Diane Duane

by Omnitopia Dawn (v5)

  Dev headed upstairs to the living wing first. Once in the sitting room area, he made for the little freezer next to the coffee bar. “Miri?” he said.

  No answer: she was out and about on her own schedule now. Dev sighed and opened the freezer. Sure enough, there on top of one of the ice cube trays was a waffle bowl of double chocolate chip ice cream, the contents slumped into a half-melted puddle. He got it out, hunted around the cupboards for a napkin and a plate, shoved the plate and bowl into the microwave, and nuked the ice cream for twenty seconds to make it a little more manageable. Then he shoved a spoon into the whole business and headed out again.

  Outside the big polished wooden slab of the entrance to Lola’s suite, Dev just paused and laid his hand against the wood for a moment, feeling his stomach clenching with nerves. Just get calm, he thought, taking a deep breath or so. No matter what happens to you today, no matter what happens to Omnitopia, not a whisper of it needs to touch your little girl, or scare her at all.

  He headed into Lola’s suite, finding Miss Poppy sitting in the main leisure area and reading to his daughter. “—and he said, ‘This is Exploding Pop-Tart. He is—’ ”

  “Daddy!” shrieked Lola, and flung herself out of the beanbag chair in which she’d been sitting.

  “Lolo!” Dev said, hurriedly putting the ice cream aside. He swept her up just before she could ram into him. Lola threw her arms around his neck and whispered extremely audibly, “Poppy’s reading me The Wuggie Norple Story!”

  Over his daughter’s shoulder, Dev gave Poppy a resigned look. “Really?” he said. “Can you take a few minutes off from that so I can eat my ice cream that you bought me?”

  “With my own money,” said Lola, squirming to get down: Poppy put the book down with an expression eloquent of relief, smiled at Dev, and headed back toward the suite’s office. Once down, Lola peered at her dad. “Do you want some fruit? You should have five a day.”

  “Oh, really?” Dev said, picking up the ice cream and going to sit down on another of the beanbags. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Well!” Lola said in a schoolteacher- like voice, and sat down on the beanbag on the other side of the low table while Dev started to eat the ice cream. “We had a new teacher yesterday. I forget her name. And she said you have to have five. And then we named all kinds of fruit!”

  “So which ones did you name?” Dev said, while in the back of his mind something started shouting, Sixty-five million dollars, my God, how are we going to recover from this even if everything works out all right? The company’s going to be damaged for years, we’re going to have to restructure . . . Yet Jim had been fairly calm. And was he doing that just to keep me from overreacting before I see Time Magazine Lady? Oh, God . . .

  “—and she said kiwi was a bird,” Lola was saying. “And I said that was silly, it was a fruit!”

  Dev suddenly realized that he was looking at the bowl, and it was empty. Wow, he thought, and put it aside. “Kiwi is a bird, honey.”

  Lola favored Dev with a look that suggested he had taken leave of his senses. Looking at her, he found himself unaccountably misting up at the realization of how incredibly like her mom Lola looked sometimes, for Mirabel gave him the same look at least once a day. “It’s a little bird that lives in New Zealand,” he said. “It’s black, and it runs around on the ground because it can’t fly.”

  Lola’s expression changed to one of profound sorrow. “Poor birdie!”

  “No, it’s all right, sweetie,” Dev said. “The kiwi bird doesn’t mind. It likes doing that. That’s what it’s built to do.”

  Lola’s expression now went serious. She put the book down, got up from her own beanbag and came over to sit down beside Dev, looking up into his face with perplexity. “But isn’t it sad when it sees the other birds? Doesn’t it want to be like them?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so—” Dev started to say. But Lola shook her head. “No! What if it wants to do something besides what it’s build-ed to do?”

  That one threw Dev for a moment. After a second he shook his head and put an arm around her. “Birds don’t do that, Lolo,” he said. “They’re not as smart as people are. So don’t worry. Birds are happy being birds.”

  She looked up at him suspiciously. “Are you sure?” she said.

  Her mom again. “Yeah,” Dev said. “I’m sure.”

