Omnitopia: Dawn

by Diane Duane

  After that, after the clients had earned out, came the pure bonus period during which (again, after the Collective’s surreptitious skim) some of those who’d been most forthcoming in helping build the zombie network would be recompensed. The rest—hundreds of thousands of greedy or stupid users who’d volunteered to get in on the action without thinking things through—would be thrown out of the speeding sledge in waves, their network addresses suddenly becoming visible when they were supposed to have been concealed, and theoretically erased logs and other useful information suddenly remanifesting themselves on hard drives all over the planet. The poor dupes would never know what had hit them. They would just suddenly hit the snow, and the wolves of world law enforcement would fall on them with glee and rip them up.

  The remaining users—“used” was probably a better word—less greedy than the pre-chosen victims, maybe less stupid, possibly just lucky, would each win his or her little personal lottery out of the funds that would be scooped in over the course of the Great Omnitopia Robbery. These people, the thousands of unseen enablers and connectors to other computer networks of use in this exploit, would keep or lose the funds they were paid depending on how smart they were about grabbing it out of their accounts, diving for cover (with the slight and sometimes regrettably incomplete advice they’d been given about how to hide), and not coming up for air again until the first wave of law enforcement had passed over them.

  And then, of course, we have to vanish too. But how long will the retasking of timings take . . . how long for the King Zombies . . . and then. the secondary network . . . hmm . . .

  Pyotr glanced down at George, but George was unfocused, his arms folded, looking out sightlessly at the room. Of course George had known Pyotr long enough now not to rush him during one of these moments of calculation. But right now he looked unusually disconnected even for George at his most patient.

  George looked up suddenly. “What?” he said.

  Pyotr smiled at him. “You were completely zoned out.”

  George rubbed his eyes. “I believe you,” he said. Sleep had not been the friend of any of them for most of these last seventy-two hours, despite everyone’s understanding that they needed to keep sharp for the hours to come.

  “What will you do?” Pyotr said.

  It was a question that most members of the Collective didn’t ask one another. Until the Venture was complete, knowing too much, knowing almost anything, could be dangerous. But we’re so close . . . and we’re at the top of the heap. If I don’t satisfy my curiosity now, I may never get the chance.

  “Do?” George said.

  “Afterward.”

  George shook his head. At first Pyotr thought this meant there would be no answer, and George was always Mr. Security, so this didn’t surprise him. But then George let out a breath.

  “I am going to have a little farm,” he said. “A smallhold, halfway up a mountain somewhere in central Europe. There will be chickens in the front yard, scratching. Maybe a flock of geese for security. I’ll raise my own vegetables and maybe have a cow. There’ll be a stream running through the field, and I’ll put a turbine in it for power. And I’ll have a windmill, and solar. There’ll be a greenhouse tunnel where I will breed the world’s hottest, but tastiest, designer chilies. There will be cats snoozing in the front yard, and pine martens will have a nest in the attic. And there won’t be a glimpse anywhere, from horizon to horizon, of the goddamn sea.”

  Pyotr raised his eyebrows. It was strange. Until recently George had been living most people’s dream: blue water, white beaches, hot sun. All right, the occasional hurricane, but still! Yet now what he wanted was to get rid of all that. The grass is always greener . . .

  Cliché again. Never mind. “Four hours,” Pyotr said.

  George got that thinking look of his. “Four hours earlier than announced to our esteemed clients. A question of how well we can cover when they start asking questions . . .”

  “Okay, shave a little off that?” Pyotr said, for when George looked concerned, his hunches were often to be trusted. “Three and a half?”

  George thought. “Twelve-minute thirteen-second offset from the half hour.”

  “Eleven thirteen,” Pyotr said.

  George nodded.

  “Start the clock,” he said. “Three hours, forty-two minutes.”

  Pyotr went over to his computer to start the sledge running over the snow.

  Behind him, he heard George softly reading something from the middle monitor.

  What is’t you do? A deed without a name . . .

  EIGHT

  UNDER THE PALM TREES of one of the pathways leading to Castle Dev, a blonde woman in a cream linen business suit was meandering along, jotting something down in a PDA, her lips moving silently as she wrote. Around her, Omnitopia staff bicycled or golf-carted by, or in some cases Rollerbladed past, and there was even one diehard three-piece-suit-on-a-scooter type who kicked past her, glancing back curiously as he went, as if a little surprised to see a face he didn’t know.

  Delia Harrington smiled at him and turned her attention back to the notes she was jotting down after her last interview. Weird, she thought. With all the people here, you’d think a single new face wouldn’t provoke any particular interest.

  She paused by one particularly large royal palm to save the file she was working on, for Castle Dev was just up at the top of the next rise. But then again, she thought, you could make a case that Omnitopia’s like a very small town. Live there long enough and pretty soon you recognize everybody.

  Delia finished saving the note and put her PDA away. Of course, for all I know, the who’s-that-girl looks are because Omnitopia security has some kind of all-points bulletin out on me as a Person of Interest. A risk to their corporate way of life . . .

