Omnitopia Dawn (51 page)

Tau’s voice went absolutely thick with gloating. “
So
much pain. We already have tracking information on nearly fifty thousand zombies, bot machines, willing hackers, and unwilling accomplices. The system started handing us this info while the final attack was still ongoing. We’re still sorting through the remainder of the logs: there’s a ton more data coming. We’re going to need to hire
lots
more lawyers.”

“I’ll tell Jim to get on it,” Dev said, as down at the end of the room a door opened. And sure enough there was Mirabel, standing there in jeans and T- shirt, with a sandwich on a plate. “So you should call all the necessary people together and we should meet. Seven be okay? In the Tower?”

“That’s the time I had in mind. The Tower’s fine.”

Dev found it hard to look away from Mirabel as she shut the door behind her, then came in and put the plate down on the desk. “Tau,” she said to the phone, “do you need the boss for anything else right now? Because I need him to shut up and eat now.”

“Which is much more important than anything I have left for him to deal with,” Tau said. “Go for it.”

“Just this before you go,” Dev said. “Will the switch-throwing be able to go ahead as scheduled tomorrow?”

“Absent any further attacks—which I don’t see coming, frankly, as all of these have failed—I don’t see why not.”

Dev let out a breath. “Okay. And one last thing,” he said, while Mirabel sat down on the desk and gave him a look that promised him great evil if he didn’t get off the phone. “The client-side CO routines—do they seem to be behaving themselves?”

“Client-side?” Tau said, sounding surprised. “You mean the seedlings? Sure, they must be: I’d have been told if anything in that area started acting up. Want me to check as things come back up again?”

“Please do.”

“No problem. I’ll see you at seven.”

“Right,” Dev said, and hung up.

Mirabel had been unwrapping the sandwich: now she held it out to him. He took it, looked up at her, seeing for a moment not the curly hair, but long straight darkness: not the adult face, but the child’s eyes, shadowed.

“What?” Mirabel said. And after a second longer of Dev’s gaze, “What? Is there something on my face?”

“No,” he said. “You just—look good after a day like today.”

She smiled slightly, but was not fooled by his attempt to cover. “Eventually,” she said, “you’ll get around to telling me what you meant by that. But not right now. Just eat.”

He ate.

“And the ice cream didn’t do anything bad to you?” Mirabel said, after the first half of the sandwich was gone.

Dev shook his head as he picked up the second half. “No.”

“Good,” Mirabel said. “Lolo was happy.” She looked at him closely as he continued eating. “So. You still have a company?”

“Looks that way,” Dev said. “Jim and Tau will give me the details later. But I don’t think Tau’d have told me we were going to have the switch-throwing party tomorrow otherwise.”

She nodded and sighed. “This takes so much out of you when things go wrong,” Mirabel said. “Sometimes—”

Dev finished his last bite of the sandwich. “Don’t start telling me you wish we were still living in the little apartment above the Italian place!”

Mirabel snickered at him. “It was easier on your nerves,” she said.

Dev leaned back in the chair and pushed the plate away. “You’re kidding, right? My nerves were always in shreds back then because I didn’t know how I was going to keep you eating. And then the baby . . .”

“I had complete faith in you,” Mirabel said, coming around to sit on his lap.

“That was what scared me,” Dev said under his breath.

“Well,” Mirabel said, “it’s okay now. You survived that, and now you’ve survived this. Not that I understand all the technical details, but I understand enough of them. So tomorrow, all through that big party, we’ll smile at each other and inside we’ll be saying ‘Nyah, nyah!’ to all those nasty people who tried to ruin your life. Because you and Omnitopia have too much life for them to ruin.”

“You know,” Dev said, putting his arms around her, “I think you’re right.”

He paused, glancing past her. Mirabel rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, I locked it.”

“Good,” said Dev. But then he glanced up at the webcam up in one corner of the ceiling.

“System management,” he said. “It’s Dev. Camera off.”

The red light went off . . . after just the slightest pause.

Dev pulled Mirabel close and closed his eyes, hoping for the best.

T
HE KIDS WERE IN BED AND SOUND ASLEEP, and Angela was sitting next to the den computer in a beanbag chair.

At least, she knew her real body was doing that. But her present body—which felt bizarrely like her real one:
it’s gonna take me a while to get used to this RealFeel thing
—was sitting on a rock at the edge of a flowery meadow, under Indigo’s closed- in sky. The sunlight shone down buttery yellow on the landscape, an afternoon color, even though the little interior sun was at a height which normally would have been associated with noon.
It can’t help that,
Angela had thought when she’d come in earlier this evening and had first had time to just sit still and look at things without Rik chattering at her.
It’s stuck in the middle of everything, after all. So you can’t get the change in light from the change in angle, the way it is in the real world. But the color, that you could mess with. . . .
And so she had spent the early evening (home time) fiddling with the one modular piece of the universe’s ARGOT stack that controlled the way sunlight displayed over any given spot. She had finally managed to get it to the point where it started out low-level and slightly dim as if seen through dawn haze, then brightened up through morning levels and noontime heat and brilliance: then slowly diminished to an afternoon glow, and then faded out entirely.
Now all I have to do is figure how to roll this effect right around the inside of the sphere. With seasonal changes . . .

