Omnitopia: Dawn

by Diane Duane

  Dev punched the off button, and just stood there for a moment looking at his phone. Then he swore under his breath. Why do we always have to be doing this to each other? He thought. I know he loves me but he has such strange ways of showing it. Dev had trouble remembering any time in his life when the two of them hadn’t been at each other’s throats about something: when he first caught the gaming bug from his mom as a child, when he ditched his (dad- pleasing but ultimately unsatisfying) English lit degree program at Penn State to go study computer science at MIT, when he went on to finance his degree independently after his dad refused to pay for it . . . Endless introspection on the subject and one interesting but inconclusive bout of analysis had left Dev with plenty of theories about The Dad Thing, but no certainty. Are we just two control freaks banging heads? Or is this a liberal-arts-versus-science argument? Dev’s dad’s three degrees were all in the humanities, and his retirement from his emeritus professorship at Penn, though often threatened, never quite seemed ready to happen. Or are we just having some kind of sublimated town-and-gown fight? This was Dev’s favorite theory at the moment, since his huge financial success had taken none of the edge off his relationship with his father, and had for some time made it rather worse. Now his dad’s routine anger seemed generally to be shifting into what read as angry pride. Who knows, maybe it’ll just be pride someday. . . .

  Naaaah.

  He sighed and speed-dialed his mom, hoping she was someplace where she could take the call. After only two rings, she answered. “Dev honey!”

  “Mom, are you okay? I’m so sorry, I should have called you when you didn’t get back to me!”

  “Oh, you silly boy, don’t beat yourself up, I’m fine.”

  “Mom, people in the hospital are not fine! By definition! What’s wrong? Is there a problem with the implant?” His mom had had a synthetic disk replacement a couple of months previously, swapping in a liquid-filled implant for a lumbar disk crushed in an old skiing injury.

  “Stop fussing, it’s not serious. They may need to put a little more silicone or whatever into the implant, that’s all. They’ve got me scheduled for a scan tomorrow morning, and then they’ll stick a needle in the little valve or whatever and pump the thing up if they have to.”

  Her tone put him more at ease than anything specific she was saying. He could just see her, silver- haired, petite but regal, those gray eyes glinting as she lounged in some clinic chair at ASU, making the place look as if it had been suddenly taken over by a small but impeccably dressed reigning queen on her day off. “Okay,” Dev said. “I’ll stop worrying, then.”

  There was a second’s pause. “I know that voice. You just got off the phone with Daddy.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  His mom chuckled, though it was a rueful sound. “More needles. What day would be complete without you two sticking a few into each other? He’s just worried about the rollout, honey.”

  “So worried he hasn’t RSVP’d yet.”

  “You let me handle him,” Dev’s mom said. “We’ll be there. But it’s just another needle, Devvie, this making you wait.”

  “Yeah, well, I really prefer his aggressive to his passive, Mom.”

  “So do I, but we don’t always get to choose. Dev, don’t you have somewhere to be right now? You must be up to your eyeballs in meetings.”

  He glanced at the phone’s clock. “Yeah, they’ll be waiting for me up in the Tower. You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m not in any pain, if that’s what you mean. I had a long day out yesterday, and it was bothering me then. I took an aspirin last night and it was fine. But they warned me not to ignore little twinges while the implant was bedding in, so I’m being careful. I’ll be home in a few hours. You go get on with your life!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” his mom said. “Unquestioning obedience.”

  Dev raised his eyebrows, for he could think of no lie more outrageous that might come out of his mother. Bella Maria Logan née DiVincenzo was a rebel at heart and appreciated rebellion in others, which was probably the only reason Dev and his father were still talking to each other at all. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Call me when you get home, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  “Ciao Bella!”

  “Knock ’em dead, Devvie,” she said, and hung up.

  Dev put the phone away, then walked his bike back to the path and got on. As he started pedaling, the phone rang again.

  “Don’t answer it, Boss!” said a voice from behind him.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Dev said as another of his employees, a buxom middle-aged Asian woman, passed him on a pink bike, wagging a warning finger at him. The phone kept ringing, then finally stopped, the call diverting to his PA’s office. Sometimes Dev suspected his people of having some kind of campus-wide warning system, so that e-mails or IMs or texts flew around campus whenever he was heading from one building to another: HE’S ON THE MOVE, DON’T LET HIM ANSWER THAT PHONE! For it was widely known that Dev couldn’t ride his bike and talk on the phone at the same time: he invariably fell off. The joke, though, suited him. In fact, he’d encouraged its spread. It meant that there was at least an hour or so each day—if divided into many small pieces—when Dev didn’t have to take phone calls from anybody. If I’d known when we went public how much quiet time I was going to lose every day, I might never have done it. But it was too late now. At least he had these precious moments, out in the sunshine or under his trees, when he could take a breath and just think—or not think. Dev knew that some people, not all of them his employees, thought he was eccentric—a local variation on the “bicycling royalty” of Europe—or else just calculating, trying to look homespun or nonelitist. He was happy enough to let them think that, but under no circumstance, unless he had a guest with him or the weather was genuinely foul, would he allow himself to be wrestled into a golf cart and a position where he would have to answer the phone.

