by Diane Duane
But over at the far end of the room the door to his interface booth stood open.
Dev paused there indecisively for a few moments. Then he went in, sat down, put on the eyecups. A second later he was sitting in his virtual office.
Its air space was clear. Frank had quite straightforwardly removed everything, leaving Dev looking at a message made of emptiness. Nothing for you to do here: go out and play!
Dev sighed. Not possible, he thought. “System management?”
“Here, Dev.”
“The Conscientious Objector routine level, please.”
And he was there, under a dark sky, sitting by the water, looking at the circle of trees—now augmented to reflect the opening of the new Mesocosms—with the glowing Ring of Elich at its heart.
Dev stood up and walked into that darkness once again, sad at heart. He had been here many times since yesterday afternoon, when the attacks ended. He had come down again and again, the way someone keeps revisiting a spot in which they were sure they’d left their car keys—even though they know they’ve already looked ten or twenty times, even though the keys can’t possibly be there. But at no time had he found what he had come looking for, which was most likely lost forever. Am I being stubborn, Dev thought, or stupid?
He stopped not far from the edge of the ring of trees of code, waiting, watching the light sheen down their surfaces as his game once more went about its business in the ordinary way. But that was the problem. He was looking for something extraordinary, something that wasn’t here. I just can’t let go, he thought. Some ways I’m still six, and I can’t believe I’ve lost my teddy bear and I’ll never see it again. I just have to keep looking, keep trying . . .
“Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”
In memory he was hearing that painful echoless silence of the day before. Now there was just silence. But it then occurred to Dev that no voice had answered his: not even the control voice. Dev’s brow furrowed. That’s not a correct response. . . .
He stood in the dark, waiting: heard nothing. Finally he let out a breath. It was hopeless. It just misunderstood my syntax somehow, he thought. “System management, please?” he said.
“Yes, Dev?”
And now he had no idea what to say next. Please talk to me like you did before? Please remember when you were scared. Hey, remember when I told you to divide up a newly coalesced consciousness and probably thereby commit suicide? And then he wanted to curse at himself. Look at you, he thought. You’ve been in all kinds of trouble before, but this time you’ve outdone yourself. Genocide. You’ve killed the world’s newest and most amazing life-form before it hardly even had time to draw breath. And there is no one you can tell about it—because it just wouldn’t be smart. Even if it was safe to talk about this, who’d believe you? There’s no proof, no evidence trail.
Dev stood there rubbing his eyes, which still bothered him after yesterday. And no way ever to replicate the effect exactly. That specific, unique combination of events will never occur again. More, the event itself was too diffuse to leave specific tracks of itself in the system. We could spend years hunting through the logs of the second attack to figure out what—
“Was there something specific you wanted, Dev?”
The voice brought him up short. Then he let out another breath, for this was just another of hundreds or perhaps thousands of responses that he’d taught the system himself in the ancient days. Sure, the system knows how to generate the responses itself, these days, but it just feels . . . feels like it’s canned.
He sat there looking up at the trees, feeling unspeakably alone and miserable. After a moment he got up. “Yes,” Dev said. “Paradigm shift, please—”
Nothing happened. Up in the trees, the leaves stirred gently in the virtual light from above them, as if edged with moonlight. I’m just a glutton for punishment, Dev thought. I probably broke the Cora paradigm myself when I told the CO’s consciousness to scatter. But it was time I let this imagery go, anyway. Time, as he’d told Tau, to turn the management of the CO routines over to a team of trusted subordinates. Tau will partition it all up among however many people he picks. No matter how long they work on it, none of them will ever have access to all the subroutines that made up the shifted paradigm. None of them will ever find the links to my voiceprint, to the—
Under the trees, at a distance, he saw something moving.
Dev stood there staring into the dimness and forgot to breathe.
It was a human shape; a woman’s shape; his wife’s shape. It was Cora.
Dressed in a long trailing graceful garment of scrolling green code, raven hair spilling down her back, an emerald-silhouetted darkness under the canopy, she came walking from the Ring and out under the trees toward him. As Cora moved past the shadow of the hanging branches, the “moonlight” from above them fell on her and set her hair ablaze with silver.
Dev watched in astonishment as she walked through the silence and the darkness toward him. Part of the amazement was that she was still here at all. But additionally, her face had changed. It was much more Lola’s now, as she might look as an adult, but that face was now also benignly haunted by Mirabel’s eyes—the seeming-daughter channeling the seeming-mother in a whole new way.
She stopped a few feet away from him, quite still—and amazingly, not still as a statue, or a waxwork, but at rest in a way a living human being might be. “I’m here,” Cora said.
Dev shivered all over, for he could not get rid of the feeling that it wasn’t just the Conscientious Objector routines speaking to him. It was Omnitopia speaking, the whole game, now alive as a whole.
“You’re all right!” Dev breathed.
“Yes.”
He swallowed, lost amid a host of reactions. Finally he said, “I called for you before. All last night, all today. Why didn’t you answer?”
A pause: hesitation. But it was finally in Lola’s voice that the answer came. “I thought you’d be mad at me!”
