by Diane Duane
“Not as yet,” Milla said. “Where will you be heading next?”
“The Castle office,” Dev said. “I want to see what else has come up in the analysis of last night’s logs.” He yawned and went to refill his coffee mug. “Tell all the usual suspects that I’m conscious again, and they should call me the minute anything starts happening.”
“Will do.” She gathered up her own paperwork and tablet computer and headed for the door.
“Milla—”
She paused, looking back at him. “Mr. Logan?”
“Were you in the fight last night?”
Milla shrugged, nodded. “I consulted a little,” she said. “The financial security teams wanted as many people watchdogging the backdoor logs to the banking routines as they could find.”
“ ‘Consulted,’ ” Dev said, and smiled. “You mean you were bashing somebody with a club.”
Milla hesitated, then grinned. “It’s good to express your aggressiveness every now and then,” she said. “I’m told you did some of that too. Before they had to rescue you.”
“Ouch,” Dev said.
“I’ll be in the Castle office with Frank in two hours,” Milla said, “so you can offload whatever scheduled stuff on us that you want. When the second wave comes, we know where you’ll want to be. But this time make sure security has you covered, okay? It gives the rest of us one less thing to worry about.”
Dev sighed. “My life,” he said, “is completely controlled by women.”
“And look where you are,” Milla said. “Mister Seventh. Seems mean-spirited to complain.”
“Go away now,” Dev said, “and let me soak up some more of this caffeine.”
Milla headed out. Shortly thereafter so did Dev, making a much briefer stop with Lola than he would have liked, but at least Mirabel was with her, helping Poppy get her dressed and get her breakfast into her. “Ice cream!” Lola shouted after him as Dev made his way out of her suite, and behind him he could hear Mirabel saying, “Yes, Daddy’ll come have ice cream with you later, won’t that be fun, now where’s your other shoe?”
Dev sighed and made his way over to the upstairs office on the other side of the Castle. Once inside he paused to look at the big display, which was showing an image of some remote, cool alpine valley with snowy mountains towering over it, though the pines and the alp they overhung were still green. That’s just about what I want right now, Dev thought. If I could just get on a plane without being seen and vanish into a landscape like that . . .
But escape was for other people. He sighed and made his way over to his desk, which had a pile of printed reports on it—material that Milla had left for him. Dev flipped through them briefly, then pushed them aside, for his thoughts were much more in the virtual world than the concrete one. He went straight to his login cubicle, sat himself down, and let the chair mold to him and the cubicle close, then put on the eyecups and made his way into the virtual version of the office.
The air was thickly hung with windows and documents, almost all of them flashing or throbbing with varying levels of urgency. One collection of yellow-burning e-mails looked more like a window shade pulled down all the way, there were so many sequential mails attached to the letter-sized top sheet, the first message in the thread.
Dev went over to it and yanked at the top corner of the pane of light representing the topmost message. Immediately the whole stack undid itself and spread itself out on the air, becoming an assortment of cover letters, images of employees who started talking to him, and spills of code that separated themselves out into the air and started scrolling down in their own little windows. “Whoa, whoa, everything freeze!” Dev said, and everything did.
He started working his way through the stack. Sure enough, they were all messages from the shuntspace people and had been left for him in the middle of the night, every one of them going on at length about code malfunctions—or at least the senders thought they were code malfunctions—in the shuntspace routines during the attack the day before. Dev pulled over a couple of the attachment windows and briefly dipped into some of the code to try to see what they were all talking about, but he didn’t know this code anywhere near as well as he knew the CO routines, and finally just shook his head. Easier to get them to tell me what they think I need to know . . .
He waved the stack of correspondence back together into one in-air pile and then reached out to poke the e-mail address on the topmost copy: [email protected]. “System management?” he said.
“Here, Dev. Giorgio’s present physical location is the basement infraconferencing suite. His virtual location is the second floor meeting center in the virtual twin of the Secure Alternate Environments Group building.”
