Omnitopia Dawn (15 page)

“Okay,” he said to the darkness. “Uh, meta, please?”

A screen like the one he worked with inside the normal game spaces rolled itself down on the air, showing him a window into the virtual 3-D storage where modules of the WannaB language, shining and round as DVDs, were stacked up like so many flat coins. He reached into the window, took one out, turned it over in his hands. Each module was a number of words, a phrase in WannaB. Each one had a number of receptor sites where it could be made to adhere to others, changing the structure and behavior of the virtual space around it. Jean-Marie had been right: working with these was easier than it sounded at first, and the resemblance to working with TinkerToys, once you got started, was strong. The difference was that these modules were worth a lot more than TinkerToys.

Rik flipped the module he was holding up into the air, caught it, looked at the way the words swam and swarmed underneath the surface of the disk. Anybody who had followed the Omnitopia feeds for long would have heard that there was a black market trade in stray words of the ARGOT language. Even in this simplified form, tamed and made less complex so that average players could handle them, there was a demand for the virtual version of words of power. It didn’t matter that the minute the Omnitopia system security people caught a ’cosm builder passing code on the black market, that ’cosm would be confiscated and the player thrown out of the Great Game on his ear. There were still people who were tempted, who thought they could get away with it. And the buyers, it was whispered, would find you. You’d be sitting in some bar in Omnitopia City, some tavern in one of the basalt-cliff towns of Onondaga, a spaceport dive on Kweltach, a downtown cellar dance ’n’ smoke place in Napoletaine, and someone would sidle up to you, sit down by you, and whisper, “Got code?” The sums that would change hands—usually in real-world money, as game gold was too easy to trace—would be very tempting indeed. Especially if you had a ’cosm that hadn’t been earning. You could make serious, serious money on the side—

Rik grimaced.
No sooner trusted than tempted,
he thought.
What kind of person am I?
He breathed out.
But I’m never going that way. I’m too chicken. Which is a good thing.

He put the disk back where he found it and said to the space around him, “Can I have the wireframe, please?”

The darkness all around Rik vanished, replacing itself with a grayed-out charcoal background which was rather like being trapped inside a turned-off lightbulb. High above him hung a little pearly sphere: his sun, no longer blinding now that it was running in schematic. Against the far-flung background of the larger sphere, the basic curvature of the space as Rik had established it so far defined itself in glowing white lines of latitude and longitude. Rik was standing at the bottom of an empty globe that was waiting to have a world written on it.

He got to work. For the next two hours he lost track of time almost entirely, stacking up terrain structures and watching the basic 2-D wireframe landscape spread out around him, then having the structures fall apart on him, and the whole thing wiped out. The modules continually did things he didn’t expect, and also things that he did, but in ways that foiled his original intentions. Nonetheless Rik began to get a feel for this mode of construction, which started to feel like putting together a puzzle (though one without a predetermined pattern). The different modules, he found, actually were programmed to give you a hint when something was going to work: there was tactile feedback as well as visual, and the “puzzle pieces” themselves would shift subtly in the color or intensity of their internal light, the cues suggesting which pieces of code were meant to work together and which were likely to cause a ruckus if you insisted on forcing them together. Finally Rik wound up with a stack that had everything he wanted to start with and that was correctly balanced, in which all the colors seemed to be flowing correctly and the sticky bits were sticking together soundly. “Okay,” Rik said to the meta window, glancing over the control panel that was displayed in it. “Turn on live display.” And he held his breath.

