Diane Duane

by Omnitopia Dawn (v5)

  “About a hundred people,” Randy said, “scattered around the various time zones, until we get the new code in place that will sniff out this kind of attack anyplace in Telekil, not just the City. We’ve got a lot of volunteers already, people who’re willing to retask their personal-project time. They’ll screen large-scale player movements in real time, assessing the weapons and other assets that the players are carrying, and assigning live assets from proctoring to keep an eye on anything that looks weird.”

  “How long for the code?”

  “A week and a half, I think. Might be two. We’ve got a lot of interleaving to do with the basic Ring routines; you don’t want it mistakenly outlawing legal movements of large groups.”

  Dev thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Don’t try to cover more than half of your personnel assignments with PP time, though. I’ll have personnel authorize double time for those who’re interested. Spread the word around in the assignments infranet and see who picks you up.”

  “Probably a lot of people, Mr. Dev. People feel protective about the City. A lot of folks are in shock.”

  Dev’s grin went a bit sour. “They’re not alone,” he said. “Anything else we need?”

  “Not unless you have more notes on our notes.”

  “Okay, then we’re done,” Dev said. “Thanks, Randy. Tell Majella I said to calm down, she’s doing a great job.”

  “Will do.”

  The window closed. Dev sighed, looked over the document one more time, and tweaked it again to take the throb out of its glow. He was about to turn away from it when he remembered to ask the usual question. “Any correlations between this and other pending material?”

  One of the attachments to the document he was still holding started to throb. It was the census list. The other was some feet away, closer to the desk. When Dev beckoned it closer, he found that it was Ron Ruis’ Microcosm status report for that morning.

  “Huh,” Dev said, enlarging that document and scrolling down it to find a name that also appeared in the census list. “Really . . . ?”

  He poked the name. “Sticky that for me,” he said. “Tag the sticky as ‘investigate.’ Meantime, show me the rack, please.”

  At the other end of the office, away past the festoons of documents hanging around the central desk, a wrist-thick horizontal beam of white light appeared. From it hung many shadowy forms which, as Dev made his way over to them, resolved into what at first glimpse could have been taken for bodies. Male and female, human and non-human, monstrous and ordinary, they were all shapes that Dev had invented for himself, or which his staff had invented for him, so that he could walk his worlds undetected and get a sense of what was really going on in there.

  He stood there irresolute for a moment, then waved the rack along a little. The shapes fled out of sight to be replaced by new ones. “No,” Dev said. “No, no, no . . .” The display changed again, then again. Finally Dev’s eyes lit on one seeming that he hadn’t seen before. “What the—”

  He pulled it off the rack, looked at the front of it, turned it around, snickered. Okay, Dev said, and shrugged into it as if into a suit jacket. “Mirror, please?”

  A reflective sheet appeared out of nothing in front of him. Dev snorted, amused. “Fine,” he said. “Kill that. Omnitopia game management—”

  “Good afternoon, Dev,” said the dulcet control voice.

  “And the same to you, game of mine,” Dev said. “First things first. I want a playback of the incident referenced in Frank’s précis document. Then a walkthrough of the incursion and excursion sites. Meanwhile, screen all in-game feeds and news services for references and reactions to the referenced incident. Plot against this month’s emo index and the baseline index from a year ago, and while I’m on walkabout, start showing me the twenty highest, twenty lowest, and a Monte Carlo sampling from the middle of the bell curve.”

  “All right, Dev,” said the control voice. “Where do you want to start the walkthrough?”

  “West side of the plaza,” Dev said. “Best view of the incursion route.”

  Part of the black glass floor peeled itself downward from the floor level and folded itself into steps. Dev headed down them, whistling softly and feeling a sudden relief as the darkness of Omnitopian night washed around him, the plaza’s torches and magelights throwing shadows away in every direction from the stones of the Ring of Elich. Okay, he thought, let’s see what needs to be done.