“Thanks. Open me a door, please.”
In front of him, the air appeared to go frosted, as if it were a pane of glass. The “glass” then slid sideways to reveal a large green-carpeted space, brightly lit. Dev stepped through.
On the far side of the door he had to pause and glance around, as he hadn’t come out where he thought he would. His intention had been to pop out right in Giorgio’s team’s virtual meeting space. But someone had apparently specified that accesses to that space should be redirected. Dev found himself standing on the lawn that lay between the road and the paved terrace and Moorish-arcaded entrance of the stucco and tile building that its inhabitants called “the Palaces of the Princes of Hell.” But the lawn stretched from where Dev stood to the horizon: there was no other Omnitopian building in sight anywhere. And over the building that he could see, something new had been erected.
Dev stood there a moment and took in the newest evidence that his shuntspace crowd was a law unto itself. Keeping the naughtier Omnitopia players in the dark and well fed with manure byproducts often wore on them. As a result they tended to act up, or out, in ways that other Omnitopia employees didn’t, so discovering that they had erected a triumphal arch at the gateway to their virtual space was merely a matter for amusement. It really was a spectacular construction, pure white marble, intricately carved, and five hundred feet high at least. Across its great lintel was graven in very perfect Trajan Roman letters the first part of the ancient warning:
FACILE DESCENSUS AVERNO
“It’s easy to get down into Hell . . .” Dev chuckled to himself, realizing they were reminding him of another, older joke. He walked forward under the triumphal arch, toward the portico leading to the main door of the Palace. Above the door was the space in which some wit three years ago had written (in beautifully drafted archaic Latin) that other famous Dantean quote, ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. Having seen this apparition and been reduced to guffaws on the morning it turned up, Dev had Frank send the building maintenance guys around to formally incorporate the writing into the arch. However, his jokey threat to make the inhabitants of the palace pay for the alteration had resulted in six hundred sixty-six dollars and sixty-six cents’ worth of nickels and dimes (and six pennies) being dumped on the lawn outside Castle Dev by a private contractor who found himself unable to identify the culprits because they had also paid him in nickels and dimes (and six pennies). All Dev could do then was have Frank arrange for a cleanup crew, find out which of the city’s charities was best set up to deal with vast numbers of nickels and dimes (it turned out to be the Archdiocese of Phoenix), and make a note to schedule all the shuntspace management for salary reviews.
Dev now glanced up at the writing as he went in the door, shook his head, and crossed the wide tiled lobby, making for the broad staircase at the back. This version of the building was identical to the real one except for one significant point: it was always night here. As he went up the stairs and glanced out the window overlooking the first landing, a big orange half moon hung high in the darkness over the palm trees out back. Control issues, Dev thought as he turned to go up the next flight of stairs. Where else would these people ever have kept a job if we hadn’t made one for them? But there were some folks for whose sake it was
worth not complaining too much about the occasional breach of corporate discipline, even discipline as relaxed as Omnitopia’s.
On the second floor Dev came out at the top of the landing and glanced around. The work and meeting space enclosed here was typically Omnitopian in its casual structure, though it was ten times the size of the space inside the real building: football could have been played here. Couches and chairs and desks were scattered across the carpeted acreage, with grown-up toys scattered around too: a basketball hoop mounted on the nearest wall before it curved off into the middle distance, somebody’s exercise bicycle off to one side, a treadmill by the far wall, a couple of game platforms on either side of a 3-D projection display, a very beat up DanceRug set into the carpet. Closer to the center of the space was a circle of twelve full-body Game Sieges, each one paired up with an isolation helm equipped with the fanciest version of the RealFeel interface. It was a joke or comment of some kind that this virtual space contained the chairs at all: they’d hardly be needed here. But no one sat in any of the chairs, and the huge staging space inside the circle was empty.
