Nova stood outside Fragging Hell and made herself repeat the words over and over: “I’m only here to pick up my prize, I’m only here to pick up my prize.” It was a Friday afternoon and Mr McGillycuddy had let her out of detention thirty minutes early. Fragging Hell was on the way home from school — in one of those roundabout kind of ways — and she’d been meaning to pick up her darts prize for weeks now. She straightened her shoulders, brushed her hair behind her ears and entered the cafe.

She marched along the strip of fluorescent lighting towards the bar and tried not to pay any attention to the whoops of delight that emanated from the gaming rigs on either side. As she neared the bar, Jockey came out from the backroom and, seeing her, swooned in mock horror.

“Nova. Returned from the dead. You haven’t been in for weeks.”

“I know. I’ve missed this place. In fact, I miss everything in the world. I’ve been buried in revision.”

“So you haven’t been playing?”

“Yeah, I have. Just doing the bare minimum to keep up with the April Bucket List.”

“So, what do you make of teleporting?”

“Teleporting? You mean the quest got completed? We can teleport now?” “Wow, Miss Negrahnu, you are seriously out of the loop. Sit down and plug in,

you’ve got to give this a go. The trick is remembering to dial round the ‘T’ the right way.”

“No, Jockey, I can’t. I’m here to pick up my prize. Then I need to get back to my books.”

He looked genuinely nonplussed for a moment.

“Your prize? Oh, your darts prize. Only two months late. Yeah, it should be around here somewhere.” He winked, ducked into the backroom and returned half a minute later with a shoebox-sized package and a celebratory smile. It was an Electropet Arkwini action figure dressed like an astronaut. Nova scanned the side of the box.

The action figure spoke in the same high-pitched voice as the arkwinis in The Game and came with his own little detachable helmet and space capsule. A playmate for Zhang. Nova grinned. Mission accomplished. Now all she had to do was stuff the arkwini in her bag and leave the cafe. Even she could do that.

But before she could move, a message pinged in from Sushi: “Have you seen the portrait? Funniest. Thing. Ever.”

“What portrait? What are you talking about?”

“Remember Spee-Akka Dey Bollarkoo, the woman who flew into the Magisterial Chamber on a carpet? She’s finished March’s monthly portrait. And you’re in it.”

“No frigging way. You’re having me on.”

“No, for real. Go and check for yourself. And Banjax has finally arrived at Castalia, you’ll need to tick him off April’s Bucket List anyway.”

That settled it. There was no way she was going straight home to spend another Friday night hunched over a pile of boring textbooks. She’d worked hard all week and deserved a gaming break now and then. She’d even read an article recently that claimed a lot of high-level executives played casual computer games during work hours to help them chill out. She should try to find the article again — it would be good ammunition next time her parents had a go at her. She found a free space, stowed her bag under the table and logged on.

The Corona Cube was a sight for sore eyes. In her inventory, the twenty-five teleport tokens she had won for getting so close to the EFF switch were now lit up, ready to use when the time was right. The Castalian constellation on the black ceiling of her cube was pulsing and glowing, indicating a new arrival at the Emperor’s palace. She reached for the stars, and the side of the Corona Cube that led back into the Magisterial Chamber turned transparent.

***

Nova stepped out of her profile square, fell to the marble floor of the chamber and looked around. Emperor Mandelbrot remained in the centre of the room. His central totem pole still reached up to the ceiling, though most of the mouths around its circumference had now melted away. Blobs of purple mess still oozed off the edge of his circular dais, while an assortment of limbs and other body parts looked like they were trying to poke their way out of his base.

She turned around to study the Player’s Grid on the north wall. It already looked different, only seven weeks after the start of The Game. On the evening of the opening ceremony, all hundred million profile squares had flickered into life. Every square had a coloured border that represented the number of lives the player had left. Mimicking the way Force Fields progressed through the colours of the rainbow as they got weaker, borders were coloured violet at first, representing three lives, changed to green when a player lost their first life, and then turned red when they only had one left.

Supposedly influenced by the tradition in martial arts, Solos referred to the borders as ‘belts’. Some people went as far as reflecting their current status in the real world, wearing belts, bracelets or armbands of the appropriate colour. Belt colours were also visible on player vehicles, appearing as the trim that surrounded the license plates.

When players lost their third and final life, their squares went dark, extinguished like candles in the wind. One hundred thousand squares had already gone dark, creating patches of shadow here and there in the giant grid. In that way, the grid performed an important function as the scoreboard of The Game, informing players about the current state of the competition. It wasn’t uncommon for people to watch the grid like it was a giant TV, and it had become so popular that Spiralwerks had arranged for huge screens to display it in public for the duration of the year.

