Omnitopia Dawn (2 page)

But to Arnulf’s mind, this architectural form of ADD just added to the neighborhood’s charm. It physically reminded you that once upon a time, this place had been nothing but a small rough rocky island off the coast of Himardell, itself probably the least interesting minor continent in all of old Telekil. It had been the sort of place no one bothered journeying to, a useless scrap of territory that no Elf or Man or even Gnarth could have been bothered to get into a fight over, because there was nothing
to
fight over. Elich Island had been nothing but a houseless rock in the sea, straggly around the edges with seaweed, streaked with bird droppings, and worthy of no attention whatsoever.

But then everything had changed.

As Arnulf walked, the streets got broader, and people began to pass him. Every kind of person, every kind of character you could imagine, and a lot that you couldn’t, became more and more frequent as you approached the town center: Dwarrows wearing three-piece suits and carrying Armani ax-cases; strolling, elegant Elves burdened with swords and spears and shopping bags; Men in every kind of human dress; holidaying Gnarths in Hawaiian shirts and fanny packs, pointing cameras at everything and ignoring the uneasy sidelong glances of the humans and other species; pack unicorns, hedge-dragons, and basilisks in mirrorshades; half-beasts and werebeasts and hunting cats and wolven—creatures familiar and creatures unimaginably strange, all making their way purposefully toward or away from the center of the City, like blood entering or leaving a hidden heart. Finding the buzz contagious, Arnulf quickened his pace as he crossed the boundary into Third Quarter. Here the street in front of him opened out even further, the cobbles gave way to fine set stone, and the houses on either side started to look more like Italianate palazzos than anything else, with ornate gilded ironwork and stained glass windows. Here and there an old blunt fieldstone tower or other feature of someone’s stubbornly unredeveloped unreal estate still broke through the surrounding glossy veneer of wealth and success, suggesting that it was still location, location, location that really mattered, not the fancy trappings of the nouveau riche
.
And indeed, if you had managed to pick up a piece of property in this part of Elich Island when the city was building, then you could truly be said to be successful. Especially just here, right by the most famous reminder of the Change.

Arnulf came out at the bottom of Quarterlight Street into the Plaza of Exploration, its smooth-paved expanse brightly lit by torches and magelight-powered spots. There it was, at the center of it all, surrounded by a many-spouted ornamental fountain with stray dogs drinking out of it, and a hungover waterdragon lying on its back under one of the spouts: the great bronze statue of Lahirien the Excessively Far-Traveled. As he crossed toward it, Arnulf wondered how much of the story about her, or the player who ran her, was true.
Is she just some kind of marketing ploy, something the game designers made up?
Yet at the same time, even back then, there had been gamers so obsessive that they’d spent all their time using their avatars to visit every single part of Telekil that could be visited by a gamer. Even now, there were lots of people more interested in exploring a given world than in playing in it. It wasn‘t a mind-set Arnulf understood—himself—he was all for the prewar intrigue, the battle, and the après- fight camaraderie. But it made sense that it would have been one of those more abstract-minded players who, by sheer doggedness, would have eventually discovered the island’s secret.

And if she is real, did they ever give her a bonus for that, I wonder?
Arnulf thought as he paused for a moment, halfway across the plaza, to gaze up at the statue. It portrayed a slender young woman, her long hair tied back, her cloak streaming away from her shoulders in the prevailing westerly wind, as she gazed thoughtfully out over what in those days would have been an extremely inhospitable strait of the Himardell Sea. Behind her on the great bronze pedestal were replicas of both the coracle in which she had sailed here, and of a rather seasicklooking cow—a reminder of the time when Elich Island’s only useful resources had been its tiny scrap of summer grazing and enough seaweed to keep a shore-based farmer’s cow alive through the winter. Once such resources had been precious in this barren, overlooked part of Telekil.
But that was a long time ago,
Arnulf thought.
And who even thinks that much about Telekil anymore?
All around the pedestal of the statue ran an inscription that now graced many a commemorative menhir across the hundred and twenty-one Macrocosms, the words set into the stone in letters of water-greened bronze:

