“I know, I know,” Dev said, feeling faintly guilty. “I’m supposed to be having lunch with Lola, I’ll be—”
“No, it’s not that! ‘Trouble at t’ mill,’ Boss.”
It had started out as old code between Dev and Jim for times when there was a fairly serious problem. Now many of the other staff close to Dev had adopted it despite not having been born when the joke was first made. “Oh, no,” Dev moaned, covering his eyes with one hand. “Not the server attack already, at the worst time, please tell me it’s not the server attack!”
“Boss, not on an open line!” Frank said. “Not something I’m not supposed to know about! Not not not . . .”
“Sorry, yes, of course, what is it?”
“We seem to have been having a little dustup in Omnitopia City—”
“A what?”
The conversation went on for some minutes while Frank gave him the earliest details. Dev went from muttering to swearing in the first five of those minutes, was immediately lectured on language by Frank as usual, and spent the rest of the briefing fuming.
Finally Frank fell silent. “So?” he said after a moment. “What should we do? Inquiring minds down in infrastructure management want to know.”
“I bet they do,” Dev said under his breath.
“There’s been a lot of muttering on the gameside infranets that you should appoint a new mayor.”
“I hate that,” Dev said. “The city’s supposed to be managed by the players. I don’t want to start pulling their autonomy out from under them at this late date.”
Dev sat down on a nearby bench and started moodily pulling the tiny spiny leaves off a branch of a nearby shrub, shaking his head. “I still can’t believe they did that,” he said.
“Did what?” said a voice from behind him.
Dev glanced up. Tau Vitoria had come up behind him, his arms full of his laptop and some folders. He sat down next to Dev, looking concerned.
Dev rolled his eyes. “Frank, tell Tau what they did.” He handed Tau the phone.
Tau listened, expressionless. Dev watched him for a few moments, impressed yet again at Tau’s strange gift for being able to listen to a conversation with this totally unreadable face, like something carved from stone. Some weird European superpower, Dev thought, or something he inherited from one of these kings he’s supposed to be related to. He gazed across the courtyard toward the family wing’s windows and thought he saw something moving behind one of them. The way the sun caught the windows at this time of morning, the reflections made it tough to see detail, but whatever was moving was down low—Then the moving object got closer to the window, and he could see it was Lola waving to him. I should be up there having lunch with my baby, he thought, not having to deal with this right now!
“Yeah,” Tau said, “I heard all about that. Yeah, just now.” A moment’s silence. “No, it’s okay, it’s being managed. Yeah. No, Randy called me first—he and Majella are waiting to talk to you right now, they’ve got some strategies. You just caught the boss before they could catch you. Yeah. Okay. Anything else for him?” A pause. “Okay. Bye.”
He closed the phone and handed it back to Dev. “I heard about this about thirty seconds after you walked out of the room, and it’s being handled,” Tau said. “Infrastructure is adding some stopgap manpower solutions to deal with this situation and the aftermath until we have time to solve it more thoroughly after the rollout. They’ll be briefing Frank in a bit. Right now the only thing that’s needed is a little more human oversight. After that we’ll teach the system how to prevent this kind of thing itself.”
Dev took the phone back and put it away, shaking his head. “I still can’t get why they did it.”
“Because they could?” Tau said. “And I warned you they would! Remember when I told you that you should have inserted the no-warfare stricture via code fiat? But you didn’t want me to, you hate doing that. ‘They’ll behave,’ you said to me. ‘Omnitopia City is the major cross-world commerce center, they know better than to mess with that.’ Well, no they don’t!” And Tau snickered at him.
“Okay,” Dev said after a moment. “Okay, I take your point.”
“And after this you will listen to me on stuff like this? Because frankly it’s a miracle that this took so long to happen.”
“Yeah, yeah, just shut up, Mr. Smugness,” Dev muttered. But he had to smile. Tau could be infuriating sometimes, but he had never yet failed to have Dev’s and Omnitopia’s best interests at heart. “So I take it you have newer news than Frank’s about who was at the bottom of this little fracas?”
