And suddenly she was sitting by herself in the conference suite again, and Jim Margoulies, dark-eyed, dark-browed, dark-expressioned, was standing there at the other end of the table where Dev had been sitting and now was not.
“Let’s go somewhere and talk,” he said.
On the White Cliffs of Dover in Gloriana, Dev was talking to the Little Bird again. It was speaking to him in Tau’s voice. “It’s bad, Big D. Worse than we thought.”
“How much worse?”
“Much much worse. An order of magnitude. We’ve got not one wave of attacks coming in, but two. The second one’s a new one. Standard distributed-denial-of-service attack, designed to block up everything both incoming and outgoing. The DDOS is even interfering with some of the wave of attacks that we were expecting.”
Dev swallowed hard. “So the two attacks aren’t coordinated, then.”
“Nope. Or rather, the timings are suspicious—the second set of guys seem to have known when the next attacks from the first set were coming through—but the methodologies are different, and the new guys don’t seem to be trying to avoid messing with the older ones.”
Dev passed a hand over his face, stared at the sweat on it. “What can we do?”
“Fight it. On the fly, like I said this morning: with live attacks, homebrewed to order. They’ve got numbers and greed, but we’ve got creativity and commitment. Today we’ll see which one wins. Get on down here: we need our Napoleon now.”
From somewhere behind Tau, Dev could hear shouts in the system coordination room in Castle Dev. “The system is going down—”
“Protect the core!”
“We’re trying—”
Oh, my God, Dev thought. Meltdown. The thing we thought couldn’t really happen: it’s happening. “I’ll be right down,” he said. “Where do they want me?”
“Better get down to the CO. It’s what needs support, and I’m busy here. That means you.”
“On my way,” Dev said.
A moment later the hard short turf atop the White Cliffs of another Dover was slowly springing up again where Dev had stood.
TWELVE
DEV KNEW THAT in hundreds of office spaces and cubbies around Omnitopia’s campuses worldwide, the reality of the situation involved people reading scrolling code and feverishly analyzing it, then hastily devising countermeasures against the invasive protocols and attacks that were assailing his servers’ boundaries—trying to strangle their contact with the outer world and Omnitopia’s millions of players while insinuating their way into the deepest regulatory and accounting structures of the game. But again the imageries his people were using to help them do that work, the myriad of personal shorthands they’d fabricated to deal with hackers and intruders before, were gathered at the boundaries of Omnitopia to meet the foe.
He had seen the echoes of those imageries reflected in the Gloriana Macrocosm, the dark wind rolling up from the south, laden with ships intent on a realm’s destruction. But here and now, all around the edges of the virtual island, they were no mere echoes and were once again a crowd of personal realities met on a common ground, fighting to at least hold that ground and at best to repulse the common enemy—
But it wasn’t happening. Though fighting their furious best in a thousand shapes, human and inhuman, real and fantastic, the mass of the Omnitopian defense was being pushed back and away from the lava moat that for the purposes of this battle defined the boundary between the home servers and the outer world. And this time, though there were at least twice as many defenders, the attacking forces seemed overwhelmingly greater: four times more than last time, five times, seven.
Dev scanned the vast crowd desperately, looking for a familiar shape or personal seeming. In the midst of it all, down by the shoreline and rallying the defenders, he caught sight of a gleam of light off something moving: a banner with the Omnitopian alpha and omega interlaced. The shuntspacers! he thought, and started pushing his way toward them.
Normally the simple desire to be among them would have made it so for Omnitopia’s First Player. But the system wasn’t responding normally. He had to push and shove his way through the press of warriors in a hundred shapes, human and beast, alien and man and woman and Elf and Gnarth, until he came out among the Princes of Hell and their system security allies under the blue banner. It was torn and stained with the struggle; the young programmer in the form of a griffin who clutched its pole in one massive claw was battered and wounded. When she reared up, beating her wings in the faces of the dark shapes and fanged maws tearing and slashing at the foremost warriors in the battle line, Dev could see the feathers missing from her pinions, the pointed bird tongue panting out of the huge beak as she gasped for air.
It was young Darlene whom he’d met in the Palace of the Princes of Hell. Dev got a glimpse of her dark eyes in the griffin’s as it turned its head toward him. “Bad timing, Boss!” Darlene shouted at Dev as some of the other Princes stormed past him. “Better get back in the rear, we don’t need you getting compromised right this minute—!”
“I’ll be gone as soon as we’re done,” he said. “How’s the ambush going?”
“Not good!” shouted Giorgio from just behind her. He was wearing the bulky, knobby shape of a gangly fifteen- foot giant in a San Diego Padres uniform, swinging a massive aluminum Louisville Slugger studded with nails. “They took the bait, all right, punched in hard where we wanted them to—and then a lot harder than we wanted them to. A much more massive attack, Boss! Not coordinated, just waves and waves. Every time we plug a few hundred Net accesses that we don’t want them trying to use, another few hundred open up. They’re not just after the money this time. They’re trying to hammer the whole server structure flat. Not just take it down, but also to get inside and destroy the code, kill the game structures from inside—”
“Have we dumped the players out?” Dev shouted.
