On cue, the miserable thing rang again. The ring wasn’t a personalized one, so Dev ignored it and pedaled on around the drive that led to the formal front entrance of Castle Dev, a wider and more overstated version of the back gate he’d left by in the morning. He rode his bike over the bridge, hopped off in front of the gate’s archway, and walked it through, over to the long, canopied bike rack off to his right. As usual, there was an empty spot at the far end: he shoved the bike into it, pushed the kickstand down, and headed for the foot of the office tower.
It was actually one of seven towers—the six lesser ones were only a story and a half higher than the corners of the building. The general effect of Castle Dev was as if someone in Renaissance Spain had seen a French chateau and decided to restate it hexagonally in golden stone, cream or ruddy plaster, and red tile. The central courtyard with its fountain and the arched, arcaded cloister spaces around it suggested that the architect had been suckered in by Moorish influences as well. Flowery vines and rosebushes clambered up the interior walls, softening the impact of the windows that overlooked the courtyard; the fountain, in full flow now that the workday was well under way, sprayed glitter high into the air. Across from the fountain and butted up against the opposite wall of the compound, the main office tower—a reworking of the castle keep concept—reached up six stories to the circular course of polarized glass that made it look as if the pointed tiled cap of the tower was floating unsupported in the air. Up there Dev could just catch sight of a few figures moving in the meeting room space. One silhouette came over to stand at the window, gazing down into the courtyard, then raised a hand.
Dev grinned and headed in through the archway at the tower’s foot. The security guy in his small outdoor-duty cubicle nodded to Dev and buzzed him through.
Dev turned left through the door and got into the glass elevator, ascending through the lower rooms—his main in- house office, the game room above it, the media support level for the rooms above and below—and then, finally, the conference room with its charcoal carpet, three hundred sixty degree view, round ironwood table with its eight chairs, and—most important—the people who went with the chairs.
Typically, none of the people were
in
any of the chairs. Natasha Bielefeld, tall, elegant in yet another of her beautifully tailored skirt suits, her precision cornrows half hidden under a Hermès scarf, was standing over by the freeway side of the window, laughing one of her patented slow deep laughs at something Tau Vitoria had just said. But this was their normal configuration. Though it had been a good while since Natasha handed over her old duties as chief server engineer to Tau and became Dev’s vice president of operations, Tash was still a hardware geek under the skin. Whenever they were in the same space with Dev, she and Tau always wound up telling each other hardware horror stories whenever they weren’t speaking exclusively in ARGOT. Tau looked like his normal self: splashy shirt, tidy jeans, extremely expensive shoes, and those chiseled dark southern Slavic good looks, moderated by a touch of designer stubble and a tendency to sudden goofy expressions that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a cartoon character.
Tash and Tau were at twelve o’clock in the room. At about ten thirty, little Doris te Nawhara, in slacks and T-shirt—the inevitable reaction to the lawyer clothes in which she spent most of her away time as Omnitopia’s chief counsel and head of legal affairs—was waving her arms in apparent exasperation as she told Alicia Chang, Dev’s lead concept artist, and young Ron Ruis, his blond, thin, and slightly hyperactive chief environmental artist, what was almost certainly yet another outrageous dumb-litigant story (of which Doris seemed to have thousands). At nine o’clock, drinking coffee and looking idly down from the window at something going on near the back gate, was tall thin Cleolinda Nash, Dev’s head of client engineering, who was responsible for the general look and feel of Omnitopia as a whole. She was wearing dark jeans, soft suede boots, a faded navy blue first-generation Omnitopia hoodie and a weary look. And opposite her, at approximately three o’clock, was the figure who had seen Dev coming: Jim Margoulies. Dev glanced at Jim now and found it strange, as he sometimes had at other such meetings, that they were both standing in this extremely grown-up and luxurious place full of fancy machinery, both overt and hidden, and that they were
not
six, or twelve, and wouldn’t get chased out if they were caught here. It was routinely a shock to look at his lifelong best friend and realize that somehow he was now as tall as Dev—bizarre, as he had been shorter until almost college—and was wearing a suit, and bifocals, and even going stylishly gray at the temples.