“A troll guild from Jormundr,” Tau said. “They steamed through the Ring Plaza, did some damage, and were getting ready to steam on out the other side when the inhabitants of the City decided to get cranky about them. Didn’t seem like a good idea to stop that. After all, civic virtue is something we do try to inculcate.”
“Was this an independent operation, or were they bought?”
“We’re looking into it,” Tau said.
Dev dropped his face into his hands, rubbed his eyes. “See that,” he said. “I leave my universe untended for one day, and look what happens!”
“Ahem,” Tau said. When Dev looked up again, Tau gestured around him to the bustle that was Castle Dev, and by implication, to the hundred acres around it—thousands of people coming and going, all with one thing in mind: that universe. “Hardly untended,” Tau said.
“Oh, please,” Dev said. “Don’t soothe me. I hate being soothed.”
“This would be obvious,” Tau said. “Come on, Big D, calm down. You have to anyway. Because guess who’s on her way?”
Dev looked around him, startled. “What? Is Miri done with her dress fitting already?”
Tau rolled his eyes. “Oh, no, Boss. Much better than that. Time Magazine Lady is about to arrive.”
“No way,” Dev said. “Not right this minute! I have to get online and have a walk around before my universe gets really cranky with me and breaks something else. Put her off for me. Better still, you talk to her.”
Tau acquired an expression of sorrowful self-sacrifice. “Well. If I have to—”
“Yes, you do!” Dev said, jumping up from the bench. “I’ve got to get in there.”
“This is just superstitious behavior,” Tau said as Dev headed for the family side of the building. “You’re a techie, Dev, you should know better—”
“Oh yeah? Remember the last time I didn’t go O-side until after lunch? That was the day we had that big attempted break- in! If I don’t get in there—”
“Go on, go on,” Tau said, “I’ll stall her for you. But you owe me one.”
“More than one,” Dev said, and headed at his best speed toward the doors that led upstairs from the courtyard to the family wing. But something was niggling at him: and right in the doorway he stopped and shouted back at Tau, “Wait a minute, what the heck are you trying to pull? You’re the one she’s scheduled to be seeing now anyway!”
Tau merely grinned at him and made a bye-bye wave.
“You’re fired!” Dev shouted.
Tau checked his watch. “Twelve-fifteen,” he called back. “Possibly a record.”
Dev, muttering in amusement now, headed through the doorway and toward the elevator. A few moments later he was walking through the doors into Lola’s suite, annoyed that he had to disappoint her, and himself, by not having lunch with her. The annoyance was sharpened by the sound of her laughter coming out of the living area. But then the annoyance fell off somewhat as he saw someone in a three-piece suit sitting cross- legged on the floor with a picture book in his lap. It was Jim Margoulies.
“How the heck did you beat me up here?” Dev said, heading over to them. Lola was sitting on the opposite side of the low table, stuffing a frankfurter into her mouth—one of several that sat on the plate in front of her along with some dunking mustard—and grinning at her Uncle Jim.
Jim shrugged. “You were on the phone. I was getting
ready to come over anyway when Tau told me to step on it, as you would probably have a problem in about two minutes. Oh, thanks, Pops—”
Poppy had come in and now handed Jim an iced coffee. Lola extracted half the hot dog from her mouth, waved it at Dev, and said, “Uncle Jim is reading me about Wuggie Norple!”
Dev grinned. It was Lola’s favorite book, one which at present she never stopped insisting she wanted read to her—with the result that Dev and Mirabel now both knew it by heart. Dev was more than relieved to let Jim handle the torture for the moment—assuming he knew what he was getting into. “That’s great,” Dev said. “Jim, you sure you have time for the literary life right now?”
“Yes I do,” Jim said, “and right now you should go take care of what you have to before you start getting stressed.”
