by Diane Duane
At the back of the exhibition space, beyond the bars, behind a velvet rope and another line of bouncers, was a dais backed with more plasma screen and holographic signage repeating again and again the trademark violet Mobius-infinity symbol, rotating serenely once every two seconds on every screen. On the dais, the last crowd of press people who would be granted admission were shouting questions, and flashes were going off with near rock- concert frequency in the face of the tall, husky, dark-haired, smiling man with his arm around the shoulders of a cardboard stand-up of himself holding a copy of the Infinite Worlds: Threefold game package.
“Mr. Sorensen! Mr. Sorensen!”
“Phil! This way, please, Phil!”
“How many DVD units do you expect to move this weekend, Mr. Sorensen?”
“In excess of five hundred thousand. Give or take one or two—”
“What about downloads?”
“It’s hard to tell, but the projections suggest somewhere in the neighborhood of three million.”
“Will you break Omnitopia’s record?”
Phil chuckled. “The question is, can they match ours?” he said. “We’ve got a tried and tested gaming platform that eight out of ten gamers say they prefer to less structured and more unpredictable forms of gameplay. Of course dedicated gamers want something new and exciting. But they also want a robust platform that they can depend on, and a game at an affordable price point, not one that’s had its buy-in costs inflated by some executive’s desire for the world’s most advanced filing system.” Phil paused for a breath and got the laugh he was waiting for. “Serious gamers want to buy games—not vapor-ware, not research that may never pay off. And they want to know that they’re going to get what they think they’re paying for! That’s what Infinite Worlds is all about. This Threefold expansion gives them the chance to have their virtual cake and eat it too—new play modalities in a landscape that’s both familiar and all new, with a rock-solid game engine and dependable server structures worldwide. When other so-called innovations have gone the way of the dodo, Infinite Worlds will still be here, always growing, but always giving the world’s most loyal gamers what they expect from Infinity Inc.—affordable action!”
More questions were shouted, and Phil kept answering them, smile in place—all but the one that one ill-advised reporter kept repeating: “Do you have a statement regarding the rumor that you’re trying to bury the hatchet with Dev Logan and merge with Omnitopia?” Phil simply ignored that the first couple of times; but after the third repetition, he glanced off to one side, where Deirdre, his PR chief, was standing, and put one hand casually in his pocket. She instantly turned to quietly give the high sign to the stage manager and the bouncers that this final press access of the day was over. One of the bouncers immediately unhooked the velvet rope as Deirdre came over to Phil and said, “Mr. Sorensen, your four-thirty—”
“I know, Deirdre. Thanks. Sorry, folks, we’re done. Thank you, everybody,” Phil said, turned his back on the press, and made his way toward the back of the dais.
His own security people were waiting for him there, four large dark-suited and Ray-Banned gentlemen who surrounded him and walked him out of the back of the Infinity Inc. store’s display space, past a jumble of temporarily stored display flats and shelving, then out to the utility entrance behind the building. His limo stood under the carport, its door open. He got in and pulled out his PDA as the door was closed, flipped its lid open, and brought up Reuters Financial to see what his stock was doing.
He swore as the limo’s other door opened and Deirdre got in. The door was closed for her, and she put on her seat belt and said nothing as the car started up.
Phil exhaled. “Well?” he said.
“Well what, Mr. Sorensen?”
Her tone was defensive, as well it might have been. “Sorry,” he said. “Not your fault. Who was that?”
“The reporter who kept asking about Omnitopia? I don’t know.”
“Find out.”
“I will. Whoever he is, we won’t be credentialing him again. I’ll see who in my department gave him a pass and make sure they tighten up their requirements.” Her mouth was set tight: an uneasy, unattractive look on what was usually such an untroubled face. “He was probably just some blogger . . .”
“It doesn’t matter,” Phil said as the limo pulled away from the building. “What I’m interested in is the source of the rumor. It’s information that could be useful. See what you can find out.”
“Of course, Mr. Sorensen.”