  Lola sighed and sat there for a few moments, thinking that over. “Okay,” she said finally. But then she looked up with a faint frown.

  “Daddy,” she said, “the kiwi bird is wrong.”

  “Huh? How?”

  “It should be green,” Lola said. “Like the fruit.”

  Dev opened his mouth, then closed it again as Lola went over to pick up the latest, most beat-up copy of The Wuggie Norple Story. She flopped down on her beanbag again and started going through the pictures. Apparently the subject was settled for the moment.

  Dev got up and glanced over at Poppy, who had just come out of the office again, but before he could say anything to her, his phone started to sing “New York New York”: Frank’s ring. Dev sighed and snapped it open. “Yeah, hi, Frank . . .”

  “Getting close to your appointment with Time Lady, Dev,” Frank said.

  “Right,” Dev said. “Where’ll she be?”

  “Delano from PR staff is ferrying her over to the conference input area in the PR building,” Frank said. “That suit you? We can still change it if you want.”

  “That’s fine,” Dev said. “I’ll head over. Anything from Tau or Jim?”

  “Nothing new,” Frank said. “And if you’re going to ask me about this every five minutes, it’s gonna be a much longer day for the two of us than it needs to be.”

  Dev made a face. “Point taken. What’s the rest of the day look like?”

  Frank recited a list of appointments with in- house staff, and Dev stood there nodding at these, but his mind was elsewhere—far down in the virtual landscapes of the Omnitopian inner world, where even now his people and the programs running under their supervision were massing for the second-wave attack and their ambush on the attacking programs and hackers. No, he thought, nothing I can do about that right now, so stay focused. Stay in the here and now, not the now and then . . .

  “Okay,” he said at the end of Frank’s list. “See if you can clear me out ten or twenty minutes around noon upstairs in my office for Mirabel. She’s been threatening me with force-feeding again.”

  “I didn’t mention that,” Frank said. “That’s twelve-thirty to ten of one, just before the meeting with the people from design structures.”

  The thought of an hour spent studying Pantone swatches and listening to heated discussions about the psychology of color and its relationship to profit profiles in the Macrocosms made Dev want to yawn. But along with everything else on today’s to-do list, it had to be done. And maybe it’s what I could use to settle me down . . . Dev nodded and said, “There was one other thing—”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “About the rollout ceremony—”

  “We finally got the catering sorted out.”

  “Not that. Have you looked at the RSVP list lately?”

  “Not in the past couple of days—Rowan’s been handling that.” Rowan was one of Frank’s own PAs.

  “Would you have her check the guest list for me? Or do it yourself? I was wondering if Stroopwaffel had RSVP’d as yet.”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Dev folded up his phone and put it away. A little behind him, Poppy was standing quietly, watching Lola as she turned the pages of the beat-up copy of Wuggie Norple. She was reciting the story to herself in a singsong voice, not that the part Lola was repeating actually had anything to do with the pages she was looking at.

  “How many copies of that do we have?” Dev said under his breath to Poppy.

  The young woman smiled. “Five or six. We reorder them from used bookstores as necessary.”

  Dev nodd
ed. “You think she needs a bird?” he said. “A green one? So she can be sure that the birdies are happy to be birdies?”

  Poppy turned on Dev a smile as indulgent as the ones she used on Lola, but rather drier. “If she brings it up again,” she said, “we can discuss it. But at this age you can make something more important than it needs to be if you make an issue of it. Let’s see what she says over the next few days. We may never hear about it again. If we do, then we can talk it over.”

  Dev nodded. “Lolo?” he said. “Gotta go!”

  Lola had flopped over upside down on the beanbag, holding the book over her head. Now she looked at him, inverted. “You gotta go to work?” she said. “Poor Daddy!”

  It was her mom’s line, but minus the inevitable irony. “Do I get a hug?” Dev said.

  Lola put the book aside, scrambled up out of the beanbag, marched over to Dev as he went down on one knee, and threw her arms around him. “Have a nice day!” she said, the imitation of her mom on purpose this time.

