My people,
Dev thought,
are something else. But they’re also why I won’t have to sell my car . . .
He ambled off among his guests again, and finally wound up wandering back over to the players’ bower under the big tree, having seen some movement over there that suggested one of the more persistent players was leaving.
The Queen of the Netherlands had just stood up and handed her little clutch-bag to one of her security people. Dev headed over to her, nodding at them, and meeting her smile with one of his own. “Did you have a pleasant evening, Majesty?” he asked.
“Very much so!” Stroopwaffel said. “Especially when your mother came back with little Lola. What a sweet child!” And she grinned a knowing grin. “I begin to suspect that she’s the real power behind the throne around here.”
“You have no idea,” said Dev.
The queen rose. “I hate to go,” she said, “but I have one of those tiresome political things to deal with in the morning, and homework to do for it before I go to bed. But thank you so much for inviting me, Dev! I’ve had a lovely time.”
“It’s the least I can do for one of our very first European players,” Dev said. “And thank
you
, Stroop. You’ve pushed the value of my stock up today.”
She looked at him quizzically. “I have? How? I checked Reuters Financial an hour or so ago and it looked like things were coming along nicely in that regard! You’d hardly need me to—”
Dev was confused for a moment; then he laughed. “No, no, not that! I meant my personal stock. My father considers me helpless in most forms of human endeavor, but political power he respects. And my mom’s been a closet monarchist since her grandma told her how they kicked poor Umberto the Second out of Italy.”
Stroopwaffel smiled that small demure smile of hers. “My pleasure to be of use,” she said. “But one thing before I go. You promised you were going to e-mail me the walkthrough for the Gloriana expansion. . . .”
Dev rubbed his face. “First thing in the morning, I promise.”
She grinned at him. “Make sure you do it. I wouldn’t like to have to blame you for an international incident.”
Dev rolled his eyes. “You always were a troublemaker,” he said. “Don’t think I don’t know who got those London stallholders to throw Doctor Dee in the Thames.”
The queen sighed. “There’s no hiding anything from the First Player, is there,” she said. “Oh, well.” She got up, glanced around at her security people: they gathered in around her preparatory to forming a flying wedge to get her through the crowd.
She offered Dev her hand: he took it and bowed over it in best Tau-style. “Have a good trip, Your Majesty,” he said.
“See you online, Dev,” said Stroopwaffel, and stepped out into the crowd, smiling, her security guards squiring her through the press and out of sight.
Dev continued his first good nights and finally escaped back up into Castle Dev, making his way up to the round conference room at the top of the southern castle tower. A lot of Omnitopian staff were lounging around up there, drinking beer or champagne and snacking on hors d’oeuvres while wandering over to the floor-to-ceiling windows every now and then to look down on what remained of the party. The Magnificent Seven were there, all of them, in various stages of dress or redress—all the female members having dumped their heels by now, and the males mostly having lost tuxedo jackets and bow ties, though Tau, as always, was still offensively perfectly dressed and glossy-looking even after so long a night.
Jim, knowing Dev’s habits at these functions, had kept a single bottle of champagne unopened on ice. Now he popped it and poured Dev a glass, and the rest of the Seven gathered around for refills.
Dev lifted the glass. “Omnitopia,” he said. “And all of you—who saved it for its players.”
“Omnitopia,” they all said, and drank.
Dev put the champagne aside after the single glass, and went looking for a beer. Conversation after that went as it normally did among the Seven when they were all together and not working—in all possible directions—though for the moment the party, the rollout, and the attack were the chief topics of discussion, with a lot of wonder being expressed that they’d survived at all. Dev had suspected earlier that there would be a lot of this, and had more or less decided to avoid talking about it any more than he had to. Yet somewhere in the middle of his second beer, he found himself standing next to Tau and looking out the window down into the courtyard, and found himself saying, “Tell me something—”
Tau looked at Dev quizzically.