He sighed and leaned back against the cushions as the limo turned onto Fifty-fifth Street. Phil gazed out the selectively polarizing smart glass windows at the traffic and the buildings, at the curious faces gazing at the limo’s windows (ebony dark to them) and wondering Is that somebody important? It was only a few minutes’ drive to the building that housed Phil’s corporate offices, but all the while he could feel Deirdre getting more tense. “Listen, Deirdre—”
“I should have stopped him,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“If it hadn’t been that guy, it would’ve been someone else,” Phil said. “You heard someone mention Omnitopia just a few moments before he did. This is the press we’re talking about. If they can’t find a fight, they’ll manufacture one. It’s their job. Peaceful relations between competitors don’t sell any papers.”
His PR chief said nothing for a moment, pretending to be distracted by the horn of a cab changing lanes and veering too close to the limo; and her tension in no way ebbed. “You’re right, of course,” Deirdre said, as the limo pulled up in front of Infinity Inc.’s New York headquarters.
Phil said nothing. The security guy riding shotgun got out and opened Deirdre’s door. “Thank you,” Phil said. “Listen, call my PA in the morning and let’s make some time to look over the schedule for the next few days. I’m going to want to make some changes.”
“Of course, Mr. Sorensen. Have a good evening.”
The door closed. The security man got in again, shut his own door, and the limo started up. “Hartnell and Wise, sir?” the driver said over the speaker.
“That’s right.”
The car purred through the early rush hour traffic, stopping, starting again, turning for the journey crosstown. Phil stretched against the cushions, pulled out his PDA again, checked his stock one more time. IICC now down four points.
He frowned, put the PDA away, and—having nothing better to do—pondered Deirdre’s uncharacteristic nervousness. After a little while, the answer came to him. She was freaked because what happened there would normally have made me go ballistic when we were away from the cameras. And this time it didn’t.
Phil smiled—a smile that the people he worked with would normally have found most disquieting. Deirdre had no way of knowing that there was about to be a big change in her boss’ attitude toward Omnitopia—bigger than almost anyone who worked closely with him at Infinity Inc. would have believed possible. So much is going to change. And when it does, the annoying questions are going to stop at last.
The midtown traffic now left Phil a good few minutes to contemplate, with increasing pleasure, what that was going to feel like. Finally the limo slid up to the curb and stopped. The security guard got out and opened his door. Phil stepped out in front of a Park Avenue address that looked much like its neighbors to either side: a discreet white limestone edifice four stories high with a gilt- and-iron gate protecting a beautiful beaux arts walnut door. As he crossed the sidewalk, the inner door swung open, and the gate buzzed and unlatched.
Inside the door waiting for him was the handsome silver-haired assistant who managed the outer office of Hartnell and Wise. “Miss Wise is waiting for you, sir,” she said, and led the way up the marble staircase to the office at the top of the landing.
The assistant opened the door for him and stood aside to let Phil step into Morgan Wise’s office. Normally in a brokerage of this age and exclusivity, the partners’ offices tried to suggest a tradition of discreti
on and reliability by affecting a lot of leather and heavy wood paneling. But this space was light, bright, and nearly bare: white-walled, floored in blond wood, with one white desk, a single understated chrome-and-rattan Eames chair on each side of it, and a single white flat screen monitor standing on the desk.
Morgan Wise was standing behind the desk waiting for him: tall, slim, her shoulder-length dark hair swinging free above the jacket of a dark-skirted suit. She reached out across the desk to shake his hand as always, then sat down again while the silver-haired office assistant shut the door. “So,” Morgan said in that soft, sultry voice that always made Phil think she would do well as a late-night radio host if she ever wearied of working the markets. “You have some news for me?”
Phil nodded. “The timings have come through,” he said.
Morgan tapped the desk briefly and a keyboard appeared in its surface. “Is the date still the same?”
“Yes.”
More tapping; then she looked up. “So?”
