Omnitopia: Dawn

by Diane Duane

  After that, if (as all the PR made it seem) Dev was big enough of soul to admit his error and accept his new position as Phil’s junior partner, then all would be forgiven, and a new start could be made. But first there had to be the admission that Dev had lost, and Phil had won. First there had to be that vital understanding on Dev’s part that you could not go it alone . . . for that way lay tragedy.

  Phil typed briefly on the black glass, wiping the computer’s logs, instructing the anonymizer to handle and reroute any further communications that came in appropriately. That he stood up and headed for the door. “Brandy,” he called.

  “Yes, Mr. Sorenson?”

  “Have the car brought around. I’ll be down in five minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And it’ll be a new beginning, Phil thought as he headed around the corner of the walkway again, making for his office doors. A new beginning for both of us. I just hope he has the sense to avail himself of the opportunity.

  Otherwise . . .

  And the doors closed behind him.

  The room was windowless, its walls painted in institutional beige well ornamented with brown and yellow Scotch-tape marks, and the air-conditioning was broken; but nobody working there minded in the slightest. In fact, Pyotr thought as he looked across the tightly-packed logjam of secondhand steeltop desks, it was a question how many of them even noticed. All heads were down, all eyes stared into screens—at least, all the eyes of those who were using them in non-virtual ways. Yes, the place did presently smell rather like a comic book store on a ripe summer afternoon, but most computer facilities got to smell like that eventually. And within the next week or so, no one would care how the place smelled, as the present inhabitants would never have to come back to it again.

  Off in the corner was the circle of VR chairs, every one occupied. There was always some fighting over these, but that too would stop quite soon. Pyotr looked absently at his watch, comparing its calendar against the one in his head. Bug out time, he thought, will be in no less than forty-eight hours, no more than seventy-two . . . and not a moment too soon. He would be one of the first out the door, once he’d made sure that the various servers scattered around the globe were each running the complex set of custom scripting that he had hand-carried to each one and privately hand-installed.

  Pyotr started ambling around the desks, often turning sideways and sidling between chair and chair, because there was no other way to get around. Guys and girls were jammed cheek by jowl as they made contact with Topers all over the planet, passing them information, making sure that they were clear on their own timings and what their role was in this operation. The sheer number of Topers they were dealing with had seemed daunting at first, but automated scripting for login and logout management had made at least that part of the process manageable. This was—Pyotr checked his watch again, comparing it against the time sheet in his head—the second to last rolling watch of operators. The next four- hour watch would turn up in about three hours; these guys would log out, their replacements would log in and the last five or six thousand remote proxies would be verified, tied into the network, and briefly awakened, then would have their “deadfall” scripts activated and be shut down again.

  I can’t believe we’re finally almost done with this, Pyotr thought. The sheer size of the vast pile of zombie-management scutwork had been daunting, but its conquest had become the core of this whole operation. Pyotr had been astonished, when he’d first started trying to assess the plan’s viability, how very many thousands of people were willing to cheat on a game, or in it, when offered a chance. Everybody wants something for nothing, Pyotr thought. So many people absolutely believe that it’s the universe’s business to give them stuff for free—hundreds of thousands of people. Millions. The master plan he’d devised was absolutely dependent on this vital feature of human nature . . . and so far, human nature had done nothing to disappoint. Pyotr was betting that things would keep going that way.

  Afterward, of course, some of the players in this vast game would discover that other universal human principles were also operating: especially the one that said There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Some hundreds of thousands of would-be cheaters would satisfy an important part of this plan, involving the concept that it was expedient that every now and then some one person should be sacrificed for the greater good. Naturally this meant Pyotr’s greater good, and that of his various lieutenants, many of them purposefully nameless, who’d worked so hard on this project for the better part of a year and a half. As for the unfortunate percentage who had been selected to take the fall in the aftermath of the Venture’s execution, Pyotr spent no more time thinking about them than necessary. Their fate would be like a scene from a film that he’d seen in his youth in the single cinema of his gray and desperately run-down suburb of Kiev. Pyotr remembered there had been troika-drawn sledges fleeing across the hard snow of winter, the bells on the harness of the three-horse hitch ringing shrill and frantic in an ineffective attempt to scare the wolves away. The sledges were heavily laden with people—nobles and desperate peasants—and the wolves, as always, were coming up fast behind. So for the driver, and the people who were most at risk in the flight, there was now the usual problem: how to keep from getting caught?

  In the movies, it had been simple enough. Every now and then you threw a peasant overboard to slow down the wolves. The wolves, not knowing any better, immediately relapsed into instinctive behavior and stopped to rip the poor soul apart. But this was entirely satisfactory for the other people on the sledge, because by the time the wolves had finished quarreling over the rags and tags lying around on the bloody snow, the sledge was way ahead.

  There were a lot of wolves out in the cold hard world who would look very much askance at the Venture that Pyotr was running here. But fortunately there were lots of peasants to distract the wolves with. Pyotr glanced around the room. None of this lot would fit that description, of course. Their position relatively high up the food chain of this scam was protecting them—and the chance that if sacrificed, one or more of them might be able to figure out what they had actually been doing, and thus set the wolves on Pyotr’s or his closest colleagues’ trail. But further down the food chain, many were about to be sacrificed in a process that, depending on the zeal of some countries’ police departments, might well get as bloody and painful as what happened atop one of those more jungly and non- foodish pyramids a long time ago and an ocean or so away.

