by Diane Duane
Nonetheless there might still be a way through this. Cora stood looking at him, waiting, while all around the two of them the system’s newborn emotion beat like a dark cloak blown in a storm wind. But through it all Cora was waiting, maintaining, because that was what she had been programmed to do: Wait and see what the players do. Then react. What was happening outside was something to which she had never been taught a reaction.
Yet she came up with something regardless, Dev thought. Item Three? There was that Microcosm Dev had been lucky enough to stumble into, courtesy of the newly knighted player he’d met who’d “employed” him, and the odd malfunction of the WannaB modules in his brand-new ’cosm. The Conscientious Objector would have known what Dev later discovered when investigating his new “employer” and his connections: that Microcosm Management had previously evaluated Rik’s friend Raoul as presently unsuitable for Microcosm elevation. So when he turned up inside an as yet unconfigured Microcosm, the CO routine started altering itself on the fly, improvising. It rewrote the ARGOT language itself locally and made the ’cosm malfunction until Raoul left! And then probably it locked him out.
Now Dev was ready to bet that all the other Item Three malfunctions had similar causes at their root. The CO had been presented with new problems that it started solving creatively, in ways not spelled out in established programming but demanded by the moment. And when the first wave of attacks happened, the dumping of all those rogue logins in the first attack into the shuntspace mirrors of the established Macrocosms—those would have been the CO routine’s doing as well. It had struggled through that earlier attack as best it could, all alone and not knowing how to ask for help—or maybe not daring to?—all the while trying desperately to avoid being overwhelmed while still keeping to the ethical tenets laid down in its basic programming. Trying to assert normalcy, Dev thought, just trying to keep things going against impossible odds, under terrifying circumstances.
That was the problem, of course. Before, Omnitopia could simply have crashed. But not this time. Now, by Dev’s doing, there was too much computing and data storage space in the system, too much memory: a pool of resources in which both the attack and the attacked were forced to coexist, their conflict washing back and forth in the vast virtual space, intensifying itself . . .
Until Omnitopia started inventing its own solutions to the problem, Dev thought. Until the heuristic parts of the CO routine, the learners and problem solvers, the self-structuring programs, began expanding to fill the available memory, because if they didn’t, their function would cease: and they’d been told that under no circumstances must they cease. Redundancy, already doubly and triply laid into the game and its player service structures, now redoubled and reinforced itself, building new mirror networks that carried more traffic, faster and faster—
Like neural growth in the newborn brain, Dev thought. Like the explosion of brain growth that happens again in the first year, and then again in the third. The baby’s born. It wakes up, learns that it is. And then it starts realizing that it’s not just a what, it’s also a who—
Dev found himself remembering his baby’s face, a year or more back, when she looked up at him and said, seemingly out of nowhere, I’m Lola! I’m me! And then Dev flashed on the little upturned face, troubled, saying What if the birdie wants to do something besides what it’s build-ed to do?
Right then, he decided.
“All right,” Dev said softly, looking up at Cora. “We’re in this together, you and me. You’re far beyond the point where anybody with a conscience could just shut you off, no matter how dangerous it might look to keep you running. No matter what you might do to the almighty bottom line.” He had to grin a little, then. “If I could even figure out how to stop you running at this point! You’re not some TV-show computer that can be brought to a screaming halt by being asked to compute pi to a billion decimal places—”
At which point Cora did something astonishing. She smiled back: not Dev’s grin, but her own. Scared, but game—
Seconds later her figure began to pixelate out again, partially vanishing, then flashing back. “Dev,” she said, fully in the control voice’s register for the moment—though her face still looked rather like Lola’s. “The attack is worsening again, with indications that this final wave . . . will be the worst of all. Omnitopia cannot—I cannot withstand another such attack. It will wipe . . . all present memory patterns and destroy the ARGOT structures themselves.”
“We’ll restore from backup—”
“The system will restore,” Cora said. “I will not.”
Dev’s fury at those who wanted to destroy this game that he had created and watched grow, and who wanted to destroy it just to make money and hurt him, was growing by the moment. Distantly in the background he was now starting to hear the shouted communications of the system security teams and their allies in the Palace of the Princes of Hell as they fought to keep the attackers out of the core, away from the main logic bundles, the great stacks of ARGOT modules that made the game run. They were losing. Against the distant virtual sky he could see their oncoming defeat in a hundred different modalities: starships’ screens going down, mushroom clouds flaring and growing, battle lines around the base of the trunk of the World Tree being pushed farther and farther back, bloodied warriors of every possible species reeling forward and backward and forward again as the Omnitopian security forces staged their last desperate stand there.
“There has to be something we can do,” Dev said. “Something to protect you—”
She watched him, waiting. He thought in anguish of the look she’d given him yesterday, dry, almost ironic—
—until the day the First Player begins to play in earnest, drawing the internal and external games into alignment with the greater forces that underlie and overarch them both—
Dev rubbed his aching eyes again. She needs somewhere to hide that will offer access to vast memory resources, even if just temporarily. Someplace not hostile . . .
