Read Online Solarversia: The Year Long Game by Mr Toby Downton, Mrs Helena Michaelson - Free Book Online Page B

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