As Nova looked at the grid, her datafeed flickered into action, highlighting the locations of her friends and the various people she’d interacted with. Having signed up to Solarversia early on, she and Sushi had obtained fairly low, central numbers that they’d always been happy with. She’d longed to win a number in the Golden Grid, the ten-by-ten section reserved by Spiralwerks for a series of promotional competitions leading up to the start of The Game, but then, so had several million other people.

One such competition had required artists to create a ‘wanted’ poster for Banjax — the creature she was here to visit — in the style of an old Barnum & Bailey poster. Spiralwerks had even offered the poster’s £50,000 reward for real to anyone who acquired a live specimen of a dodectopus, a bounty that had gone unpaid. A later competition had offered a Golden Grid square to the person who submitted the best photo of the winning poster.

Nova had been gutted that her own entry — of the poster printed onto material and hoisted from her school’s flag pole — hadn’t won, and even more gutted at the week’s worth of detentions she’d received. As Burner had pointed out at the time, she might well have killed herself getting the flag in position, given that the pole was on the roof, and she had kicked loose a number of tiles that had had to be replaced.

Standing in the chamber, Nova witnessed several dozen profile squares turn dark over the course of five minutes and watched the replays of all the relevant deaths. Then she headed to the far side of the chamber to investigate an enormous painting that took up a full third of the south wall. It was the first artwork by Spee- Akka Dey Bollarkoo, or “Flower Face” as Burner had taken to calling her, and had been painted in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch Renaissance artist famed for the fantastic imagery of his large triptychs, landscapes inhabited by outlandish objects and beings.

The centre of the painting featured the Emperor himself, floating in space, holding aloft his unfurled fist, where Arkwal perched, telescope in hand. Gorigaroo appeared halfway up the totem pole, using the Emperor’s mouths as foot and handholds. With his free hand he was stretching towards Castalia, which looked like a balloon floating just out of reach.

Plenty of players had been immortalised too. The first person to land on Alpha Island, the first Solos to acquire various vehicles, and the winners of some of the quests, depicted in their moments of triumph. Some deaths had been recorded too — she could make out a half-eaten avatar, smoking and blackened, hanging from the mouth of a lavadile.

In the bottom left-hand corner were two buildings she recognised. Standing atop the taller one was Pedey Gonzalez, triumphantly pushing the Force Field switch into its off position, circled by aeroplanes and helicopters. Nova zoomed in and saw, with a mixture of pride and shame, that Sushi was right: her moment in the sun had also been preserved. There she was, desperately reaching for the switch, her shadow stuck to the building by the stupid plunger.

She felt a fresh pang of pain as she remembered how close she got to pressing the switch herself. A hundred big ones had been within her reach. She’d even dreamt about it a couple of times, dreams in which she’d been the one to trigger the switch, only to wake up as poor as ever. There was nothing she could do about it now. Nothing except train harder. She shared the image on her feed, however much it pained her to do so, knowing that she might as well tick an item off the Bucket List while she was here.

Her concentration was broken when she heard the faint whooshing sound of ruffled vines. Gorigaroo’s gong was unmanned — he’d be swinging around overhead somewhere. In the southeast corner of the chamber she spied Ludi Bioski interacting with his strange machine, the Orbitini, which stood waist-high to an average man, spanned ten metres in length and was a metre wide.

The array of its components was mind-boggling. Everywhere you looked there were spinning wheels, switches, tuners, sliders, dials, gauges, buttons, handles, zips and keyboards. And then there were the parts of it that seemed to have come from a chemical lab: vials of liquid, linked to one another via a series of twisting pipes, and pots and pans that bubbled away, emitting a thick brown smoke that wafted into the massive chamber.

The central interface consisted of coloured glass beads that were arranged on a spiralling double helix. Ludi spun wheels, flicked switches and mixed liquids. Then, apparently satisfied, he would slide the glass beads up, down or along his twisting abacus and the digital screen at the front of the Orbitini would display a new ‘Event Card’.

Nova watched as he moved three of the orange beads partway along the double helix so they collided with a necklace of yellow and purple beads further along. An Event Card appeared: a tornado with a rating of 3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale would tear through the centre of Berlin in the next few minutes. She flipped to cam mode and checked the video feeds being labelled #BreezyBerlin.

If anything, she was slightly annoyed that she wasn’t there to experience it for herself. She’d practiced her ‘High Velocity Object’ combinations only the week before in one of the Simulators. There had been fifteen objects to dodge, ranging in size from a flying deckchair that would knock off a handful of health points if you failed to avoid it to a small lorry that would kill you outright.