High above him, the sun came on. For yards and miles, and then apparently thousands of miles from where he stood, in a truly amazing imitation of distance, landscape went rolling out. It was very generic landscape—forests and fields, occasional mountain chains, a few large and small oceans automatically generated by the fractal routines built into the code. Underfoot it still felt flat as a floor: there were no textures in place as yet. But that could wait. Right now the landscape ran right up around the insides of the sphere, as he’d told it to, and right up to the top of the sky, where a particularly large ocean was covering the entire “polar” region of the inside of the sphere, looking and acting as if gravity was holding it there. Rik let his breath out slowly, watching with wonder the sheen on the water at that great height from the little hot sun seemingly hanging eight and a half thousand miles or so below it.
This is so cool! At this “distance” the upper surface looks like sky, even though it’s not. A little darker, maybe. More indigo. But all the virtual air between here and there is scattering the light just fine. Might want to turn the sun up a little—

He grinned at himself. “
Turn up the sun.” Hah. What a little tin god we are all of a sudden.
But that was another question. This ’cosm, this world, was going to need a name. And the name would have had to come from somewhere.
This world needs a mythology. And a history. And people, obviously people. But what kind? And animals. And a goal. What’s a world without a goal? There has to be a game in here, something worth playing, something worth striving for.

Suddenly Rik actually broke out in a sweat as he realized the sheer size of the endeavor he’d walked into. He took a deep breath and slowly turned, taking a look at the parts of the globe that had been behind him. He was going to have to turn this from just a shell into a real world. He was going to have to people it, infuse it with life . . . and then market it. Because, as he turned, he now saw something hanging in the sky as a replacement for the FOR RENT sign. It read

Very slowly he smiled.
The heck with creation anxiety,
Rik thought.
This is going to be an absolute blast. I can’t wait to see that thing tick over for the first time.

And I really can’t
wait
to show the guys!

“Door, please,” he said to his space. The door back into Rik’s private eye office reappeared. He went through it and headed straight over to the coatrack in the corner by his desk, where the robes of his art were hanging. He snapped his fingers, changing instantly out of virtual street clothes into his normal Omnitopian character kit—boots, breeches, linen shirt and undertunic, the quilted tabard lined with spearproof dragon hide, and finally the belt pouch with the bags of simples and Rik’s special medical tools. For a moment he considered wearing something more formal.
But no
.
This is just another of our usual meetings. I don’t want them to get the idea I’m getting all stuck up on them or something.

Rick reached up to get his cloak, swung it around his shoulders, and paused for a moment.
This is so strange,
he thought.
One day everything’s going on as usual and the next day suddenly it’s a big deal what you wear, what you say.
He thought of Raoul.
And who you see—

He let out a breath. There was nothing that could be done about that, but it’d be a lie to say that Rik would have been relieved if he’d found that Raoul couldn’t make it tonight.
Never mind,
Rik thought.
Other things to think about today.
And he couldn’t help grinning again as he reached around behind the coatrack, got his swordbelt and buckled it on, slinging it in the over- the-back carry position.
It’s still so neat. Let’s go—

He went back to the door. “Close the Microcosm, please,” Rik said to the game management system. The doorway went cloudy and vague with the same kind of swirling gray-out that the Ring of Elich used for doorways that were out of commission or waiting for an incoming transit.

“Omnitopia City,” Rick said. “Quarterlight Street, by the Great Ring, please.”

The swirling in the doorway cleared away to show him evening light. Rik glanced around his office, waved the lights off, stepped through the door—

—into absolute chaos.
What the f—!
Rik thought in shock as the sound came on with his passage through the doorway, and he heard the roar of people’s voices, shouting, screaming, the hubbub of running feet, and saw the stuttery flash of magelight all around in the twilight.

The Plaza of Exploration was a battlefield—literally. It was hard to make out at first who was doing what to whom. There was one large group, not human, who seemed to be operating in concert and chasing most of the other people Rik could see in the plaza, striking at them with clubs of ironwood and carved stone.
Trolls?
Rik thought, astonished.
They look like it, anyway. Liveried—
At least it looked like a livery they were wearing, something dark purple.
But what the heck’s going on here? You can’t have a battle in Omnitopia City!

Nonetheless, somebody seemed to have forgotten to tell the trolls that. There were maybe five thousand of them in the plaza, scattered all over the place and bashing anybody they could catch. Things weren’t all going their way: here and there flashes of magelight from characters and players of all styles struck them down as Rik watched. The trolls were trapped in this world, too, as Rik could see from here that the Ring of Elich had shut itself away behind a secondary ring of impenetrable blue fire.

