There was quiet around the table. “You’re all being very nice not to say what you’re thinking,” Dev said, “which is that the CO routines are my invention, that I’ve been the one who’s been all paranoid over the past couple years about keeping them away from almost everybody else at the company—”
“Except that the paranoia’s paid off,” Tau said. “Remember when we expanded all the virtual real estate in the Macrocosms to ‘realworld’ size? Without the CO, we’d never have caught the guys who tried to use that event to divert all the Telekil logins on launch day and steal our users’ private info. And we caught the moles who’d been trying to get inside the Conscientious Objector’s guts. The only reason they failed was because you’d made sure the CO’s inside code was kept so inaccessible to everybody but you and the Chosen Few.”
“Meaning you,” Dev said. “All right. Unfortunately the downside of that is that there aren’t many of us who can work on that problem. So let’s you and me do some old- fashioned hacking tonight. Got time?”
“Nothing else more important on my plate,” Tau said. “I’ll alert the software implementation groups to lock down what they’re doing and get all today’s changes stable before six.”
“Okay. Pass whatever else you’ve been working on to your trouble teams, okay?” He sighed, scrolling down past the bug list. “Enough of the so-called real world, which is really annoying me today. Unreal estate, ladies and gentlemen! Tell me of my worlds!”
A rustle went around the table. “Macrocosms!” Dev said. “What’s buzzing in the Hundred and Twenty-one Universes?”
“The rollout, mostly,” Ron Ruis said. “The pace of gameplay has slowed a little everywhere. It’s the usual let’s-see-what-happens thing.” He grinned. “Rubbernecking.”
Dev nodded. “That we were expecting. Ongoing conflicts?”
“Running in sixty-four percent of the Macrocosms today,” Alicia said.
Dev frowned. “Seems a little low.”
“Design planning mandated a ’cosm-wide ‘peace percentage’ for the pre-rollout period,” Ron said. “We can go down as low as sixty. It lets the newbies travel a little more widely without getting stomped on too much. Also, some of the marginal ’cosms have had their conflict constants dialed down a little so that players can do more exploring without getting jumped by game-generated characters every other minute.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” said Cleolinda. “A lot of people have the rollout on their brains right now. It’s impairing play somewhat, so it’s just good business to have the GGCs cut them a little slack.”
“New conflicteds today?”
“Fifteen. There’s the full list.” Alicia brought it up on all their laptops.
Dev glanced down at it, nodded. “Okay. Dasheth Prime, Pandora, LongAgo Three . . . Oh, good, TwoMoons finally got their act together. I was starting to worry—thought we gave a war and nobody came.”
A chuckle went around the table. “Every world to its own speed,” Alicia said. “Can’t rush these things, sometimes, and the Moonies are a breed unto themselves.” She left unspoken the other strange truth about that ’cosm, which was that its income had been five percent over the Omnitopian average for the past three years—and despite intensive study, no one really understood why.
“Heaven forbid I should fix what’s not busted,” Dev said. “Nothing else in the Great Worlds? Fine. How’re the Microcosms?”
“Eight thousand four hundred twenty-two running today,” Ron said promptly. “They paid—” He glanced at his laptop. “—just north of one point two million dollars in royalties. Of nonrunning ’cosms, we had twelve deactivations and forty-one formal abandonments—those are being fostered out to other MicroLevelers as usual. Three crashes due to bad or strange code—those are being debugged. Thirty- four new Levelers came in, twelve by system-initiated upgrades. The rest got the accolade from staff, either independently or by nomination.”
“Those deactivations—anything new that’s going to get us sued?” The Playground fiasco was still very much on Dev’s mind. The idea that someone might have been using his universe for such evil purposes made his flesh crawl.
Ron shook his head. “ToS violations, but nothing like that. One of them was a stolen-gold laundry. Very clever; it exploited a loophole in ARGOT. I’ll pass you the details.”
“That loophole plugged?”
“It will be by tonight, temporarily at least. It’s been moved way up the list of things to fix for the next release of the language.”
“Okay. Copy me the new ’cosm details as usual.” He turned to Jim. “And one more so-called real world thing I forgot. I had a phone call just before I came up. Our most reticent shareholder is very concerned about our share price. I have a feeling you may be hearing from him.”
Jim covered his face with his hands. “Oh, Bog preserve me!”
“He’s just following the money,” Dev said, “like your other biggest fan. But the sentiment he was expressing is popular. I really, really want us to break a thousand during the launch. It’ll leave a welt on Wall Street’s hide they won’t soon forget.”
Jim shrugged. “Better go sacrifice a goat to the great god Fed,” he said. “No guarantees.”
“Really? You don’t think we’ll do it? We’ve moved heaven and earth to get it to happen . . .”
“Heaven and earth have their own motions,” Jim said, and leaned back in his chair. “You think I wouldn’t like it too? I want to redecorate my office.” A skeptical snicker ran around the table, as Jim had not been known to redecorate any space he’d occupied since he joined Dev in the company: he preferred to be moved into an entirely new building.
“Okay,” Dev said. “You’re hedging your bets. I can understand that.”
“It’s how I made us the unstoppable financial force we are today,” Jim said and there was no snicker this time, because the statement was incontestably true. Along with his ancient friendship with Dev, forged in the fires of that never-to-be-forgotten fistfight when they were six and rock-solid ever after, Jim had brought to the Omnitopian round table, along with his Harvard MBA, a near-Machiavellian understanding of the markets. “Dev, never mind the goats. If I see us ready to go over the top, you’ll be my first call. But it’s too soon to say.”
