Diane Duane

by Omnitopia Dawn (v5)

  “Thanks!” Danny said. “Enjoy your day!” And he headed for security, where he handed the bored-looking blue-shirted Homeland Security agent his passport and boarding pass and glanced at the long line of resigned-looking people in various stages of taking off their shoes and belts.

  That was when he realized that the woman in the blue shirt was looking over his shoulder at something else, her expression still bored, as she held his boarding pass up. Danny looked over his shoulder and saw two burly guys in Atlanta police department uniforms coming along, staring at him with great interest.

  The Homeland Security agent handed one of the policemen Danny’s boarding pass. “They flagged him four- forty at the desk,” she said, then to Danny, “Sir, you need to go with these officers.”

  “What?” Danny said.

  “We have some questions for you about your travel today, sir,” said one of the policemen, taking the boarding pass as his partner took Danny’s elbow. “Did you buy your ticket yourself?”

  Danny’s hair was standing up on the back of his neck.

  “Uh, yeah—”

  “And did you buy it with your own money, or money someone gave you?”

  That was when Danny knew it was over. “It’s not fair,” he said as they walked him away; “they said no one would notice!”

  “Sir,” one of the cops said, “I have to tell you that you’re under arrest on suspicion of fraud and receiving stolen goods. Please listen while I tell you about your Miranda rights. Anything you say may be used against you—”

  And they led Danny off toward one of those nondescript doors that every traveler sees in every airport. Danny had occasionally seen these before and wondered what was behind them. Now, though, one opened before him, and it occurred to Danny that whatever else might be behind this one, mint juleps—now or later—were not going to be on the list.

  Later that afternoon, Delia Harrington found herself sitting in another of a series of handsomely decorated but windowless offices up in Omnitopia’s legal building. When the door opened one more time, she expected to see Jim Margoulies again, asking—politely enough—for one more amendment of the statement they were going to require of her before they let her leave in disgrace. But much to her surprise, Dev Logan walked in.

  She had thought herself fairly far beyond surprise at this point, but this did surprise her. “Don’t get up,” Dev said, closing the door behind him and swinging around the table to sit down at the far side.

  “I’d have thought I was about the last one you wanted to look at right now,” Delia said.

  Dev sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I won’t pretend that the prospect fills me with joy,” he said, “but we need to have one last talk.”

  Delia couldn’t imagine what this would be about, so she kept quiet.

  “You have to understand,” Dev said, “that various people in this building and elsewhere in Omnitopia upper management, as you might expect, are urging me to get you in as much trouble as possible—career, legal, and otherwise. And my first impulse was to agree with them. But over the course of the day, things . . .” He rubbed his eyes. “Things have happened.”

  “How is your share price doing?” Delia said, working hard to sound both neutral and not entirely crushed in spirit.

  “Recovering nicely, thank you,” Dev said, giving her a look that was also oddly neutral. “Delia, do you believe in karma?”

  She blinked at that. “Some days. Some days I think it may be just another kind of superstition. Other days . . . not so much.”

  Dev let out a little breath of laughter. “Interesting. We’re both of the same mind on that.” He sat back in the chair. “So . . .”

  He was silent for a moment, looking at the table, musing. “So,” Dev said again. “You’re going back to New York the day after tomorrow, with your story for Time. And with no stain on your character, as they say in English law.”

  Delia stared at him.

  “What has happened here,” Dev said, “will remain here. With this understanding: that after this, you work for us.”

  “And not for Phil Sorensen,” Delia said softly.

  “Oh, no! As well as for Phil Sorensen.” Dev produced a very small and wintry smile. “With the continual understanding that our silence about the illegalities we caught you in here could always be broken should your behavior warrant it.”

  Delia thought about that for a moment. “I’m supposed to become sort of a double agent,” she said.

