lining up to try their luck. Every failed attempt taught people something new, and avatars were getting closer to landing all the time. Hundreds of aircrafts were taking off from Right Flights every minute — she reckoned it was five minutes at most before someone made it to the switch. It was now or never.

She banked hard left to join the queue. A French man had just made the first successful landing and was climbing the sloped roof toward the switch. She willed Hawk to go faster, her sixteen speed points seeming painfully slow as others zoomed past. Three other players landed in quick succession and clambered after the French guy, now halfway up.

The four climbers inched upward. Surely one of them was going to make it. And they might have, had it not been for player 28,044, Bojango from Ecuador. Bouncing around Baltimore, he’d stumbled on a hidden quest on the roof of a local fire station, which gave him the loan of a helicopter armed with water cannons and the promise of a bounty for every player he squirted off the roof. All eyes were on him as he approached the building, long jets of spray emanating from the cannons.

The French guy was first to lose hold. Drenched by a deluge of whitewater, he crashed straight into the woman below him on his way down. The two of them slid clean off the edge, fell thirty floors, then bounced so high and so far that they didn’t come to rest until ten minutes later. A lanky Welsh woman was next to get a face full of H2O. To her credit, she hung on a good while longer than the Frenchman, but eventually she lost her grip too. She lashed out in an attempt to grab on to anything that might break her fall, and managed to grasp the fourth player, sending them both shooting over the precipice. The roof was clear once more.

Nova was wondering what to try next when a bright flash caught her attention. A sharp-eyed gunner had accepted his own mission to shoot down the helicopter, and it was now on fire and spinning wildly out of control. She felt a rush of energy zip down her spine — it was back to plan A.

She yanked the controls and sent Hawk into a loop, spiralling around to position herself for an attempted jump onto the building. The commotion of the helicopter had scattered the other players far and wide, leaving her second in the queue to approach the tower. She located the autopilot button that would enable Hawk to land himself once she’d jumped free. It would mean having to run to the nearest Greasy Wrench to pick Flynn up afterwards, but that would be a small price to pay in exchange for the prize money. She pressed the button at the last second and jumped for her life.

Her arms and legs flailed at her sides for what seemed like an eternity until finally she slammed against the sloped panelling of the roof. Adrenaline pumped through her veins. It turned out that her jump was one for the replays — she had timed it even better than the American woman in front of her and had landed higher up the roof. Bingo.

The switch was a mere stone’s throw away. She glanced over her shoulders, desperate not to succumb to a pesky helicopter at this late stage. There were none in sight. Her heart pounded in her chest. Ten metres to the switch. The latticework of panelling made for easy climbing, enabling her to find a solid rhythm, arms and legs coordinating well. Seven metres. A quick check over her shoulder. The Yank remained a safe distance behind. Five metres. Still no sign of a helicopter. Three metres. Then suddenly she stopped moving. What the hell?

“Hard cheese, sucker!” the American woman said as she clambered past with a stupid grin on her face. Nova looked at the message flashing in her headset.

“Attention: Shadow Sucker attached. 27 seconds remaining.”

She looked down to see a plunger attached to the wall. The woman had fired a Shadow Sucker at her, pinning her shadow in its place for thirty seconds. A disembodied voice, one of the player catchphrases, announced that her attempt was “close, but no cigar.” Anger rose inside her like she’d never known. Then Gorigaroo’s gong sounded, so loud she thought she might lose her grip. Not that it mattered any more. The fourth Earth Force Field switch had just been triggered by Pedey Gonzalez, player number 75,330,094, from Florida, USA.

The gong noise emanated from the switch itself and Nova watched with a mixture of interest and dismay as a series of concentric sound waves bubbled into the sky. As the waves reached the EFF, miles above them, the Field rippled and shimmered as it changed from indigo blue to blue-green, reminiscent of a sunlit ocean.

Nova grabbed the Booners off her head, threw them into the corner of her room and slumped into her pillows. Had anything more unfair happened in the history of the universe? She doubted it. Mrs Woodward was right. It was a stupid game. And now it was four in the morning, she’d had no sleep and she was going to fail her A-levels. Tears welled in her eyes and she felt herself sink deep into her mattress.

Bouncy was the one thing she didn’t feel right now.

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

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