  Delia breathed out, smiling at herself. Okay, now that’s just paranoia, she thought. Not the best state of mind to be in while preparing to meet the world’s eighth richest man . . .

  She headed up the path toward the castle gateway. People were making their way toward and away from it at various rates of hurry, and as she examined each face she saw, over and over again, something she’d started to identify over the course of the day: an expression of slight excitement, like kids about to get out of school. Except they’re in school, she thought. More or less. Just about everybody I’ve seen today genuinely seems to like working here. It’s so bizarre.

  Another truly paranoid thought wandered across her forebrain: that everybody who didn’t like working here had been told to stay home today because the reporter from Time was coming through . . . Delia snorted at herself and started the slight uphill climb toward the nearest castle gateway.

  She turned onto the sandstone-paved walkway that led up to the gate. The entry area dividing the broad deep archway from the interior park and garden was quiet for the moment: there was no visible security presence there, not so much as a booth with a security guard in it.

  Delia’s directions had been straightforward enough: through the arch, go across the courtyard, through the glass doors, give your name to the guy at the desk. But it was still strange to see the very heart of the Omnitopia empire seem so quiet, so nearly empty, and so unguarded. Delia slowed down a little as she came up the archway, thinking about asking somebody whether she was in the right place. Did I come in on the wrong side or something?

  Off to her right and just on the near side of the arch, somebody was parking an ancient- looking, dusty black bike at the last slot in a bike rack there. He was a tall, lean, shaggy- haired, sandy-haired guy in cream chinos and a white shirt, and as he turned—

  Delia, finally seeing his face, stopped right where she was. It was Dev Logan himself, without a staff member in sight, dusting his hands off against his pants and reaching back to the spring-clip rack over the bike’s rear fender to unclip some folders he was carrying. He pulled them out and started going through one of them, and as she approached, he glanced up at her once, then twice.


  And said, “Oh, my gosh, you’re Delia Harrington, aren’t you?”

  Did he actually say “gosh”? was her first thought, and she had to control her urge to laugh as he came over to her and shook her hand. “That’s right,” Delia said.

  “Oh, good,” Dev said. “I’m okay with faces but I get a little mixed on names sometimes . . .”

  He actually looked at you when he shook your hand, and the smile seemed genuine. This was dangerous. It was something Delia had seen before in politicians, the instant sincerity, absolutely believed by the purveyor—until the need to believe it in front of a specific person went away. It could be very winning, and the more won over Delia found herself feeling, the less she trusted the emotion.

  “Listen, I’m really sorry we had to reschedule,” Dev said. “I hate having to make people wait.”

  “Oh, no, no problem . . .” Delia said, somewhat disarmed against her will. “You’re very busy of course . . .”

  “It’s just been one of those days: with the launch coming up, everything’s been getting screwed up at the last minute. I barely had time to see my daughter at lunchtime before things started to go south . . .”

  That approach put her back on course, emotionally at least. The Family-Man ploy was one of the things that Delia found hardest to swallow about the whole Dev Logan picture, when it was well known that the child had hot and cold running nannies and a toy budget probably approximating the GPD of a small country. “Well, family time’s so important, after all . . .”

  “So is keeping commitments,” Dev said. “Sorry again. But at least the delay would have left you a little time to have some lunch. You did get something to eat, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “I stopped over at the cantina—” Various Omnitopia staffers she’d spoken to over the course of the morning had said, “You have got to get over there,” and once inside, she’d seen why. The multileveled twenty-four-hour dining facility reputedly modeled on the Baths of Caracalla, staffed by purloined star chefs and their minions and used as a training site by European hotel schools, would have been anybody’s candidate for one of the Restaurant Wonders of the World. Yet it had felt as casual as a small- town diner—laughing and joking going on in the corner booths, people playing cards at one table, here and there a sofa with some guy sleeping on it, or a girl working on a laptop and eating a roast beef sandwich while her Labrador made sad starving-doggie eyes at her. And the food offerings had stretched all the way from simple high-piled bowls of fruit to four-course extravaganzas of every ethnicity . . . while still proving capable of delivering that most deceptively simple and difficult dish, the perfect three-egg omelet. “Normandy butter,” the young Asian chef who made it for her had said, shrugging a perfectly French shrug. But Delia had suspected that the omelet’s perfection had more to do with knowing just when to stop. Once again, as the chef had turned away, she’d gotten a sense of an entirely different flavor of Really-Likes-Working-Here Syndrome . . . but in this case, having missed breakfast, she’d been able to put it aside.

  “That’s good,” Dev said. “Come on, let me show you around here a little, and then we can talk.”

  He gestured her to the archway: they went through together. “And you’ve spoken to Joss and Tau,” Dev said. “Those meetings at least went all right.”

