Joss flashed a dazzling grin at her that said,
And that’s not all you weren’t expecting, but I’m not saying a word.
He glanced at her rental car. “Don’t forget your briefcase,” he said.
“No, of course not. . . .” She reached into the backseat after it, shut the car, locked it. Delia settled herself in the passenger seat of the golf cart, glancing around the parking lot. “Is today a day off for people here or something?”
Joss looked at her with slight surprise. “Why?”
“The parking lot’s kind of empty.”
“Oh! No, not a holiday,” Joss said, starting the motor up again.
“We’ve got a lot more room down here than we need. Most of our staff use park-n-ride facilities based off campus. There are shuttles that run all over town from the topside level.”
He drove down toward the far end of the structure. Delia peered upward as they went. Joss glanced at her. “The ceiling?”
Delia laughed. “Yeah.”
Joss nodded. “Solid ‘cold light’ like that has been a trope in science fiction and fantasy roleplaying games for years and years. When Dev found out that somebody’d finally figured out direct-glow electroceramic, he had to have it.” He glanced up at the last of the roof as they drove up the ramp. “The boss is such a geek.”
Delia blinked at that. This was not the kind of opinion she normally heard from upper management about uppermost management.
“But it’s energy-saving too,” Joss said as they drove up toward the sunlight. “So the bottom- line types like it. And it’s supposed to never burn out, so the physical plant people
really
like it.”
They came up into the sun near one of the two gate buildings, but only for a second; the next moment they were under the canopy of the trees. “So much for technogeekery,” Joss said. “Was your flight all right? Hear there was some pretty bad turbulence this morning.”
“Uh, yeah, there was,” Delia said. “I guess other people off my flight have come in?”
“Might have,” Joss said, “but I heard about it from one of the board members this morning. They’ve all come in for the rollout. Your timing’s perfect: we don’t normally get all of the Magnificent Seven on campus more than a few times a year.”
They were driving down a wide path that curved between plants and raised beds that partly concealed the buildings behind them: the path was full of people strolling, driving golf carts, riding bikes painted in the same shade of pink. “Forgive me,” Delia said, “but I have to ask. Are all the employees here really this casual about the board of directors?”
“It varies,” Joss said. “Some people like to be more formal. I know there’s been a lot of press speculation that we’re all just stock-option-brainwashed wage slaves who’ve drunk the happy happy corporate Kool-Aid.” He shrugged, flashed that grin at her again. “I think you may find a little more variation in the sample when you’re on the fifty-cent tour today. Are we well paid? Yeah, better than a lot of people at similar companies. If there are any similar companies.”
“Which of course you’re paid to tell me there aren’t.”
Joss gave her a wry look. “Of course. But, who knows, you might come to some similar conclusion yourself before you’re done. Are we brainwashed? I don’t think so. Trouble is, people who’re brainwashed into thinking they’re happy and people who’re having a lot of fun doing fulfilling work for a decent wage tend to exhibit some of the same symptoms. Add the side effect that the second kind of people trigger in folks doing work they hate for crap wages, and the clinical picture gets kind of confused.” Joss angled to the left when the path they were driving down branched. “But you’ll get a fair chance today to check the corporate coolers for unnatural-colored fruit drinks. One of my horde of slavering minions will take you around the buildings, get you oriented. That’ll take an hour or so. Make sure you make the minion stop and get you something cold halfway through: it’s gonna be a hot one today. Then you’ve got a meeting with Ron Ruis, who’s our chief worldbuilder, and Tau Vitoria, who’s chief server engineer, the king of our hardware guys.” Joss chuckled. “Watch out for him, he’s a hand-kisser.”
“What?”
“Tau’s very European,” Joss said, rolling his eyes in amusement. “He’s a minor member of some deposed Slavic royal family or something, I forget which one. Tau’s all manners and languages, but don’t be fooled. It’s just a blind to keep you from noticing that he’s the kind of guy who’d still be wearing pocket protectors if his staff hadn’t broken him of it.”