  “I will!” Dev said, letting her go with difficulty. Lola headed back over to the beanbag, threw herself down on it once more, and instantly became absorbed in the book again.

  Dev got up and headed for the door, glancing over at Poppy. “Has Mirabel been here already?”

  “Early this morning,” Poppy said. “She’ll be meeting us at preschool in a while.”

  “Okay,” Dev said. He looked over at his upside-down daughter and sighed. “I hope my day starts going as calmly as hers . . .” He headed for the doors. “Talk to you later, Miss Pops.”

  “Right you are, Dev.”

  He headed out and down to the bike rack. There a stream of Omnitopia employees were showing up at the Castle and others were leaving in a tangle of bikes being parked, unparked, or just left on or picked up from the grass, while the line of golf carts out in the road was starting to string away out of sight around the curve. A lot of the people going in and out looked grim or preoccupied—in many cases so much so that they didn’t even react to Dev’s presence. That worried him, as this contact with his people was normally one of the things that made his workday a pleasure.

  Dev pulled his bike out of the rack and rode off toward the PR building, trying hard to keep his mind on his riding. I wish I could just dump this interview, he thought. But Frank hadn’t mentioned the possibility to him, which suggested to Dev that Frank knew perfectly well it was too important to cancel. Dev’s thoughts kept going back to the crowd that would be gathering around the Tree, preparing virtual weapons, hastily coding defenses against the oncoming onslaught—

  He sighed as he came around the curve to the PR building. That’s their fight now. Trust them to get on with it. Meanwhile, my fight is here . . .

  Dev parked the bike in the last space in the rack and loped up the stairs into the PR building. The upstairs halls under the glass ceiling were busy, people nodding at him casually as he passed, but not stopping to chat as they more normally might have done, and the concern on their faces made Dev’s stomach flip- flop again. He couldn’t do anything but concentrate on getting his breathing under control. As he headed down along the northern curve of the building among the freestanding workspaces and meeting areas with their sofas and low tables, he spotted Joss coming along toward him, wearing something most unusual for him: a frown.

  “Problems?” Dev said to him as they met.

  “You should be asking me?” Joss said under his breath. “Mine are nothing compared to yours, I’m sure.”

  Dev looked around at Joss’ staff, who were going to and fro at the same somewhat accelerated pace as everyone else he’d seen this morning. “I’d like to think all this hubbub is still about the rollout . . .”

  “Only some of it,” Joss said. “We’re starting to catch a lot of grief from the world’s nosier newspapers as they look for a big bad-news story to tell.” He snorted. “Some of the British tabloids are getting ready to print the most unbelievable things. I won’t trouble you with the details now, except that Big Jim’s going to have himself a party suing a couple of them when the dust settles.”

  “Assuming the day leaves us something for it to settle on,” Dev said. “Is Miss Harrington in place?”

  Joss nodded. “About five minutes ago. She’s having a nice cup of coffee.” He raised his eyebrows. “Not that I’m sure she needs it. She seems a little wired this morning.”

  “Exposure to the corporate caffeine culture?” Dev said. “Or something else?”

  “Not sure.” Joss let out a breath. “Boss, I don’t like to speak ill of people, especially when they’re in the building, but there’s something shifty about that one.”

  “You mean besides her intention to make me look like a hypercorporate bad guy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How much does she know about what’s going on?”

  Joss shook his head. “Not sure. Granted, people will always let things slip a little if they see somebody with an all-areas pass, But in this case, I’m not sure. Miss Harrington hasn’t said anything obvious to any of my staff, anyway, or I’d have heard about it.” Then Joss sighed. “I should get on with things, Boss, it’s going to be a crazy day. Did Frank give you the list of the microspots we needs you to do for media tonight?”

  Dev rubbed his eyes. “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember right now. Send the list to my phone, if you like, or the laptop, and I’ll deal with it later. What time are we talking?”

  “Starting around six.”