“’Start?’ ” Dev said. But he smiled at his friend and got down by Lola. “Got a hug for Daddy, Lolo?”
She stuffed the hot dog back in her face and put her arms up. Dev smooched her, participated enthusiastically in the rather mustardy hug, and said in her ear, “You know what Mommy said?”
“What?”
“If you’re a good girl, she’s gonna take you to Coldstone later.”
Lola emitted a shriek of joy that was deafening at this range, not that Dev minded. She disentangled herself from Dev and turned to Jim with utmost seriousness. “Unca Jim,” she said, “can you come to Coldstone? I’ll buy you an ice cream.”
“Hmm,” Jim said. “Well, we should consider the financial side of this carefully before we make any overt moves.”
Lolo put down her hot dog, jumped up, and vanished into her bedroom. A few moments later she emerged carrying her piggy bank, a fat pink earthenware business with a pronounced smirk, which had been a gift from Jim.
Dev gave Jim an amused look. “I’m going to leave you fiduciary wizards to sort this out among yourselves,” he said. “If you need me, I’ll be O-side.”
“I’ll catch up with you later,” Jim said.
Dev headed out past Poppy, who was standing in the doorway looking on with amusement at the energetic shaking and jingling now underway. “I’ve gotta cure her of this impulse buying,” Dev said.
Poppy chuckled. “No impulse about it, Daddy Dev,” she said. “She’s been plotting this assault on the marketplace ever since you mentioned Jim this morning.”
Dev shook his head, smiling, as he headed out. “When her mom turns up,” he said, “tell her I’m online, okay? Got some things to see to.”
“Will do, Dev.”
He left Lola’s suite and headed down to the far end of the family wing proper. Dev had offices all over the campus, in every major “village of the like-minded,” but his main one took up about a third of the north side of Castle Dev. There three floors of the north wing had been interconnected with spiral stairs and old European- style open passenger lifts. The doors at the end of the family wing opened on the third- floor executive office, the most comfort-oriented one, which was more like a giant living room than anything else, and child-proofed. Couches and comfy furniture were scattered around the big central desk, most of the walls were lined with railed bookshelves, and all the windows looked inward. The outer windows on this level were replaced by a FullWall macroplasma screen for teleconferencing and other purposes. Right now it was showing an image that was one of an endlessly changing set of webcam views—in this case, some Mediterranean city he couldn’t identify offhand. “Household management,” he said as he opened the door of the glass- enclosed niche for the paternoster lift and waited for the downward-moving step to reach floor level.
“Yes, Dev?”
“What’s that on the wallscreen right now?”
“A view of Split Harbor,” said the management computer.
“Thank you. Boot up the second floor online suite, please?”
“Booting now.”
Dev stepped onto the lift step as it came level, keeping an eye on the niche’s glass door to make doubly sure it closed and locked properly behind him, as Lola sometimes came in here with one or another of her PAs. City security, he thought as the lock snicked home. Manpower isn’t going to solve it. I wonder . . . But there were other concerns right now. Item three on that list kept coming back to haunt him, and the Conscientious Objector routines, which he was sure were somehow at the bottom of that particular malfunction. Well, we’ll see what Tau and I can brainstorm later. Meanwhile . . .
He stepped off the lift on the second floor. Here was the place where Dev got most of his daytime work done: another neutrally-furnished place like the tower meeting room, but this one featuring several huge desks—one of which was Frank’s, though Frank also had numerous offices and cubbies scattered around the campus linked together by teleconferencing and online-access facilities. Various solid filing facilities, more bookshelves, and another smaller FullWall alternated with both outside and inside windows on this level. Off in the northeast corner sat a black glass cube twenty feet on a side.
Dev headed for it, and the access cube’s sensors, checking his biometrics, cleared the glass and swung the cube door open for him. Inside was a big comfortable zero-G chair, its intuitive gel cushions and built-in counterbalance functions meant to keep a heavy online user’s body from feeling the strain of all that sitting-still time. Dev sat down, reached into the chair pocket, and pulled out the RealFeel interface. “Close up,” he said to the cubicle, “and go dark. Interior lighting on low. Frank?”
