Wonderscape Page 5

“This is the logo of Hxperion, a company that designs and builds in-reality adventure games, or I-RAGs for short. You are currently in the Wonderscape, the largest and most extraordinary I-RAG ever created.”

  Arthur had played enough games to know that an RPG was a role-playing game and an MMO was a massively multiplayer online game, but he’d never heard of an I-RAG before. He moved closer to the glass, staring at the Hxperion logo. No wonder they’d seen it everywhere.

  “The Wonderscape is divided into realms,” Newton continued, drawing a series of interconnected circles. “Players are called wanderers. In each realm, they face a series of challenges, which they must complete in order to earn loot and progress to another realm.”

  “But what are you doing in a game?” Cecily asked. “You’re a scientist.”

  Newton’s expression soured. “Every realm of the Wonderscape is themed around a different hero from human history. Cleopatra’s realm, I’ve heard, is an amazing recreation of Ptolemaic-dynasty Egypt, and apparently there’s no better way to see Ancient Greece than to visit Alexander the Great’s realm. If exploring is your thing, you can join the famous Viking Leif Erikson on his journey to North America, or climb aboard Vostok 6 with Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Only if you complete all the challenges in a realm are you personally congratulated by the hero – an attraction that has made the Wonderscape incredibly popular, and Hxperion very powerful.”

  Arthur felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he considered the implications of what Newton was describing. He couldn’t believe it was really possible to visit all those places and meet all those amazing people. But why hadn’t he ever heard of the Wonderscape before? He spent loads of spare time scouring the Internet for rumours of new games; it didn’t make sense.

  “So much for playing video games from the comfort of your sofa,” Ren quipped.

  Newton batted his pen. “Those ancient things? People of the twenty-fifth century want something more thrilling than that. I-RAGs are the most popular form of entertainment these days.”

  “Sorry?” Arthur said, thinking he’d misheard. “Did you just say the twenty-fifth century?”

  Newton’s cheeks flushed. “Ah, my mistake. That just slipped out.”

  “Just slipped out?” Arthur tried to bite back his frustration. “What exactly are you saying? That we’re in a different time?”

  When Newton didn’t immediately answer, Ren gave him such a harsh glare he squirmed and returned his pen to the glass. “Wonderscape realms are located on different planets in the Known Universe,” he explained hastily, sketching a large spiral with a rectangle in the centre. “At the moment, you are in Realm Thirty-Three, on Earth. But wanderers move from one realm to another. That’s where this comes in – the gateway you walked through to get here.”

  Arthur recognized Newton’s drawing. The spiral represented that twisting quagmire of blue smoke he’d felt thrumming with energy at Number Twenty-Seven – the portal.

  “It’s called a Wonderway,” Newton went on. “As far as I can determine, it bends space–time so that users are able to travel the cosmic distances between Wonderscape realms in just a few seconds. Based on your entry coordinates, I believe the Wonderway you travelled through did the reverse – it enabled someone to travel vast expanses of time in only a few centimetres of space.”

  Arthur gazed into the dark water beyond the glass, feeling like he might drown in the enormity of Newton’s words. He tried to steady his breathing like Cecily had taught him. “So right now we’re … in the future?”

  “2473,” Newton clarified. “Here, sit down.” He pulled three chairs out from under a laboratory table and Arthur, Ren and Cecily flopped into them like a trio of rag dolls. Cloud bounded into Ren’s lap and buried his head between her knees.

  Thinking back to the Expo ticket, Arthur now realized why it was called EXPO 2469 – because that was the year it took place. And no wonder he’d never heard of I-RAGs before; in the twenty-first century they didn’t exist. A thousand questions streaked through his mind all at once, like a shower of comets. “What’s 2473 like?” he asked, focusing on one at random.

  Newton winced, cleaning the glass with the end of his sleeve. “It’s best you don’t know. Trust me, it can be unsettling to learn about an era more advanced than your own. You need to return to your own time as soon as possible.”

  “But how?” Cecily questioned. “By travelling through another Wonderway?”

