Solarversia: The Year Long Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

knew something to be true, something she had hoped for, and dreaded, in equal measure. Solarversia was as addictive as she’d thought it would be.
     

Chapter Five
    Nova hadn’t eaten breakfast cereal in years, but she’d persuaded her mum to buy the box on the kitchen table because of the tie-in with Solarversia. It was corporate sponsorship deals like this that had enabled The Game to be offered for free. Companies had been given the opportunity to sponsor Gameworld quests, at a price determined by the quest’s size, location and importance.
    When asked in a poll, the majority of players had confirmed that the corporate sponsorship model was the preferred form of monetisation, over alternatives like ‘pay-to-play’. Some companies had even won plaudits for the creative way in which they’d showcased their products and services in VR, and had plans to replicate them in the real world.
    The company that made Flakeroonies had sponsored a large quest aboard the International Space Station, and their cereal boxes had reflected a space theme for the last few months. Prodding at the soggy flakes with her spoon, one leg hugged to her chest, Nova found her mind was still occupied with thoughts of the night before.
    How would she find enough time for revision? She should breeze psychology, her best subject by far. But sociology and English? Not so much. She’d probably do what she always did — wing it — and without trying too hard, scrape into Hull University. But she never felt she’d had much chance of getting into Nottingham, where Burner was hoping to join his brother, Jono, and it was looking even less likely now The Game had begun. The truth was, revision held very little appeal compared to the excitement of the virtual world.
    She flicked her Booners down and looked at the cereal packet. Flakes started to rise out of it as if magically unbound from gravity. When she touched them with her spoon they floated across the kitchen toward the fridge. If she flicked them they popped. Those she didn’t jab, flick, poke or in some manner interfere with landed on the kitchen table, which, to Nova, looked like the cratered surface of the Moon.
    An arkwini in a spacesuit poked his helmet round the side of the packet, twitched his little chimp nose a couple of times like he was sniffing out danger, and then scampered out from behind it, followed by several others. Each arkwini held a garden implement of sorts — a rake, hoe or mechanical blower — that they used to gather the fallen flakes into piles.
    When the piles had grown large enough, another arkwini appeared, pushing a wheelbarrow, which he used to transport the flakes to the futuristic conveyor belt illustrated on the side on the box. He emptied the flakes onto the belt, which transported them to a fish tank where they were devoured by a twelve-armed octopus. Her goggles had transformed the kitchen table, and the objects on it, into a moving, living scene. This was augmented reality, a halfway house between boring, everyday consensual reality and the wild, anything-goes virtual kind.
    Mr Negrahnu stood in the doorway, paper in hand, shaking his head while he observed his daughter prodding thin air and muttering to herself. “You do realise, love, that you’re sitting there, talking to a box of cereal?”
    Nova volleyed an eye back to the kitchen. “Morning, Dad. Floating Flakeroonies. I’m helping the arkwinis feed Banjax, the dodectopus. He gets hungry.”
    “Right. Course he does. Sorry to have interrupted you hard at work.”
    She flashed him a snarky smile. People who stuck with consensual reality through choice were either weird or old. Usually both.
    “Feeding this Tampax creature, it counts towards your grades, does it?”
    She had to force herself not to snap back at him. “We agreed that I could do what I want this weekend. My birthday, the start of Solarversia, remember? You just wait ’til Monday. My books won’t know what hit