He went over the next few minutes’ worth of data with great care, identifying every single action of the Microcosm’s interleaving WannaB modules as they executed independent routines or interacted with each other. When he was finished Rik couldn’t do a thing but stand there shaking his head, for he didn’t see a single interaction that hadn’t been running smoothly for all the day before that, and wasn’t behaving itself now.
He sat down on the chair the system had made and stared at the display. Well, I do not get this, he thought. Because absolutely nothing was different except that Raoul had just come in. There must have been something else going on in the system at large. There was something in that last e-mail about outages or malfunctions in the underlying levels of Microcosm control because of all the new load on the system running up to the rollout . . .
“Where’s the e-mail window?” he said. “The one from my office.”
“Right here, Rik.” It slid around from behind the display of command strings and displayed itself in front of him.
“Run down the stack,” he said. “Thanks.” The stacked mails in the window displayed themselves envelope-first, and he waved them aside as ones he didn’t want displayed themselves. “No, no, no, no, no, yes!” he said. “That one, please, open it—”
It was yet another of many daily e-mails about system issues affecting Microcosms. Rik had elected to take them on a minute-by minute basis rather than as a digest at the end of each day, at least until he was a lot surer about the way his ’cosm was behaving, or supposed to behave. Now he read through the mail and saw nothing whatsoever that had anything to do with the graphics interface troubles he was experiencing, or thought he was experiencing. Damn, Rik thought. Maybe I need to get Jean in here. I’m not all that sure what I’m looking for. . . .
Rik sighed and pushed the e-mail window aside to look once again at his time line. And once again he found himself thinking, That’s so weird. Raoul comes in, and things start to go south. . . . For there was a whole series of structural and graphics commands that started to fail in a little cascade, beginning a tenth of a second after Raoul came in, and all going down within a few hundredths of a second of each other.
So weird. . . . Could it be something to do with his software? Some plug-in or configuration that’s running on his home machine? Rik shook his head. But what the heck could have an effect like this? All the Omnitopian ’cosms, Macro or Micro, were supposed to support all the major operating systems, RPG suites, and hardware configurations. That was one of the reasons the game was so successful: it went out of the way to tailor itself to you, rather than making you go out and buy special hardware for it—unless, of course, you absolutely wanted to. The trouble is, there’s no way to tell what he—
“Excuse me?”
Rik jumped, turned, and was surprised to see Dennis standing there behind him, still in that disreputable boiler suit, still looking disheveled, but also looking abashed. “Dennis!”
“You paid me fifteen,” Dennis said, sounding truculent.
Rik blinked. “Uh, yeah. I’m sorry, is it not enough, I thought we agreed—”
“We agreed on ten,” Dennis said.
“Uh,” Rik said. “I kind of thought it was—you know, sort of a tip—”
Dennis stared over Rik’s shoulder in a vague and embarrassed way, grimaced, and then looked away. “Don’t need a tip,” he said. “It’s too much. I credited you five back. Just so you know.”
“Oh,” Rik said. Crap, he thought, I’ve hurt his feelings—“Sorry,” he said. “Dennis, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“ ’S okay,” Dennis said, and turned to go. “What time tomorrow?”
Rik had to stop and think. “Oh, God,” he said, “I’m back to work. . . . What time zone are you in?”
Dennis paused. “Eastern.”
“Uh, eight p.m., then. That be okay for you?”
“Fine,” Dennis said, turned, and vanished.
Rik sighed and turned his attention back to the log screens. After a moment he said, “Send a mail—”
“Who to, Rik?”
“Jean Mellie. Subject: Microcosm structural malfunction: possible external causes.”
“Thank you. Ready to transcribe body—”
“Great. Dear Jean, I have a question about some weird behavior in my ’cosm after a group of friends came through. If you’ll look at the attached log file . . .”
NINE
ELSEWHERE IN OMNITOPIA, a lone figure stepped out of a tangle of shadows into a wide and level landscape lit by a ubiquitous, sourceless pale blue light. In the near distance, tall slender shapes burning brighter than the pale sky reared up against it, clouds of glitter-shot gloom wreathed around their upper reaches. Dev frowned at the sight—not his usual reaction—and headed into the forest of code.
All around him, great trees of light stretched to unlikely heights, their mighty limbs and outreaching branches forming a complex ceiling as bright as a sky. The trees’ trunks were composed of folios and modules of code, stacked in rounds, each module ringed outward with new versions like the rings of a tree. Among the select group of Omnitopian employees who worked with the most basic levels of the game and its servicing programs, there were probably hundreds of ways they could choose to perceive this structure. But for Dev and Tau, this was the only one. It was Dev’s original vision, reaching right back to the times when the major programming languages started to make 3-D representations of themselves possible. When he first designed ARGOT and started writing in it, Dev had intentionally designed its command structures so that they would support this kind of vision: his magic forest, one that cast light instead of shadow, with the trees’ roots sunk in the basic ARGOT substrate, and the uppermost branches interlacing the way the various sub-sub-sub-routines interlaced in gameplay.