  “Wonderways are activated using realm-keys, an item found in loot,” Newton explained. “You will have already received one by completing the Voyage of the Captain, but that realm-key will only open a Wonderway to another realm in the Wonderscape. I suspect that in order to get home, you will need a special type of realm-key, one that has been reverse-engineered to open a Wonderway through time. Let’s call it a time-key.”

  A time-key. That was their ticket home. Rerunning the avalanche challenge in his mind, Arthur remembered the quartz prism he’d collected at the end. It was the only item any of them had received. He patted his pocket and pulled it out. “Do you mean this is a realm-key? An ordinary one?”

  “That’s right,” Newton replied. “It may seem unassuming, but it’s actually an advanced piece of technology.”

  “It looks a bit like the gem on the Fuzzball’s collar,” Ren observed. Giving Cloud a scratch under his chin, she unclipped the obsidian prism and handed it to Newton.

  The scientist appraised it cautiously, then held it under a magnifying glass. “Fascinating,” he muttered. “Realm-keys can only be used once, but this has been designed for multiple journeys. It has the same basic structure as a realm-key but with an entirely different space–time frequency.” He lifted his head from the magnifying glass. “It could be a time-key. I think we should test it.”

  The unicorn heads on Newton’s slippers nodded as he dashed over to the huge black frame standing in the middle of the floor. Maybe the scientist was just excited, but the speed at which he moved was starting to make Arthur feel uneasy…

  The metal frame had a hexagonal hole cut in the bottom, exactly the right size to fit a realm-key. Beside it was a holographic keypad. “Is this a Wonderway?” Ren asked, approaching slowly. “It doesn’t look like the one we walked through on Peacepoint.”

  “This one hasn’t been activated yet,” Newton explained, tapping a few numbers on the keypad. “To do that, you first enter your destination – a realm number – and then insert a realm-key. For time travel, I suppose you input a date.” Arthur didn’t get a chance to see which date Newton had entered, as the number pad vanished once the scientist had slotted the obsidian prism into the keyhole.

  The effect was immediate. The black Wonderway turned sapphire-blue and then burst at the edges, transforming into smoke. The floorboards beneath it trembled as the vapour churned in an anti-clockwise direction, forming a whirlpool. Deep in his bones, Arthur felt wave after wave of energy discharging from it, just like before.

  Cecily’s braids whipped around her shoulders as a wind picked up, sweeping around the room. “Is it working?”

  “So far so good,” Newton said, scribbling observations in his notebook.

  Arthur’s hope soared. Being in the future was thrilling, but he just wanted to go home. In a few moments he, Ren and Cecily might be back inside Number Twenty-Seven…

  But then a flurry of green sparks erupted from the centre of the whirlpool, like a firework had detonated inside. Arthur was forced to clamp his hands over his ears as a deafening screech cut through the air and the obsidian key shot out of the vortex and spun to a halt on the floor. The blue smoke vanished into a point at the centre and the solid Wonderway frame returned.

  As the wind settled around his ankles, Arthur’s insides turned leaden. They weren’t going home after all.

  “There must be a problem,” Newton said, stating the obvious. He collected the prism off the floor and placed it back under his magnifying glass. “When the Wonderway ope
ned in your time, was there any evidence to suggest something had gone wrong?”

  “You mean, like exploding gnomes?” Arthur asked delicately.

  Newton raised an eyebrow, looking carefully at Cloud’s prism. “Hmm. My suspicion is that this is a time-key, but it was damaged the last time it was used. You will need to get it repaired before you can use it again.”

  “Can’t you repair it for us?” Cecily asked.

  The scientist shook his head. “I don’t have the right equipment or expertise. There is probably only one person who does: the time-key inventor. Whoever they are, you will need to find them quickly.” He returned to the glass and scribbled down a formula that was so long, it ran over six lines. After substituting all the Greek letters for numbers, and completing a series of calculations, he circled an answer: 57.

  “Imagine a jar of bubblegums. Each bubblegum is in exactly the right place, but as soon as you pull one out, the rest fall into different positions. Travelling through time has the same effect on the order of the universe – it scrambles everything.” Newton tapped his finger against the glass. “That’s why the universe is always seeking to rebalance itself. And, according to my calculations, fifty-seven hours after your arrival, it will autocorrect, deleting you and any other anomalies present. So, given the time you arrived here, let me see…” He removed a golden pocket watch from his trouser pocket and glanced at its face. “You now have fifty-three hours and twenty-seven minutes to get back to the twenty-first century.”