Phil pulled a piece of note paper out of his inside jacket pocket, handed it across the desk to her. Morgan looked closely at it and tapped again at the keyboard, pausing once or twice to check the figures written on the note. “All right,” she said, pushing the note back to Phil. “I’ll have my silent colleagues in the Far East start bracketing our shell companies’ buy orders around those times. After that—” She folded her hands above the keyboard, rested her chin on them. “I think the twenty-first is going to be a very busy day for you. Because in the wake of the day’s events, I’d say you could be majority stockholder by . . .” She studied her monitor for a moment. “Let’s say midnight.”
Phil smiled. “That’s when their rollout party is supposed to start,” he said softly. “Won’t it be interesting if the company has a new owner by midnight their time?”
Morgan smiled. “We’ll see how it goes,” she said. “But if the share price reacts as emphatically to what’s about to happen as our calculations suggest, it could happen even sooner. All we can do now is wait.” She arched one eyebrow. “Always the hardest part.”
She stood up. So did Phil. “You can always pass the time by thinking about your commission,” he said.
“Please,” Morgan said. “Some things one does for art’s sake.”
Phil smiled, shook her hand again, and headed for the door.
It opened before him: the silver- haired assistant showed him down the stairs. As he swung the gate to the sidewalk open and the beaux arts door shut at his back, Phil began to hum, and as the limo door was opened for him and he slipped in, he started to sing softly.
“The party’s ooooooverrrrr . . .”
And the limo door closed.
FOUR
IN A CIRCULAR ROOM directly under the pointed tower-roof of Castle Dev, the circular table of inlaid black ironwood was being prepped for a meeting. Pads were being laid out, bottles of mineral water fresh from the cooler set out with glasses and napkins, laptops brought in and set down at the places where their owners would sit. But out in the sunshine, half a mile away, a man on a black bike was pedaling slowly down a nearby path, thinking hard.
His phone rang, its ringtone singing a music-box version of “Hail to the Chief.” Dev sighed, braked, and hopped off the bike, walking it off the path onto the grass under a nearby tree and then letting it lean against him while he fished the phone out of his pocket. From about fifty feet farther back along the path, Dev heard the sound of badly smothered laughter. He glanced that way and saw a couple of his employees, one male and one female, watching him as they approached. The lady was talking to someone on her own cell phone, while the guy was texting someone at high speed. The phone-talker grinned at him as they got closer; the texter looked up and smiled too.
Dev rolled his eyes at them and tried to scowl, but he wasn’t really in a scowling mood at the moment and besides, they knew the joke. As he flipped his phone open, Phone Girl and Text Guy passed by. Phone Girl waved, Text Guy saluted snappily. Dev nodded, waved back, turned away. “Hi, Dad . . .”
“Morning, Son,” said Joseph Logan’s gravelly voice. “What the devil’s that noise?”
“Noise?” Dev said. He stared around him, trying to see what his father was talking about.
“That screeching!”
“What screeching? I can’t—” Then, in the tree above him, he located it. “Oh. It’s one of those jaybirds,” Dev said, peering up into the branches but unable to see anything: the birds in question were famously shy. “The beige and gray guys that keep wrecking your feeder.”
“Nonsense. Thing sounds like one of those birds you always hear screaming in nature movies. You should get rid of them, they’re probably dangerous.”
“Those are red-tailed hawks, Dad,” Dev said. “The TV people use that sound effect for every bird except the Bluebird of Happiness. If there were hawks here, we couldn’t get rid of them, they’re protected. Anyway, these are jays, and I can’t do anything about them. It’s their nesting season, and they’re protected too. Was there a reason for this call besides you trying to save me from the local wildlife?”
“I was worried about you,” said Dev’s dad. “Your stock is down.”
Dev rolled his eyes. His father might actually be worried about him, but the reasons would be far more complex than anything merely related to the antics of the stock market. “Jim says we’ll be fine. We’re hoping to hit a thousand by rollout day.”
