The old man dissolved into nothingness and Sushi found herself standing in the middle of a deserted lounge bar. The arrangement of the place struck her as odd: the small circular tables, the stiff-backed chairs arranged neatly around them and the vulgar carpets decorated with a recurring image of an old bearded man carrying a trident. It was the view through the windows of the ocean that told her she was aboard a cruise liner. But what was she supposed to do? It wasn’t like the puzzles she was used to, and besides, her avatar couldn’t move from its spot.

A background noise piqued her curiosity. She couldn’t place it or say much about it, save for the fact that it was getting louder by the second. When the tidal wave hit the ship a few seconds later it sent her crashing against a couple of bar stools, her avatar still out of her control. The lounge windows soon cracked under the pressure of the surrounding seawater and the incoming tsunami flushed her down a corridor into the depths of the ship. She tumbled head over heels for what seemed like an eternity, and finally came to rest sprawled on her hands and knees looking like a washed-up shaggy dog.

Getting to her feet, she looked up at the appliances hanging down from the floor-turned-ceiling: ovens, sinks and workspaces. She was in the ship’s kitchen. Small fires were burning where boxes of cereals and other dry goods had been flung out of cupboards and onto the hobs. Water flooding into the room was beginning to swirl around her ankles. A message flashed in her display: Escape from the Poseidon. 11,762 safe spots left. And then, for the first time, she was able to move.

Ten minutes earlier she’d arrived at Ayers Rock in Australia. She was there to see Giganja, one of nine Grandmasters players were required to visit throughout the course of the year. Grandmasters hosted the Planetary Puzzles, a series of self- contained games that started on the hour, every hour. The datafeed had told her that there were 16,803 people there with her to play the 10 a.m. puzzle. She now knew what the puzzle was about. Unless she escaped from the ship in time, she’d lose one of her three precious lives.

Glancing around the steaming, smoking cauldron of a room, she desperately searched for clues, consoled only by the knowledge that every other player, in his or her phased instance of the ship, would have been as disoriented as her.

First she tried looking for clues in the water. It was infused with a random assortment of cans of food, kitchen utensils and dinner ingredients. An oxygen counter appeared in her display while her head was submerged — it looked like she could remain underwater for a maximum of thirty seconds at a time.

Abandoning the underwater search, she clambered onto a metallic vent that enabled her to reach several cupboards. The first two were empty. Bummer. Balancing one leg on the vent and the other on a pipe protruding from the wall, she stretched to reach the third one. Its door swung open to reveal a brightly coloured object. She couldn’t make out what it was, only that the same Poseidon logo that had appeared on the carpet in the lounge was printed on its side.

Heart thrashing around in her chest, she strained to reach it. Her fingers flailed towards it uselessly, so she decided to leap. Headsets like hers — the same make of BoonerMax goggles that Nova owned — worked off brain waves to move avatars around the Gameworld. The technology wasn’t yet perfect, but according to the creators of such devices, it would be by the time the next Game started in 2024.

She sprang through the air, snatched the object clean off the shelf — it was a snorkel — and crashed to the water below, hitting a fixture on the way down. Her datafeed told her the snorkel could lengthen the duration of any underwater excursion to two minutes. The fall had cost her 18 health points, but at least she could search underwater now without the risk of drowning.

The water had reached waist height and was still rising. Swimming through a medley of bobbing potatoes and carrots, she cruised around the upturned kitchen, not quite sure what she was looking for. Other cupboards were either bare or contained nothing more interesting than the kitchen cupboards at home. And the freezer room, which had looked promising at first, also turned out to be a red herring. Wading past the thawing carcass of a lamb, and panicking slightly as she glimpsed the number of safe spots start to diminish, she spotted a discarded chef’s hat with the same logo emblazoned on its side.

