“I call it,” Dev said, stepping out of nothingness beside her. “I simply say, ‘System management—’ ”
“Here, Dev,” said the Omnitopia control voice.
“Get me the request letter from Time magazine regarding Delia Harrington’s visit, please?”
“Which one, Dev?” said the dulcet voice. “There are three. The first is dated February thirteenth, when the project was first mooted; then March twelfth, when the initial agreement was signed, and June fourteenth when Miss Harrington was assigned and vetted—”
“That’s the one,” Dev said.
A piece of glowing virtual paper floated over to him: he plucked it out of the air, showed Delia the letterhead, and glanced at it for a moment before tossing it out into the darkness again. “See?” he said. “It’s that easy.”
“So there’s something to the statement that Omnitopia’s main effect has been to build you the world’s most effective filing system.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Dev said, grinning. “It has other purposes.”
“But you’re certainly very polite to it,” Delia said.
“It’s always wiser, I think.” Dev glanced around the office as if looking for something. “Better treat matter as soul than soul as matter—which Zen master said that? Then again, probably none—doesn’t sound very Zen. Anyway, machinery has a tendency to turn on you if you don’t respect it—that’s been my experience. I’d sooner play it safe.”
He waved a hand and all the bright documents hanging in the air vanished, leaving Delia with an unobstructed view of the big view-screen that also existed in Dev’s private office. Right now it was showing a view from some skyscraper in New York. Far below, a flow of traffic speckled yellow with cabs was pouring by, while pedestrians under umbrellas hustled past, the whole vista being hammered by an unsympathetic rain. “So,” Dev said. “Let’s think about where to go. You’ve seen the list of Macrocosms, of course. And probably a selection of the Microcosms. But lists can be pretty dry. I might be able to help you track down something congenial. Do you have a favorite time period? A favorite place? A story you remember from childhood that you were fond of?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, wondering if this was some kind of Rorschach test, and determined not to give him anything useful. But Dev’s eyes widened, and then he laughed.
“Oh, no,” he said. “You think this is some weird kind of analytical tool! Like we’re trying to dig out your deepest darkest secrets and then slip you subliminal ads for Deep Dark Chocolate Cornflakes or something.” And he roared with laughter.
Delia made a face, annoyed that her thoughts had been that obvious. “It’s a fear that a lot of people have these days,” she said. “Online marketers have become so sneaky, so sophisticated—”
“Delia,” Dev said. “I have no desire whatsoever to psychoanalyze you. You want some of that, talk to my dad—he knows lots of nice shrinks back at Penn. All of whom dumped him because they said he was the worst client they’d ever seen: not that they don’t still happily drink his whiskey when he invites them out here and tries to pump them for what they really think of him.” Dev snickered, then got control of himself. “I’m sorry. Seriously, just pick a historical period if you like; that should be neutral enough. Who could tell anything about you from that?”
“Well . . .” she said, and pondered for a moment, uncertain.
“Tell you what,” Dev said. “If you like, while you’re thinking, I’ll pick one. You’re busy trying to figure me out; let me give you a hand. But I need something first.”
He reached into the air and plucked something out. It was a name badge of the cheap sticky HELLO, MY NAME IS type. The name apparently scrawled in some kind of Sharpie marker on the blank part of the badge, in cockeyed capitals, said RUFUS T. FIREFLY.
He slapped it onto his shirt. Delia looked at this, bemused. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said.
Dev wandered over to his virtual desk and looked it over one last time, plainly seeing something there that wasn’t displaying for Delia. “That I’m occupied with business,” he said, “and that I’d prefer my players to leave me alone for the time being.”
Delia put her eyebrows up at that. Dev Logan’s face was everywhere these days, as instantly recognizable as a film star’s: if he was going to walk around in his worlds undisguised, it seemed highly unlikely that his fans and users were going to let him be. The groupies in particular had an aggressive reputation. “You think they’re really going to do that?” she said.