The combinations had been pretty simple, and she’d completed the module without error, but like every Solo knew, executing moves in the safety and comfort of a Simulator Booth was a different proposition to executing them in the Gameworld for ‘real’ in a situation like this, when health points were at risk.

The first few gusts took players by surprise. She saw arms outstretched as hats were blown from heads and sallied forth on currents of air, saplings bending this way and that, doors slamming shut and bursting open. Within thirty seconds players needed to lean at unnatural angles and hold on to buildings and lampposts to remain where they stood.

As the moody-looking tornado gathered speed, so too did the death counter. It ticked upwards, dozens at a time. She watched a car get flipped into the air and bowl down the street, striking people out of existence as it went. People, it would seem, who had failed to master the most basic of combinations. People who hadn’t bothered to learn their Science. Nova smiled. This was survival of the fittest. Best for noobs to go out early on, leaving serious players, Solos like her and Sushi, to battle it out properly.

The winds abated as quickly as they had started. Six thousand players had lost a life, all thanks to Mr Random. Nova let out a long, quiet whistle while she flicked through some of the previous Event Cards. He’d made it rain teleport tokens in Tokyo, had turned the city of Strasbourg green for a week, and last Thursday had given all prime-numbered players in the upper-right quadrant three spins of the Tweel of Fate.

But she wasn’t here to study Ludi’s Event Cards or laugh at noobs. She walked over to the northeast corner of the room, which remained empty for now. Solarversia, like most other massive multiplayer online games, incorporated a technique known as ‘phasing’ which enabled certain areas of the game world to look different to different players. Sushi, who had already visited Castalia and seen the new character Banjax, would see him in this corner if she was here. Nova, who was yet to unlock the character, only saw an empty corner. As she approached it, she heard the familiar ‘ding’ of a Bucket List item being ticked off.

To her right, a small platoon of arkwinis appeared, their little monkey hands struggling to get much purchase on the taut ropes that were attached to a glass tank two storeys high. The stop-start motion of their actions caused gallons of water to slosh over the sides, drenching some, making others slip over. Water splattered around Nova’s feet and she jumped back to watch from a safe distance. Once it was close enough to the wall, the arkwinis ran round to the front of the tank and pushed with all their might until it came to rest, tight against the northeast corner.

Inside the tank was Banjax, the twelve-armed dodectopus. He was a deep green colour, like a pond thick with algae. Though she’d seen the Tweels of Fate based on his appearance, she hadn’t expected him to be so big or look so ferocious. The beast had remained relatively still during his transportation by pushing against the sides of the square tank with his tentacles.

Now the tank was at rest, he released all but one of his powerful green arms, unsuckering them one by one. She approached the tentacle that remained attached to the side. About a foot back from its sucker, the tentacle swelled spherically. It looked like a python that had swallowed a football. A similar sphere was present on each of the other arms. She went close to the tank and looked into the open sucker. It contained a man’s face, jabbering away so quickly it looked like he was talking in tongues.

“He’s dishing out prizes for the Tweel of Fate,” one of the arkwinis said. “Banjax controls every tweel in Solarversia — hundreds of thousands of them — from here.” The tweels were strange things and players were divided on whether you should bother visiting them. Jockey, who had been stung three times in row, losing teleport tokens and even his prized Battle Axe, swore that he would never visit one again. Burner had laughed in his face and declared that you needed “to be in it to win it”. Unsurprisingly, his experience had been mostly positive. So had hers: yesterday she’d won a bottle of Growsome that promised to add two feet to her height for sixty seconds. She couldn’t wait to use it.

“The faces near the end of his tentacles, the ones dishing out the prizes. Are

they all the same face? My friend Burner and I can never decide.”

“Have you done Master Arkwal’s tour of the palace yet?”

“The one where he shows people the different domes? Yeah, I did it a few weeks ago, why?”

“There’s a similar tour for each of the Emperor’s entourage. Even one for the Emperor himself. Questions like that are answered on the tours. I’m not allowed to divulge anything myself. Sorry, but you know what Master Arkwal’s like.”

He raised his little eyebrows, and they exchanged a smile. It was only when his little chimp face pixelated slightly — which happened occasionally due to bandwidth restraints — that she remembered he wasn’t real. A shiver went down her spine. She’d been caught in the uncanny valley, interacting with a program as if he was a sentient being.

As the arkwini got back to his mopping, Nova saw a message flash up from her mum asking when she’d be home. She quickly pinged a reply saying she was just about to wrap things up and would be there soon. Having her mum call the school to track her down was the last thing she needed — Nova had skilfully managed to omit mention of her detentions from every conversation they’d had this month — but one phone call was all it would take to reach Game Over. She checked back into her Corona Cube, took a deep breath and braced herself for an evening of not really concentrating on King Lear.

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

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