And under that, in smaller letters, the wise words of the great Discoverer of the Way to the Outworlds:

Like many other passersby, Arnulf waved a hand in salute to the statue and then went on through the plaza, all surrounded by its high and stately houses, built and rebuilt many times now by those wealthy gamers who’d been smart enough to realize quickly just what it was Lahirien had found. Out the other side of the plaza Arnulf went down Left Ring Street, making his way into the much larger Court of the Wanderers. At the court’s edge, Arnulf stopped. Here the buildings surrounding the court had been kept back a decorous distance from the street. But that only made sense, for from the many streets and avenues that poured into the great circle, a constant stream of players was coming and going. Here the buzz wasn’t just something you felt, but something you could hear. And here in the middle of it all, massive, ancient, and softly humming with the power of ages, stood the Ring of Elich.

It looked like Stonehenge on steroids. A massive circle of trilithons and pillar-stones a quarter mile wide now surrounded the site of the original, time-weathered circle, whose stones had long since been moved outward and incorporated into the expanded Ring to accommodate the huge traffic of travelers from all over Telekil, the old game world. This was Omnitopia’s engine: the magical transit circle that let players with enough gold, or enough other qualifications, out into the Macrocosms of Greater Omnitopia. The discovery of this gigantic game within a game, four years ago, had turned the massively multiplayer online gaming world on its ear. No one had ever dreamed that such a number of gaming worlds, of such complexity and magnitude, could or would ever be staged inside the same platform—or that they would all be made available for no more than what you were already paying to get into the original. For hard-core gamers like Arnulf, the day the old “Otherworlds Campaigns” game had suddenly turned into Omnitopia had been like Christmas and all your birthdays and your wedding day rolled into one.
Except that it costs a lot less than your wedding day.

The blue crackle of transit fire leaped from stone pillar to stone post of the Ring of Elich, connecting the lintels at the top of the circle. Players stepped through the doorways, verified themselves with the game systems, and vanished. From other portals around the ring, other gateways, players appeared from worlds far off in the Omnitopian Pattern of universes, or worlds very close. Here came a ten- man cadre of a warrior guild returning from some battle, possibly even the one in Pandora that Arnulf had been considering. They were carrying two downed colleagues, and behind them came the guild’s paymaster, staggering under sacks of loot, while behind him came a dragon on a lead, panniers over its huge back, carrying even more. Over there, a laughing group of human “crossbreed” adventurers, dressed like Elves in dagged tunics and bright hose, with bows slung over their shoulders, vanished into a gateway that lay briefly open on the green fields of Whereaway. Each time a group transited, the vista behind them flickered to show where they were going, or where they were coming from. World after world, Macrocosms, Microcosms, foreboding landscapes and benign ones, mountains and meadows, vast oceans, other planets—they were all there. Other gates revealed race courses full of careening vehicles with exhausts afire, or grim looking concrete labyrinths full of people and creatures shooting at each other. The vistas flickered in and out sometimes too quickly to get a grasp of what they were. The Ring of Elich was the second-by-second proof by which Omnitopia lived up to its name.
Any
kind of game you could think of was here somewhere, either as a Macrocosm built by the game company’s in- house staff, or as Microcosms built by favored gamers. Endless possibilities, endless challenges were here—and at least part of the buzz in the Ring right now was because the whole Omnitopia scenario was about to widen out again in three days’ time, on Midsummer’s Eve, when the walls between the worlds traditionally got thin.

Arnulf stood there a moment longer, drinking it all in.
Just three days until the rollout,
he thought.
Another shift in the paradigm. What are they going to pull on us this time? What’s going to happen here? I can’t wait to find out!
The hair actually stood up on the back of his neck at the thought.