Here and there around the space were signs that the place had been suffering an infestation of old-style coders. Junk food wrappers, pizza boxes, and drinks cups with bendy straws were piled up in pyramidal heaps. Close by where Dev was standing, a virtual version of one of those little disk-shaped self-propelled vacuum cleaners was bumping the curve of its “head” side repeatedly against the nearest wall in a manner suggesting that its sensors had been addled by the sight of more garbage than it could deal with. From the poor little vacuum came a tiny sound of disconsolate weeping. It was the only sound, however; the space was empty of anyone human.
Dev shook his head and started strolling around looking for more virtual doors. “Hello?” he said. “Anybody home?”
Nothing. He wandered farther into the space, pausing by one of the desks. Above it hung a series of airscreens full of code: some of this looked like what he’d seen in his office. “Saw your new lawn ornament,” Dev said to the space in general. “What, the thing with all the garden gnomes last month wasn’t enough?”
He turned away from the screens and looked around again, then went over to the unhappy little vacuum cleaner and bent over it, picking it up. The weeping faded down somewhat, replaced by soft whimpering. “You guys,” Dev said as he glanced around, petting the vacuum, “seriously, you should pick up in here a little. Somebody might think you were slobs or something—”
Without warning, somebody walked backward out of the air into the middle of the space: a petite young African American woman in a denim skirt, tank top, Day- Glo pink sneakers, and a boom-mike headset. She was talking to someone in another part of the floor’s virtual work area. “No, what did you think I meant?” she was saying. “I told you, there were at least ten references to that address prepended to the strings—”
Dev cleared his throat. The young woman looked over at him in shock. Then she yelled through the open air-door, “Hey, he’s here! Giorgio? Where are those guys, get them in here, tell them to load their stuff up, Dev’s here!”
She waved a hand at the space. The garbage piles vanished, along with all the virtual furniture, and the circle of chairs relocated themselves almost out to the walls. A breath later, the ceiling vanished and the space in the middle of the vast floor was instantly filled by a ghostly version of the Code Forest. Some of the trees were half-hidden by translucent hovering code windows.
The young woman headed over to Dev. In the wake of the change in the space, she was now wearing a glowing virtual sticky-tag of the HELLO, MY NAME IS type that had “Darlene” scribbled on it in a big loopy hand. “You usually go around hijacking people’s domestic appliances, Boss?” she said.
Dev offered her the vacuum. It was sniffling. “When they’re in distress.”
Unimpressed, she took it from him, turned it over, checked all its wheels, and put it down. It zipped away across the floor. “Giorgio taught him to do that,” she said. “Playing for sympathy. Giorgio does it too, when one of us sees something he didn’t see first. Which is what happened tonight after the attack.”
“Tonight?”
Darlene rubbed her face as, behind her, people started pouring out of the door in the air. “Last night,” she said. “Eight hours ago. Whatever. Sorry, Boss, the shunts were full of craziness from around the time the attack started, and we’ve spent all night trying to pin down what it was.”
A crowd of eight or ten young men came out through the air-door. “Sorry, Boss,” said the foremost of them, whose tag said ROBERT, “we were off looking at a shuntspace.”
“Which one?” Dev said.
“Pandora,” said one of the group behind him. “That’s where the anomalies started spreading from,” said another. “Willowisp first, then some of the Microcosms in the nearby server structure. But that constellation was noncontiguous—”
“Whoa,” said a deep voice at the back of the group. “Let’s take it from the top, okay?” And the tall thin shape of Giorgio Falcone pushed through the crowd. Giorgio was yet another hire associated with Tau’s bad-boy university period, as rough around the edges as Tau was polished—very much in the style of the T-shirted, torn-jeans geek archetype, with eyes red from late-night coding and fingers yellow from chain-gobbling bags of Cheetos. But Giorgio’s spiky black hair and single tasteful nose ring lent his punk-European air a domesticated quality.
“Let’s sit down and you can all tell me what these mails were about,” Dev said.
“Sofas,” Giorgio said, and the sofas that had banished themselves to the far sides of the room now slid back and positioned themselves around the edges of the small crowd of intense people that had formed around Dev. Everybody sat.