  “That’s right,” Dev said. “Should Phil call for your services again as regards to Omnitopia—and why wouldn’t he, since we’re going to send you back to Time with such glowing reports, and to Phil with some harmless inside info that he genuinely can make use of—then you will remember whose side you’re really going to be on, in terms of information you acquire about Phil. For our part, we will let people at other magazines know that you’re one of our preferred feature writers, because of the work you’ve done on this assignment. You’ll have an excuse to be back here every now and then, which will please Phil and doubtless make him eager to have you nose around a little more on his behalf. And when he does, you’ll let us know what he wants you nosing around about.”

  Delia thought about that. “And who knows,” Dev said, “you might even start to like working here. At which point we could revise the terms of the agreement, and get rid of the coercion.”

  He must have caught the sudden wary look in Delia’s eyes. Dev put his hands in the air. “Nobody’s going to feed you any Kool-Aid,” he said. “But we can always use good writers. Time wouldn’t be using you if you didn’t fit that description. As for the rest of it? Your choice. Decide.”

  Delia sat and thought. Then she looked up.

  “You’re on,” she said.

  Dev got up, came over to her and stuck out a hand. Delia, taken off guard, hesitated before she put out her own and shook Dev’s.

  “How do you know you can trust me?” she said.

  “I don’t,” Dev said. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  “It’s a game, isn’t it?” Delia said after a moment. “It’s all part of the game for you.”

  “As long as you don’t say ‘just’ a game,” Dev said. “Otherwise? Yes. Life is play. The harder the play, the more interesting. And this— this play is fairly hard. But notice that I don’t ask how I know you can trust me.”

  Delia had no immediate answer to that.

  “We’ll be in touch about the details,” Dev said. “Meanwhile, we’ve all had kind of a busy day. So I’ll see you at the party.”

  And he was gone. Delia stood there looking out the open door: then sat back to wait for Jim Margoulies, who she suspected would be along shortly with more paperwork.

  Twenty-eight hours later, evening was descending gradually on Omnitopia’s Tempe campus. Around Castle Dev, among tents and bowers and other open-air spaces that had been set up over the preceding day, more than a thousand people were gathered around a massively central dais that looked down over a dance floor and more covered seating areas. In the middle of the dais, accompanied by Mirabel and surrounded by the Magnificent Seven, Dev Logan stood in white tie and tails, holding a giant red button.

  “So without further ado,” Dev said, “I’m ready to declare this expansion to the world’s most popular game open and bid everyone welcome to the new Omnitopia. Everybody ready?”

  A roar of enthusiasm from the players around the fringes of the party space. “Okay, people!” Dev shouted—and they shouted the rest with him: “Let’s—go—play!”

  And Dev punched the button.

  All around Castle Dev, the hundred and twenty-one pillars that had been set up to represent the Macrocosms flashed into white light, and then around certain pillars rings of blue laser light—eleven lasers for each ’cosm in question—lanced up into the sky, representing the extensions and alterations to each extended ’cosm’s servers. Naturally, in the virtual realm, where the party was being echoed in real time in the Omnitopia
mirror ’cosm, the tens of thousands of players attending by invitation didn’t need such cramped physical shorthand: they were seeing the tree-versions of the ’cosms themselves, hundreds of feet high, each surrounded by new, slenderer trees mirroring the central ’cosm of which each was an expansion. A roar of applause went up both in the physical world and across the virtual party space.

  The button-pushing was of course purely ceremonial, an excuse for the photo opportunity. Dev looked out over the gathering, judged that the reaction was good, possibly even a little more enthusiastic than could reasonably have been expected, and let out a breath of relief. “Have a good time, everybody,” he said, “and enjoy your evening with us!” And he thumbed off the body mike and stepped down off the stage.

  Behind him, the band started playing, and various members of the Magnificent Seven who’d been on the stage with him for the publicity presentation now forsook it with great relief. “The usual private meeting afterward?” Jim said under his breath to Dev as he and Mirabel came down the steps.

  “Yeah,” Dev said, “up in the Tower.”

