Solarversia: The Year Long Game

For the Many

Even if there can be only one

Chapter One

The minute Nova Negrahnu heard about Solarversia she was convinced she was going to love it with every ounce of her being. Enabled by virtual reality, a technology that had been promised again and again, but had only just come to fruition, this game was what she’d been dreaming of since she was a little girl.

In Solarversia, the normal rules of existence would cease to apply. It sounded like a magical world, a place to fight monsters, fly through the sky and explore the Solar System, and all from the comfort of her own home. From the expression on the face of her best friend, Sushi Harrison, she wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

“Who was it that sent you the link?” Sushi asked, without looking up from her iPad.

“Burner. But it’s been going mental on social media. He and Jono have already signed up.”

Sushi cleared her throat and read out the press release Burner had sent them.

“Solarversia is billed as an exciting new form of entertainment, fit for the 21st century. An amalgam of virtual, augmented and mixed realities, Spiralwerks, the London-based company behind The Game, claim that it integrates every form of digital entertainment that came before it. One hundred million players will vie to be the last person standing through a series of challenges that blend racing, fighting, strategy, psychology, lateral thinking, creativity, popularity and cold hard luck. Solarversia will last an entire year and the Grand Champion will be awarded prize money rumoured to equal ten million pounds.”

Their mouths dropped wide open.

“Ten million?”

“That’s just for the winner. It pays a prize to everyone in the top thousand, and there’ll be tens of thousands of quests throughout the year, paying their own bounties.”

“Oh, my God. It even includes Krazy Karting,” said Nova.

“This is insane. Check out the signup screen.”

The screen was blank, except for two counters and a button. The first counter, displaying the number of signups, had just hit fifteen thousand and was rising rapidly. The second one displayed a timer, and was ticking down to The Game’s start date on the 29th February 2020.

“We have to wait four years for it to start?” Sushi asked.

“That’s the day after my eighteenth birthday.” Nova grabbed her friend’s hand. “Do you think we’ll still be best friends then?”

“Are you kidding? Of course we will. If we can be best friends from two to fourteen, I think we’re safe for life, aren’t we?”

Nova nodded uncertainly. “But Seattle’s such a long way away from Maidstone.”

“Let’s both sign up to play. I bet you my winnings we’re still best friends when it starts.”

‘‘OK. You’re on. And we better had be.”

The girls spent the next couple of hours learning about the world of Solarversia and all it entailed. It was the puzzle aspect of the Gameworld that thrilled Nova the most. Although Krazy Karting was her favourite driving game — she was already ranked in the top few hundred players in the world — her real passion was lateral thinking and puzzle solving.

Brought up on a diet of sudoku, crosswords and jigsaws, she had started to think of ways to create more complex puzzles of her own. When she stumbled upon a blog post that described the grand prize in more detail she sat bolt upright and inhaled until her lungs were full.

“This is getting ridiculous. You’ll never guess what the Grand Champion gets to do.”

“Apart from working out how to spend ten million pounds, you mean?”

“Something way more important than that. Solarversia is going to be a quadrennial event. After 2020, the next one doesn’t start until 2024. And the Grand Champion of the first one will help to design the second one. Sush — I’ve just found my dream job. I absolutely, categorically need to win this thing. My life doesn’t make sense without it.”

“If you do win, I’d be happy to attend to the commercial side of the prize for you, ensuring the cash gets spent in a suitable manner. So you can — you know — focus your attention on the design aspect of the prize. That’s so like me, putting others first.”

Nova slumped into a pile of pillows. Game design had been top of her list of jobs since she discovered that it was a thing. This was the daddy of all such jobs — and she’d need to beat a hundred million people to get it. If that wasn’t the toughest job interview in history, she didn’t know what was.

Once the girls’ accounts had been verified, they were guided to an area that asked them to create their avatars — three-dimensional representations of their real-world bodies. Nova stood in the middle of Sushi’s room, held her arms out and looked straight ahead, while her friend scanned her from head to toe with her phone. The iPad, which she’d leant against some school books on Sushi’s desk, rendered a 3D mesh of her body in real time.

“Hold still, will you? Else we’ll be here all night.”

“You can talk; how many times did I have to scan you? Nothing wrong with wanting to look my best in front of a global audience.” She glanced at the screen to assess her avatar, which was slowly revolving about the y-axis. “No way, look what you’ve done to my stomach.”

“I think you’ll find that your love of curry, rather than my phone-handling skills, did that to your stomach. You don’t want to look perfect in any case. There won’t be enough difference between your Normal Avatar and your Super Avatar. Besides, people that know you well, like Burner and me, will know you were sucking it in. You can’t polish a turd.”

The Game required each player to create two avatars: an ordinary, realistic version, and a ‘super’ version, described by the creators as the version of their self the player would ideally want to be, given the chance. Changes to height and weight would be subject to certain limitations in order to ensure that avatars didn’t interfere with Gameworld features such as player transportation, but Spiralwerks had specified that they wouldn’t enforce any other restrictions.

Finally content with their figures, they pranced around Sushi’s bedroom to a series of tutorial videos that captured the way they moved. They jumped up and down, drew weapons, shot at targets, hugged each other and pulled off all manner of dance moves. Every action fed into their personal Solarversia Avatar Movement Algorithm.

After the moves came the sounds: they spoke in their normal reading voices, then laughed, yee-haaed, shrieked and made numerous other noises that captured them in the throes of death. As it neared midnight, they collapsed on Sushi’s bed, exhausted. It was the night before the Harrison family’s big move from the UK, and Nova was sleeping over at her friend’s house to prolong the moment of goodbye for as long as possible.