  On cue, the miserable thing rang again. The ring wasn’t a personalized one, so Dev ignored it and pedaled on around the drive that led to the formal front entrance of Castle Dev, a wider and more overstated version of the back gate he’d left by in the morning. He rode his bike over the bridge, hopped off in front of the gate’s archway, and walked it through, over to the long, canopied bike rack off to his right. As usual, there was an empty spot at the far end: he shoved the bike into it, pushed the kickstand down, and headed for the foot of the office tower.

  It was actually one of seven towers—the six lesser ones were only a story and a half higher than the corners of the building. The general effect of Castle Dev was as if someone in Renaissance Spain had seen a French chateau and decided to restate it hexagonally in golden stone, cream or ruddy plaster, and red tile. The central courtyard with its fountain and the arched, arcaded cloister spaces around it suggested that the architect had been suckered in by Moorish influences as well. Flowery vines and rosebushes clambered up the interior walls, softening the impact of the windows that overlooked the courtyard; the fountain, in full flow now that the workday was well under way, sprayed glitter high into the air. Across from the fountain and butted up against the opposite wall of the compound, the main office tower—a reworking of the castle keep concept—reached up six stories to the circular course of polarized glass that made it look as if the pointed tiled cap of the tower was floating unsupported in the air. Up there Dev could just catch sight of a few figures moving in the meeting room space. One silhouette came over to stand at the window, gazing down into the courtyard, then raised a hand.

  Dev grinned and headed in through the archway at the tower’s foot. The security guy in his small outdoor-duty cubicle nodded to Dev and buzzed him through.

  Dev turned left through the door and got into the glass elevator, ascending through the lower rooms—his main in- house office, the game room above it, the media support level for the rooms above and below—and then, finally, the conference room with its charcoal carpet, thr
ee hundred sixty degree view, round ironwood table with its eight chairs, and—most important—the people who went with the chairs.

  Typically, none of the people were in any of the chairs. Natasha Bielefeld, tall, elegant in yet another of her beautifully tailored skirt suits, her precision cornrows half hidden under a Hermès scarf, was standing over by the freeway side of the window, laughing one of her patented slow deep laughs at something Tau Vitoria had just said. But this was their normal configuration. Though it had been a good while since Natasha handed over her old duties as chief server engineer to Tau and became Dev’s vice president of operations, Tash was still a hardware geek under the skin. Whenever they were in the same space with Dev, she and Tau always wound up telling each other hardware horror stories whenever they weren’t speaking exclusively in ARGOT. Tau looked like his normal self: splashy shirt, tidy jeans, extremely expensive shoes, and those chiseled dark southern Slavic good looks, moderated by a touch of designer stubble and a tendency to sudden goofy expressions that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a cartoon character.

  Tash and Tau were at twelve o’clock in the room. At about ten thirty, little Doris te Nawhara, in slacks and T-shirt—the inevitable reaction to the lawyer clothes in which she spent most of her away time as Omnitopia’s chief counsel and head of legal affairs—was waving her arms in apparent exasperation as she told Alicia Chang, Dev’s lead concept artist, and young Ron Ruis, his blond, thin, and slightly hyperactive chief environmental artist, what was almost certainly yet another outrageous dumb-litigant story (of which Doris seemed to have thousands). At nine o’clock, drinking coffee and looking idly down from the window at something going on near the back gate, was tall thin Cleolinda Nash, Dev’s head of client engineering, who was responsible for the general look and feel of Omnitopia as a whole. She was wearing dark jeans, soft suede boots, a faded navy blue first-generation Omnitopia hoodie and a weary look. And opposite her, at approximately three o’clock, was the figure who had seen Dev coming: Jim Margoulies. Dev glanced at Jim now and found it strange, as he sometimes had at other such meetings, that they were both standing in this extremely grown-up and luxurious place full of fancy machinery, both overt and hidden, and that they were not six, or twelve, and wouldn’t get chased out if they were caught here. It was routinely a shock to look at his lifelong best friend and realize that somehow he was now as tall as Dev—bizarre, as he had been shorter until almost college—and was wearing a suit, and bifocals, and even going stylishly gray at the temples. When did we grow up? It’s so strange. But aren’t we lucky? We can still play . . .

  The sound of the elevator doors brought everybody else’s attention around. “Hey, guys!” Dev said and went around to exchange hugs and greetings with Alicia and Cleo and Doris, who he hadn’t seen in the flesh for some days, or in Doris’ case, nearly two weeks.

  “Busy time, Dev,” Doris said, looking him over carefully. “And going to get busier. You all right? You look thinner.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve dropped a few,” Dev said.

  “I have a message for you from Mirabel,” Jim said, bringing Dev a cup of coffee. “She just texted me. It said, ‘Tell him to beware the sandwich of doom.’ This mean anything to you?”

  “That my life’s in danger again,” Dev said, taking a slurp of the coffee. “Or still. In other news, your favorite ‘niece’ is demanding an audience with you.”

  Cleolinda chuckled. “The consummate financier,” she said. “Always following the money . . .”