  Arthur froze. “Fifty-three hours?” He calculated quickly. “That’s a little over two days from now! What happens if we’re late?”

  “If you’re still here when the time runs out?” Newton scrunched up his nose. “Very messy. Your bodies will most likely break down into protoplasm.”

  Arthur opened his mouth to respond but found he had no words. No wonder Newton had been hurrying! He glanced at Ren and Cecily, who were both staring at him.

  Fifty-three hours. That was it. That was all the time they had to find this mysterious time-key inventor and get home … before the universe turned them into slime.

  7

  Arthur grasped the edge of a laboratory table to steady himself. His whole body was shaking and he didn’t know how to make it stop. Finding the time-key inventor in a place as vast as the Wonderscape seemed … well, impossible.

  “I can’t believe any of this is happening,” Cecily uttered, hugging her elbows as she sat on a stool. “Everything feels like it should be a dream, only I know it’s real.”

  Pacing by the glass, Ren snorted. “Dream? I think you mean nightmare. We’re over four hundred years from home and if we don’t make it back in time, we’re going to turn into protoplasm – that’s basically snot, isn’t it?”

  Arthur thought it best not to reply. His face felt numb. This morning he had been worried about being late for school; now he might never see school again. For a painful moment his mind turned to home. His mum had passed away when he was two, and he had no cousins or aunts or uncles, so for as long as he could remember his family had just been him and his dad. He pictured his dad’s face when they’d said goodbye earlier: his wonky glasses, kind smile and curly dark hair. Arthur knew that if he ever wanted to see his dad again, he had to think of a plan, fast. “We need to figure out who the time-key inventor is,” he said, clenching his fists. “What clues do we know about them so far?”

  “They’re a genius?” Cecily offered.

  “Maybe not,” Ren said. “Why would a genius give a time-travel device to a dog?”

  She had a point. Arthur couldn’t understand why anyone would leave something that powerful hanging around Cloud’s collar.

  “All right, well, they must know a lot about Wonderways and realm-keys,” Cecily reasoned. “Perhaps they work for Hxperion? And those initials scratched onto the base could be a maker’s signature – HW.”

  At this, Arthur rustled around in his rucksack and pulled out the EXPO 2469 ticket. “According to this, we know the names of three Hxperion employees, at least: Milo Hertz, Valeria Mal’fey and Tiburon Nox. It says here they’re the founders of the company.”

  “And siblings,” Newton chimed in from the other side of the room. Since informing them of their fate, he’d left them to discuss things while he busied himself with an experiment involving a vat of colour-changing jelly, a small mirror and a hot-water bottle. “They were all adopted. Tiburon is the oldest; Valeria’s in the middle and Milo is the youngest. According to my research, they were each responsible for one major innovation in the Wonderscape. That’s how the Hxperion logo was formed: a hexagon to represent Milo, who invented realm-keys and Wonderways; a cross for Tiburon, who developed mimics; and a triangle for Valeria, who created Wondercloaks.”

  The word Wondercloak spiked Arthur’s interest, but he brushed it aside. He was more concerned with his own impending doom. “Do you know where we might find them?”

  Newton stiffened, as if finding the founders was not a good idea. “Tiburon and Valeria each have their own operational headquarters in the Wonderscape, but the two locations are top secret. As for Milo Hertz – nobody knows where he is. He fled four years ago.”

  “Fled?” Cecily repeated. “What do you mean? He ran away?”

  Newton walked over to a table of microscopes and opened one of the Wondernews Archives drawers that Arthur had been curious about earlier. The scientist selected a trio of small glass slides, switched on three microscopes and placed one slide under each. “Here, these will show you what happened.”

  Arthur didn’t understand how a microscope was going to explain anything. The last time he’d peered through one at school, he’d seen a squirming mass of bacteria that had put him off probiotic yoghurt for life. Still, he followed Ren and Cecily over and hazarded a peek through one of the eyepieces.