At the heart of the forest stood a faintly glowing shadow of the Ring of Elich, more as an orientation tool than anything else. From inside the great Ring reared up the hugest tree of all, the vast-trunked structure of Omnitopia system management, its branches reaching high out of sight into heaven, its roots tangling into the depths. But it too was presently just a shadow, faded out in favor of the rest of the forest. All around the central tree and the shadow Ring stood a hundred and twenty-one lesser but still mighty trees of code, each subtly different from the others, though up until the main branchings the trunks looked much the same. Behind about a third of these trees stood glowing wireframe shadows of each. These were shuntspaces—alternate universes, each perfectly identical to its twinned Macrocosm except for its population. The master Conscientious Objector routine caught players who tried to cheat the Omnitopian game system and shunted them into these duplicate Macrocosms, which were otherwise populated only by other cheaters, game- generated characters with a built-in bad attitude, and those Omnitopia staff who occasionally descended into these “Lesser Hells” to blow off steam by punishing the wicked.
But the shuntspaces weren’t Dev’s major concern right now. There was no sign of Tau just yet, so Dev breathed out and just stood there in the midst of it all for a few moments, turning slowly, looking at the flow of light in the trunks of the Macrocosm-trees and the lesser, more shadowy flickering in the shuntspaces. There were too few peaceful moments like this these days: too little time to hold still and appreciate what he’d achieved. Miri would say this was the price of success, he thought. Well, I don’t care. I hate the price. I just want to play.
Dev sighed. And there’s my inner three year old talking. Never mind. . . . He glanced away from the great ring of Macrocosm-trees and their shuntspaces and off to one side, toward the sapling forest in the distance—the rowdy crowd of Microcosms that had sprung up in the fertile ARGOT earth in such a short time. Since Tau hadn’t yet turned up, Dev wandered over that way. In response the virtual landscape poured itself toward him at increased speed until he was standing under the tangled eaves of that energetic young forest. The slender trunks of the sapling forest were not as
regular or as elegant as the great piles of Macrocosm code had to be. They straggled, they leaned, their upper branches had bumps and galls—places where some Leveler’s design had tried to get the WannaB version of ARGOT to do something it hadn’t really been designed to do, and sometimes had succeeded. The code got twisted out of shape, got inelegantly assembled, branches tangled rather than interlacing gracefully. But the energy of it was undeniable. There are people having fun in there, Dev thought with satisfaction. And that’s what it’s all about.
He paused by the nearest sapling, laid his hand against it. Instantly the landscape around him was drowned in darkness, and in the dark a new set of images burst across his vision: the shore of a tropically blue ocean with a huge ringed planet rising slant-ringed from the haze and clouds on the distant horizon. Out over the water he spotted a hard glint of light off something moving. Dev squinted at it and saw it was a glider: as it wheeled above that warm bright water he caught another glint of the sun on translucent wings.
He nodded appreciatively. “System management?” he said.
“Here, Dev.”
“Make me a window and show me meta, please.”
“Done.” A rectangle of air on his right opaqued and began to flow with details about the Microcosm—its designer, the extra WannaB modules that had been plugged into this space, what they were being used for. Dev discovered that this little world was surprisingly detailed, if on a very small scale: this ocean was teeming with strange and intriguing life-forms, all hung on interestingly tweaked variations of the basic WannaB non-playing character template. A lot of time spent on this, Dev thought, briefly putting his finger on one of the template names on the virtual panel. Instantly that whole stack of code displayed itself in front of him like a pile of glowing DVDs. Dev reached out to it, pulled a single module out of the stack and looked it over. Interesting. Somebody’s taken a linguistics module and stuck it into a personality heurism routine out of the game-generated character stack, so these creatures in the water can learn from each other as well as the live players. Clever way to use WannaB to mimic some of the same effects we get in the full implementation of ARGOT . . . Dev slipped the code module back into the stack and waved it away. The stack vanished as Dev looked more closely at the meta display. A twelve-year-old built this? Dev thought as he glanced down at the MicroLeveler’s bio. Her name was Della Chun, and she lived in a suburb of Akron, Ohio. Her picture, looking like a school picture, showed him a shaggy-haired girl with a broad smiling face and a clever glint in her eye.
“Well, now, Della,” Dev said. He looked up into the air. “Executive game management?”
“Here, Dev,” said the dulcet Omnitopia control voice.
“Flag this user to the attention of HR, six years from today. Message: if Della is still gaming with us after she graduates high school, have someone at HR contact her and see if she’s interested in a job. Also between now and then, flag any communications from her to Omnitopia support regarding code issues and route them to BSI.”
“Done, Dev.”
“Thanks.”
Behind him he heard something squeaking faintly. Dev turned. Sure enough, here came Tau, walking toward him along the black sand beach and looking around him admiringly.
“You’re late,” Dev said.
Tau snorted. “Doing your work,” he said, “so don’t start complaining. Especially with your on-time stats this week. What’cha got here?”
“New ’cosm,” Dev said. “Went up last week, apparently.”
Tau glanced around him. “What’s it called?”
Dev glanced at the meta information. “Caribee.”
“Looks more Hawaiian,” Tau said. “Like something over on Kona.”