  “See you there,” Jim said, slipping away with a grin. Dev looked where Jim had been looking and understood his sudden exit—across the crowd, Dev’s dad could be seen making his imposing way. He always looks so great in a tux, Dev thought. Pity he won’t commit to putting the damn thing on and turning up until half an hour before the party . . .

  “Gonna scoot,” Mirabel said in Dev’s ear. “Bella will want to see Lola in a little . . . and you and your dad need to—”

  Dev smiled. “Go,” he said. “See you in a bit.”

  Just behind his dad, in black sequins to just below the knee—a look that would have suited her in her twenties if she’d been a flapper, and which suited her still—Dev’s mom came through the crowd, smiling at people, waving at some she recognized. Dev grinned at his dad and went to his mom first. “You nutcase,” he said, hugging her. “Wearing heels when you’re just out of bed. How are you feeling?”

  “Ow!” Bella said. “Watch the back!”

  “Oh, sorry, sorry—”

  His mama poked him and roared with laughter. “You are such a sucker,” she said. “What a weenie! I’m fine. You can hug me all you want.”

  “Just be careful,” Dev’s dad said.

  Dev gave him a look. “And you cut it out,” Bella said, turning and elbowing her husband as enthusiastically as she’d poked Dev. “Don’t make him crazy. He’s had enough crazy for the next good while.”

  Dev’s father looked a him with a shadow of a scowl. It was, however, not an angry scowl: more of a contemplative one, as he looked across the gathered crowd. “Must be a thousand people here,” he said under his breath.

  “One thousand two hundred and twelve,” Dev said, beckoning over a waiter who’d been discreetly shadowing him, and from the waiter’s tray handing his father a whiskey on the rocks and his mother a white wine. “A motley crew. Computer geeks from other companies, news people—see the camera lights over there? That’s the Entertainment Tonight people, they want to talk to you two later—software gurus, friendly competitors, assorted celebrities, rock stars, TV stars, film stars, industrial spies—”

  “What?” Dev’s dad said.

  “Oh, sure,” Dev said, “thirty or forty of them. They’d try to crash the party if we didn’t invite them, and then there’d be bad publicity. Instead we invite them and let them get liquored up, and if they say anything interesting—” He shrugged and smiled. “What we don’t pick up, the TV people do. The rest of the crowd—” He looked out across the great tented expanse; in the midst of it, on the dance floor, a lot of lively gyrating was now going on, and all around it people were standing and talking, or sitting and talking in numerous bowery conversation pods all outlined in white strings of LEDs, the branches of the trees above them outlined in white starlights too. “Omnitopia staff and various hangers-on: and a select group of our players—mostly Old Souls who’ve been with us since we started.” He pointed, smiling again. “Look, there’s a bunch of them over there. You can tell—they’ve all gravitated to the monitors. Only our oldest players would be crazy enough to want to spend time in Omnitopia at an event like this.”

  “All those people over there are playing?” his father said, peering at the crowd under the biggest tree. “They don’t look much like players . . .”

  “You mean they all have really nice clothes on, and don’t look like geeks?” Dev said.

  His father shot him a look, then relented enough to grin. “All right,” he said, “touché.”

  “That’s a player?” his mother said, indicating a woman sitting by herself at the edge of the gamers’ pod: a young woman, dark- haired, in a tailored dark-blue silk suit. “Doesn’t she have a lovely dress,” Bella said, and paused. “And what a lot of boyfriends.” Bella raised her eyebrows. “Big, mean looking boyfriends. What are they all, bouncers or something?”

  Dev’s father looked where his mama was looking. “Don’t think so. Some kind of security . . .”

  “Come on,” Dev said, “I’ll introduce you.” The waiter who’d been shadowing them held out his tray. “Just leave the drinks here.”

  They made their way down from the dais through the crowd. Dev waved away the few cameras that got too close, smiled at the phone cams and other personal digital devices pointed at him, and made his way over to the bower under the tree with his mama and dad in tow.