Dev shrugged. “Let’s see. Meanwhile, let’s walk down to the Ring and I’ll think of someplace to go along the way.”
He waved a hand and the floor went translucent, so that Delia discovered that the two of them appeared to be standing high above the central square in Omnitopia City, which was flooded with bright sunlight. “Whoa,” she said, briefly thrown off by the vivid reality of the illusion.
“I like living over the shop,” Dev said. “Come on.”
Part of the floor vanished, replaced by stairs leading down to the ground level of the city below. From here the true apparent size of the Ring of Elich was striking, and probably intended to be so. It’s all about effect with this guy . . . Yet it was hard not to be impressed as the two of them came down to the cobblestones and paused there. The expertise, and yes, the art that had gone into this place, in its older meaning of artifice, was considerable. Delia looked down at the cobbles she was standing on, scuffed at them, and felt exactly what she would have felt if she’d scuffed her heels on the surface of some mittel-European old town’s street. “Ow . . .” she said.
“Sorry,” Dev said. “Mirabel says it’s a mistake to wear high heels to the Middle Ages. She wanted me to enable a terrain smoother in here, but the players overruled her. Never mind, not too much farther to go.”
They headed over to the towering stones of the Ring, making their way toward one of the great gray-swirling portals. “Where did you get the idea for this?” Delia said as they got onto more even paving, the huge gray slabs that surrounded the Ring proper.
“I have no idea,” Dev said. “It might have been something I read. There were always traditions that suggested the big trilithon rings had connotations to primitive people beyond just signaling a meeting place for religious ceremonies: that they were seen literally as gateways to other worlds, not just as symbols for the passage.”
“Fairy rings . . .” Delia said. “Magic circles . . .”
Dev laughed under his breath. “Please,” he said. “I prefer to play a little bigger. I wouldn’t be big on mushroom rings and crop circles myself. But people do build them here in their Microcosms.” He shrugged. “To each his own.”
“But playing big,” said Delia, “that’s what it’s all been about for you, hasn’t it? Playing bigger than anyone else.”
Dev gave her one of those odd assessing looks of his: not expressionless, but so neutral it was tough to tell what might underlie it. “You know,” he said as they strolled along toward the Ring and fetched up at the end of a line of waiting players, “I guess that’s the automatic assumption. That I’m personally in competition with everyone else. I suppose our competition—there’s no other word for them, I guess—does feel that way.”
He let out a breath, looking up toward the head of the line. Up there Delia could see a group of latex-suited people carrying futuristic-looking beam weapons. They were intermingled with a crowd of what appeared to be giant sabertooth tigers—blue ones—and were chatting amiably with them. “It doesn’t occur to anybody,” Dev said, as the door cleared and showed the inside of what appeared to be a huge orbital habitat, “that I might be competing with myself. Trying to think bigger than I was able to think last week, plan something larger than I could have conceived of last month.”
“You could tell them that,” Delia said, “but it would probably be dismissed out of hand as just more altruistic Omnitopia guff.”
He grinned at her as the g
roup up at the top of the line passed through the gate and it silvered out again. “Yeah,” he said, “I know. It’s a tough life.” He paused as the line moved up. One or two people in the group just ahead of them, five buzz-cut young men in arctic camo but apparently unarmed except for belt knives, glanced over their shoulders at Dev: then they saw the sticky name tag and looked away. Delia watched them with interest as they moved up to the massive stone lintel of the Ring portal and saluted it punctiliously. It cleared before them, revealing a screaming white wilderness of blowing snow, but they didn’t go through right away, and a couple of them looked back toward Delia and Dev again.
“Seriously, though,” Dev said, “there comes a point in this kind of endeavor where you just can’t win. People start to assume that everything you do and say is publicity—which it just can’t be; no human being can possibly be so single-minded—and no matter what you do, it’s used against you. Fail to be seen to be doing good works with your massive wealth, and people say you’re greedy. Allow yourself to be seen giving millions of bucks to charity, and people say you’re only doing it to avoid looking greedy. There comes a point where you have to try to stop listening to what people say about you, and just do what you feel is right.”
