“Good. I don’t want the system getting bogged down in slow downloads like it did on the last expansion. It made our first-day numbers look like crap.”
“No danger of that now, sir.”
At the bottom of the staircase, the usual golf cart was parked. Phil climbed in. Link got behind the wheel, started it up, and hung first a right, then a left to drive down the vehicle-and-mail-cart access path along the south side of the building.
Phil pulled out his PDA and flipped it open for a moment, glancing at the Bloomberg page for Infinity’s stock and noticing with satisfaction that the graph for the day had edged up slightly.
Good. All we need is a nice fat hit on the numbers today to make Omnitopia’s splash look a little less splashy. Three points would do; five would be better. But we’re already in a position even just on prelaunch buzz to take the first shine off Dev’s day in the sun. And then, after those first clouds move in, the deluge.
About a third of the way down the facility’s floor, Link hung a left. In all the cubicles they passed, Phil saw interested eyes peering out at the sound of the oncoming cart’s beeper or the sight of the rotating light on its back. The looks, though interested, weren’t particularly surprised, for Phil was here at least a few times every week—sometimes just wandering up and down among the cubicles, sometimes being driven around, or driving himself—and looking in on this or that department to keep them on their toes. The company HR and psych people had repeatedly emphasized to Phil the importance of being here and being seen to be part of the team. He did it because he knew it was good business to do it, but sometimes it got on his nerves.
Whatever happened to just doing your job because you were being paid to do it? All this I’m-one-of-you stuff, they know it’s a sham,
I
know it’s a sham, why do we need to bother? They’re my employees; why should I have to bribe them to perform?
But such was the corporate culture in which Phil now found himself, and rather than incur the bad publicity that would come along with not being seen to be playing the game, he played it.
That’s what we’re all about, here, anyway, isn’t it?
he thought, resigned.
Games.
Link was slowing now. He pulled the cart over and parked. Outside the next island of cubicles on the right, a crowd of ten or twelve employees were standing, all dressed in identical violet II T-shirts emblazoned with the new
Infinite Worlds: Threefold
logo and the legend ROLLOUT FEVER—BE THE FIRST!
Phil climbed out of the cart and went to meet them. They broke into applause as he headed toward them, and Phil had to grin, even though he suspected the response of being coached rather than spontaneous.
Doesn’t matter, be sincere even if you have to fake it.
“Hey there!” he said, and made the rounds of the group, shaking everyone’s hand.
“Okay!” Phil said when that was done. “So you guys are the team leaders for the Social Networking Download Stimulus Initiative. Or SNDSI for short . . .“ His attempt to pronounce the vowel-less acronym made them all laugh. “Who makes these names up, anyway? Never mind. Whatever we’re calling it, your section managers have pulled you out of the ranks for this opportunity because they think you and your teams have got the best chatting and blogging and tweeting skills in the company. So today your job is to get out there and chat and blog and tweet up a storm about
Infinite Worlds Threefold
. And we’ve made it even easier for you by building custom chat, blog, and tweet clients for you. Now, as I understand it, you’ve all had a week or so to break those in?”
Heads nodded all around the group. “Great. All over the world, people are already excited about the hot new product we’re rolling out today, but your business today starting at six p.m., and tonight, and tomorrow until six p.m., is to get them five times as excited as they thought they were! Every time you and your teams blog about the game and someone follows the URL to the download site, every time you tweet about it and they jump to the Twitter- linked address, every time a chatter follows the link you point them to—that login and download will be credited to your account and your team’s. Then, at the end of the twenty- four hours, we’ll total up the logins and downloads. The winning team will be getting not only the place of honor at the rollout party here tomorrow night, but also an extra week of paid vacation this year.” The whole group cheered. “And an all-expenses paid vacation in Hawaii for that whole team and their families to use it on!”
The expressions of shock and delight, the shouts and the sudden outbreak of inter-employee hugging, went well beyond Phil’s expectations: for a moment he was caught off guard and lost the thread of what he’d been saying. But after a few seconds he recovered. “So what you need to do is motivate each other like crazy today and tonight and tomorrow, and remind the gaming world and the whole Internet that Infinity Inc. is the original nine hundred pound gorilla, no matter how many other hairy apes may be running around the place!”
More cheers. One of the employees, a little pigtailed lady, had actually burst into tears at the news about the vacations, and was still wiping them away while jumping up and down for joy. Looking at her, Phil started feeling more uncomfortable than ever, and couldn’t work out why.
Doesn’t matter. Time to go . . .
“Okay, people,” he said, “good luck! Go for it, and make me and your teammates proud!”
The employees all burst into applause again. Phil waved at them and headed back toward the golf cart, trying not to look like he was hurrying.
Phil climbed back into the cart’s backseat and kept waving at the employees while Link got in, started the cart up, and turned them around. Then he looked over his shoulder and kept waving at the still-cheering crowd until they turned the corner and were out of sight. Annoying as he found the need to “incentivize” his staff, it was still amazing the enthusiasm you could generate by diverting no more money than the company spent for bottled water over a couple of weeks.
Phil let out a breath. “Okay,” he said. “On to other business.” He pulled a little bottle of hand-sanitizer out of his pants pocket, squirted a bit of sanitizer gel into one palm, and gave his hands a scrub. “Is the car back yet?”
“Right outside the west doors now, Mr. Sorensen.”
“Good. I want hourly reports on how they’re doing as soon as they get started. I won’t be turning in until late, so don’t skimp on the post-midnight reports, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Now get me out of here.” Phil sighed. “I have to go be charitable.”
SIX
L
UNCH, OF COURSE, did not happen on time, for this was Dev Logan’s life, in which nothing during these three days was going to go according to plan. He hadn’t made it more than halfway across the inner courtyard before his phone went off, and this time it was one of the tailored rings he never ignored, his assistant Frank’s. “Boss—”
“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!”