by Diane Duane
“Total downloads to five p.m.,” Link said, “four million, three hundred and eighty thousand, two hundred and twelve.”
“That’s great,” Phil said. And it really was, though it was strange how flat he found this small triumph in the actual moment of its achievement. Those numbers were nearly half again what he had expected—half again what even the most enthusiastic and optimistic of his trend-trackers had suggested they might achieve this week. Phil smiled again at the thought that Omnitopia was not going to have everything its own way. “So go ahead and issue the statement we prepared. Just make sure you swap in the new numbers.”
“Yes, sir, of course.”
“And while you’re at it,” Phil said, “you might want to add a little something to it along the lines of how even our most ambitious competitors couldn’t have predicted such a jump in product interest. How plainly the players are as interested in established, reliable platforms as in new, unproven, blah blah blah . . .”
“Got it,” Link said, and Phil could faintly hear scribbling in the background. “You want to see it before I pass it on?”
Phil thought a moment, shook his head. “No need,” he said. “Just make sure you copy it to me and the usual PR people in e-mail. Meanwhile—” He looked out and down through the wall-wide window at the skyscraper shadows moving slowly out across the river, gnomons of a sundial that he watched every day. Almost five-twenty now, he thought. Over there it’ll be— “Any news today from our normal inside sources?”
There was no question what he meant when he said “inside.” There was only one other inside that mattered to Phil. “Nothing that we weren’t expecting,” Link said. “They’re all scrambling around trying to patch software holes, exactly as we knew they would be.” There was a pause. “Obviously you were right about this. They got a little too ambitious for their own good. Got themselves married to this particular date because of some weird symbolic quality—”
Phil nodded. “It’s the solstice,” he said. “And Dev always was hung up on winter solstice this, spring equinox that, all these artificial, outwardly imposed due dates. It’s a weakness, and it’s strengthened by the fact that we know about it. Never mind.” Phil was still amused that he’d known the new Omnitopia’s most likely rollout date long before any of his people inside had been able to bring in the news, long before any press release had been issued. The man was just too predictable in some ways, and the fact sometimes made Phil sorry for him. “Meantime,” Phil said, “make sure you and your team keep a close eye on what’s going on over there in the next forty- eight hours. If anything happens or goes wrong that we can exploit, I want to hear all about it, and I want a press release ready to go within minutes. Any of their publicity that we can attach ourselves to over the next three days, that’s fine with me. Dev may have paid for it, but we’ll reap the benefits.”
“Yes, Mr. Sorensen,” Link said.
“All right,” Phil said. “That should be it for today. You and your team be in early tomorrow. Things are going to start speeding up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good-bye.”
The connection shut down. Phil stood there for a moment, went on looking out and over the river. One of the Circle Line cruise ships began creeping across the reflection and shadow of his own skyscraper’s tower, turning it briefly into a bright hash of interference patterns and wave crests. That release will come out in . . . He glanced at his watch. Maybe an hour. And whoever in Dev’s organization was tasked to keep an eye on him and his company’s business would see the article, make a note of it, and bring it to Dev—
Phil shook his head. Or maybe not. Phil always insisted that his own people bring him in all Omnitopia-sensitive material for his own personal examination first thing in the morning. But it was more likely, knowing Dev’s organizational habits, that Dev had delegated someone else to make that judgment call for him, deciding on his behalf what needed to be read and what didn’t. Phil shook his head, scowling. Too like him, he thought. Always taking his eye off the ball. He never learned that the really important stuff you don’t dare delegate. But it was entirely an aspect of Dev’s too- easygoing management style to delegate these most important judgment calls. That damned fake populism of his, that weird egalitarian streak. You’d think he’d have grown out of it by now.