One of the arctic camo guys in front of them was waving frantically in their direction. Delia smiled a little to herself, amused to find that Dev’s certainties about his sticky badge would break down so quickly—and then stared as a trio of gigantic polar bears came racing up from behind her and Dev to join the others. Camo guys and bears plunged through the gate together. Then the portal silvered over again.
Dev smiled slightly as the two of them made their way up to the gate. “Hunting expedition,” he said. “Heading for Shangri-La . . . or the mountains around the city, anyway. I doubt the monks’ll allow serious stalking inside the city limits. Only question will be who’s hunting who . . .”
“How do you know that?” Delia said.
“A little bird told me,” Dev said. And instantly there was a little bird about the size of a wren sitting on his shoulder, glowing a most obvious dark neon blue and looking at Delia with a cheerful expression. “The Bluebird of Happiness, possibly?” she said.
“Just a messenger from the game,” Dev said. “A concrete expression of the alerts I normally hear. But as the First Player, I have certain perks, which everybody who enters Omnitopia signs off on as part of the terms of service. The game tells me who’s around and what they’re doing while I’m on the ground. If there’s something happening that needs my immediate attention, I’ll be in a position to take care of it.”
“Rewarding the good,” Delia said, “and punishing the wicked.”
Dev gave her a dry look. “Would that everything was so binary,” he said. “Anyway, come on, let’s have a look at something a little different. Afterward we’ll go somewhere more typical.”
He walked up to the trilithon, laid his hand on it. “Game management,” he said.
“Here, Dev.”
“Mañana, please.”
The silvery fog inside the portal cleared, revealing a wide landscape under starry skies. “It’s flat,” Dev said. “You won’t have to worry about your heels here. Come on through.”
He walked in, and Delia stepped in after him. Behind them, the portal silvered, whirled itself together and vanished into night. Or not night, exactly—more like twilight, the sun already set and the day cooling. The surface around them was perfectly smooth, as Delia found when she took a couple more steps to come up to where Dev stood looking down at . . .
. . . what? Many tiny glittering patches of light lay spread out over a vast expanse of what to Delia looked more like a huge warehouse floor than anything else. “I leave them lit up,” Dev said, “because it depresses me to think of them sitting here waiting in the dark.” “They’re—” Delia moved closer to one, leaned down to look at it. “Cities?”
“In some cases,” Dev said. “Some of them are whole worlds, or at least the seeds of them. Here—” He reached down to the nearest of them and touched the top of what to Delia looked like a tiny needle-like spire.
In the blink of an eye the whole thing had sprung up around them. Delia found herself having to crane her neck to see the towers now. The two of them were standing in the midst of a soaring cityscape, all spines and spires of green glass and metal, while traffic—strange alien podlike vehicles like ambulatory gemstones—flowed past and around them, seemingly ignoring their presence. “This was going to be sort of another version of Oz,” Dev said. “I was still building its story, but the image came to me one night, and I got up and built this—”
“In the middle of the night?” Delia said, hearing the sound of a juicy personal tidbit she might be able to exploit.
“Yes, well,” Dev said, “you do some weird things when you’re still getting the hang of being married.” He grinned a little. “Mirabel has pretty much broken me of that. Or actually, my daughter has.”
“Does your wife play?” Delia said.
Dev shook his head. “She has an account, but she seems to be missing the MMORPG gene. So I don’t press the point with her, and she doesn’t try to get me interested in birding or stamps.”
“Stamps?”
Dev sighed. “You have no idea. Please don’t ask me for details. You can contact Mirabel’s PA and see if she’s interested in adding anything to this, but I wouldn’t bet on it. She’s very private.”
Delia thought about asking whether there was any possibility of seeing the near-mythical Lola, but then decided against it. Beside her, Dev waved at the sky, and the skyscrapers around them once more collapsed to a little patch of glitter on the ground. “Anyway,” Dev said, “at some point I’ll probably farm some of these out to Omnitopia staff and let them complete the work in whatever way seems best to them. Fostering, we call it—the standard approach to a Microcosm that’s been abandoned. It’s always a shame to waste.”