“Started doing that about twenty minutes ago,” Giorgio shouted back as he swung again. In the wake of the blow, a crowd of Orcish attackers sailed out over the front line, heading for some hypothetical outfield fence. “Can’t do it all at once—takes a while. We got the European servers closed down first, since they were getting hit hardest. North America’s next. Tau’s overseeing the shutdown; he’s got his server support people pulling all the servers he can offline before they crash. They’ll do it by powerdown if they have to.”
Dev moaned, rubbed his face. There were too many things that could go wrong with what Tau was doing, especially if the attacking forces had left worms running inside the servers. Offline they might be, in terms of communication with the outer world, but that wouldn’t stop the process of the destruction of their code. And powerdowns, unless they were done in the right way, could be just as destructive. Still, the point is to protect the players—“Okay,” Dev said. “I’m heading down to the CO. Hold the fort here!”
“We could really use a fort right now,” Darlene shouted. “But we’ll make do. Be careful, Boss!”
“You too! System management—”
That long pause again, vastly unsettling, while around him the tumult and furor of the battlefield went on. From somewhere nearby came a yell: “Here comes the big wave, this is it, brace up and don’t let ’em through!”
“Here—Dev—”
“Give me access to the CO routines!”
It seemed to take forever for the stairway down into the deeper levels to manifest itself. All around him the fight went on, his own troops pushing away all around him as Dev hurried down the stairway into the darkness. “Keep the battlefield view!” he shouted to the system management program. “And have Cora meet me when I’m in!”
The stairway down to the Conscientious Objector level seemed unusually long. Above Dev the roar of the battlefield faded a little, then started to reassert itself as slowly a duplicate of the “upstairs” view faded in at the horizons of the CO space. At the heart of this level, the great circle of virtual code trees still stood, but its light was fl
ickering, and patches of the great trees’ structures were fading in and out, or missing entirely.
Dev got down to ground level, paused, and looked around him. He was alone on the island in the midst of the sea of code, which lay strangely flat and stagnant all around. “Cora?” he shouted. His voice fell into the silence, and no answer came back. “Cora!”
Nothing. And slowly Dev became aware of an ache in his eyes, and an odd queasiness completely distinct from the stomach flip- flops he’d been feeling for what now seemed like years. It’s the RealFeel system, he thought in horror. It’s starting to malfunction. And why wouldn’t it, considering what else is going on? Which brought up the question of what would happen if Omnitopia players were caught inside when the system went down. There were all these it’ll-never-happen discussions about the RealFeel interface, Dev thought, the sweat breaking out all over him, about what could happen to someone who’s using it if the system fails catastrophically. He looked around desperately for Cora, but there was still no sign of her. Oh, please don’t let the CO routines go down now, that’s the last thing we need! “System management!” Dev shouted.
A long pause: too long a pause. “Here—D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-de-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-v-v-v-v-v-v…”
The sound of the scratched-CD stutter ran cold down his spine. No, oh, no no no, if basic management goes down we are really screwed—“This is Dev! Senior management override! Shut down all user RealFeel accesses right now!”
“D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d—”
The digital stammer seemed to go on forever. There was no way to tell whether the command had been properly carried out or not. All around him, the view of the virtual battlefield was stuttering too, vanishing in big sporadic dark blocks like a bad satellite TV signal, jumping, freezing, vanishing into black blocks or null- input background blue. We’re losing it, we’re going to lose everything—
All around Dev the motion of the battle jittered to a halt, started again, froze; and it froze sporadically, starting up again in other parts of the panorama, degrading to hugely pixilated views in yet others. Gradually the blocks of darkness covered more and more of the world around Dev, so that he seemed to be looking through an openwork brick wall in which more and more bricks were being plugged into place, shutting everything away, walling him up. The roar of the battlefield grew more and more distant, the view more and more minimal. Only a few bricks’ worth of life and movement remained, little windows in a rapidly extending vista of solid black. Through those last few openings the sound faded to silence . . . and then they too started to wink out, and a few breaths later the last rectangle of view closed down and left him—
—in darkness.
Dev stood there, just stood very still, trying to figure out where he was now and what was happening. The RealFeel technology was fairly new and hadn’t rolled out too widely yet—the vast majority of Omnitopia users worldwide were still using the classic screen-and-keyboard or screen-and-joystick interfaces. So most people will be seeing nothing but our standard timeout screen on their own computers’ client programs, Dev thought. But those who, like Dev, were still using RealFeel—assuming that his shutdown order might have failed, likely enough since everything was going so wrong—would now be stuck in the middle of this. Thousands of users, maybe, stuck in—is it full sensory deprivation? Oh, God— The prospect of hundreds of thousands of lawsuits rose up of Dev’s mind, and the sweat went colder all over him, if that was possible. But the thought of unsuspecting players, some of them children, suddenly finding themselves here during what should have been a safe gaming experience, was far worse. Kids shouldn’t be using RealFeel, but they will be, you know that—
Dev closed his eyes and took a breath, trying to get some control over himself: then opened his eyes again. This made not the slightest difference to what he could see. He pulled his hands in, tried to feel his own body, and was overjoyed to find his chest was still where he’d felt it last. Dev clasped his hands together, resisting the urge to wring them in distress. It’s the game version of me I’m feeling, he thought, not the sitting-in-a-booth version. So the system hasn’t crashed completely . . . yet.