Yet once upon a time, that had been one of things about them, about him, that had made Dev fun to work with . . . And the thought began to intrude itself: Just when did it change? But Phil pushed that thought away half-formed. It didn’t change, he thought. I changed. I learned to see those traits for what they were and are: fecklessness. An unwillingness to accept the consequences of one’s own actions. Shove it off on somebody else, and then forgive them in that good-natured way of his when something goes wrong. Pretend to be Lord Bountiful, the free-and-easy employer, the all-around nice guy. Phil shook his head again. There was no room for nice guys in this business. And sooner or later, that one would finish last. . . .
The only problem was, for the last couple of years the Nice Guy had kept finishing first. And there was something wrong with that.
It was very strange. Had Phil been thinking about anybody else, he’d have suspected that they had something illegal going on—and he’d have torn into the situation to find out just what it was, so he could use the information to trip his enemy up. But Phil knew Dev too well. Whatever was causing his present success would not be anything illegal . . . or, at least, nothing he knew about.
That was one reason Phil was investigating other possibilities in that direction. No matter how charismatic you might be, you couldn’t have forty thousand employees who were all on the straight and narrow. Somewhere in the organization, somebody was doing something underhanded, and when such errors of judgment or purposeful misbehavior came to light, it could be publicized to best advantage. You give them too much rope, Phil thought to as he went back to pacing. Much too much rope. One of them will hang you with it. The only question is, how much will we have to help them?
Phil walked all the way down to where the “widow’s walk” ran into a V-shaped railing that faced the corner of the building’s window-wall. Around the corner, the walk went on above his lounge pit: a handsome, sleek executive getaway space with entertainment center, screen table, and VR gear, linked into all the networks and all the news services, and tied into a broad array of screens where he could see what he needed quickly and without fuss. On any normal day, Phil spent a lot of time in the Pit, watching how his games were doing, descending into chat rooms and trolling Web sites for evidence of how his publicity was working, and personally examining the output of the many paid flacks who were out there astroturfing the endless game-blogs and numerous major social networking Web sites. You could never keep too close an eye on such things. While his hired turfers held their jobs on the understanding that they were to do strictly as they were told, there was always the chance of the occasional slippage. Phil had already caught several of these this week, and as a result two of his online personnel managers’ heads had rolled because they had not been keeping a tight enough watch on the paid acolytes. It wasn’t that Phil liked firing people, but paid work needed to be done correctly. And if you didn’t do it correctly, Phil Sorensen was not going to waste any further paychecks on you.
He frowned, leaning into the railing and gazing out through the corner of the building. Phil had learned entirely too many lessons about money and how to waste it in the ancient days when he had been working with Dev. There had never been such a guy for saying he understood about not blowing money on impulse projects, and then going off and doing it anyway. Worse, it sometimes seemed as if coincidence and circumstance were cooperating with Dev to raise Phil’s annoyance level by making Phil look stupid when Dev said their company should do something and Phil said no . . . and then crazy blind luck or unpredictable circumstance stepped in to make it seem as if Dev had been right all along, and Phil dead wrong. You can only take so much of that kind of thing, Phil thought.
It had to stop. And so it had, when Dev bailed out.
He’d taken little joy in the solution at the time. And for some months Phil had cherished some damned fool’s hope that eventually Dev would see sense, come back to the firm, admit that Phil had been right all along. He’d waited a year, two years, two and a half . . . and it hadn’t happened. It had never occurred to him that Dev could possibly be so stubborn. Or so angry?
Phil turned away from the corner railing, at which he had been standing like the captain of a ship at sea, and started pacing up and down on the Pit side of the office. Now when will that damned phone ring, he thought. . . . And angry? No. Dev doesn’t get angry. And he doesn’t get even, either. The damn universe just seems to do that for him. The thought was bitter. Time and time again, even back when they were still friends, he had tried to understand what Dev was up to; what made him tick, what made his decisions keep working out right even when logic and the cold probabilities said they shouldn’t. He’d never managed to find an answer. It hadn’t made Phil angry, as it wasn’t worth getting angry about. But frustrated. And when the parting of the ways came at last—when it became plain that despite being a programmer and theoretically a logician, logic was the last thing Dev wanted to bring to bear on this particular problem—after the break, Phil had spent a good while wondering why he himself had found it so difficult. There’d been months during the restructuring of the company when he had found it hard to focus. And he hadn’t been helped by the wave of employee resignations that followed.