“Well, they won’t be entirely lost, then,” Delia said.
Dev turned to her and gave her a look that was far less neutral than the earlier one. “That’s not really the point,” he said. “Oh, sure, somebody will take Oz Prime or whatever it winds up being called and make a terrific scenario of it. And I’ll go spend some time there and probably enjoy it a lot. But it won’t be what I know I could have done if I’d just had the time. Sure, sometimes there’s nothing you can do. Life interferes in ways you don’t expect, and you have no choice but to lay something aside and move on. You start realizing that you have only so much time to work with, that you have to prioritize. It’s sad, but . . .”
He straightened up. “You just learn to cope with it,” Dev said. “I’ve got a lot of people expecting me to spend my time to my best advantage so that they get their paychecks on time. But all the same,” and he turned and looked around, so that when Delia’s eyes got used to the dark again she could see that there were hundreds of these little scraps of worlds lying about on that dark plain. “This is what I see behind my eyes, a lot of nights, when I’m trying to get to sleep . . . the worlds I didn’t have time for, and probably won’t have time for later. Hence the name of the Microcosm. Yeah,” he said, catching Delia’s look of surprise, “the rumor’s true. This is my Microcosm, the place I keep visiting even though I have a hundred and twenty-one ‘real’ universes of my own to play with already.” He looked around him with an expression of strange sorrow.
“Does anyone else know about this?” Delia said. “Your staff?”
Dev didn’t answer instantly. He looked distracted, though apparently not due to anything the Little Bird had told him—it had put its head under its luminous wing and was apparently asleep. “I think a couple of them suspect,” he said. “Maybe they even suspect what’s here. But those people haven’t pressed the point either.” She looked at Dev in the dimness and got a glimpse of an unusually grim smile. “What profits it a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?”
Delia didn’t say a
nything. It was always possible that this was more of what she’d earlier started to refer to as the Devvier-Than-Thou act, pure PR meant to emphasize how Nice he was. Yet at the same time, he’d had a point before, little as Delia liked to admit it. If he genuinely did feel sad about the lost opportunities in his life—which realistically was still possible, eighth richest man in the world or not—no, wait, he was seventh now, wasn’t he—who would believe him if he told them? I could be doing him a disservice.
But that’s why I came here to begin with. Who am I fooling?
“Anyway,” Dev said, “this was a whim; I haven’t had time to even set foot in here for weeks. Let’s move on. System management?”
“Here, Dev,” said the control voice out of the air around them.
“Open us a gate, please.”
“What world, Dev?”
“Tangaran. With an abstention for me and my guest, please.”
“Done, Dev. Please enter.”
The lintels of a stone trilithon materialized first, and then the silver mist between them. It swirled and vanished to reveal a bright morning sky, though the color of it was strange—more greenish than anything else. In the distance under that sky, green fields spread to the horizon.
“You’ll have fun with this one,” Dev said, and stepped through. Delia went after him and found herself—
—in the midst of a pitched battle. All around them, hulking hairy apelike creatures in rivet-studded leather breastplates were bashing on more apelike creatures in metal helmets and battered armor. As one pair of the battling creatures plunged right at her and Dev, Delia couldn’t help herself: she let out a little shriek and ducked away—
Not that it mattered, because the creatures passed right through her and Dev as if they were dreams or ghosts. Furious at herself, Delia straightened up and looked around the battlefield, where hundreds and hundreds more of the ape creatures were chasing each other across the trampled and bloodied landscape in small and large bands. “Just so you know,” Dev said, “no one here cares about how you reacted, because Tangaran is a Microcosm where people come to unlearn their initial freaked-out reactions to being in a battle situation. Everybody who comes here to fight is doing so with an eye to helping people who have trouble with virtual fighting get past it.”
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