He turned slowly, looking for any glimpse or flicker of light. Nothing. “Okay,” he said softly into the darkness. The sound of his voice was completely echoless. “System management?”
Nothing.
Dev took a cautious step forward, feeling for it with his foot. In a way it was silly. He wasn’t anywhere physical, and there was no way he could fall and hurt himself. But the old human reactions to darkness and the fear of falling were no less powerful in a situation like this—and the system was, after all, malfunctioning.
“System management!” Dev said again.
Silence. But this time, from behind him, a sudden brief flash, like a dim camera flash going off.
He spun. It was gone.
“What was that?” he whispered.
Silence. Darkness. More loudly, Dev said, “System management!” This time he saw the flash face-on. It was distant; a rectangle of light, seemingly out at the edge of things, though without more detail of the object he thought he’d seen, it was impossible to tell how near or far. It was like a digital photo, frozen, grainy, impossible to make out at this distance.
“Enlarge that!” Dev said.
It vanished then appeared again, not so much enlarged, but just seeming closer, as if it were a poster that someone had moved. A small figure, a blurry background, gray, black, white. But there was something familiar about it . . .
“Enlarge again!” Dev said.
Once again the image vanished, then reappeared, again seemingly closer. A child. A little girl in a sundress. One arm stretched up and out of frame, perhaps holding someone’s hand, the other waving something bulky around . . .
What is that? Dev squinted at it. “Enlarge again!” he said, and the image flickered out again just as he realized what it was. A stuffed toy, a floppy bunny-shape he knew very well, because he was constantly having to put it through the living suite’s washer due to contact with one sticky food or another.
The floppy toy was unquestionably the indefatigable Mister Dobbles, his whiskers and right ear stitched on again after their last traumatic removal (they were always getting stepped on or caught in doors). And the child’s face was also clearly visible. Dev’s breath caught. It was Lola.
“What the—” Dev whispered.
He started walking toward the image to get a better look at it. Where did this come from? he thought. As Dev got closer, he could just barely see the Omnitopia alpha and omega sigil down in the bottom left corner, and in the bottom right, the grainy detail of a security cam date and time stamp. “Enlarge again!” Dev said.
The picture flickered out, came back larger. But this time, as he kept heading toward it, Dev caught a glimpse of some other light source off to his right. Another image had appeared, again black and white, grainy: another security cam image. Lola over in the Omnitopia preschool playroom with a crowd of other children, all of them moving from one little desk to another as part of some group activity.
Another sudden light shone from behind him. Dev turned again. A third image, this time of Lola and Mirabel, walking together down an Omnitopia campus path. But the focus of the image was on Lola—
And now the images were appearing faster and faster, all around him, until the horizons right up to the zenith were nearly completely tiled with them, and they started overlapping each other in digital collage. Lola in the preschool playground, Lola in the schoolroom, Lola in bed, Lola playing with her Uncle Jim and carefully counting pennies and dimes out of her piggy bank . . .
How am I seeing this? Why am I seeing this? Some malfunction? Everything’s going wrong in the system right now, why not? But then again, what kind of malfunction would show him nothing but pictures of his daughter?
And Dev’s mouth went dry as dust. Were these images the contents of some file folder that had been hidden until now, only revealed by the massive system crashes that
were going on around him? What is this, Dev wondered, actually starting to shiver. Evidence of some kind of employee stalker? Or some kind of threat against her? Was someone saying, “I know where your kid is, every minute of every day?”
He started to go hot with fury. No one on the outside had access to Omnitopia’s interior security video, especially the parts of it that involved the living quarters. That was something Dev had made absolutely sure of from the start. This meant these images would have to be part of some inside job. But the thought horrified him, for the personnel allowed access to such information were rigorously investigated, and the rest of the security surrounding his own surveillance systems was as tight as what he’d set up around—
—the Conscientious Objector routines—
Dev tried to swallow and found he couldn’t, faced with the thought that his presumptions about Omnitopia campus security plainly weren’t all that sound. And now here was evidence that someone with access to in-house surveillance video had a very unhealthy interest in his baby. Dev’s first urge was to wake up his in-system phone and start screaming at the Omnitopia security people to send a crowd of goons straight over to the crèche and have them make a living wall around Lola—
If I even can. If the phone’s even working. And now how can I be sure I can trust them? If one of them’s behind this—