The Kingdom of the Seven Stars: Chaturanga

Chapter 11

Alex jogged beside Alice, Ellen and Captain Zachary into their fourth room.

It was big enough that their breathing echoed. The floor was the size of a football pitch. The chessboard covered the entire floor up the walls again and the squares were much bigger too. The room was in good condition, with metal walls like the third room, but Alex noticed they were tightly sealed where they met the floor. The ceiling was higher than before with large hatches in it. There were no chess pieces on the board.

"Ah. Invisible Chess, Chata?" said Alice, looking around. "Or Blind Chess? Or reverse Haunted House Chess?"

"No, you'd probably stroll straight through all of those as well," said Chata, from her wall screens, which were also larger than the ones in the other rooms. It let them see her – and the expressions on her face and in her eyes – more clearly than before. "You really are Stephen's grandchildren."

"You did this to him too, didn't you?" said Alex. "You gave him challenges."

The more he thought about it, the more certain he was that Captain Zachary was right. Chata had said in the Billiards Chess room that the momentum dampener was not working. But now he thought about that, he realised he had never heard of a momentum-dampener before.

Chata scowled and her lips twisted.

"Try being alone on this planet for six hundred years," she said. "Try being abandoned by the people who programmed you. Try being alone in your empty shell of a museum with nothing to do and no one to talk to. You'll be thinking up fun things to do on a chessboard when they come back too. It's the only way to keep from going crazy. I'm not entirely sure it's worked, but it's better than nothing."

"I can imagine," said Captain Zachary. He discreetly checked his laser pistol.

"You played these games with King Stephen?" said Ellen.

"Oh, we played games," said Chata. "I gave him the hardest, most fiendish challenges I'd thought of in six centuries. And he... he strolled through all of them like a grandmaster playing a beginner."

"How did he do it?" said Alex.

"He kept changing the rules," said Chata. Her scowl deepened as she remembered. "Not literally. He didn't cheat once. He just... reinterpreted everything. I thought I'd given myself every advantage. But he kept finding ways to use those advantages against me. Whatever game, whatever situation I presented him with, he found a way to turn it around. He kept making arguments that I couldn't argue with. I couldn't find any way to beat him or to stop him leaving. He left his stuff as a consolation prize."

"I see," said Alex. He could guess why Chata had been keen to stop his ancestor from leaving. Meeting one of the greatest chess players in history after six hundred years of being alone must have been a dream come true for her. He remembered from his history lessons that intelligent computers were often close enough to human minds that, just like them, they could imagine and dream. And they could also go insane.

"And now, four hundred years later, here I am in the same situation with his great-grandchildren," said Chata. "So I'm not making the same mistake again. I won't rely solely on processor power. I'm introducing an element of randomness into this next game. I thought I had last time, but this time I really will."

"Don't blame me because you can't play pinball," said Ellen. "And it's not as random as everything thinks it is. You can always guess roughly where each ball is going to go."

"Yes. So you proved," said Chata. "That's way I'm going with something that none of you cannot possibly be good at. Welcome to the Prawns Challenge."