Then his head snapped around as, from not too far away, he heard the yell
“MEDIIIIIIC!”

Rik’s eyes went wide, but he couldn’t help grinning. Even unprepared as he might have been for this particular scenario, dealing with that kind of shout was what Arnulf Manyfaced lived for. Hurriedly he whipped off his cloak, flipped it inside out so that the squared white cross and crossed swords showed clearly on his back.
But what the heck am I going to say to the guys? They’re going to say I’m avoiding them. Well, never mind that now . . .

He plunged into the fray. All around him magical blasts of multicolored fire were shooting in every direction, kicking up paving stones, knocking plaster off walls on the buildings closest to the Ring, blowing out windows. Arnulf plunged through an insane melee of shrieking and cursing and the yells of men and women and beasts of every kind, dragons howling, somebody’s leashed hellhound yelping where somebody else had stepped on it. Arnulf paused only long enough to let a very large crowd of angry Gnarths muscle past him in pursuit of the trolls, their armor in shreds and their independent liveries indistinguishable from one another in the coating of city muck and blood they’d acquired during the beginning of the fight. Then he ran on again, trying to see where the shout had come from.

“Over here!”

He angled to the right, where a big hairy guy, some kind of drow or ogre at first guess, was waving at him past the body of a battle mammoth. Rik shook his head as he dropped to his knees beside the huge bulk: it took a lot of ergs or magic to bring one of these down, as most of them availed themselves of magial engineering as soon as they could afford it, buying themselves an augmentation of that already redoubtable hide.

“What happened?” Rik said, unfastening one of his simples bags and dropping it in front of him.

“Guy caught a blast of trollfire right in the chops,” said the ogre. He—no, she, sometimes it was hard to tell with ogres—was a huge red-haired type, horny- hided and with the typical big blunt face. “Then a troll hit him from behind when he went down—”

“Friend of yours?”

The ogre shook her head. “No, just saw him go down. Thought he blundered in here by accident, maybe—”

“I bet a lot of people’ve been doing that,” Rik said. “Did it myself. How long ago?”

“Maybe five minutes.”

“Great. Thanks.”

The battle mammoth stirred a little, a feeble jerk of the legs. “What happen?” it said. “Can’t move—”

The translation sounded a little stiff. “Game management,” Rik said as he got up and hurriedly looked the beast over, “display original language.”

The translation obligingly displayed in a split frame above the stricken character’s head. It was Chinese of some kind, Rik thought. “What is that?”

“Mandarin,” said the game management voice.

“Okay,” Rik said. “Lie still, it will be all right.” He kept his wording a little more formal for the moment. The game translation matrices famously had trouble with slang and casual usages when the servers were overloaded, which Rik could just bet they were at the moment. “I am a medic, I will help.”

He circled around and did the quickest assessment he could when the client was so very large. Head and chest were okay, but there was definitely considerable damage to the rear: a big crushing injury of the back right leg, a lot of blood loss from a torn vein. Arnulf got busy, as there was no time to waste when there was damage of this kind—not if he was going to keep this player from losing his character entirely. There was no telling how much of the guy’s monthly—or yearly—income was wrapped up in this persona. Game display would show that data later, if Arnulf had the time or inclination to look.

Arnulf held his hands out over the massive body and invoked the medspell routine that would give him a more detailed diagnosis. He heard in his ear, without really noticing it, the soft stylized
ka-ching!
cash-register chime that told him the system had docked his game gold total for the performance of this spell. The spell graphic proper ran with its usual speed and showed Rik the details of the tear in the vein—fortunately a fairly clean one—and the smashed muscle.
Aah, whatever hit him got the tendon too. Damn it. Probably one of those nasty big stone clubs with spikes sticking out all over it. Never mind, let’s get him patched up—