  Rik heaved a sigh of relief when he finally stepped through the gateway into Langley B. It was starting to seem as if he’d been trying to get here for days, but now he stood at last in the midst of the White Arcades at the heart of the City of Artificers, the arch-surrounded plaza at the hill-town’s top that was Langley’s primary access to the Ring of Elich. As usual, the marble-paved space inside the arcades was full of midweek traffic: the stalls and stands that belonged to the casual traders were being cruised hard by various people and creatures in mystical robes and wizard’s hats, long black trench coats (usually hiding samurai swords glowing a dangerous blue from inside their scabbards, and sometimes right through them), and in a few cases, motorcyclists’ leathers or ornamental ladies’ armor with about as much coverage as your average bikini.

  Rik skirted carefully around one such lady—he’d run into them in the past and they could be testy: something to do with cold chain mail against the skin, he’d always imagined. Must give you some awful kind of rash. But, leaving the predictable wizards and mages aside, you got a lot of aligned and unaligned warrior types here as well from Macrocosms and Microcosms everywhere. Langley B was famous right across Omnitopia for the quality and variety of its magian and wizardly gear, everything from the simplest basic outfitting—robes and so forth—up to the fanciest custom magic weapons. Almost everybody who worked in one of the feudal or magical scenarios came here to shop or commission materiel eventually, as there were more arms- and magic-devoted Ivory Towers here than in any other Macrocosm. Some people suggested that the special protective status that went with Tower facilities should simply be extended to the whole ’cosm to save time and cut down on red tape.

  Rik made his way leftward around the curve of stalls, which matched the curve of the surrounding arcades, and went on down the small winding street that led to his preferred robier’s. Calling it a street was possibly an error: it was more of a stairway, its path switching back and forth as it made its way steeply down past the houses and shops set into the hillside or perched precariously on stilts and pillars on the street’s far side. All the narrow buildings had the typical steeply-pitched Langley blue-tile roofs with extended, curved eaves; what they lost in width they made up for in depth, normally extending several stories up or down, depending whether they were on the hill or valley side of the street. As usual, Rik got a little confused about which one of them was his robier’s place, as it wasn’t signed, and its front had the same wide, closed shop-shutter and was plastered in the same worn, gray-blue stucco as its four immediate neighbors on the hill side of the street. Rik paused for a moment in front of them, and then remembered the weird spider-shaped boot scraper next to the wooden door he wanted. He went over to that door and knocked on it.

  Nothing. Rik knocked again, louder.

  Still nothing. Rik stood there in the morning sunshine and wondered, as he often had before, whether this house’s owner was a real player or somebody game-generated. The high quality of Omnitopia’s GGCs was either a source of joy or a serious annoyance, depending on what you were trying to get done at any given moment. Lal the Robier’s profile, which he’d looked at any number of times, did not show any out- of-world contact info or other personal details. Not that this by itself was unusual—lots of players preferred to keep their in-Topian and out-Topian lives strictly separated, either for personal reasons or the normal concerns about identity theft, persona-jacking, and so on. Still, it was annoying not to know whether his knocking was simply leaving a “Rik tried to reach you” message in the in-game me
ssage box of someone who was busy with their real life at the moment, or whether the game was just making him wait because that might be a thing that the character who lived here would do—

  With great suddenness and a deafening creak almost like a gunshot, the shutter next to the door abruptly dropped, bouncing down flat at the end of the iron chains that normally held its top edge up against the house. Inside, in the darkness, a little dark-shawled shape with a tangle of white hair glared out at him, blinking in the brightness. “What?!” she yelled.

  “Uh, fair morning to you, Lal,” Rik said. “’Tis Arnulf Manyfaced. I’ve come for my robes.”

  “You were supposed to be here two days ago!”

  “Uh, yesterday,” Rik said.

  She came farther into the light and scowled at him. She had a round wrinkled-potato face and little sharp black eyes half hidden among the potato wrinkles. It was not a face you could ever imagine smiling; or if it did, you might be tempted to back away before something untoward happened. “You might have sent me a messenger to tell me you were going to be late!”