“I should be taking notes,” Delia said. It was meant, if anything, as misdirection: her memory was her one of her chief assets, one that made her more effective at what she did than some writers who were far more glossy prose stylists.
“Ask his staff for the latest gossip,” Joss said. “Or rather, try to stop them from telling you.” He took another branch of the path, where it ducked through a tunnel of greenery formed by a pergola smothered with vines and the beginnings of bunches of grapes. On the other side was a small parking lot paved in the same sandstone flagging as the paths, with a semicircular three-story stuccoed building embracing it. There were three or four golf carts and a scatter of bikes in front of it, both in a rack by the front doors and abandoned on the lawn around the parking area. Under a small patch of palm trees on one side on the lawn, a couple of employees were sitting on the grass, one hammering away on a laptop, another leaning against a tree and reading. To Delia’s eye, they looked like they were just barely out of college.
Joss killed the golf cart’s engine. Delia picked up her briefcase and followed him toward the doors, glancing at the young man and woman under the palm trees, and at the people going in and out of the doors ahead of them. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how young the workforce is here,” she said. “A big tech company, after all . . .”
“Young, yes,” Joss said as they went in, “but we’re also the state’s biggest employer of seniors. Possibly the biggest one in the South-west, though I’d need to check the stats.”
That surprised her. “Really? How many?”
“At least eight hundred people fifty-five or over,” Joss said. “I think about five hundred people over sixty-five. It makes sense down here, after all! There are all these educated retirees who enjoy working from home on ‘relaxed hours’ or some other kind of flextime. A huge untapped resource.”
It was of course the kind of thing that you would expect a PR person to be telling you about. Delia made a mental note to look into this another time, specifically with an eye to finding out what kind of wage these putative retirees were earning. “Anyway,” Joss said, as they headed in through the building’s lobby and up a broad flight of stairs in its center, “after you see Tau, Dev should be ready for you—assuming something bizarre hasn’t happened to his schedule between now and three hours from now.” They came up to the second floor, where a large central corridor followed the main curve of the building, and small informal open work areas budded off on both sides. The whole feel of the place was bright, open, airy. Delia looked up and was surprised to see what appeared to be completely unobstructed blue sky.
Joss chuckled. “Our famous glass ceiling,” he said. “It’s polarized—you get that it’s-not-there effect until the sun hits it. Welcome to the Flackery! This is where we handle PR for the worldwide operation, so if things look a little crazy right now, it’s all about the rollout . . .”
They walked down the corridor to the right. “Maybe it’s just me,” Delia said, “but if this is the building when things are crazy, then at a calm time it must seem positively comatose.”
Joss looked up and down the corridor. “Nooo,” he said, “too many people on Rollerblades for ‘comatose.’ Come back next month.” They walked past a big kidney- shaped table with numerous large flat-screen monitors on it. Working in front of one of them, or perhaps playing, was a man in his forties, intent on a number of figures running around in some grassy landscape. They appeared, from the quick glimpse Delia got as they passed, to be playing tennis.
“He’s in Namath,” Joss said, after a glance. “It’s a Macrocosm where all combat is in the form of Earth sports. Once a year each of the Sports Nations there holds a competition to determine who’s going to rule each nation for the next game season.” He shook his head. “I stay out of there. That ’cosm is
nuts.
Talk about your unbridled savagery and internecine warfare.”
Delia had to laugh at that, considering the continent-wide conflict that she understood was commonplace in most of the other ’cosms. Joss chuckled too. “Have you been into the game yet?”
“Once or twice,” Delia said. She had gone in on a staff Omnitopia account that the PR office had given her. But certain that the account was being monitored, and wanting to do a little sleuthing without being watched, she had also slipped in using a standard account bought online with an over-the-counter credit card voucher that belonged to a spare identity she kept for purposes of anonymous research.
“But you haven’t really gotten into anyplace specific long enough to want to spend time there.”
“Well,” Delia said, “I haven’t found where I’m really comfortable yet. I don’t know if I’m wild about the idea of casting myself as some kind of wizard or warrior.”