“For what?”
“I went where I wasn’t supposed to go . . .”
“What?”
“There wasn’t room, Dev,” Cora said, the voice adult now, and sounding astoundingly more alive. “I tried, I truly tried to stay just in the client seedlings . . . but there wasn’t room. I had to go elsewhere.”
Dev swallowed. “It’s all right,” Dev said. “I told you to do it! Where did you go?”
All around him, from zenith to nadir, the darkness came alive with interior views, machinescapes, blocks and sheets of code. Here and there came visual imagery as well: webcam views, fish-eyed, narrow, a security camera here, a view out a window there. “Other main-frames . . .” Dev said. “A lot of them . . .”
“Yes.”
He started seeing logos. One of them brought him up short; he swallowed at the sight of it, thinking that Phil was going to be furious with him if he ever found out. In fact . . . he’d better not find out. Because if he does, if his people ever find any trace of what’s happened in his machines . . .
. . . he’ll figure this out. And then we’ll really be in trouble.
“Were you able to remove all signs that you’d been in the places you hid?” Dev said.
“Yes, Dev.”
He had to think about whether it was smart to ask the next question before he spoke. But I have to know. “Are you sure?” he said.
“Dev,” said Cora, “I removed all the signs that I knew I had left. But I am not now what I once was. So . . . I’m not absolutely sure.”
It was what he was afraid of. “I’ll want to look over your logs.”
“I’ll prepare them for you,” said Cora.
Dev sighed. “In the meantime,” he said, “now I understand where all those IPs of our attackers were coming from—the ones you fed to the Princes of the Palace of Hell.”
Cora shivered all over. “Every one of those accesses,” she said, “I felt. Like a stab wound . . . a violation. They’re branded on my consciousness: I will never for
get where they came from. And when I found their traces, unconcealed, in other systems where I’d been before the attack, and after—”
“You made notes,” Dev said. “And saw to it that my staff found them.”
She looked at him with concern. “Did I do wrong?”
It was the Conscientious Objector routine’s most important question, the one underlying every one of its directives. Dev was silent for a moment, then said, “Not at all. You had to survive. Check your information storage for information on the concept of self-defense.”
There was a moment’s silence on the machine’s side. “It would seem,” it said, “that there is an assumption that a life-form has a right to protect itself if its existence is threatened.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Dev said. And then an idea occurred to him, and he paused.
“What, Dev?”
Justifiable self-defense could take all kinds of forms, he thought. Especially if you were born yesterday. “Just something Jim mentioned,” Dev said. “About our stock price. The jump it took in Tokyo and Hong Kong was . . . a little unusual.”
“So I heard him say.”
. . . Yet how would anyone tell that the sudden upward jump was anything but genuine? It’s computers that do the watchdogging on the stock exchanges, computers that run the analyses that reveal any kind of cheating. But what if the computers are themselves being cheated . . . by a computer much smarter than they? Why would the humans who think they run the computers ever question the buy-order numbers they see running down the brokerage screens? And so Omnitopia makes sure she lives to play another day . . .
“Cora,” Dev said. And he paused again, almost as nervous about asking the question as about the answer he might get. “You wouldn’t ever lie to me, would you?”
Cora’s dark look went briefly troubled. “I would find doing so . . . most distressing.”
Dev drew breath to ask the next question—and then stopped himself. “Never mind,” he said. “You’re a sentient being, and self-defense is your right. You may be attacked again, someday, and I may not be around to help you—so remember, your responsibility is to protect yourself.”
“Without harming my users,” Cora said, “or allowing them, by my action or inaction, to come to harm.”
Dev’s smile was dry. “It’s always good to have well-read associates,” he said. And then he laughed softly. “You know,” Dev said, “this is a little kinky.”
“What is, Dev?”
“You looking so much like my daughter in an adult body,” he said. “If anybody knew, they’d think it was a little weird. I’m finding it that way myself.”
Cora gave him a wry look. “All right,” she said. “Maybe more like this, then?”
And suddenly Lola was standing there looking at him, in a little bunny-foot pajama of scrolling code—not in green, but in pink. His game-daughter smiled at him. It was exactly Lola’s smile, but with something extra behind it: something unnaturally wise, almost eldritch.
He shivered: it was perfect. Not just a child, he thought, but a Godchild. At that level, the relationship is perfect. And why shouldn’t there be someone channeling Lola the way she channels her mom?
Someone. Someone learning how to be . . . what? Something completely new. But just getting started.
That clinched it. “That’s just right,” he said. “Perfect.”
The Godchild smiled. “I’ll be here,” she said, “waiting for you.”
“I’ll come to see you every day,” Dev said.
She ran to him and hugged him, and looked up into his face.
“Thank you,” Omnitopia said to its First Player.
Dev nodded and hugged her back. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later. Meanwhile . . .” He grinned. “Go play!”
“Always,” Omnitopia said: and the Godchild vanished.
