“Boss!” Giorgio said. “
This
is a big party. But we’ll come to yours.”
Dev smiled, waved at them, and stepped through the door.
Back in his virtual office, he stood silent for a moment, looking down through the darkly transparent floor at the Ring of Elich and thinking over what the Princes of Hell had told him. “Management?” he said then.
“Here, Dev.”
“Give me access to the CO routines.”
“What mode?”
“The same as last night.”
The view through the floor changed, showing him the rings of glowing trees as seen from thirty or forty feet above the base level and the floor opened, the stairway building itself again downward beneath him. Dev headed down the stairs.
Once down on the island that held the circle of a hundred and twenty-one trees, Dev paused on the shore, looking down into the roil of green light representing the CO routines. He reached into the air, pulled out the Sword of Truth, and stood there for a moment, considering the lines of code tangling and rolling liquidly at his feet.
Then he shook his head. “System management?”
“Here, Dev.”
“Is Tau viewing the CO routines at the moment?”
“No, Dev. Tau is in the Castle in consulting suite five, in conference with Cleolinda.”
“All right.” Still, he was feeling a little paranoid this morning, so—“Are any other Omnitopia personnel viewing the CO’s outrider programs?”
“The shuntspace staff on duty have a window open, but none are observing.”
“Good,” Dev said. “Alert me if either they or Tau begin observations.”
“I will, Dev.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Paradigm shift, please. Personal CO idiom—”
“As requested,” said the control voice.
The light changed, the landscape shifted. Suddenly the island looked like a real island—rushes and cattails down at the water’s edge, verdant sward underfoot: a clear sky above, with a big moon hanging low and silver in it. The forest of code behind him now looked like a real forest, the massive rough-barked trunks rearing up behind him, stretching out vast branches, every leaf of the overshadowing canopy edged with the silver of moonlight. In front of him, the liquid shift of the CO routines was now expressing itself as water, rippling pewter and silver under the moon, stretching away to the horizon in all directions.
Dev went down to the water’s edge and just stood there for a second, listening to the wind. Then he reared back and threw the Sword of Truth upward and out over the water.
It spun in the moonlight, fell toward the surface, but never had a chance to strike. White in the silvery light, a slender arm thrust up from the water and caught the sword by the hilt. For a moment the arm simply held it so: then water rippled as what held the sword started to move closer to the shore. More of the arm showed, and white silk fell back from it, shimmering in the pallid light as the shape to which the arm belonged made her way up toward the shore with the Sword of Truth in her hand.
She looked like Mirabel, but a different version of her: as fair as Mirabel, but instead of his wife’s blonde good looks, the woman had long straight hair dark as night and a glance nearly as dark. Over the trim little body was thrown a much longer version of the white silk bathrobe, with a white silk shift underneath it.
“Cora,” he said.
“Good morning, Dev,” said the Conscientious Objector.
“Take a walk with me?”
“Certainly.”
They walked toward the outermost ring of Macrocosm trees together, and for a good while in silence, while Dev decided how to proceed. This mode of debugging was one he had never used when anyone else was around; as far as he knew, not even Tau knew about it. But its roots went back a long way. In that distant past when he and Jim Margoulies were still running networked computer games with actual cables connecting their machines, Dev had added a voice to the help function in his first rough edition of Otherworlds. Jim had teased him unmercifully for days—first along the theme of “You want it to come alive and talk to you!” and then, much more painfully—especially because it was a female voice Dev had chosen—“You’re trying to build yourself a girlfriend!” Nor had Jim cared in the slightest about all the research that said female voices were easier to listen to than male ones and cut through the game noise better. He just laughed every time he heard the voice speaking. Dev, who then had had no girlfriend, hurriedly removed the voice from his machine.
But later, when Mirabel had come into his life and he was working on the new version of the game, Dev got a sudden stubborn impulse and stuck the voice back in. When
Otherworlds
debuted as a game that more people than just the two of them could play, though Jim had mocked him for it, the control voice had turned out to be one of its most popular features. It had something to do with the flexibility of the response routines that Dev had designed for it, and also with the actress Dev had hired—a woman who had done a lot of voice work for cartoons and who managed to sound engaged and comforting without ever getting gooey: neutral enough not to be your girlfriend, but not like your mom, either.
Jim’s mockery didn’t stop overnight. “I just like talking to my game,” Dev kept saying. But “You just like talking to yourself!” was Jim’s constant reply, until over time other subjects became much more important, and this one dropped off his grid. But it never fell off Dev’s, and when he got the idea a year or so ago of installing an experimental set of ARGOT modules at the edge of the CO for his own use, he somehow never got around to mentioning it to either Jim or Tau. His intention had been to build a comfortable way to interact directly with the CO’s so-called Rational Algorithm—the heuristic self-analysis modes that were the most important part of the Conscientious Objector, the key to having it run itself.
Since the original installation, Dev had been hacking at the self-expression part of the routine in a casual way every now and then. But there hadn’t been time to indulge such elective tweaking since the new hyperburst memory arrived two months ago. From then until now, just about all the time Dev normally set aside to deal with code issues had been given over to helping make sure the vast new memory heaps were working correctly. Now, though, he looked at the Lady of the Lake walking silent and serene beside him, and felt vaguely guilty for not having come to see her sooner.
The Pathetic Fallacy, of course,
he thought.
It’s just a program. A very smart, very slick program.
But still, it’s
my
program. I should take better care of it. Visit it more often . . .
They passed into the first shadows of the moonlight, where the tallest branches of the outermost trees in the circle blocked the moon away; the dark hair of the woman walking beside him became a shadow, the eyes unreadable. “So how are things?” Dev said.
“Very busy right now,” said Cora, with a sidelong look at him. “As you know.”