But then he took a deep breath. Outside, in the real world, time was flying: Angela was going to have words with him if he took too long about this.
Okay,
Arnulf thought.
First, out to Langley B. That‘s going to take about half my transport gold for today. Head to the artificer’s there, pick up that new magian kit. Then back here and do the gating to Meruvelt. Get those robes, then meet up with Tom and see if his people are really serious about doing that run into Pandora . . . they didn’t seem to have their minds made up the last time. Stop in the tavern with them, shoot the breeze for a while, then head back home. Angela did say she wanted me to mow the lawn tonight—

“Excuse me?”

Arnulf turned around and found himself looking at a gawky young human male, dark-haired and pale, dressed in Omnitopian beginner’s standard issue: the brown cloak, bleached linen tunic, cotton hose, and brown leather boots of a low-credit kern. He was almost the archetypal Clueless Noob—almost certainly some kid in here for the first time, caught up by the worldwide hype about the expansion rollout. “Well met, comrade,” Arnulf said putting out a hand. “What’s the score?”

The noob was so new that he didn’t even know yet to clasp Arnulf’s arm in return of the greeting. “Uh, yeah,” the noob said, “everything’s going pretty good. I think.” He looked past Arnulf, staring at the Ring. “Except, uh, I’m not real sure where to go from here . . .”

Rik/Arnulf kept the smile off his face.
I must have been like this once,
he thought.
But then who wasn’t? I can never understand the schmucks who like making fun of these poor guys . . .
“It’s okay,” Arnulf said. “Everything’s a little overwhelming your first few times. You heading outworld?”

“Oh, yeah, just got my first transit bonus.”

Rik nodded. He’d heard on the feeds that this had been happening a lot in the run-up to the rollout; noobs were being given outworld transit allotments as soon as they signed up—maybe a little too early, in Rik’s opinion. But the people running the game probably wanted as many new gamers as possible to get out there, see the other worlds, and get their friends excited about it too. “Where were you thinking of going?”

“Well, I heard about this place called Pandora—”

Rik looked the noob over while trying not to be too obvious about it. Kerns couldn’t afford a concealed-carry license, so it was immediately obvious that this one didn’t have a weapon, not even a knife. He probably didn’t even know he needed one.
Or he thinks they’re cheaper somewhere else, or—oh, heck, who knows what he thinks? But you can’t let somebody like this just charge in there.
Though Rik knew there were gamers who would, amused by the prospect of having sent a clueless noob into a war zone unprepared.
Serve them right,
such people would say afterward.
They should’ve read the docs first, they should’ve done their homework, blah blah blah.

Rik/Arnulf shook his head. “I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “Unless you’re a really high-level gamer hiding in a noob suit—and don’t get me wrong, I know it can be fun to do that, I’ve done it myself on occasion—then I really don’t recommend you go into Pandora right now. Things are kind of busted loose. There are mercenary bands all over the landscape, and they’ll grab you and chain you up with a caffle of other slaves and sell you off to turn somebody’s grist mill or haul some big heavy war machine all over the landscape till they’ve whipped your avatar to death. Not the best way to get the feeling of the game, huh?”

The clueless newbie shook his head vigorously. “So I’ll tell you what,” Rik said. “If you go over there—” He pointed off to one side of the Ring. “See that little booth off to the right of the Ring, by where Dancer’s Street comes into the circle? Not that one—a little more to the right. Yeah, the pavilion with the red silk walls. You go over there, tell the Magister behind the counter that you’re new in town and you’d like an in-and-out transport to Pastorale. It’s a really nice Macrocosm, a good place to walk around, trade for a while, get the feeling of your new skin, meet some other people. There’ll be a lot of other n—” Arnulf stopped himself. No point in rubbing the poor noob’s nose in it. “—A lot of players just getting used to the scenario. And there are plenty of really friendly game-generated characters there who’ll help you get the ropes sorted out. Go get yourself some nice souvenirs, help out some bunny rabbit in distress, pick up a flower fairy or two, make a couple of friends, and get out of there with a little extra credit. How does that sound?”

The noob nodded enthusiastically again, smiling. “Uh, thanks, thanks a lot! It’s all so—”

“I know,” Arnulf said. “It’s really, really big. You have no idea! But you want to survive long enough to learn to enjoy it.”