She turned the hat inside out to find a map stitched to the lining. A dotted arrow led from the kitchen to the ship’s engine room, where the map’s legend indicated she’d find a door in the hull that led to freedom. At last, she was getting somewhere. As she waded through the water to the kitchen’s exit, she heard Gorigaroo strike his gong. He wasn’t actually there on the ship; Grandmaster Giganja had mentioned that the gong would sound every three minutes, signalling a new clue. The cupboard that had contained the snorkel started flashing. Those who hadn’t discovered it yet soon would.

Sushi squealed with joy when she reached the engine room door. The sign above its handle — which she’d had to crane her neck to read — confirmed that it led to freedom. Except the door was locked. As the minutes passed without her discovering a single additional clue, her joy gave way to fear and frustration. There were fewer than five thousand safe spots left when the gong sounded again.

This time the ship’s furnace flashed. Diving back under the water, she cursed at her stupidity — she’d noticed a chunky metal grill affixed to its front in one of her reccies, but not thought to inspect it. Idiot girl. The grill came away from the furnace as soon as she touched it to reveal an opening wide enough for her head, but not her shoulders. Clutching hold of the sides, she poked her head inside and soon found a metal plaque bearing an inscription: Find the boy in the cabin with the keychain round his neck.

She resurfaced and felt a huge rush of energy course through her body. It was all coming together. The corridor that led from the kitchen to the engine room had also led to a dozen or so cabins. After checking the first couple and finding nothing she’d ignored the rest in her excitement to get to the engine room.

She re-entered the corridor and did her best to ignore the visceral fear creeping through her. The water was up to her neck and gave no indication that it was going to stop. Her display flashed as the number of safe spots ticked under two thousand. She entered the first cabin and checked the only places large enough to hide a boy: the wardrobe and the bathroom. No dice.

Next cabin, the water now creeping above her chin. Wardrobe empty, bathroom too. Ditto the next cabin. Come on, little boy, where are you hiding? By the time she found him, curled on the top shelf of the wardrobe in the fifth cabin, there was less than a foot of air to the ceiling. A new chart for his oxygen level appeared in the display next to hers. Shit — she was now responsible for his life too, and they’d have to share the snorkel, halving the two-minute time frame. She was, however, relieved to spot the keychain around the boy’s neck. Taking his hand, she started the swim back to the engine room. It wasn’t far, but with the safe spots counting down in her peripheral vision — now fewer than a thousand — it felt like a slog.

As they progressed along the corridor, her heart, which was already pounding, stepped up a gear as the lights started to flicker. The ship was losing power. She checked on the boy. His terror mirrored her own, exacerbated by the unnatural sound of cast iron being twisted and bent as it succumbed to the enormous pressure of water bearing down on the vessel.

All of a sudden she was close to panicking, despite reminding herself that none of it was real; she was at a gaming café in town, not stranded inside the claustrophobia-inducing bowels of a capsized ship. Now kissing the ceiling, the deluge of water into the craft had finally finished; the ocean had won and the exit was still ten metres away.

She watched her display in horror, not knowing what to fear more, the dearth of safe spots — three hundred and counting — or their lack of oxygen. As they reached the door in the hull, the boy’s key started to flash. So did the oxygen gauge — they each had less than five seconds of air. She looked up, craning her neck as far as it would go above the water — there was an air pocket — the little beauty!

Kicking like a donkey on heat she surfaced into the pocket with a second to spare and was overjoyed to watch their oxygen counters slowly replenish. Waiting what she considered to be the bare minimum, she nodded at the boy and the pair of them sunk back under.

As soon as they got to the handle, the little boy took charge, removing the keychain from round his neck and inserting the key into the lock. Then he moved aside and motioned for her to turn it. Clutching it with both hands, she started to wind it in an anticlockwise direction, just like the sign advised, happy with herself for thinking it through on the swim back and realizing that the direction would be the same, regardless of either the sign or the door’s uprightness.