  The handsome young woman sat tapping away at a keyboard, oblivious, as Dev and his parents approached. Around the table, watching the crowd in general and everybody in the immediate neighborhood, stood four very large men in dark suits with that Very Serious Government Security look about them: keen eyes peering in all directions, earplug headsets with the very best “invisible” bone-conduction boom mikes all in place. Dev nodded to them as he got close, and to the smallest of them, a high-cheekboned blond man, he said, “My mother and father.”

  The man nodded, and he and his associates all looked Dev’s mother and father over as if making sure their faces matched some list in their heads. Then they stepped aside, but not too far. As they did, the little dark-haired woman glanced up, then smiled at Dev. He went over to her and took her hand, and the young woman said, “I love the new flat-graphic interface, Dev. It’s very cool.”

  “From you that’s high praise,” Dev said, and grinned. “Your Majesty, may I present my mother, Bella Logan. My father, Paul Xavier Logan. Mom, Dad, I’m pleased to present you to Queen Catherina-Amalia of the Netherlands. Known to her fellow Omnitopians as—” Then he broke off, grinning at Catherina-Amalia’s sudden shocked look. “Well, I’m not going to out her, not even here. You can never tell who might be listening.”

  His dad looked amazed. “Your Majesty—you play his game?”

  The queen laughed. “Oh, this isn’t just playing a game!” she said. “I visit Dev’s world. His countries are the only ones I spend as much time in as my own.” And she gave Dev’s father a naughty-little-girl look. “That’s why I had to come, you see. It’s only right to pay a visit to a neighboring friendly monarch when he’s just upgraded his whole nation.”

  She smiled at Dev. “And this is a massive upgrade,” she said. “Suddenly we get a whole new set of levels to play with? Mesocosms—”

  Dev nodded, turned to his dad. “We’ve graduated some of our most popular Microcosms to a higher level,” he said, “which they share with player-tweaked versions of some of the most popular Macrocosms. It means higher royalty levels and more accessibility for the player-created universes—which always had some limitations on access size that we wanted to overcome—and more flexible versions of the most popular in-house universes, so they can now accept player input into their structures, and share Macrocosm-level royalties out among contributing players.”

  His dad nodded, but the look he gave Dev was wry. “After all the money you lost yesterday,” he said, “you’re going to start giving more of it away?”

  �
��It’s all about flow,” Dev said. “As it happens, we’re well on our way to recouping what we lost. Jim told me earlier that once the news of the new Mesocosms got out to the press this morning—”

  “Leaked out, you mean,” said the queen, her look as wry as Dev’s dad’s.

  Dev glanced at her with his eyebrows up. “Nolo contendere, Your Majesty,” he said. “Anyway, a formal press release followed . . . at which point the ongoing raid on the retail outlets and download centers around the world started turning into an out-and-out onslaught. Most of our resellers are out of stock already.”

  “Remind me to have my country ask yours for a loan,” the queen said.

  Dev grinned. “We’ll discuss our relative liquidity later.”

  “Tomorrow, perhaps,” said the queen. “Meanwhile, I don’t want to monopolize you tonight.”

  “I know a dismissal when I hear one,” Dev said. “Majesty—” He bowed a little: so did Dev’s dad. His mom smiled at the queen as they all turned away.

  “She’s such a faker,” Bella whispered to Dev. “She just wants to get back to playing.”

  Dev’s dad was about to say something as he looked over his shoulder: but sure enough, the queen was already typing again. “What a fan she must be,” he said.

  “One of our oldest in Europe,” Dev said. “Where do you think I got my bike?”

  His mother stared at him. “You mean that old black thing?”

  “Not so old,” Dev said, as his friendly waiter materialized again and returned his parents’ drinks to them. “Well, the company that makes it, yeah, they’re old. But it’s a good bike. It’s what she rides at home when she goes out for the paper in the morning. When she sent it to me, she said she thought the sovereign of a friendly foreign power might appreciate one.”

  Dev’s father raised his eyebrows, already managing to look bored with the whole business. His mother blinked: then suddenly smiled at the sight of someone making his way through the crowd toward them. “Jim!”