Phil shrugged now as he had shrugged then. It was understandable, he supposed. Some of the ways people assigned their personal loyalties in a big company made no sense when you examined them closely. The original crew—people like Jim and Cleolinda—they were such cult-of-personality types, so easily swayed by a personal manner, the perception of intimacy. Whether that intimacy was ever actually there, they either weren’t able to see or were unwilling to evaluate. Phil was probably well rid of them. During those first couple of years, when none of them had seen that they’d made a mistake and come back to Infinity, he’d kept saying to himself, Who cares? Good riddance! Let them find whatever minor success they can with him. Over here, we have work to do. And the team who had replaced them were the best people—crack talents in code and finance, hired away from top firms all over the planet, well-paid and worth their pay. The company now had the structure it had lacked in the ancient, sloppy days when Dev had still been here, swinging crazily day by day from one piece of business to another, flinging himself into the unknown like some kind of programming-enabled orangutan, always expecting that there would be something there to grab onto at the other end of the leap—
—and always finding it.
Luck, Phil thought: sheer, blind luck. What else could it be? It’s not like he has some inherent ethical superiority, there’s nothing so all-fired advanced about his business model, it’s not as if—
The phone rang.
“Finally,” he said under his breath. “Sorensen!”
“Is this a bad time?” The voice that spoke sounded male: but of course these days that guaranteed nothing, what with the various voice-masking or frequency-stripping technologies you could buy if you had a mind to.
“No. But you’re late,” Phil said. “What’ve you got?”
“Our on-campus contact has handed me exactly what I needed,” the voice said. “And I’ve been looking into back-channel stuff all morning.”
“And?”
“I’ve been promised a data delivery at local end-of-business,” the voice said.
“Damn it,” Phil said, “is that the best you can do? We’re putting a lot on the line here. If anyone gets the idea that there’s any connection—”
“Not the slightest danger of that,” said the voice at the other end. “They’re all so inward-looking, it’s genuinely never occurred to them. It’s exactly as you predicted; they’re all so busy trying to look good, to look like the nice guys—”
“All right,” Phil said. “Just keep your eyes open. How was your contact with the big fish?”
“Delayed. About an hour.”
“Fine. Send your debrief to the car, I’ll read it on the way to the heliport. Or, no, I’ll probably be in the air at that point. Just send it to my PDA.”
“Will do.” The connection went dead.
Phil swore softly under his breath and turned, making his way down the hardwood steps into the Pit. Must make a note to have someone here see if they can’t be a little more proactive with what we’ve been so generously given . . . He sat down in front of the big black table-sized slab of WindowGlass that was the heart of the entertainment system and leaned across it, glancing down into its darkness. How is it fair, he thought, meeting the eyes of his dark reflection there, that he looks like he does, and I look like this? You could say all you liked about the distinguished look afforded by going prematurely gray: it said other things about you that merely seeming distinguished couldn’t offset. Phil let out an annoyed breath, touched two or three patches on the table’s surface. Across from him, the wall lit up with a scrambled and anonymized Internet access screen—just a browser window, blank.
Phil put his hands down on the glass table and started typing. He was still a coder at heart, uncomfortable with some of the more newfangled input types—especially Dev’s much-touted optic nerve interface. God knows what that’s doing to people’s retinas, Phil thought. I should ask R&D what they make of those last few articles in the Lancet—He kept typing. In the browser window before him appeared a long string of letters and numbers. Phil hardly even had to look at them: he’d typed this particular string so many times over the last year or so that it was probably going to be found engraved on his heart when they embalmed him.
The browser window cleared, went white. Then, after a long pause, an icon started flickering in the toolbar at the top of the window; a little pen and pad. Someone was typing at the other end.