  “Yes, they were very helpful,” Delia said. They had in fact been two of the most carefully spoken people she’d ever interviewed. Of the PR guy, she could have believed this, and was prepared for it. But Tau Vitoria was supposed to be an overenthusiastic software geek stuck in a perpetually collegiate attitude toward his work and his friends, much given to practical jokes and weird hours. Delia had not been at all prepared for the slick- looking, soft-spoken, extremely tailored young gentleman who took her hand and did not actually kiss it, but bowed over it with a formality that somehow managed to be genuinely youthful and charming. Multilingual, well-read, obviously well-educated despite the number of universities he had apparently been thrown out of for bad behavior, Tau had been almost too large a set of contradictions for Delia to cope with at one sitting. She had been both relieved to get away from him, and strangely eager to have another run at him and see if she could crack that glossy exterior and find some dirt under it, or at least dust. “Tau,” she said, “in particular—”

  Dev grinned. “Everybody,” he said, “hits Tau and bounces. I bounce every day. Here, let’s go in the side way—”

  He led Delia along a path through the courtyard that led to the base of a broad space between two of the west- side towers and a wide set of dark-glass doors that slid aside for them as they approached. “You probably know from the PR what this building’s like already,” he said. “Family quarters, executive offices, and the master corporate suite—”

  “There are more people in here than in any one other building on campus, aren’t there?” Delia said as they headed across a sculpture-studded sandstone floor and up a wide staircase along the back wall.

  Dev nodded. “We tried decentralizing it,” he said, “but it didn’t work so well, though the villa-and-courtyard or crofting model does quite well everywhere else on campus. Seems this particular ‘village of the like-minded’ prefers to stay very physically close in the workplace.”

  They came out on the landing, and Delia realized that “close” did not look exactly as she’d started to imagine it might on the way in. The distance between the inner and outer walls of Castle Dev on this side was far greater than that between the walls where the archway was, and the four galleried sides of the space they now entered went nearly up to another of the polarized glass ceilings, slanted inward toward the central garden plaza, and at least four stories down below ground level. Nonetheless, all those spaces were as flooded with daylight as if they were at ground level and completely windowed. All of them had desks and glass cubicles and semicircular group work sofas surrounding large round worktables and most of the workspaces Delia could see were busy with people.

  Dev leaned over the railing, gazing down into the depths. At the very bottom of the atrium, a fountain played in a rectangular pool; on its charcoal-gray bottom, the ubiquitous Omnitopia alpha/omega symbols faded in and out of visibility in a shimmer of moving water and silvery underlighting. Delia, gazing down into what she could see of the workspaces, said, “This part of the building must go right out into the mesa . . .”

  “Support spaces mostly,” Dev said. “It’s not kind to make people work too far underground. And there’s too much temptation for computer people to go nondiurnal as it is. We try to keep people on days, and in daylight, mostly.” He straightened up. “Come on down to my office space.”

  “You have one here?” Delia said, heading after him toward a ramp that curved around one side of the galleries. “I thought your main office was on the other side of the building.”

  “Oh, yeah. But I have an employee-accessible office space in every building on this campus,” Dev said. “And all our other buildings, worldwide. People have to be able to find me.”

  “But doing it virtually must make it easier. You’ve got that famous virtual office space—”

  “Sure,” Dev said. “But I still need local places when I’m out and around to dump a briefcase or a laptop. And my colleagues here need somewhere local to walk into when they want me. It’s a courtesy thing.”

  They headed down around the curve and out onto the level below the one where they’d been standing. Here Delia glanced up and saw that many light-bending tunnel guides, the source of all that daylight, were set in the ceiling. Dev followed her glance. “Not a perfect solution,” he said, strolling among the sofas and the big comfortable-looking part cubicles where his employees glanced up, nodded or waved at him, glanced away again, “but better than artificial.”

  “Even better than your solid light in the parking lots?”

  Dev smiled as they made their way into the center of the space, where a wide oval of more cubicles and worktables surrounded a big se
micircular glass desk and its matching semicircular sofa. “Couldn’t help that,” he said. “Had to have it. But I’m such a geek, everybody says so. . . .”

  He tossed the folders he’d been carrying onto the desk as he came up to it. “You have some stuff you want to show me, I take it,” Dev said, leaning against the desk.

  Delia nodded, handing him the one thing that Time editorial had sent along with her: the dummy cover of the edition in which Dev’s interview and background article would appear.

  He glanced over it. For just a second Delia thought she saw a flicker of something in his expression, a split second of annoyance or surprise: then the expression sealed over. No, come on, Dev, tell me what you really think! “The typography might not be right yet,” Delia said, hoping to winkle that look out of its hiding place again.

  “No, it looks fine,” Dev said, tucking the cover dummy back into its folder. Then he grinned—an expression utterly at odds with the previous one. “It’s a lost cause, you know that? I’m just not photogenic.”

  Delia had to restrain herself from looking at him cockeyed. Are you out of your mind? she wanted to say. You’re the eighth richest man in the world, do you seriously think anyone cares if you’re not classically handsome? But he genuinely looked sheepish. Is this another of those manufactured moments? . . . But no. No one could genuinely look that embarrassed at himself if he really wasn’t. Especially not the big-shot head of a multinational.