“You hear any stories from our own people about strange RealFeel experiences during the ‘blackout?’ ” Dev said. “Funny imageries . . . stuff like that?”
Tau yawned and rubbed his eyes for a moment, then had a swig of beer. “Yeah,” he said, “there’ve been some strange stories making their way around the company intranet.”
“About what?”
Tau shrugged. “Mostly the system initiating conversations under strange circumstances. And sometimes in pretty peculiar modes. The control voice speaking very emotionally. Or sounding weird even when it seemed calm. One of my people told me that it sounded like somebody who was scared, but was trying to hide it . . .”
Dev looked away, then shook his head. “What’s your take on it?” he said.
Tau chuckled. “Stress,” he said. “What else could it be? There was enough stress washing around in this place for you to float a liner in.” He had another gulp of beer.
“Any of that happen
after
the attack?”
Tau shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard,” he said. “But then my people haven’t been talking about after the attack, except as work requires. What everybody wants to be sharing are battle stories. You’ll hear about fifteen thousand of those over the next few weeks, I’m guessing.”
Dev nodded and had a long few gulps of beer. “Just keep an eye open,” he said. “Any more of that kind of thing happens, I want to look into it myself.”
“You always want to look into everything yourself,” Tau said, resigned. “Trouble with you is, you have no concept of how to delegate.”
Dev thumped Tau in the shoulder with one fist and headed over to Jim. To him, as they stood together by the window looking down into the courtyard, Dev said only one word. “Delia?” he said.
Jim shrugged. “It might work,” he said. “Playing this kind of double game is always dangerous.”
“This from the man who got me to jump off the garage roof with him when we were eleven?”
Jim smiled, then shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes. Phil—” He made a face. “No telling what’s going on inside that guy’s head at the best of times. And after this, when he’s plainly lost face—privately at least—and is about to lose market share, very publicly—who knows what he’ll be thinking in a week, or a month? But this way we may have a slightly better shot at figuring that out.”
Dev nodded. “Jim,” he said, “thanks again. For everything.”
Jim gave him a look that was amused, but soft around the edges with affection. “You mean, thanks for letting me have the most fun I can have without getting my head stuck in Lola’s dollhouse? You’re welcome.”
Dev gave him a one-armed hug and headed out. “See you in the morning, everybody,” he called to the rest of the Seven.
“Night, Dev!”
He made his way out of the Tower and strolled across into the Castle proper to get rid of his tux. This late in the proceedings, no one in their right mind would expect him to stay dressed—especially when a significant portion of his remaining party guests were probably heading for the fountain at the front entrance to get wet. In the suite, he made his way back to the closet space, dumped the tux jacket and the tie, and changed into a more casual white shirt, then headed out and made his way down to his office to glance at the desk and just on the off chance that something else needed his attention before calling it a day—
“Who do I think I’m kidding?” he murmured as he entered the office. The lighting was evening-dim. His desk was clean. The view window was showing the party. Nothing needed him here.
But over at the far end of the room the door to his interface booth stood open.
Dev paused there indecisively for a few moments. Then he went in, sat down, put on the eyecups. A second later he was sitting in his virtual office.
Its air space was clear. Frank had quite straightforwardly removed everything, leaving Dev looking at a message made of emptiness.
Nothing for you to do here: go out and play!
Dev sighed.
Not possible,
he thought. “System management?”
“Here, Dev.”
“The Conscientious Objector routine level, please.”
And he was there, under a dark sky, sitting by the water, looking at the circle of trees—now augmented to reflect the opening of the new Mesocosms—with the glowing Ring of Elich at its heart.
Dev stood up and walked into that darkness once again, sad at heart. He had been here many times since yesterday afternoon, when the attacks ended. He had come down again and again, the way someone keeps revisiting a spot in which they were sure they’d left their car keys—even though they know they’ve already looked ten or twenty times, even though the keys can’t possibly be there. But at no time had he found what he had come looking for, which was most likely lost forever.