  Pyotr checked his watch one last time and wandered to the far end of the room. There one desk was distinguished by having a whole meter of clear space all around it. Behind that desk, looking at three flat panel monitors at once, was George. George was dark and curly-haired and sounded like some kind of midlands Brit or other, though his docs said he’d most recently been living in Barbados. How or why he’d come there Pyotr had never inquired, filing George’s business (along with that of most of his other senior colleagues of the Venture’s Inner Ring) under “Don’t Need to Know At All.” It was all too easy to know too much about one or another of your colleagues on this job, especially if by bad luck law enforcement caught one of them—or you.

  Now Pyotr came around the back of George’s desk and looked casually at his three monitors. One of them featured a view into some Omnitopian virtual interior strong on stainless steel; one was scrolling down a long block of relatively short lines of text; and one was showing a chat window, the log of the last message from one of their sponsors.

  George now stretched, leaned back, looked over his shoulder at Pyotr. “He sounds a little cranky here,” he said, indicating the chat window.

  Pyotr shrugged, reading down the logged conversation. “The prerogative of a running-dog capitalist entrepreneurial prat,” he said. “Wasn’t going to rock the boat by arguing with him. He doesn’t like the figures, tough. Not gonna let him micromanage me. All the other clients like the numbers just fine.”

  George just nodded and turned his attenti
on back to the screen. This particular client would be shocked to find that anyone else was funding this particular effort: he took it so very personally. But then all of their clients did. As a result, great care had been taken to make sure that none of them knew others were involved, or that the risk of the Venture as a whole was being distributed in more ways than any of them expected. Pyotr shifted his attention to the middle monitor. “What is that?” he said.

  “Text Microcosm,” George said, leaning in to look at it again. “Million Monkeys. They’re fanficcing Macbeth.”

  “Text?” Pyotr said, shaking his head. He thought he’d heard about nearly everything that had to do with Omnitopia, but this was a new one on him. “You mean there are no visuals at all? No gameplay?”

  “They are playing,” George said. “They’re rewriting Shakespeare in real time. In iambic pentameter.”

  The concept startled Pyotr. He could only imagine the reaction of his university literature teacher to such an idea: the bug-eyed apoplectic spasm that would follow could have put him in the hospital. “They think they can do Shakespeare better than Shakespeare did?”

  George grinned. It was a goofy look, one Pyotr didn’t see often during business hours here, for George was mostly very serious. “Some people,” he said, “think really well of themselves. It’s fun to watch.” He yawned. “And it’s a gas to stick my nose in occasionally and correct their scansion. It drives them nuts.”

  Pyotr leaned against the wall and rubbed his eyes. “All right,” he said. “So. Cranky magnates and idiot monkeys, and—” He peered at the first monitor. “Is that a kitchen?”

  George nodded. “There’s a worldwide cooking competition going on in Le Jeux de l’Escoffier,” he said. “It was just stopped by one of the adjudicators. Some players are claiming that someone’s gotten into the game software and sabotaged the rules governing the physics of hollandaise.”

  Pyotr rolled this idea around his mind and then pushed it aside, as it was even stranger than the idea of rewriting Shakespeare. “The fact that you’re looking at all this stuff now,” he said, “suggests that you’ve got an answer for the question I asked you two hours ago. So when do we go?”

  “We could go right now,” said George. “We’re ready.”

  Pyotr stood there and weighed the advantages and disadvantages of that versus the “go” times they had been predicting all day. The basic problem was striking the right balance between the desire for haste and the desire to execute their plan without introducing too many unwanted variables and uncertainties.

  But the sooner the better, Pyotr thought. The more quickly we move, the less prepared Omnitopia will be. They weren’t stupid people over there. They had to have picked up some hints of what was about to happen to them, regardless of the care that Pyotr and his colleagues had taken to cover their tracks. And no organization, not even the Venture, could ever be guaranteed leak-free. So—the sooner we hit, the sooner we can start making our money, and the sooner we can finish up, close down, and vanish. Because no matter how well we’ve planned this, if it doesn’t go the way we said it was, we’re going to have some very angry, very powerful people after us. The more time we have to hide, the better I’ll like it.

  But if we jump too soon, too much before when we told the clients we would, they’ll start getting the idea we’re jerking them around. Not that we aren’t, of course . . . And this presented its own problems. The major corporate clients mostly believed what they were told about the Venture’s situations and timings, having little choice in the matter: their own intelligence sections had hit and bounced off the Collective’s security enough times that they’d all realized they had little choice but to accept what they were being told. Both the governmental clients had gone through the same exercise, but—being less inclined to take “no” for an answer—had then been allowed to establish moles here who were fed careful but believable and verifiable disinformation. These had finally led the governments involved to relax their vigilance, in both cases being blinded by their perception of themselves as too dangerous to monkey around with. Pyotr had gamed out their scenarios with particular enjoyment and had laid careful anonymous bets with gaming syndicates in Barbados and Las Vegas, the bets leveraged by his estimates of which government would wobble first and hardest, and how certain key stocks would move, especially the petrochemicals. But it’s still gaming. I prefer to be out of here and well hidden away where I can see how it all unfolds without having to make long explanations to clients who don’t understand that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

  George leaned back in his chair and laughed again. “It’s true what they say,” he said.