When did we grow up? It’s so strange. But aren’t we lucky? We can still play . . .
The sound of the elevator doors brought everybody else’s attention around. “Hey, guys!” Dev said and went around to exchange hugs and greetings with Alicia and Cleo and Doris, who he hadn’t seen in the flesh for some days, or in Doris’ case, nearly two weeks.
“Busy time, Dev,” Doris said, looking him over carefully. “And going to get busier. You all right? You look thinner.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve dropped a few,” Dev said.
“I have a message for you from Mirabel,” Jim said, bringing Dev a cup of coffee. “She just texted me. It said, ‘Tell him to beware the sandwich of doom.’ This mean anything to you?”
“That my life’s in danger again,” Dev said, taking a slurp of the coffee. “Or still. In other news, your favorite ‘niece’ is demanding an audience with you.”
Cleolinda chuckled. “The consummate financier,” she said. “Always following the money . . .”
Jim looked shocked. “I thought it was my heart of gold and boyish good looks!”
General jeering and snickering ensued. “Actually,” Dev said, “it was the dollhouse you gave her last Christmas. And the way you got your head stuck in it while you were working on the upstairs bathroom.”
Jim gave Dev a look. “I seem to remember you standing there while I was stuck and doing nothing about it, too,” he said. “That was a laugh riot. Remind me to punch you in the head.”
“That approach never got you far when we were ten,” Dev said. “But I’ll schedule it if you insist. Have Pammie call Frank.”
More snickering. Dev sat down in his usual spot at the table, on the freeway side of the room. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get ourselves sorted out. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
The group sat down, pulled out paperwork, opened laptops, reached for notepads. One of Dev’s various office laptops, all of them identical and tasked to keep themselves so, was waiting for him at his place. He popped the lid and waited for the machine to come out of sleep mode while glancing around at the friends who’d followed him from the collapse of the company he’d originally formed with Phil Sorenson seven years ago. From the ashes of that nasty and uncomfortable breakup, they’d helped Dev put together the new start-up that launched Omnitopia’s immediate predecessor. It had been a shaky start. But from a very small group with limited money but big dreams, they had since grown into a power to be reckoned with,first in the gaming world, then in the corporate landscape. It was always heartening to Dev that, so far at least, his core group’s tightly interlocking friendships had been sufficient to keep them all both close and effective in the face of ever- increasing challenges. It was a shame, though, that the necessities of running a worldwide business made these physical conclaves so much less frequent than they used to be. Dev and the Seven were never out of touch, but with all of them jetting all over the planet to keep an eye on things, there was little chance for everyone to get together in the same place except at quarterly corporate assessment and planning meetings—and occasionally at times like this when there was a major change coming in the game, or some kind of crisis.
Yet here they all are, chatting away as if they’d last been around this table just yesterday.
He turned his attention back to his laptop, tapping at it until the magazine-length document that passed for his to-do list came up. “Okay,” Dev said. “Let’s deal with the reality-based world first. Who’s got the most important thing?”
“Besides your sandwich?” Jim said.
Dev rolled his eyes. “Besides that.”
“Well,” Natasha said. “How about the massive online attack scheduled for between twenty-four and forty-eight hours from now that’s intended to crash the game, destroy our credibility worldwide, and steal a hundred million dollars of our money?”
Dev gave Tash a resigned look. If she wasn’t a drama queen
per se
, she was at least high up in the line of succession. “Yeah,” he said, “let’s talk a little about that. Anything new since your note the other morning?”
Natasha leaned on one elbow, picking at the keyboard of her laptop with one hand, and shook her head. “All of you networked in? Here’s what we’ve got.” She looked around at the others. “Briefly: in-game security has been working this problem for most of a month now. Around the time we announced the hard launch dates for the rollout of the new expansion, the chatter level about Omnitopia on the major phreaker and hacker sites worldwide started going up. Lots of the—for lack of a better word, let’s call them people—on those sites started suggesting to each other that the period when we would be migrating the game software and ancillary routines to the new servers would be a great time to attack us, if they could just figure out exactly when the move was going to happen.”