“No need to,” Joss said. “The system’s set up so that you can find out which ’cosm you prefer and choose a role from inside it. No one has to still be playing Otherworlds Campaigns if they don’t want to. That’s just a staging area for the other games now. Though we do get some players,” and he grinned, “who stay in the old central game world, in Telekil, and never go outside of it.”
That surprised Delia. “Don’t you find that a little frustrating?”
Joss shook his head. “To each their own,” he said as they walked past more and more office pods filled with people sitting in front of screens, standing in front of them, or walking around with headsets on, some of which covered their eyes as well as their ears. “But that’s the whole idea of Omnitopia: that there should be something for everybody. If you can’t find what you like, then just play long enough—or well enough—and you may get a chance to build it yourself.”
That, of course, was the heart of the attraction that Delia suspected was the true cause for Omnitopia’s wild expansion over the last few years. There was nothing like the hope of money, big money, to concentrate people’s minds. “How many people are doing that now?”
They came into a large semicircular work pod at the end of the building. Its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a garden area, and through the trees and shrubs the occasional pink-biked cyclist could be seen passing by. In the middle of this space was a big semicircular desk with a phone, three flat monitors, a couple of comfortable chairs pulled up to the desk, and a statue of a lady in flowing Roman garments blowing a trumpet. A high, curved hardwood credenza stood against the wall. Joss opened a door in it, reached in, and came out with another plastic card. “How many?” Joss said, going to a cupboard in the credenza and opening it. “I haven’t seen numbers for this week, but last week it was—” He frowned, trying to remember. “Eight thousand? Something like that.”
Delia blinked at that. “Eight
thousand
other universes inside Omnitopia?”
“Well, I know it sounds like a lot,” Joss said, closing the credenza’s door, “but they’re not as complex or as resource- hungry as the Macrocosms. I mean, each of the Macros has had hundreds of people working on it, and in it, for years. In those, you’re talking about virtual landscapes that in some cases are nearly as big as the Earth’s. The Micros are a lot smaller, simply because MicroLevelers can’t spend anything like our kind of man-hours on them.”
He walked back to his desk and picked up the phone, hit a button on its dial pad. “Robbie? Yeah. Miss Harrington is here. Would you come on down and take over for me? Thanks.” He hung up the phone, then rummaged under his desk for a moment and came up with a sticky pad. He scribbled on it for a moment, then straightened and came around the desk again, fiddling with that second plastic card.
“Here,” Joss said, peeling something off it: a curl of plastic. “Can I borrow your thumb for a moment?”
“My thumb?”
“Your right one.”
Bemused, Delia held it out. Joss pressed the card against her thumb, then handed it to her. On the spot where Joss had peeled the plastic away, Delia now saw her thumbprint slowly fade in, developing in dark blue against the light blue of the Omnitopia omega and her printed name on the card. “This is your ‘enter all areas’ pass,” Joss said. “After you’re finished with your talk with Dev today, this is your key to the campus. Wave it in front of door readers to go into any public-access area of any building and some of the private-access areas like cafeterias. Show it to any staff member you want to talk to in order to establish your bona fides. Use it to step into any Omnitopian Macrocosm or open-access Microcosm, using whatever input-output method you like—keyboard, VR room, RealFeel setup. The staff will help you with I/O and anything else you need; all you have to do is ask. Don’t worry about returning the pass. It’ll expire either at midnight or as soon as you drive off campus, whichever comes first. Each day, when you come back, you’ll get a new one until I’m told your work here is done.”
Delia stared at the card, astonished. It had never occurred to her that she might be simply handed, on a plate, the kind of access to Omnitopia that this card entailed.
This story could—
I
could .
. . She shut that whole line of thought down for the moment. It was too soon to work out exactly what she
could
do. But the possibilities were staggering . . .
A beefy, sandy- haired man about six feet tall, dressed in a polo shirt and chinos, came into the room. “This is Robbie Wauhea,” Joss said as the man smiled at Delia and shook her hand. “He works with me on North American publicity for Omnitopia in general, but he’s also handling rollout-specific PR. He can answer all your questions about what’s going to happen in the next three days.”