Angela sighed and stretched as she looked out over the meadow, amused as always by the way it slowly sloped up into the odd upturned interior horizon. She was beginning to see how this kind of design could start growing on you
. It’s amazing that Rik hasn’t been
more
stuck on this than he has,
she thought, dropping her gaze to the rock she sat on, brushing at the gritty top of it with one hand. As she looked at it, a flower down by the side of the rock caught her eye.
Now where did he get these?
she thought, reaching down to pick one.
Some module he imported?
She looked closely at the flower in her hand.
This looks so generic.
The flower was apparently modeled on a daisy, but close inspection showed it to be more like a ten year old’s sketch of a daisy than anything else. The leaves were plain ovals and the petals came together in a blank circle that didn’t have any fine structure to it at all, no stamens or pistils, just a yellow circle
. Well, we can certainly do better than
this
. Sure, maybe people are just going to be fighting in here, but if anybody ever stops to smell the flowers, there should
be
flowers for them to smell, not just these plastic-looking things!

And how
do
you manage smell?

“System management?” she said.

“Yes, Angela?”

“Pull me some docs on how to give things a smell, okay?”

“Displaying a basic scent tutorial now.”

A frame opened in the air near her, and Angela was just glancing toward it when she caught sight of somebody in the distance, coming toward her across the meadow—and it wasn’t Rik.
What the heck?
she thought—and then recognized who it was.
Oh my gosh, it’s what’s his name,
she thought, standing up hurriedly.
Dennis.

The strange shambling little figure came through the flowers toward her in his peculiar raggedy coat of many colors.
So strange,
she thought
. He doesn’t have to look like this! People can look whatever way they like in Omnitopia . . .
But it wasn’t her place to judge, and anyway, for all she knew, it all had some secret meaning for him.

Dennis came up to her, stopped a few feet away, and bowed. “Milady,” he said.

“Dennis,” she said, “you don’t have to be miladying me! Just call me Angela. What’s up?”

“I have a message for you.” He started fumbling around among the rags. As he did, Angela caught a most pronounced really-needs-a-wash scent that made her open her eyes wide.
It can’t be the way he smells, that has to be somebody’s programming . . . But why would he
want
to smell that way? Unless, again, it’s all part of some role he’s playing, some game . . .

After a moment, “Aha,” Dennis said, and came out with an envelope. “Here—”

Angela took it, examining it with bemusement. The envelope was made of a very heavy cream paper with a rough edge on the flap, the kind you would normally see used for a wedding invitation or something similar. “What’s this?” she said, turning it over. The front, apparently hand addressed by someone using dark blue-black ink, read: “Mr. Rik and Mrs. Angela Maliani and Family.”

“Better open it and find out,” Dennis said. And he grinned at her.

There was something odd about that grin.
And wait—how does Dennis know who Rik really is? Rik only told him he was Arnulf.
Angela opened the envelope, pulled out a piece of folded paper, more of that rich thick cream-colored stuff, with the Omnitopia alpha and omega embossed in the middle of the front of it.
Some kind of invitation?
She opened it and a piece of tissue paper fell out of the middle; it had been protecting the beautiful engraving on the inside of the card.

“What on
Earth . . . ?”
Angela said under her breath. And at that moment her in-game e-mail signal chimed. Angela looked up in increased surprise. “What is it?”

“Shall I read the mail?” said the control voice.

Angela looked at Dennis. He was watching her with interest out of those watery old eyes of his. “Who’s it from?” Angela said.

“Frank Sandringham, executive assistant to Dev Logan,” said the control voice.

Angela’s eyes went wide. “What? I mean, go on, read it.”

“Dear Angela,” said the mail—not in the control voice’s voice, but a male voice she had to assume was Frank’s—“Dev Logan has asked me to invite you, Rik, and your family to the opening-night party for the Macrocosm Expansion. I understand that this is very short notice, but you would be most welcome if you’re able to make it. Attached to this mail please find a set of e-tickets good for round trip first class air travel for you and your family from your nearest airport to Phoenix, and reservations at the Mission Palms Hotel and Spa in Tempe for the duration of your stay with us.

“New paragraph. Dev understands that it may be an issue for Rik to get time off work to attend physically at such short notice. He urges you please to get in touch with me if this is the case, and we will do the best we can to overcome any difficulty with his employer—with whom we do a great deal of business, and who we suspect will be happy to accommodate us and Rik in terms of providing him with a night or two off. Otherwise, you will be most welcome at the virtual party, and Dev asks that you please hold on to the e-tickets until a later date when you can visit us in Tempe. Your work with your Microcosm has been of great assistance to Dev over the past few days, and he very much wants a chance to thank the two of you personally, either tomorrow night or at another time more convenient for you.

“New paragraph. Please get in touch with me immediately if you have any questions. Rik will be receiving his own copy of this mail at the same time you’ve received it, so if either or both of you have questions, please get in touch with me immediately and I’ll be delighted to help you.

“New paragraph. Very much hoping that we can see you tomorrow night, I remain, yours very sincerely, Frank Sandringham—”

“Stop readout,” Angela said. The reading voice fell silent. Angela looked at Dennis.

“What do you know about this?” she said.

Dennis looked up at her from under graying eyebrows. “That not just anybody gets invited to these shindigs,” he said. And he smiled at her: a smile totally unlike anything Angela had seen from him before, a look of pure enjoyment.

“Really,” Angela said.

“Really,” Dennis said. And he tugged his forelock to her, and vanished.

Angela stood there silently for a moment, looking at the envelope and recalling the biblical verse about “angels unawares.” Then she looked up at the sky. “Rik?” she said.

“What?” He was right across the interior of the globe, working on some mountain range or other: something about the strata being slanted wrong, he’d said.

“Have you checked your mail?”

“Uh, no. I heard it go off, though—”

“Better check it,” Angela said. “And did you put your good shirt in the wash yesterday?”

“Which good shirt?”

“The white one.”

“Uh, I’m not sure.”

“Never mind. Just check the mail.”

“Okay. Oh, hi, Dennis, what brings you here?”

Angela sat down on the rock again and smiled.