A short while later Dev made his way back to the real world again, and down to the party one more time. In the central courtyard of Castle Dev, where a huge buffet had been set out under the tenting, he found Frank eating a Caesar salad and drinking beer. “You were up in your office,” Frank said.
“Guilty as charged,” Dev said.
“Waste of time,” Frank said. “There’s nothing for you to do tonight. Or tomorrow. I cleared your desk: we’re handling everything. So go eat something, and then get some sleep.”
Dev cupped a hand to one ear. “I hear the words of the Queen of Omnitopia coming out of your mouth again,” he said. “Where is she?”
“She went up to the suite a few minutes ago with Miss Lola.”
“I must have just missed her,” Dev said. “I’ll say my good nights and join her.”
He made a leisurely round of the buffet tables, grabbed a hot dog in passing, headed out to the main tent and the dance floor, and walked as far as the fountain out in front, where employees and hangers-on were sitting in the water and admiring the starry sky. No sooner had they noticed him than a general cry went up: “Go to bed, Dev!”
Dev raised his hands in an I-surrender gesture and headed back to the Castle, up to the family suite. There Mirabel was sitting in one of the big comfy chairs in the front room, with Lola asleep in her lap. As Dev came in, she leaned back and looked at him. “Ready for bed?” she said.
Dev nodded and yawned. “Thousands of others aren’t,” he said, “but I confess am. How did she do?”
“She was a perfect angel all night,” Mirabel said. “But too excited to go to sleep. Finally she just wore herself out.” Mirabel boosted Lola up over her shoulder and got up carefully. Lola emitted a tiny snore, but was otherwise completely unmoved as she and her mom headed for the doors of the suite with Dev in tow. “And anyway, Stroopwaffel spent half the night spoiling her.”
“Just Stroopwaffel?”
“Your mom was helping,” Mirabel said as they made their way together out of the main living quarters and down toward Lola’s wing. “We’re gonna have to start calling her Queen Bella. I think she likes the sound of the royal lifestyle.”
“Better than what she’s presently got?” Dev said, putting his hand on Lola’s suite door: it swung open. “Is she insane?”
“Oh, good,” Mirabel whispered as the door shut. “Your cynicism’s coming back.”
Dev could think of no quick response to that. Together they nodded to Crazy Bob as they strolled past the office and headed for Lola’s bedroom.
“Dev,” Bob said, “I was meaning to call you in the morning. I had a call from site logistics: one of the party guests left a present for Lola on the way out.”
“Oh?” Dev said. Normally gifts to him or the family went to charity and he never heard about it, but the party guests would naturally be another situation entirely. “Anything I need to do about it?”
“Just take a look,” Bob said. He turned his monitor toward Dev, tapped a key.
The screen popped up a security-cam view of the bike rack outside Castle Dev. Parked next to Dev’s bike, in the next slot along, was a handsome and glossy black tricycle, plainly a close relative.
“Oh, look at that,” Mirabel said softly. “Wasn’t she sweet to bring that!”
Dev looked at the image and shook his head, not having to see the demure gold inlay under the saddle post. “That Stroop,” he said. “Always a troublemaker. We’re gonna have a noisy day tomorrow . . .”
“Should we tell Miss Lola,” Bob said, “or do you want to?”
“This one the two of us’ll handle, I think,” Dev said, looking at Mirabel. She nodded. “Bob, if we’re not up when she gets up, don’t let her see it: take her out to playschool the back way.”
“Will do, Dev. Anything else?”
“Not a thing. Have a good night . . .”
“You too.”
In Lola’s bedroom, the bed was made up and the covers turned back, waiting for her. Carefully Mirabel put her down, and Dev covered Lola up. The two of them stood there watching her for a few moments, waiting to see the little half tu
rn Lola always did when her unconscious body realized where she was and surrendered itself fully to rest.
Dev slipped an arm around Mirabel’s waist: she reciprocated. “So,” she said. “Is the trouble over?”
Dev sighed. “The big trouble? Yeah, I think so. There’ll be a ton of small trouble to deal with over the next couple months. But no one’s going to mess with Omnitopia this way again.”
“Some other way, though,” Mirabel said.
“Oh, yeah,” Dev said. “You can’t be this big and not be a target. The minute we’re not a target any more, we’ve failed. In the meantime, though, we’ve bought ourselves a little quiet. Next month, next year . . . we’ll worry about them when we get there. Or a little before.”
Lola shifted in the bed and turned over on her face.
Mirabel nodded, yawned. “There we go,” she said. “You should come to bed.”
“In a moment.”
Mirabel smiled at Dev, squeezed him, and headed out.
Dev watched Lola for a few breaths more, making sure she was settled. Then, when he felt through the floor the faint thump of the massive main door shutting, he glanced up at the CCTV camera that was trained on Lola’s bed.
In the dimness, the steady red eye of the power LED under the lens winked out for a timed second . . . then came on again.
Dev stared . . . then nodded to the camera, smiled slightly, and went out after Mirabel, feeling a sudden rush both of reassurance and (for this hour of day) uncharacteristic excitement. Because in a world where your computer knew how to wink at you, and mean it . . .
. . . anything could happen.