  He might have, but it had completely slipped his mind in the madness of the last day or so. And it was true that the service-driven economy of real life could sucker you into thinking that just because it was a business day in a given Macrocosm, the person with whom you had business could be expected to be there. “I’m sorry,” Rik said, smiling at her in an attempt to get her off the shouting jag he had a feeling was about to start. “It was completely my fault, Lal. Please forgive me.”

  She scowled at him. “Huh,” Lal the Robier said, and disappeared back into the darkness of her shop.

  Several moments later she appeared with a bundle done up in rough handmade brown paper and string. “I suppose you’re going to want to try them on,” she said, and sniffed in disdain, glaring at him again.

  Actually there was nothing he wanted to do less right now. His friends were waiting for him in Meruvelt. “Uh, no,” he said, “it’s all right. If there’s a problem I’ll stop back another time and we can do the alterations.”

  “Very well. Take them with or have them sent?” the little woman growled.

  Do I really want to cart these things all the way to Meruvelt? Rik thought. You did pay slightly less for moving artifacts from one ’cosm to another if you carried them yourself. But then the group would be heading back to his own Microcosm as well, and Rik would have to bring the robes along. Do I, Come to think of it, do I incur any extra charges for that? Rik sighed, decided to keep it simple for the time being. “Send them, please.”

  “Fine. You owe me twelve in gold, plus one gold six minims shipping.”

  Rik fumbled around in his waist pouch for the right coinage while trying to convert Langley gold ducats to Omnitopian game gold units in his head, wondering whether he was about to be overcharged for his shipping. But he was in a rush. “Thank you,” he said, and handed over the necessary gold.

  Package and robier vanished into the darkness of the shop together. A second later chains rattled and the shutter was hauled up and slammed closed against the wall. Rik stood there, slightly bemused. But only a second later, the game management system said in his ear, “A delivery for you, Rik. Do you want to hear storage options?”

  “No thanks,” Rik said. “Store it in my office space.”

  “Done,” said the control voice. “A confirmation of this operation has been stored in your inbox.”

  “Okay,” Rik said, and turned to make his winding way back up the street. Well, at least I’ve got them now, and I can show them to Angie. Still have to wonder, though: is Lal real . . . ?

  On the way back up the hill, Rik stopped once or twice at the switchback terraces to get his breath. The view down from here was fantastic, especially on a nice day like this when the weather was clear: endless vistas of hilly green forest and countryside rolling away into the misty horizon, a morning sky streaked with filmy mares’ tails, the high pink sun warming it all. But to his mild horror, Rik now found himself unable to appreciate the view simply for what it was. In the back of his mind, he kept seeing wireframes. I wonder how they got that effect, he thought, looking up at the mares’ tails and trying to work out how the pertinent ARGOT or WannaB modules would have to be stacked. You’d have to fiddle with the wind variables, I guess. Or who knows, it’s probably a macro: they have to have the Macrocosms completely automated . . . As he climbed back up in to the Arcades plaza, Rik found himself debating whether it wouldn’t really be more fun to control the weather yourself, day by day. But probably that gets to be a bore after a while. Or you’re busy with all the other things you have to do to keep a world running.

  Or counting all your money, said one hopeful part of his brain. Rik snorted at himself in amusement: it’d be a long time yet before he had that problem.

  He went over to the center of the plaza, where the paving stones outlined, in dark stone and crystal, a broken circle that mirrored in small the stones-and-openings pattern of the Ring of Elich. All over Omnitopia, broken circles like this marked each ’cosm’s access to the master gating system. Rik picked an opening, waited for the crystal to go from gray to clear, and stepped through.

  He came out of the Ring of Elich, stepped clear from the gateway he’d just used, and then said, “Gate management?”

  “Listening,” said the control voice.

  “Preprogrammed gating to Meruvelt, please?”

  “Found. Laid in,” said the voice. “Approach at will.”

  Rik picked a short line—not even a line, really, just a group of she-Gnarth laden with shopping bags—and waited for them to go through while glancing around to see whether things were now looking a little more normal. The gate before him swirled gray, cleared, and there was the broad green City Meadow at the edge of Meruvelt’s main city, Dunworn.