  “Fine. Send me the list.” Joss headed off down the hall, and so did Dev, in opposite directions this time, Dev briefly walking backward. “Room two?” he shouted after Joss.

  “That’s right.”

  Dev continued on down around the semicircle until he reached a large dark-glass wall screening off its own semicircular end. This was divided into two halves: Dev headed for the left-hand one.

  Here goes nothing . . . he thought. Remember, now, don’t get freaked, don’t get rattled, keep it calm.

  But in the back of his mind he just kept seeing his troops gathering down there in a last line of defense around the Tree: and out beyond them, massing to overwhelm them, the darkness . . .

  The meeting room was unusually stark for Omnitopia, Delia had thought: a dark gray oval slate table about six feet long and four feet wide, with a number of the ubiquitous RealFeel chairs placed around it. That was it: black glass walls, no windows, no other furnishings.

  She had settled herself down in the chair at one end of the table with less nervousness than she’d sat in one yesterday, when she first came into contact with the RealFeel interface. It had been beyond strange to feel and touch and even taste things that she knew couldn’t actually be there. And afterward, when she got out of the interface, had been even stranger. Real life had felt peculiarly colorless and flat next to the hyped, pumped, artificially brilliant landscape she’d just emerged from. As if you’d been in a stained-glass world, she thought, and then stepped down out of the glass into the gray streets around the church.

  She shook her head and reached out to the coffee cup, then stopped, realizing it was already empty. I’ve been living on this stuff, she thought. These people are getting to me. But it wasn’t so much because of their own caffeine ingestion, though there was plenty of that around. These people all seemed to live their lives at the same pumped, overexcited level, as if everything mattered more to them than it did to most people. They really have drunk the Kool-Aid, she thought last night when she was finally able to stretch out in bed in the hotel with the lights off. What bothered her—if anything did—was her certainty that these people, regardless of the department they worked in, were not only aware of her opinions about them, but amused by them. Her first impulse had been to dismiss this as some kind of bizarre corporate hubris. But that concept had suffered some erosion over the past eighteen hours, for there was no ignoring the fact that these were some of the smartest corporate types, from the highest to the lowest, that she’d ever me
t, and she had met some pretty low ones in her time.

  The glass of the wall slid open door- fashion, and Dev Logan walked in. “Good morning,” he said. “I didn’t keep you waiting too long, did I?”

  She glanced up at him, smiling. “Not at all.”

  “Good,” Dev said. “The pace around here has accelerated a little today, and I’m going to spend the whole day wondering if I’ve been late for something . . .” He walked around to the RealFeel chair at the other end of the table and sat down in it. There was a brief decorous hum of motors as it shifted its balance and support settings to suit him.

  Delia raised her eyebrows. “Are they all programmed to do that?” she said. “Recognize you instantly?”

  He laughed. “These? Hardly. But they do recognize anybody who’s sat in them and adjusted them before, and I’ve easily sat in every chair in this building more than once.” He got a rueful look. “I spend a lot more time here than I really want to. But how about you? Did you have time to get used to one of these yesterday?”

  “Oh, yes,” Delia said. “I used about every form of input you have. This one—” She pushed herself back in the chair. “It takes a little getting used to.”

  “Seems a little too brightly colored?” Dev said. “Everything a little overstated?”

  “Well, now that you mention it . . .”

  Dev nodded as he reached up for the eyecups. “We tried using more natural colorings,” he said, “but our users overruled us. Said they preferred a more vivid palette. I’ll be spending some of today looking at this month’s palette polls to see what the newest take on the subject is.”

  “Sounds scintillating,” Delia said, as she fitted her own eyecups into place and blinked a few times to make sure they weren’t on too tight.

  “You have no idea,” Dev said. The droll weariness of his voice surprised and amused her. “Ready?”

  “Certainly.”

  The darkness fastened down tight around her, somehow darker than the darkness inside the cups. Then Delia found herself actually inside the fabulous “virtual office” she’d heard so much about, with its numerous desks and midair hangings of documents and files. “Goodness,” she said, just standing still for a moment as she looked around. “How do you find anything?”