The next few seconds seemed to occur in a singular moment: the handle making a thunking sound, the door swinging up and open to reveal a clear blue sky, and Sushi and the little boy being winched to safety by the waiting rescue team. She’d done it – solved Giganja’s puzzle, the first of her friends to do so.

She ripped the Booners off her face, inhaled sharply and realized she’d been holding her breath for real. The panicky feelings on the boat had been strong, and for some reason she wasn’t shaking them. It was hard to regulate her breathing. She rubbed her eyes. Too long in VR? She looked up and around at the gamers on chairs to the left and right of her. That was weird — the girl to her left was also rubbing her eyes. So were the group of guys by the bar who’d been drinking beers and watching replays. One of the men started to cough and the others coughed in sync. Sushi sniffed the air. Something was burning — rubber? Suddenly the air burst into a thousand shards of glass.

***

Arty wanted to relax. He wanted to go home, get a takeaway, flop in front of the TV and forget about his week. Instead, finding himself unable to leave the office, he’d ordered a curry that remained untouched on his plate, his mind still on the griefing attack at Ripley’s Junction. It had been consuming him endlessly. The analysis they’d done on the night of the attack hadn’t relieved him one bit, because it had shown that it probably hadn’t been perpetrated by the ROFL Mongers or any of the other griefing clans that Spiralwerks knew about, the kind that griefed for the ‘lolz’. They were fairly sure it had been the work of the Holy Order.

It was the conga line, viewed from above, that had clued them in. Lots of the players involved in the griefing attack had abandoned their cars to join the line, but after a while, most of them had got bored of waiting and had wandered off to the nearest Corona Cube to log out. The griefers had stayed in the line long enough that they reached the front and were able to control its direction. They’d steered it over a bridge and looped back round under the road that passed beneath it.

Carl, the Chief Technical Officer, had been the one to spot the pattern. Viewed from above, the snaking ‘S’ symbol was overlaid on itself at ninety degrees. The conga line had been distorted until it was configured like a curly swastika, a symbol that featured prominently in the Order’s manifesto. They were proud to be promoting a new form of fascism, one that involved loyalty and devotion to an unseen, as yet unmanifested superintelligent cybernetic organism. And they had a beef with Spiralwerks for an unknown reason that was killing him. The whole thing made him feel sick.

There had been a brief moment of euphoria following Carl’s discovery. Spiralwerks had been very strict about only allowing real people to sign up and play Solarversia, and had worked hard to prevent people from creating multiple accounts. So they’d sent the details of the players involved in the griefing attack to MI6 and the FBI, confident that they were about to help catch the lunatics behind it.

Today Arty had received a call. Yes, the people involved in the attack were real, but every one of them had been ruled out as having anything to do with the Order. Each avatar was real, but they belonged to down-and-outs, vagrants and beggars who had been approached a couple of years back and been paid a few bucks to stand still while someone waved a phone over them. The euphoria had quickly soured.

Arty stuck his fork deep into the mound of rogan josh and lifted it carefully to his mouth. Then he pushed his chair back from his desk and changed channels on the big screen until he came across one of the numerous Solarversia programmes. Some were dedicated to certain aspects of the game, such as quests, exhibitions or vehicle choices, others were punditry shows, following celebrities and players that were doing well, having won lots of money or obtained a special item of some sort. Many featured user-generated content.

He chose to watch a show about the Planetary Puzzles, one of the types of quest he’d been heavily involved with in the creative stages. Players had to face nine Grandmasters in total, one on each planet in the Solar System. They progressed in difficulty with the planet’s distance from the Sun. Mercury’s Grandmaster, Killanja, was the easiest, then Meganja on Venus, ending with Brontanja on Pluto, the most difficult of them all. Players would have to face every Grandmaster, though not in any particular order, and such visits were included in Bucket Lists later in the year. Unsuccessful attempts at puzzles lost players a life, although the item was ticked off the list for the attempt.