The two statements were independently true, but Dev was hoping his father would take them as interrelated—that might buy him a few moments’ peace. But this was a futile hope. “Not that I don’t like Jim,” Dev’s dad said, and Dev thought, Bzzt! Five points off for fibbing!—“but he’s still kind of wet behind the ears at the corporate finance game—” Bzzt! Wall Street Journal’s CFO of the Year! “—and I’m a little worried about your exposure when you have all these conglomerates sniffing around your coattails and acquiring your shares on the sly. If you—”
“Dad,” Dev said, “before you get started, I know exactly what you’re thinking about, and it’s well nigh impossible for CapCities to do anything on the sly. They have as much on their plates and as many people staring at them right now as I do. CapCities wants to buy Shanghai Welter but can’t do it because they don’t have enough liquidity because of the jump Shanghai took on the NASDAQ last month. So CapCities has been strutting around the markets acting big for the past couple of weeks while they liquidize some of their other assets to cover their shortfall—” Dev heard his dad drawing breath to interrupt him, but he forcibly overrode his own politeness reflex and kept right on going. “And since our rollout’s coming up and we’re big in the news right now, it serves their purpose to pick up a little of our stock and make some smaller companies think Wow, look at that, I bet they’re thinking about acquiring a controlling stake in Omnitopia! I bet they’ll want some smaller stuff, too, let’s divest ourselves all over them! And Cap’ll pick up some of those little guys like Andorra Electronics and Delta V Broadcasting to cover the divisions they’re going to divest, which they’ve been looking for an excuse to get rid of for months. Then about two days after we roll out, they’ll say, Sorry, your figures weren’t quite what we were expecting after all, which will be true—they’ll be bigger, but never mind—and afterward CapCities will go off and buy Shanghai the way they wanted to, and everything will be fine. When it’s all over, I’ll send you the clippings.”
There was a brief silence. Maybe the clippings thing was taking it a little too far, Dev thought. The silence stretched. Finally his dad said, “The only reason you know all that is because Jim told you.”
Absolutely right, Dev thought, and that’s why you’re pissed—you didn’t get to tell me first. Which it’s not your job to do. Why do we have to have this same conversation every day with different words? “That’s what he’s paid for,” Dev said. “And he’s one of the best in the business, or at least that’s the delusion that the Wall Street Journal has at the
moment. So you relax, because Jim and I have it set up so that it’s gonna be easier for somebody to obtain a controlling stake in the moon than in Omnitopia. Meanwhile, where’s Mom? She said she was going to call yesterday evening, but I thought maybe she got busy.”
“She’s in the hospital,” his dad said, with what sounded to Dev like barely concealed triumph.
“What?”
“For tests. Her back was acting up again.”
“Oh, God,” Dev said. “Do you know when’s she going to be out?”
“This afternoon. And you’d know, too, if you’d just concentrate a little more on staying in touch with her instead of playing the high and mighty corporate executive—”
Which I couldn’t play hard enough for you five minutes ago. I just cannot win, can I? “This afternoon?” Dev said. “When did she go in?”
“This morning—”
“So she’s not in the hospital, she’s at the hospital. At the clinic—”
“Oh, well, if you’re going to play semantics games with me—”
“Games are what it’s all about, Dad,” Dev said, in a voice intended to sound carelessly cheerful. If it was vengeance for his father trying to throw a fright into Dev over something relatively minor, at least it was a petty vengeance. “Who taught me to play hard? And speaking of games, you still haven’t RSVP’d for the big switch-throwing ceremony.”
“Uh,” his father said. “Well, I don’t know, it depends on your mom. If she doesn’t feel like going—”
“I understand completely,” Dev said. “Try to let me know by tomorrow night, okay? Otherwise I’m going to have to give your VIP seat to some minor head of state, and they’ll brag about it afterward, and then I’ll have to buy their country to put them in their place. It’d put a dent in my liquidity, and we can’t have that, can we? Gotta go now. Bye-bye.”