Am I being stubborn,
Dev thought,
or stupid?
He stopped not far from the edge of the ring of trees of code, waiting, watching the light sheen down their surfaces as his game once more went about its business in the ordinary way. But that was the problem. He was looking for something extraordinary, something that wasn’t here.
I just can’t let go,
he thought.
Some ways I’m still six, and I can’t believe I’ve lost my teddy bear and I’ll never see it again. I just have to keep looking, keep trying . . .
“Hello?” he said. “Are you there?”
In memory he was hearing that painful echoless silence of the day before. Now there was just silence. But it then occurred to Dev that no voice had answered his: not even the control voice. Dev’s brow furrowed. That’s
not a correct response. . . .
He stood in the dark, waiting: heard nothing. Finally he let out a breath. It was hopeless.
It just misunderstood my syntax somehow,
he thought. “System management, please?” he said.
“Yes, Dev?”
And now he had no idea what to say next.
Please talk to me like you did before? Please remember when you were scared. Hey, remember when I told you to divide up a newly coalesced consciousness and probably thereby commit suicide?
And then he wanted to curse at himself.
Look at you,
he thought.
You’ve been in all kinds of trouble before, but this time you’ve outdone yourself. Genocide. You’ve killed the world’s newest and most amazing life-form before it hardly even had time to draw breath. And there is no one you can tell about it—because it just wouldn’t be smart. Even if it was safe to talk about this, who’d believe you? There’s no proof, no evidence trail.
Dev stood there rubbing his eyes, which still bothered him after yesterday.
And no way ever to replicate the effect exactly. That specific, unique combination of events will never occur again. More, the event itself was too diffuse to leave specific tracks of itself in the system. We could spend years hunting through the logs of the second attack to figure out what—
“Was there something specific you wanted, Dev?”
The voice brought him up short. Then he let out another breath, for this was just another of hundreds or perhaps thousands of responses that he’d taught the system himself in the ancient days.
Sure, the system knows how to generate the responses itself, these days, but it just feels . . . feels like it’s canned.
He sat there looking up at the trees, feeling unspeakably alone and miserable. After a moment he got up. “Yes,” Dev said. “Paradigm shift, please—”
Nothing happened. Up in the trees, the leaves stirred gently in the virtual light from above them, as if edged with moonlight.
I’m just a glutton for punishment,
Dev thought.
I probably broke the Cora paradigm myself when I told the CO’s consciousness to scatter. But it was time I let this imagery go, anyway.
Time, as he’d told Tau, to turn the management of the CO routines over to a team of trusted subordinates.
Tau will partition it all up among however many people he picks. No matter how long they work on it, none of them will ever have access to all the subroutines that made up the shifted paradigm. None of them will ever find the links to my voiceprint, to the—
Under the trees, at a distance, he saw something moving.
Dev stood there staring into the dimness and forgot to breathe.
It was a human shape; a woman’s shape; his wife’s shape. It was Cora.
Dressed in a long trailing graceful garment of scrolling green code, raven hair spilling down her back, an emerald-silhouetted darkness under the canopy, she came walking from the Ring and out under the trees toward him. As Cora moved past the shadow of the hanging branches, the “moonlight” from above them fell on her and set her hair ablaze with silver.
Dev watched in astonishment as she walked through the silence and the darkness toward him. Part of the amazement was that she was still here at all. But additionally, her face had changed. It was much more Lola’s now, as she might look as an adult, but that face was now also benignly haunted by Mirabel’s eyes—the seeming-daughter channeling the seeming-mother in a whole new way.
She stopped a few feet away from him, quite still—and amazingly, not still as a statue, or a waxwork, but at rest in a way a living human being might be. “I’m here,” Cora said.
Dev shivered all over, for he could not get rid of the feeling that it wasn’t just the Conscientious Objector routines speaking to him. It was Omnitopia speaking, the whole game, now alive as a whole.