“Three days before the launch is too soon?”
Jim nodded. “Three days in finance is like a week in politics,” he said. “Or two. Ask me again in about forty-eight hours.”
“I will do that,” Dev said, and turned to the others. “Anybody else? Last thoughts?”
Heads shook all around. “We’re done,” Jim said. “Better go get online before your world crumbles.”
Dev nodded, stood up. “Okay, troops,” he said. “Let’s go play!”
Everyone else got up. “We doing a Great Wall tonight?” Doris asked. It was code for a group dinner, just as it had been seven years ago when such dinners took place not in an Omnitopian executive dining room, but in the back room of a little Chinese place in Phoenix.
“Yeah,” Dev said. “My place?”
The sound of general agreement ran around the room as people packed up their things. “Great,” Dev said. “I’m going home for lunch. Jim, come on with; you can see She Who Must Be Obeyed before you go back to work.”
“Do I get to ride on the back of the bike?” Jim said, shutting his briefcase.
Dev rolled his eyes and headed for the elevator.
FIVE
RIK DID HIS BEST TO BE GOOD that day. It was hard work. He made lunch for the family, he tidied the master bedroom, he vacuumed the upstairs hall. Granted, the upstairs hall really needed it. Mikey, too, had been good that day, and had spent the better part of an hour cleaning out the hamster cage. As a result, the upstairs hall between Mikey’s room and the bathroom, where the upstairs garbage can lived, was liberally scattered with cedar shavings and other slightly less salutary detritus. Rik had busied himself making sure he got every shaving up, while thinking slowly an
d carefully about a lot of the reading he had done online earlier that morning. It came almost as a shock to him when somebody came up behind him and took the vacuum out of his hands.
“Enough,” Angela said to him. “You’re going to give me a guilt attack. Go play with your toy.”
He looked down the hall, satisfied that it was clean, and smiled at her. “You really are the best woman on the planet, you know that?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, I do. Now please, get in there and close the door. Your halo is blinding me.”
He smiled at being let off the hook. “What’s for dinner?”
“Spaghetti and meatballs,” Angela said. “And no, you don’t need to help. I don’t wanna see you until six.”
“Can I have an iced tea first?”
“Anything. Just go away and stop being so good! I’m beginning to wonder what pod person removed my husband when I wasn’t looking.”
He kissed her soundly, went to the fridge, and got himself a very large iced tea—he’d have beer later, after he successfully pulled off what he had in mind, assuming he could pull it off—and took himself up to the playroom. When he got the RealFeel headset on again and got into his workspace once more to find that golden apple logo still showing in the status window, he had to shake his head. It was hard to believe. But there it is.
And how am I going to explain this to Raoul?
Sitting there in his little private eye’s office, he rubbed his face, shook his head. Raoul was a problem for later in the day. And not that much later in the day, either. What is it now? Threeish, here. Which means it’s . . . He tried to do the time zones in his head. Fortunately, everybody was on the same continent. It’s okay. I may actually have enough time to get this to work. At least enough to paper over the cracks and show them that I’ve actually been giving this thing my attention.
He walked out the door of his little office inside the Omnitopia gaming system and straight into that vast darkness. There Rik stood, staring up at the THIS SPACE FOR RENT sign that still hung there. Rik was tempted to leave it there while he worked, just as a reminder that all this was still real. But it was time to get past that now—what was he, a kid who couldn’t get used to reality?—and anyway, it might screw something up. Better to get rid of it.
He didn’t want to be standing there in the dark, though, so first he turned on the sun.
It was small and fiercely bright, and somehow looked much closer than the real sun would, even though from where he was standing, its diameter looked the same. That was one of the first things that had occurred to Rik about a good- looking Inner Earth: a sun about six hundred miles wide, hanging in place and rotating as if it was made of hyperdense matter, as heavy as the whole Earth’s core so that everything stayed in balance. No point in having an Earth that wobbles in its orbit, after all. You want it so that the people supposedly living on the surface will never notice. Not that they’re ever going to be my problem.
The sun had been surprisingly easy—even easier than the structure for the world in which it was now hanging. With only a little searching in Omnitopia’s forums, archives, and Web spaces, Rik had found that there were a lot of Microcosm templates available that started out with hollow spheres for convenience, and then constructed various structures inside them—caves, castles, you name it. After some browsing, Rik had found one that had suited his purposes particularly well, being nothing else but a hollow crystal ball meant to hold genii or demons. The sphere’s outer dimensions were variable, but didn’t impair the hugeness of the inside, which was meant to be as big as a world to the creatures held inside it, even if it seemed small to those outside. Rik wasn’t particularly concerned about the outer dimensions—the first thing he’d done with the WannaB language was describe the outside as out of bounds. The access to Rik’s ’cosm via the Ring of Elich was going to be on the inside of the sphere, not the outside. It would take only a sentence or three in WannaB, he thought, to opaque the crystal. Then it would just be a matter of starting to lay terrain down on the substrate.
The terrain, Rik thought. He couldn’t wait for the others to see this place. Well, I can’t wait for most of them to see it. But not bare, not like this. It needs a little work first.
“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