  Rik moved through, stepped away from the ring of flat black and white flagstones laid in the meadow, and took a deep breath of the evening air as he looked out over the low wall that bounded the meadow on its east side. This was another place that had a great view. Dunworn was a walled city built at the top of a plateau in the broad, gently rolling plains country of Meruvelt’s northern continent. It was cavalry country, this whole continent—chariot country, too—and had become a favorite playground for gamers from all over Omnitopia who preferred mounted feudal or Renaissance-era combat. That also made it a good place for medically-minded players, as there was always a battle of some kind going on here, and plenty of casualties to treat.

  For the time being Rik turned his back on the view and headed toward the town, which rose up in the middle of the plateau, surrounded by parkland and stabling. Stable Circle smelled as warm and brown as usual as Rik made his way through it. The whinnies and snorts of hundreds of horses, and the roars and grunts and whimpers of other beasts less horselike but no less useful as cavalry, were all around him as he zigzagged through the shanty stabling of the outer ring toward the more permanent and better-built facilities, the long-term stabling, livery, and short-rent barns. Past them was the ring road around the town proper, along which were the usual snack stalls set up to tempt the stabling crowd and the steed owners making their way back and forth. The smell of grilling sausages and frying breads made Rik’s stomach growl as he headed for the gates that pierced the town walls on the east side.

  Something to eat, he thought, would definitely be on the agenda at this point. Rik normally tried to keep his in-game eating to a minimum, as it could get you into bad habits out-of-game—and there were always the stories of people whose brain/body relationship had somehow left their bodies too amenable to believing that the virtual food had been real, so that they gained terrible amounts of weight even though their diets in the real world continued as usual.

  Rik went through the gate and headed across the cobbled plaza, shuddering at the thought. He wondered yet again how some people could spend all their spare time in Microcosms like SinTwo and GulaGula—which were all about not just eating, b
ut eating entirely too much—and come out again still able to cope. The thought of places where you could purposely turn off your appestat and eat constantly, for hours, without any side effects, always struck him as faintly disgusting. But no laws were being broken there, and it was people’s own business what they did . . .

  As for me, he thought, turning into one little street that was lined with cookshops and restaurants, a sausage or two won’t do any damage at all. About halfway down the street Rik could see the glow in the windows of the House of the Last Man Standing, his crowd’s preferred tavern. It was well away from the busy heart of town, but the prices were better down here, and the Last Man had a name for being popular with the locals as well as with the quick- turnover battle-following crowd.

  He pushed in the broad iron-bound door and glanced around. The Last Man’s front room was high-ceilinged for an in-town inn, with the second floor apparently converted to a gallery in some earlier era: some people thought this might have been a coaching inn at some earlier time and had had its courtyard enclosed. At any rate, now there were two levels to drink and dine on—the big downstairs floor and the upstairs gallery level, where you could hang over the railing and pelt people you didn’t like with beef bones.

  As the door closed, a bone whizzed past Rik and bounced on the flagstoned floor in front of him. Instantly a mereworm dashed out from under one of the nearby tables, snatched it up, and made off with it, roasting the bone with a tiny jet of firebreath as it went. Rik looked up at the sound of laughter and saw Tom and Barbara and Raoul, all in MediMages Without Frontiers post-battle garb, sitting at a table for four up in the gallery wing nearest the door. “You’re late!” Barbara shouted.

  “Two days late!” Tom called down.

  “Oh, come on, it’s only one,” Rik called up to them, and headed for the stairs.

  When he got up into the gallery, his mouth started to water immediately, because they hadn’t waited for him, and the order had just arrived. The fourth place setting, with the typical oversized napkin and the Meruvelter two-tined fork, had a big sausage platter on it, and a hunk of brown fennel bread, and beside it was a huge mug of the local whitebrew beer, like one of the Belgian wheat beers. “Oh, you guys,” Rik said as he plunked down on the bench beside Barbara, “you have no idea how good this looks. Barb, how’s the little one?”