Phil waited. A second later, in the browser window, a single line appeared. We are kind of busy right now.
Phil rolled his eyes at the other end’s effrontery. So am I, he typed. Report.
Ninety-five percent of all preset logins now achieved and confirmed, said the screen. Pingbacks confirm that the installed software is ready to go with an estimated two percent failure rate.
Phil frowned at that. He typed, Why so high? Estimated failure was 1.3 percent last week.
There was a few moments’ pause—the person at the other end was apparently not as fast a typist as Phil—and then the answer appeared: Norton changed its antivirus update rollout day this week, expecting network/backbone trouble on June 21. Last-minute decision, and we had no warning. Failure rate is still within acceptable parameters, as it suggests a maximum of 180,000 plus/minus consoles failing to respond.
Phil shook his head: this wasn’t good. It was a basic tenet of logistics and tactics in warfare to make sure that your overwhelming force was genuinely overwhelming; in a situation like this, 180,000 consoles one way or another might make all the difference. Understood, he typed, making a private note to himself to make sure this particular lack of insight on that organization’s behalf would not go unrecompensed. So talk to me about risk-distribution management—
Going forward as planned, the answer came in the browser window. Approximately 200,000 identifiable risks are in place and timed to begin revealing on June 22nd. Effect will snowball through the 26th and then die back before the secondary peak on June 30th and the tertiary on July 8th. They will be snowed under with investigations well into fourth quarter. Local LE will have its hands full.
Understood, Phil typed back. His private intention was to make sure that law enforcement had its hands at least a few cases fuller if these people slipped up as far as execution was concerned. And if they thought they might try anything in the way of payback after the fact, they would find him amply protected; he had been dealing with corporate espionage and ways to prevent it for some years now
, and his own effectiveness in this regard had become, to his pleasure, something of a legend. Finally, Phil typed, execution time still as stated in last communication?
Yes, the answer came back, subject to operational conditions. Final determination will be made here, and we will text you as agreed on inception.
OK, Phil typed. Good luck.
Don’t believe in luck, the answer came back. The connection ended; the browser window closed itself.
Phil stared at the screen a moment longer . . . then smiled again, a slightly rueful look. That much, at least, he and his invisible correspondent had in common. Though he thought casually about luck, as most human beings did, he knew at heart that the concept didn’t mean to him what it meant to others. Always underlying the word, for him, was a clear sense that the universe tended to play favorites. Not with him, though, who deserved it: with someone who really didn’t, who hadn’t done enough of the kind of hard work that he had. Well, Phil thought, Dev, my boy, your luck is about to change. He actually thought this with some sorrow. They really had been friends, once. That friendship had been the rock and solace of his life. And then Dev had walked away from it, and from the business that had united them, the business they could really have made something of together. What had happened since, at Dev’s end, could only have been the result of an unusual confluence of circumstances that had, however briefly, functioned in Dev’s favor. But Dev was going to find out that statistical improbabilities couldn’t go his way forever: that the world was full of little surprises—sudden stumbling blocks set in the way, just waiting for you to take a spill over them.
It would be Dev’s lack of foresight that would now make him take that spill. He would never see Phil’s influence behind what was about to happen to Omnitopia’s market value, for Phil had been most fastidious about covering his tracks in regards to the painful but necessary object lesson he was about to deliver to his old friend. The massive raid on Omnitopia’s liquidity and the destruction of the data in Omnitopia’s servers would cause the company’s share price to crash in the inevitable sellstorm, and Morgan Wise and her silent brokerage associates scattered around the world would swoop on the devalued shares and buy them up by the million for Phil at fire- sale prices. Then Dev would discover with terrible suddenness that luck would take you only so far. At what he surely expected to be one of the high points of his career, Dev would go sprawling on his face in front of the world’s media as a result of his own hubris. Then Dev would finally understand that you cannot go it alone—that you need your friends, and turning your back on them is a mistake.