Omnitopia Dawn (27 page)

George leaned back in his chair and laughed again. “It’s true what they say,” he said.

“And what do they say?”

“For honesty and that go- for-broke stick-to-it-iveness thing, hire Americans. For culture and good food, hire the French. For efficiency, hire the Swiss. But for good old- fashioned suspicion and the ability to effortlessly imagine six different kinds of backstabbing and their results, hire a Russian.”

Pyotr shrugged, smiled. George was full of these little aphorisms. Sometimes they were even true. “And for boring clichéd proverbs,” he said, “hire a Brit.”

“Even a cliché,” George said, “has an element of truth. Otherwise it wouldn’t survive as a cliché. So what about it?”

Pyotr considered.
Too early, and the corporates will get nervous that we’re going to cheat them somehow. Then someone might actually blow the whistle, regardless of the safeguards we’ve got in place. Not good. . . . Wait too long, though, and we might misfire.
The thought that Omnitopia might already have sussed out what they were up to and was going to able to shut out more of the attacking servers with every passing second, wouldn’t let Pyotr be. He felt like a man standing in a burning building . . . and what was burning was money:
his
money.
So. Just rearranging the first wave of bot execution times, the ones that’re best masked . . .
Those would be the million-plus zombie computers around the world that were tasked to ensure that the Collective’s own “base” take from the Venture was securely skimmed off and socked away. This zombie-group’s business moved under cover of the normal automated nightly interbank wire transfer action that slid around the globe in an eight-time-zone-wide band every “night”—night being, in banking terms, a very relative thing. Many banks that should have known better were too wedded to the concept of banking hours and tended to do their big transfers in the local “middle of the night.” This left them too limited in their transfer randomization—two thirds of the day, you knew they weren’t sending anything, and rooting out their traffic pattern in the remaining third was mostly a matter of computer processing power and patience.

Under cover of the big burst of traffic that would come in Asia starting around Tokyo’s banking midnight—for all the biggest banks were routinely in a rush to get their transfers and reconciliations done before the net got clogged with their competitors’ bandwidth usage—the King Zombies, the Collective’s privately-tasked money-stealing machines, would log into Omnitopia’s Asian and European servers. When they were in, they would make use of a large range of clandestinely purchased “preferred access” network backdoors to gain entrance to the game’s master accounting program. The King Zombie computers would then initiate a complex series of transactions exploiting a very secret and heretofore unnoticed loophole in the Omnitopia game gold accounting routines—one sold to the Collective months back by a perceptive but unlucky Omnitopia employee who’d been drummed out of master auditing after a sexual harassment suit. The Zombies would be asking the accounting program to value the Venture’s previously accrued gold for withdrawal to “player” bank accounts—but due to the incorrectly-written accounting routine, the valuation would get stuck in a programming loop and accidentally increase the amount of gold in question by a factor of nearly a hundred. The withdrawal would then be made on the revalued amount, but the preloop accounting assessment would leave the Omnitopia accounting system thinking it had only disbursed the uninflated amount.

This whole process would take the flock of King Zombie computers 14.66 minutes. Then the King Zombies would wipe their own tracks out of the accounting routines and simply vanish from Omnitopia’s logs as if they had never been there. Later, when their transfers to many other banking systems around the world were complete, the King Zombie machines would erase their own hard drives using best-practice triple-overwrite runs of the type preferred by the NSA, and finally voltage-shock the drives into catastrophic crashes. The custom boards installed in these machines to override the drive controllers and run these routines would then fry themselves.

A while before then, somewhere in Omnitopia, the alarms would start going off. What was uncertain was how quickly, and with what level of understanding of what had provoked them. The Conscientious Objector algorithm was the Collective’s greatest fear in this business. All they could rely on was that the CO was mostly oriented toward watching the ways players would cheat, and was not as strong in accounting as it might have been were the company more oriented toward protecting its money than protecting its gameplay. Everything else had to be about people: what people would notice was happening, how fast they would notice it, and where, and when.

But the longer they took, the better, because that would be collateral damage time for all the eagerly waiting clients, and bonus time for the Collective itself. Most of the clients simply wanted to hurt Omnitopia for one reason or another—political, social, personal—and didn’t care about the money all that much except as a symbol for pain inflicted in that most basic corporate/international sense, the fiduciary. The clients wanted the company to fail, or people in it to be hurt or get fired, or stock markets to respond in specific ways to the financial damage. That blinded all the corporate and national clients a bit, and made things easier for the Collective. Yes, the clients would get their money—at least, what they would consider significant proportions of it—always masked by errors in reckoning carefully introduced by the Collective itself.
That
skim stayed home and would be divvied up among those in this little windowless room and the other two like it who’d done the actual work: part of their achievement bonus.

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.

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.

U
NDER 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.