“She may have lifted it from there, who knows,” Dev said. “I flagged her for the Baker Street Irregulars. She did something interesting with her ancillary life-forms.”
“Really? What?”
“Later. It’s CCG stuff.” He took his hand away from the presently invisible sapling he was still leaning on, and Caribee flickered out, replaced by the Microcosm-forest of which it was part. “Come on,” Dev said, “the Underworld awaits. Let’s go get our debugging done.”
“We hope,” said Tau.
“Now, don’t be negative.” Dev stomped on the ground.
It split, the crack widening out and spreading across the ARGOT substrate, deepening into a crevasse that dropped away from their feet into profound darkness. A stairway leading down into that darkness began manifesting itself below them, tread by tread. Together they stepped down into the dark, the light of the code-forest dwindling away above them.
As they walked downward, light began to swell around them, a greener glow. It came from what hung down from the underside of the floor they’d just broken through, which down here was a ceiling. Like some huge and bizarre chandelier, an inverted forest, itself surrounding an inverted and shadowy version of the Ring of Elich, hung down into the dark. These upside-down trees, each of the hundred and twenty-one mirroring a Macrocosm-tree above it, were more shadowy than their counterparts above, but far more complex. Their branches, from the great limbs to the tiniest twigs, led not into the Omnitopian game structure, but into the millions upon millions of client computers all over the world on which Omnitopia’s players were actually playing. A fine blue-gray mist was gathered about the thinnest twigs of the trees. This rendered the reality of fifty million living rooms and playrooms, smart terminals and servers—and soon, if things went well, a hundred million of them. Every particle of that fog, every machine or device, had a tiny seed of this master structure installed in it.
At the bottom of the first flight of steps leading down under the surface Dev and Tau had just broken through, there appeared a landing in the virtual stairway. Dev and Tau paused there, and though the landing remained level under their feet, all around them the Conscientious Objector underworld started to slowly rotate so that the inverted mirror forest now started becoming an upstanding one. Dev watched the visualization right itself, letting out a breath of concern. Building the code that ran and maintained these client seedlings had cost him, and later Tau, more labor than anything else in the building of the first generation of the new game. The seedlings had to guard the game and protect it from hacking and cheating and exploitation, which was continually on the minds of a small but nontrivial percentage of Omnitopia’s players, to a greater or lesser extent. They also had to protect all the players’ personal information from access by anything but the bookkeeping and scorekeeping routines that had a right to know where a given player was in the game, how much he’d spent or was owed, and what his game karma was from moment to moment. Each client seedling had to know how to obey the data privacy laws of a hundred and sixty- five different jurisdictions and how to save the player’s status and settings online in case the client machine failed. Each seedling also had to be able to keep itself from being damaged accidentally or on purpose, know how to repair itself when damage did happen, and how to notify the main game servers when, for whatever reason, those repairs failed. This delicate and complicated interface was both the game’s great strength and its weakest link, and there wasn’t a day Dev didn’t spend at least a few minutes worrying about it. But today, he thought, there’s a lot more reason than usual. . . .
The ceiling Dev and Tau had just stepped through was now a floor again. The landing under their feet now reoriented its stairway to lead down to it, and the two of them headed downward. As the rotation finished, something else had appeared—the structure in which the trees of the CO itself were rooted, an island surrounded by a lake of what at first glance looked like lava. But lava was rarely emerald green. Anyone who went down to the shore and gazed down into that wash of light would see not light and dark particles of molten stone, but a constantly intermingling swirl of ASCII characters, millions of lines of code fluidly interacting with one another, in the green-on-black of monitors long gone. This was the visual expression of the Conscientious O
bjector’s basic code taken as a whole—a barrier to the potentially inimical outer world, and an intelligent gateway to the inner one, constantly self-testing the traffic that flowed between the two on millions of ephemeral bridges from moment to moment.
Dev and Tau stood there for a few moments on the Omnitopian shore, their backs to the trees and the shadow Ring, watching the ebb and flow of light in the lake. Both of them had been down here so often in the course of any normal work week, over several years, that often a few minutes’ viewing of the CO routines in this graphic mode was all it would take one or the other to identify where a problem might be coming from: an eddy in the waters, a dark swirl of shadow in the body of code as routines interfered with one another or an attack or intrusion snagged or blocked the flow. But now Tau looked over at Dev. “You see anything?”
“Nothing,” Dev said. He sighed and reached into the air beside him, pulling out of it a long glowing object. It was a cartoon sword, thick-outlined and filled in with flat animation cel colors, though it glowed at the edges with a 2- D Gaussian glow, like a streetlight seen through fog.
The Sword of Truth had started life as a macro, a programming analysis and management routine that Dev and Tau had jointly devised back when Dev first started letting Tau help him with the CO. Dev had laid down its core routines, and Tau had multiply folded them onto themselves and welded them together, a many-leveled sheaf of self-executing instructions like the layers of iron and steel in a katana’s blade. Then together they had taken turns honing its diagnostic edge to a razorlike sharpness until it was now almost alive in terms of its ability to detect what was wrong with a segment of Omnitopian programming.
Tau put up his eyebrows. “Thought you’d want to get down and splash around in the lava at random for a while first,” he said.