Dev nodded, walking quietly under the shadow of the branches with “her”—saying nothing, waiting to see what she would say.
“It’s a surprise to see you here twice in two days,” Cora said. “Doubtless a report is required?”
“Well, yes,” Dev said. “Just what’s the matter with you lately?”
“You’re referring to the recent series of minor system malfunctions?” Cora said. “They have to do with the installation of the new memory and the relocation of the old memory functions into it.”
Dev rolled his eyes. “We’d kind of figured that out. I was hoping you might cast a little more light on the subject.”
“That’s not possible just yet,” Cora said.
Dev paused inside the first ring of trees as they came out into the moonlight again. “Just yet?”
Cora stopped still as well, looking up into the faint indigo radiance of the sky. There was something unnatural about her stillness: she breathed normally enough as she stood there, but there was no sense of her being at rest . . . unless it was the rest of a statue, a waxwork.
Something else to work on
, Dev thought.
More natural body language. Though it was the spoken language I’ve been working on . . .
“The rollout isn’t one hundred percent complete yet,” Cora said. “Only eighty-two of the hundred new memory heaps have been brought online. Everyone had to drop everything last night when the attack started, including the transfer staff: they had to lock down the migration process and isolate the noncertified memory to make sure it couldn’t be contaminated by the attacking programs. In any case, it won’t be possible to do a full internal analysis until all the heaps are up and running. There is, besides, the considerable likelihood that because the interleave between the CO routines and the rest of the Omnitopia gaming environment was designed to work with a hundred percent of the memory heaps enabled, the problems are secondary to the gradual nature of the rollout.” Cora turned her face toward Dev, and again there was that strange sense of nonspontaneity about it that made it impossible to say “she looked at him.” “Once the remaining memory is certified, activated, and interleaved with the rest of the system, full analysis can go forward. But there may be no need for that. Once all the memory’s in place, the problems may be resolved.”
Boy,
Dev thought,
I really did a great job with the new articulation routine.
The Omnitopia voice management systems had had to be completely rewritten for the rollout, and Dev had recalled the control voice actress (now a venerable lady of seventy) to do a top-to-bottom phoneme retraining that enabled the system to generate vocabulary seamlessly on the fly, whether it had been trained in a specific word or not. Plainly the routine was working. “So what’s the estimate for getting the remaining memory online?” Dev said and started walking again.
Smoothly Cora started walking alongside him, pacing Dev as he made his way into the shadows of the inner ring of trees. “The transfer staff are working on the ninety-second heap right now,” she said. “At the rate they’re going, it should take another four to five hours. Noon, perhaps. Do you need a closer estimate?”
“No,” Dev said, “that’ll do fine.”
“Is there anything else you need to know about?” Cora said.
Dev sighed. “How are
you
holding up?”
“The question would make more sense if the system of which you were inquiring was capable of some sort of personal reaction,” Cora said.
Dev smiled slightly as they passed between two of the gigantic trees, looking up at the faint shift of light and shadow high up in the canopy. “Granted.”
“Which Omnitopian myth says will not happen until the day the First Player begins to play in earnest, drawing the internal and external games into alignment with the greater forces that underlie and overarch them both.”
Dev raised his eyebrows at the sudden veer into in-game legend. “Sounds like something from one of the fan sites. Kind of cryptic . . .”
The CO routine’s AI looked at him obliquely through Cora’s dark eyes. “That would be a subjective judgment on your behalf.”
“All human judgments are subjective,” Dev said, “by definition.”
They strolled on. “The most logical assumption,” said Cora, “would be that the question was motivated by a momentary mood of whimsy, or that you’re indulging a favorite pastime of humans in general, the attribution of behaviors typical of the living to inanimate objects.”
Dev smiled wryly. When building this routine, he had been careful to provide it with access to almost all biographical data about him and a broad spectrum of textbook material on human behavior, as he had always intended it to be able to surprise him occasionally. “Perhaps so,” he said. “At any rate, there’s one possibility I want to rule out before we part company for today. Have you been compromised by any external system?”
“No, Dev. There are about a hundred different alarms that would have gone off were that the case.”
That was true enough. “All right,” he said. “Thanks.”
Together they kept walking through the shadows. Here and there a patch of moonlight managed to splash to the ground, but mostly their steps were illuminated by the Sword of Truth, which Cora was still carrying, and by the glow of the ground ahead of them, within which this region’s version of the Ring of Elich stood massive and silent, shining darkly under the moon. “Do you want this back?” Cora said, offering him the sword as they came out through the inner ring of Macrocosm trees into the clear grassy moonlit ground between them and the great trilithons of the Ring.
Dev reached out and took it from her, then turned and pushed it into the place in the air that would hold it for him until he needed it again. “Thank you.”
Cora lifted her head a little, as if hearing something far off. “The outer system management program,” she said, “is requesting your attention. Jim is trying to reach you, as is Tau.”
Dev sighed. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll get in touch with them as soon as I get back up into the office and handle a couple of things. Would you open a portal in the Ring for me, please?”
“Of course, Dev,” Cora said.
Ahead of them, one gap in the Ring swirled with rainbow fire, then cleared to show the view down the length of Dev’s virtual office. “I’ll see you later,” he said.
Cora stood still, watching him. “It does seem all too likely,” she said. “The system will be ready for you, as always.”
Dev nodded and headed off toward the Ring. Just at the portal he turned and looked behind him. She was gone.
There’s a program that still needs some work,
he thought, turning back toward the portal.
Next month . . . end of the year . . . whenever. But that could be a solution for what Tau was talking about: the virtual helper that can guide other trusted senior staff through the business of managing the CO routines without actually seeing the proprietary parts of the program. Something to take up with Tau. Meanwhile, time for Jim.