  Happily, there wasn’t a writhing organism in sight. It was as if Newton had placed a miniature TV screen under the lens, because Arthur found himself watching a video. A female news presenter dressed in a waist-length tartan cape was reporting from a venue packed with people. “So Wondernews is a news channel?” Arthur asked.

  “Not always,” Newton answered. “Its format is different in every realm. Here, it’s a news channel viewed through microscopes.”

  Arthur briefly speculated how else Wondernews might be presented; perhaps in Cleopatra’s realm you read it as a newspaper from a sheet of papyrus? Somehow, the microscope was able to emit sound. He tuned his ears into the reporter’s voice.

  “This popular event attracts hundreds of thousands of fans every year,” she said in a serious tone, “but attendees I’ve been speaking to are now confused and worried. Footage of the incident, which has been shared widely, was recorded by several fans at the opening ceremony.”

  The report cut to an auditorium heaving with people, all wearing waist-length capes. There was obviously something weird about the garments, because the designs kept shifting. Some had the appearance of tumbling sand or windswept grass; others were decorated with fluttering insects or ink blotches that slid around, changing colours. Arthur recalled Newton’s mention of a Wondercloak, and guessed that might be what they were.

  Rising in front of the crowd was a wide stage illuminated by overhead spotlights. Its heavy velvet curtains were printed with the EXPO 2469 logo – the same as on Arthur’s ticket.

  As the crowd chatted happily, there was a clang backstage and an angry voice shouted, “MILO!”

  A muscly young man with hunched shoulders and a mop of scruffy dark hair shot out from behind the curtains and sprinted across the stage. He was dressed in a hexagon-patterned Hawaiian shirt, baggy denim shorts and sandals, and covering his back was a floor-length cloak that looked like it had been stitched together from green oak leaves. His tanned skin glistened with sweat and his grey eyes were drawn wide. Clutched in his arms was a bundle of black jersey with a couple of drawstrings – a hoody.

  Seconds later, a group of T-class mimics skulked thr
ough the curtains and zoomed after him. They each carried a strange sword with a black blade that appeared to be smoking.

  The audience hushed. People turned to each other, pointing and whispering.

  Pursued by the T-classes, the man hurtled through a door on the opposite side of the stage and disappeared.

  Here, the video ended. Arthur lifted his face away from the microscope to find Ren looking confused. “The beefy guy running away from the T-class mimics was Milo Hertz,” she said, connecting the dots. “And that was the last time he was seen? I wonder why they were chasing him.”

  “He vanished right before the Expo opened,” Newton said. “Authorities have been looking for him ever since; apparently, he left behind several unpaid debts.”

  “Sounds like he was in trouble; his brother and sister must be worried sick,” Cecily remarked.

  Curious, Arthur took another look at the video. This time he experimented with the two focus knobs on the microscope. One seemed to operate the play, pause, fast-forward and rewind functions; the other allowed you to zoom in or out.

  As Arthur replayed the clip, he searched for details that might explain why Milo was running. During the fourth repeat, he noticed something reflected in the cover of an overhead spotlight, and zoomed in. There was an opening in the bundled hoody Milo was carrying, visible only from above. Inside, Arthur spied a patch of coarse white fur, a pointed ear and a slice of a familiar ruby-red collar.

  He took a sharp intake of breath. “The hoody is Cloud! Cloud is the hoody!” He shook his head and tried to organize his words. “I mean, Cloud is inside the hoody Milo is holding.”

  Ren peered back through her microscope and adjusted the focus. “Arthur’s right – and Cloud’s wearing the time-key around his collar. Maybe Milo Hertz is the inventor?”

  Cecily bit her lip. “But then whose are the initials HW on the time-key?”

  As soon as she’d posed the question, Arthur realized their mistake. He gathered Cloud into his arms and twisted round the time-key – now back on the little dog’s collar – so everyone could see. “I think we’ve been reading this upside down. They don’t say HW; they say MH – for Milo Hertz.” Cloud fidgeted in Arthur’s grasp, so he plopped him down on the floor.