“That’s our Normal Avatars sorted, then.” Sushi scrolled down her profile page to check what else was required. ‘‘We still need to decide what our Super Avatars look like, choose our avatar names, catchphrases, vehicles and player numbers.”

Nova cocked her head to one side and dug her little finger into her ear. “It doesn’t start for three and a half years, but I think the Solarversia jingle might already be stuck in my head.”

“That gives me an idea. Why don’t we download the jingle and use it as a ringtone for one another? Every time it goes, it will remind us of tonight.”

They jolted into action again. Once the jingle was synced to their devices, Nova brushed her hair behind her ears and looked at her friend.

“You are going to call me, right? All the way from the States?”

“Of course I am, you eejit. You better not be too busy to speak. I won’t know anyone over there.”

“You’ll be fine. They’ll go nuts over your British accent, while I’m stuck here, Billy-no-mates in the ’Stone.”

“Don’t be stupid. Life’s going to be so boring without you. Who else do I know who can turn literally anything into a game?”

“That’s true. Making toast will never be the same, huh?”

They laughed. Earlier that evening Nova had devised a whole series of complex tasks and hoops to jump through which culminated in a slice of toast.

“I’m not going to forget you, OK? How about we make a deal? If one of us wins Solarversia, we have to promise to split the prize money with the other one. We’ll be apart, but we’ll be playing it together. For each other.”

Nova smiled. “Solarversia Sisters, eh? So we’ll be rooting for each other all the way? I saw something in the rules about virtual wills. There can only be one winner, so that means one of us is going to die at some point.”

Virtual wills were a feature that allowed players to leave all the items in their possession to a friend, once they had lost their third and final life in The Game. They watched over each other’s shoulders as they named each other sole beneficiaries of their wills.

“One last thing. If I’m going to Seattle, we need to make it ultra official. Put your headset on and bring up that Halloween app with the fake blood module.”

Nova held out her arm and watched as her friend pressed hers against it, smearing dark red blood all over their wrists.

“Solarversia Sisters forever,” they said in unison.

Nova grinned. It felt good to have a backup plan with the person you trusted most in the world.

Chapter Two

Casey Brown placed his foot on some loose shingle and felt his leg slide out from under him. It was probably the fourth time that hour, but right now his grasp of time was even worse than his grasp of space. Each hallucinogenic episode had been more intense than the last.

They began when the colours of his surroundings started to move, until eventually trees merged into bushes, the hills became waves in an ocean, and the sky looked like it wanted to swallow him whole. Scarier still was when time appeared to move in reverse for several seconds and he’d somehow known the answers to questions he hadn’t yet asked. Or had that even happened yet?

As his leg slid out, his shoulder came forward to cushion the blow, the instinct to protect the head kicking in despite his state. Pain coursed through his central nervous system, and for a second he thought he’d never make it. But he’d thought that a thousand times over the last few days and had willed himself on, desperate to make it. Only twenty more yards, Case, you can do it. Warriors win.

He felt dirty, his brow caked in sweat and mud, God-knows-what matted in his hair. A hot shower, a greasy hamburger and his bed: these were things he’d never take for granted again. His bloody hands shook despite the mild Mississippi afternoon, and his wrists ached from the chafing of the old piece of fishing rope that tied them together and attached them to the net of rocks he dragged behind him.

Going up the hill, like he was now, had always been easier: the rocks were below and couldn’t fall on him, as they’d done countless times on his journeys down. The task had been to climb the hill a hundred and forty-four times and this was his final ascent. He was nearly there. Only fifteen yards to go. Warriors win.

Willing him on from the top of the hill was Wallace, one of the people that had introduced Casey to the Holy Order in the first place, and the guy in charge of these initiation rites. Wallace wasn’t much older than Casey but years of smoking had taken their toll and the crow’s feet around his eyes gave him a craggy, hardy look.

“Come on, Casey, ma boy, you’re on the home stretch! You’ve gone done the hard bit. That’s right, put your back into it, soldier, it’s mind over matter.”

On his hands and knees, Casey grabbed hold of a grassy tuft, hauled himself another yard and could now make out his comrade’s grin beneath his black Stetson. Dragging the net of rocks with a renewed sense of purpose, he powered through the final few yards and collapsed at the base of his target, an old wooden pole.

The circular disc on top of it was engraved with a series of curly swastikas, the Holy Order’s emblem. During one of his hallucinogenic episodes the pole had looked like a magical toadstool. The symbols had grown hands and legs, which had interlinked and danced around, taunting him in his weakened state. Using the pole to steady himself with one hand, he held the other out and looked at his friend.

“The knife, please.”

Wallace smiled a yellow-toothed grin and flipped the knife in the air. Casey caught it by the blade and turned to face the pole. “Hope I never see this fucking thing again, long as I live.”

Suddenly aware that his cigarette smoke was making it harder for his friend to catch his breath, Wallace wafted the air with his hand, took one last drag, and flicked the butt to the ground. He retrieved an emergency ration bar from his backpack, removed the silver foil, and broke it into pieces while Casey carved his final notch.

“She’s a bitch, ain’t she? The first hundred ascents are bad enough. The next forty-four are pure torture. Never thought I was gonna make it, right up ’til the end. It’ll all be worth it, trust me.”

His hands shaking, Casey swapped the knife for the ration bar and collapsed on the floor. Three and a half days of mental and physical exertion had broken him. Wallace rummaged through his backpack again, this time pulling out a walkie-talkie. He flicked a switch, waited for it to crackle and hum, and then held it to his ear.