Tash looked up from her laptop, scowling. “Those interested in attempting this kind of attack would know that the migration needs to be complete by at least a day or two before the hard launch. There’s no way any company in our situation would try to deploy a new version and sign up possibly millions of new users without actually having the new servers up and running. The hard copies of the games go on sale in the stores at midnight oh one on the twenty- first. That’s been public knowledge for months. What everybody around this table now knows, and what the naughty people out in the hacking community don’t know, is that most of the migration has already happened and that its most crucial phase is scheduled to begin tonight at nineteen fourteen local time, or oh three fourteen Zulu. That being the latest some of us could get it moved to.” She gave Tau a look.
“And the soonest I can guarantee it’ll go off without a hitch,” Tau said. “Which is something of an issue.”
Tash dropped her gaze to her laptop again in a way that somehow managed to imply that such a delay was something that never would have happened on
her
watch. “Testing will occupy another twenty-four hours,” she said. “The mythical ‘switch’ will actually be thrown about twenty hours before the ceremony, which is at eight p.m. local on the twenty-first.”
“And that’s when we’re expecting the trouble?” Jim said.
Tash shook her head. “It would be nice if we could be so sure. But there are two things these people want, as far as we can tell. They want our money, and as much of it as they can get. But even more than that, being hackers, they want to make us look stupid. That means they have to hit us as close to throw-the-switch as possible, so as to be able to break their exploit to the news media at the same time we’re doing our main publicity blitz, thus maximizing the appearance of their cleverness and our stupidity. However, they also want to execute the actual exploit, whatever it may be, sufficiently early so that they’ll have time to successfully go into hiding and not get caught with what they’ve stolen. That works slightly in our favor. It gives us time to either catch them in the act, or to undo whatever damage they’ve done before the ‘switch’ is officially thrown.”
“So,” Alicia said, “the vulnerable time starts . . .” She checked her watch. “Any minute now.”
Tash nodded.
“What kind of attack are we looking for?” Ron asked.
“Something intended to compromise one of the main game structures,” Tau said. “Early indications suggest that it won’t be anything crude, like a distributed denial-of-service attack. Or not
merely
a DDOS. The focus of the main attack is most likely to be player management, but that’ll probably just be a blind for an attack on the financial structures.”
Doris te Nawhara shook her head. “Why bother with player management?”
“Massive identity theft?” said Alicia.
“That’s what I’ve been worrying about,” Dev said. “Even if they fail at the money theft, it would still be incredibly damaging to us as a company if they made off with the credit card data and banking and personal profile info we hold for millions of players. The subsequent lawsuits would destroy the company in a matter of months.” Dev let out a long unhappy breath. “Fortunately, one of the main purposes of the Conscientious Objector real-time proxy implants in our users’ machines is to prevent that kind of data theft. And I take it—” he looked over at Tau “—that the CO routines are functioning normally.”
“They were the very first part of the old game substructure to be migrated into the new servers,” said Tau. “They’re operating exactly as they should. But you should know that as well as I do.”
“Well, yeah, I should,” Dev said, “but I haven’t looked at them yet today.”
Everybody around the table glanced at each other. “You haven’t been online today?” Alicia said incredulously. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” Dev said. “It’s just been busy. Anyway. We need to continue to keep the data about the expected attack exactly where it’s been—under wraps, confined to the most senior people in the departments involved, and only those people and departments. There are entirely too many ways for this to leak out into the public domain.”
“Any of which,” Jim said, “could damage our share price badly.”
“We’ll get back to that,” Dev said. “Now, the news
will
leak, of course. Sooner or later that’s more or less inevitable. But the longer it takes, the happier I’ll be. Meanwhile, we’re not just going to sit around and wait for this to happen. We have a fair number of options open at our end. Tau?”