  Jim looked shocked. “I thought it was my heart of gold and boyish good looks!”

  General jeering and snickering ensued. “Actually,” Dev said, “it was the dollhouse you gave her last Christmas. And the way you got your head stuck in it while you were working on the upstairs bathroom.”

  Jim gave Dev a look. “I seem to remember you standing there while I was stuck and doing nothing about it, too,” he said. “That was a laugh riot. Remind me to punch you in the head.”

  “That approach never got you far when we were ten,” Dev said. “But I’ll schedule it if you insist. Have Pammie call Frank.”

  More snickering. Dev sat down in his usual spot at the table, on the freeway side of the room. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get ourselves sorted out. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  The group sat down, pulled out paperwork, opened laptops, reached for notepads. One of Dev’s various office laptops, all of them identical and tasked to keep themselves so, was waiting for him at his place. He popped the lid and waited for the machine to come out of sleep mode while glancing around at the friends who’d followed him from the collapse of the company he’d originally formed with Phil Sorenson seven years ago. From the ashes of that nasty and uncomfortable breakup, they’d helped Dev put together the new start-up that launched Omnitopia’s immediate predecessor. It had been a shaky start. But from a very small group with limited money but big dreams, they had since grown into a power to be reckoned with,first in the gaming world, then in the corporate landscape. It was always heartening to Dev that, so far at least, his core group’s tightly interlocking friendships had been sufficient to keep them all both close and effective in the face of ever- increasing challenges. It was a shame, though, that the necessities of running a worldwide business made these physical conclaves so much less frequent than they used to be. Dev and the Seven were never out of touch, but with all of them jetting all over the planet to keep an eye on things, there was little chance for everyone to get together in the same place except at quarterly corporate assessment and planning meetings—and occasionally at times like this when there was a major change coming in the game, or some kind of crisis. Yet here they all are, chatting away as if they’d last been around this table just yesterday.

  He turned his attention back to his laptop, tapping at it until the magazine-length document that passed for his to-do list came up. “Okay,” Dev said. “Let’s deal with the reality-based world first. Who’s got the most important thing?”

  “Besides your sandwich?” Jim said.

  Dev rolled his eyes. “Besides that.”

  “Well,” Natasha said. “How about the massive online attack scheduled for between twenty-four and forty-eight hours from now that’s intended to crash the game, destroy our credibility worldwide, and steal a hundred million dollars of our money?”

  Dev gave Tash a resigned look. If she wasn’t a drama queen per se, she was at least high up in the line of succession. “Yeah,” he said, “let’s talk a little about that. Anything new since your note the other morning?”

  Natasha leaned on one elbow, picking at the keyboard of her laptop with one hand, and shook her head. “All of you networked in? Here’s what we’ve got.” She looked around at the others. “Briefly: in-game security has been working this problem for most of a month now. Around the time we announced the hard launch dates for the rollout of the new expansion, the chatter level about Omnitopia on the major phreaker and hacker sites worldwide started going up. Lots of the—for lack of a better word, let’s call them people—on those sites started suggesting to each other that the period when we would be migrating the game software and ancillary routines to the new servers would be a great time to attack us, if they could just figure out exactly when the move was going to happen.”

  Tash looked up from her laptop, scowling. “Those interested in attempting this kind of attack would know that the migration needs to be complete by at least a day or two before the hard launch. There’s no way any company in our situation would try to deploy a new version and sign up possibly millions of new users without actually having the new servers up and running. The hard copies of the games go on sale in the stores at midnight oh one on the twenty- first. That’s been public knowledge for months. What everybody around this table now knows, and what the naughty people out in the hacking community don’t know, is that most of the migration has already happened and that its most crucial phase is scheduled to begin tonight at nineteen
fourteen local time, or oh three fourteen Zulu. That being the latest some of us could get it moved to.” She gave Tau a look.

  “And the soonest I can guarantee it’ll go off without a hitch,” Tau said. “Which is something of an issue.”

  Tash dropped her gaze to her laptop again in a way that somehow managed to imply that such a delay was something that never would have happened on her watch. “Testing will occupy another twenty-four hours,” she said. “The mythical ‘switch’ will actually be thrown about twenty hours before the ceremony, which is at eight p.m. local on the twenty-first.”

  “And that’s when we’re expecting the trouble?” Jim said.

  Tash shook her head. “It would be nice if we could be so sure. But there are two things these people want, as far as we can tell. They want our money, and as much of it as they can get. But even more than that, being hackers, they want to make us look stupid. That means they have to hit us as close to throw-the-switch as possible, so as to be able to break their exploit to the news media at the same time we’re doing our main publicity blitz, thus maximizing the appearance of their cleverness and our stupidity. However, they also want to execute the actual exploit, whatever it may be, sufficiently early so that they’ll have time to successfully go into hiding and not get caught with what they’ve stolen. That works slightly in our favor. It gives us time to either catch them in the act, or to undo whatever damage they’ve done before the ‘switch’ is officially thrown.”

  “So,” Alicia said, “the vulnerable time starts . . .” She checked her watch. “Any minute now.”

  Tash nodded.

  “What kind of attack are we looking for?” Ron asked.