“First of all,” Dev said, “make sure you copy all this to Tau, okay?”
“The system’s been logging every word any of us have said to anybody since last night,” Giorgio said, “and we’re not about to stop now. We started getting a lot of—I wouldn’t call them spurious logins into the shuntspaces, but ingresses of low-volume players, users who had no reason to be shunted because they mostly hadn’t been in the system in terms of total play-time for long enough to have misbehaved that badly. A whole lot of them started getting pushed in around six thirty, seven. It set off our alarms, because we never get so many ingresses in such a short period.”
“How many?” Dev said.
“Thousands,” said Darlene, who had flopped down by Dev on the next couch over.
“She’s understating,” Giorgio said. “Ten thousand, maybe fifteen, in the first wave. Our shunt handling systems started creaking under the strain, so we had to get in there ourselves and shore them up. And when we’d done that, the traffic leveled off a little—then started increasing again. Almost as if somebody’d noticed that we’d compensated. But by then we began to have enough spare time to track the ingresses back to the source. And guess what was pushing them in on us?”
“The CO routines,” said about half the group in chorus.
Dev rubbed his eyes. “Oh, God, not more Item Three stuff! People, Tau and I had a run at that issue last night before the balloon went up. And we came up empty.”
“I don’t think this had anything to do with Item Three,” Giorgio said. “If by that you mean the same thing that’s been causing these weird little glitches and outages all over with the CO’s digital fingerprints on them. This was a lot less random. As far as we can tell, the CO started acting as if the rogue logins were straightforward in-game cheats, and it shoved the first couple waves of them into the shuntspaces. Pandora was the first one to start showing those results—”
“Pandora—like Pastorale—being one of the ’cosms seriously threatened last night,” Dev said.
Giorgio nodded. “Exactly. Look. System?”
“Yo!”
Dev blinked at the syntax. “Snapshot, please, of the schematic of Pandora shuntspace from nineteen thirty.”
“Gotcha.�
��
Around the circle of sofas, a vast hollow cylinder of translucent green fire shot up toward the sky: the room’s skydomelike ceiling obligingly got out of the way as the cylinder narrowed and dimpled out into rapidly extruding branch structures nearer its distant top. The inside of the cylinder was sheeted with a myriad of scrolling screenfuls of code text, a thin skin of water. Here and there the flow of code ran faster than in other places, downsliding patches of code overlapping one another, pausing in their movement inside the trunk of the virtual tree, then slipping away horizontally or sliding up inside the tree again. Some hundreds of the codescreens nearest the viewers in the circle could be seen to be edged with a hot process blue. “Gamegenerated characters?” Dev said.
“That’s right,” Giorgio said. “We have about three thousand of them working in Pandora right now. Yesterday morning there were fifteen hundred and sixty-three cheaters resident.” He pointed at various other patches ascending or descending gently along the inner skin of the Macrocosm’s virtual structure: these scraps of code were edged in red. “Interactions were perfectly normal: the cheaters don’t have a clue—we interact with a sampling of them every day to make sure. But then—watch this. System? Display the time- elapsed imagery we were examining an hour ago.”
“Displaying,” said the system. Suddenly the sliding patchwork of interacting program fragments began to be obscured by more and more patches appearing. These paler patches, a leprous green-white, began overlaying all the others more and more quickly until the underlying, normal login traffic could hardly be seen at all. Soon they were so thick on the inner surface that it had gone almost entirely green-white.
“Once they got into the shuntspace,” said Giorgio, “the user logins cloned themselves into multiple fake accounts and started trying to exit the ’cosm in the usual way, via the local Ring and out into Telekil. We peeled off a few of them and took them apart—”
Giorgio pointed at one side of the tree’s interior, and one of the patches peeled itself away and sailed over to him. Giorgio caught it out of the air and stretched it wider and longer. In his hands it became dark lettering streaming down over a pale green-white background. He passed it over to Dev.