  “And what do they say?”

  “For honesty and that go- for-broke stick-to-it-iveness thing, hire Americans. For culture and good food, hire the French. For efficiency, hire the Swiss. But for good old- fashioned suspicion and the ability to effortlessly imagine six different kinds of backstabbing and their results, hire a Russian.”

  Pyotr shrugged, smiled. George was full of these little aphorisms. Sometimes they were even true. “And for boring clichéd proverbs,” he said, “hire a Brit.”

  “Even a cliché,” George said, “has an element of truth. Otherwise it wouldn’t survive as a cliché. So what about it?”

  Pyotr considered. Too early, and the corporates will get nervous that we’re going to cheat them somehow. Then someone might actually blow the whistle, regardless of the safeguards we’ve got in place. Not good. . . . Wait too long, though, and we might misfire. The thought that Omnitopia might already have sussed out what they were up to and was going to able to shut out more of the attacking servers with every passing second, wouldn’t let Pyotr be. He felt like a man standing in a burning building . . . and what was burning was money: his money. So. Just rearranging the first wave of bot execution times, the ones that’re best masked . . . Those would be the million-plus zombie computers around the world that were tasked to ensure that the Collective’s own “base” take from the Venture was securely skimmed off and socked away. This zombie-group’s business moved under cover of the normal automated nightly interbank wire transfer action that slid around the globe in an eight-time-zone-wide band every “night”—night being, in banking terms, a very relative thing. Many banks that should have known better were too wedded to the concept of banking hours and tended to do their big transfers in the local “middle of the night.” This left them too limited in their transfer randomization—two thirds of the day, you knew they weren’t sending anything, and rooting out their traffic pattern in the remaining third was mostly a matter of computer processing power and patience.

  Under cover of the big burst of traffic that would come in Asia starting around Tokyo’s banking midnight—for all the biggest banks were routinely in a rush to get their transfers and reconciliations done before the net got clogged with their competitors’ bandwidth usage—the King Zombies, the Collective’s privately-tasked money-stealing machines, would log into Omnitopia’s Asian and European servers. When they were in, they would make use of a large range of clandestinely purchased “preferred access” network backdoors to gain entrance to the game’s master accounting program. The King Zombie computers would then initiate a complex series of transactions exploiting a very secret and heretofore unnoticed loophole in the Omnitopia game gold accounting routines—one sold to the Collective months back by a perceptive but unlucky Omnitopia employee who’d been drummed out of master auditing after a sexual harassment suit. The Zombies would be asking the accounting program to value the Venture’s previously accrued gold for withdrawal to “player” bank accounts—but due to the incorrectly-written accounting routine, the valuation would get stuck in a programming loop and accidentally increase the amount of gold in question by a factor of nearly a hundred. The withdrawal would then be made on the revalued amount, but the preloop accounting assessment would leave the Omnitopia accounting system thinking it had only disbursed the uninflated amount.
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  This whole process would take the flock of King Zombie computers 14.66 minutes. Then the King Zombies would wipe their own tracks out of the accounting routines and simply vanish from Omnitopia’s logs as if they had never been there. Later, when their transfers to many other banking systems around the world were complete, the King Zombie machines would erase their own hard drives using best-practice triple-overwrite runs of the type preferred by the NSA, and finally voltage-shock the drives into catastrophic crashes. The custom boards installed in these machines to override the drive controllers and run these routines would then fry themselves.

  A while before then, somewhere in Omnitopia, the alarms would start going off. What was uncertain was how quickly, and with what level of understanding of what had provoked them. The Conscientious Objector algorithm was the Collective’s greatest fear in this business. All they could rely on was that the CO was mostly oriented toward watching the ways players would cheat, and was not as strong in accounting as it might have been were the company more oriented toward protecting its money than protecting its gameplay. Everything else had to be about people: what people would notice was happening, how fast they would notice it, and where, and when.

  But the longer they took, the better, because that would be collateral damage time for all the eagerly waiting clients, and bonus time for the Collective itself. Most of the clients simply wanted to hurt Omnitopia for one reason or another—political, social, personal—and didn’t care about the money all that much except as a symbol for pain inflicted in that most basic corporate/international sense, the fiduciary. The clients wanted the company to fail, or people in it to be hurt or get fired, or stock markets to respond in specific ways to the financial damage. That blinded all the corporate and national clients a bit, and made things easier for the Collective. Yes, the clients would get their money—at least, what they would consider significant proportions of it—always masked by errors in reckoning carefully introduced by the Collective itself. That skim stayed home and would be divvied up among those in this little windowless room and the other two like it who’d done the actual work: part of their achievement bonus.