The household management computer said, “Finding him.” A moment later came the soft burr-burr of an on-campus phone ring.
“Yeah, Boss?”
“I’m in the second-story cube,” he said. “Need to have a quick look around at some things online. I should be done in an hour or so. Are we clear?”
“No problems at all, Boss,” Frank’s voice said. “Except for the one you’re gonna have with certain parties if you’re not seen to eat something pretty soon.”
Dev smiled wryly. “Tell her what happened to my lunch hour.”
“I’ll tell her,” Frank said, “but don’t think it’s gonna spare you what you’ve got coming. Just go over to the cantina when you’re done and eat a sandwich, will you?”
“Yes, Mommy! Bye-bye.”
The connection went quiet: from long analysis of his voice patterns, the household management computer knew when Dev was done with a call. He sighed, slipped on the RealFeel headset, got the eyecups in place, and looked into the darkness.
There was the usual faint flash as the headset’s hardware got into sync with his optic nerve and engineered the necessary connections. A second later Dev was sitting in his online workspace, which was a twin of the second floor office—with certain differences.
He got up out of the chair. The glass of the cubicle cleared around him, and the door opened. Dev headed out into the office, making for the central desk. What in the physical world had looked like a huge and fairly tidy expanse of ebony, featuring only some paperwork awaiting signing and some bric-a-brac surrounding a small brass cannon, was here a huge black glass slab around which hung hundreds of vertical sheets of light. Most of them were pale almost to the point of transparency, some of them brighter and more visible, a few of them opaque and glowing; in one case, the glow was throbbing brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer, like something that urgently needed to be looked at. Beyond the desks and the documents there were no walls: the view stretched straight out over the streets and rooftops of Omnitopia City. The floor was glass nearly as black as the desk, and through it, away down a couple of hundred feet or so, could faintly be seen the upper surfaces of the lintel stones of the Ring of Elich. Farther down, Dev could see the plaza around the Ring, busy with players as always. He paused to study it for a moment. If there was any vista in Omnitopia that Dev knew how to read, it was this one; and to his eye it looked a lot more agitated than usual.
Well, they’ll calm down, he thought. But meanwhile—
Dev went over to the most brightl
y throbbing document, reached out, and tweaked its lower corner. The doc expanded to a sheet a couple of feet long by a foot: it was Frank’s initial written debrief about the streaming attack on the plaza, now with a couple of attachments. One of them was a complete census of players involved in it as attackers, victims, or other participants; another was an initial analysis and list of suggestions from the infrastructure management people. Dev flicked the surface of the document a couple of times with a forefinger to make it scroll up as he looked over the suggestions. He thought about them for a moment, then scrolled back up to the top again and poked one of the names on the document’s cc list. “Randy?” he said.
A window popped open on the document. In it there appeared the webcammed image of Randy DeNovra, the chunky dark young senior manager in infrastructure management. He was sitting in front of his monitor and typing something by hand, yet another of a series of endearingly retro office habits. “Hey, Mr. Dev—”
“I’ve just been through your recommendations. Thanks for getting those in so quickly.”
“Like I wouldn’t have done it even if I’d had a choice,” Randy said, “which I did not. Majella’s been running around screaming at the top of her lungs for the last hour about being terrified of some kind of copycatting attack. And it could happen, so the sooner we have some kind of measure in place, the better.”
Dev listened. “Don’t seem to hear any screaming now.”
“Her PA made her go have a latte,” said Randy. “When she comes back, she can claim it was her blood sugar talking.”
Dev smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Just quickly: suggestion one sucks, so don’t do that. Suggestion two sounds kind of okay, but let me think about it for a while, and if I haven’t come up with something useful in the next twenty- four hours, go ahead and do what you’re planning. Suggestion three—How much manpower are you intending to spend on this particular solution?”