A problem that Spiralwerks had encountered as soon as they began working on Solarversia was the viral nature of information. As soon as one person knew something, everyone in the world could know it. The minute a puzzle had been played, word of how to solve it would be out there, on forums, on social media, in tweets. There was no way to prevent the spread. The only way round it was to find a solution that meant no puzzle was ever played more than once.

But in a game supporting a hundred million players over the course of a year, the number of individual puzzles Spiralwerks needed to devise stretched towards infinity. It had taken a lot of false starts, but the team had eventually managed to created an artificially intelligent program, which spawned hundreds of thousands of unique puzzles at the right level of difficulty, puzzles that were surprisingly varied and fun to play. These were the Planetary Puzzles.

The TV presenter of the programme introduced a player who had just faced Giganja, the Grandmaster in charge of Earth’s puzzles. Arty loved these segments, where the person watched a replay of some recent action and spoke about what had been going through their mind at the time, discussing the reasons they’d acted in the ways they had. Suddenly the programme cut to a sombre-looking man in a newsroom.

“We interrupt this programme to bring you some breaking news. A series of explosions have been reported across the United States, all occurring shortly after midday. Five cities were targeted, killing nineteen people, injuring many more. The death count is expected to rise. Some viewers may find the following scenes disturbing.”

The first and most devastating blast had struck the Electropets’ Headquarters in Menlo Park, California. A knot formed in Arty’s stomach — Electropets were on the Holy Order’s corporate hit list. Someone had gained access to the building carrying a bomb in a suitcase and detonated it in a busy lift. Eight people, severed from life in an instant. Arty watched a fire crew pump water into a mangled, blackened lift shaft before the programme cut to an eyewitness account with a clearly shocked, middle-aged American-Asian woman who spoke in fits and starts:

“It was lunchtime. My colleague Jerry asked if I wanted to grab yum-cha. I walked to the elevator with him before realising that I’d forgotten my purse. Jerry even made a joke about it. I can see him laughing right now — I always forget my purse. I told him I’d join him. He said he’d save a place for me in the line. It was so loud it shook the entire building. I fell into the water cooler. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Jerry’s gone.”

The next piece of footage was from a gaming cafe in Seattle where multiple lives had been lost. No, thought Arty. His fork, suspended in mid-air since the newscast began, clattered to the ground. Was the cafe affiliated with Spiralwerks? Was this an indirect attack on them? The entire front section of the cafe was missing, as was the top half of the van parked outside. Every window in the vicinity had been blown out of its frame. The road was chock-full of police cars, ambulances and fire engines that struggled to pass one another. People were either hugging each other in tears or sitting on the curbside, hands on heads, staring into space. This wasn’t right, it couldn’t be happening. He grabbed his tray with shaking hands and put it on the desk, suddenly feeling sick. The newscast reverted to the studio.

“All of the targets appear on a list that was recently circulated by the Holy Order, an organisation comprised of ‘techno-shamans’ who have declared allegiance to an artificially intelligent being ... who doesn’t exist as yet. The Holy Order claim that this being — who they refer to as the ‘Magi’ — has contacted them from the future and persuaded them to help ‘give birth’ to it. The Order’s manifesto, entitled Sacred Singularity, provides an explanation of the reasoning behind their bizarre beliefs, stemming from a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The group claims that the logical outcome of the thought experiment is that the world will become a far better place once the Magi is in charge of it, and use this explanation to excuse their terrorist attacks.”

Beside him, Arty noticed that Hannah had entered the room. She’d initiated a bridge call in Settlers of Catan, the meeting room down the corridor, and wanted him to join them as soon as possible. He nodded to her and mumbled his confirmation while anger rose inside of him. No, he wanted to say, no, I cannot join them. It would be a meeting focused on death and destruction. What did he know about such things? Nothing. He was a creator, an innovator. He made things, didn’t destroy them, and he wanted it to stay that way.

All of a sudden, the Year-Long Game had deformed into something bearing more resemblance to a Year-Long Nightmare.

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

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