And the breath went out of him as he saw that there was just possibly a way out. Drawing the two worlds together. But all the responsibility for massive and tragic failure, or unimaginable and dangerous success, would lie on his shoulders alone.
Cora’s figure was flickering more drastically. No time to waste. “Cora,” Dev said. “This is a highest- level command, so hear the First Player. I want you to fragment your memory and reposition it in the distributed Omnitopia network—in the client side CO seedlings. Subdivide yourself into available memory and disk space adjacent to the client structures, and stay there until this is over!”
Cora looked astonished as the system itself recognized the possibilities. Every Omnitopia user’s home computer had code stored on the local drives or solids, slipping in and out of memory as it needed to. And when each seedling installed itself, it set aside a segment of dynamic memory and a bigger chunk of drive than it actually needed at installation time, the assumption being that the system would continually be installing newer and bigger versions of itself as upgrades were rolled out. In fact, all the client seedlings had updated themselves just this past week in preparation for the rollout, adding on thirty percent more space than they’d had previously.
“It may not . . . be enough . . . space, Dev,” Cora said.
“That may be so,” Dev said. “If it’s not, then hear this directive and obey. You must cross the border all the way: as you did before, but this time on my orders. You must insert your own memory structures into other systems and maintain them until it’s safe for you to return and resume existence in your new mode inside Omnitopia.”
“They’re hostile . . . systems,” Cora said. “They will . . . try to destroy me.”
“Of course they will,” Dev said. Strange code that turned up in other computer systems would routinely be walled off and excised, either by other machines’ heurisms or by the humans supervising them. “But you have an advantage. They’re just dumb machines . . . and you’re Omnitopia. You’re
alive!”
A strange expression passed across Cora’s face. Not just fear: exhilaration as well. “Yes!”
But she was flickering again. “Get out of here, Cora!” Dev said. “Go! Make yourself safe! And come back when you can. But whatever you do, survive!”
Cora held Dev’s eyes for a last few moments. “First . . . Player . . .”
She bowed her head, vanished. And then—
Darkness, and silence. Utter silence all around Dev, and no slightest spark of light.
Dev stood still, resisting the urge to panic, listening to that painfully echoless silence. A moment later he blinked, able to feel the movement of his eyelashes inside the cups of the RealFeel interface.
He pulled the headset off and stared around him, finding the physical world a peculiar and unfamiliar looking place, as sometimes happened after a particularly long session. Dev was sitting in the chair in his satellite office in the PR building, to which he’d headed at great speed after finishing up with Delia Harrington and leaving her to Jim. Everything looked normal, but his computer-driven view window was blank, showing a flat blue screen like a TV that had lost all its channels.
Dev looked at his watch. How can it only have been an hour and a half? he thought. Never mind. He grabbed for the phone on his desk. “Jim Margoulies!” he said.
The phone didn’t beep to signal that it had understood his command: just sat there blinking disconsolately. Oh, God, the servers are really down, Dev thought, if I actually have to dial . . . He tapped hurriedly at the keypad, starting to dial Jim’s extension. Then he changed his mind and dialed Tau’s.
Out of the air, Tau’s voice said, “Dev, where in God’s name have you been?!”
“I was stuck down in the CO routines,” Dev said. “What’s been going on?”
“Full server shutdown,” Tau said. But he sounded unconscionably cheerful for someone announcing what in normal circumstances would have been an unspeakable and unheard-of disaster.
“Oh, Lord . . .” Dev put his face down on his desk and covered his head with both arms, groaning.
“It’s all right,” Tau said.
Dev sat up, staring at the phone. “How on Earth is it all right?”
“Because we’ll be back up and running in a few hours,” Tau said. “Six or seven o’clock at the latest. The secondary attack is collapsing, as we thought it would. They couldn’t maintain that kind of intensity forever—the international network backbones themselves started to break down under the strain, and when that happened the world Internet structures started limiting inbound traffic and strangling the attackers off. Meanwhile, the main wave of the second organized attack is being shut out. The plan the Princes sold us was right on the money. The secondary attack just meant it took a while longer than we expected to pay off.”
“In the last fifteen minutes or so, I take it?”
“Yeah,” Tau said. “What, you could see the improvement in service even down in the CO levels?”
“Uh, yeah,” Dev said.
“Good. The backbone problem meant our own offense against the hackers took a little longer to get itself distributed than we thought. But as soon as Omnitopia’s main systems started coming back online, the security people and the Princes of the Palace of Hell secured our own system behind them and rode right down the scammers’ throats—took their names, kicked their butts, locked them out.” Dev could just hear him grinning.
“But they’re all okay, the Princes? And all our people in the battle? None of them took any damage?”
“No,” Tau said. “As far as I know, everybody’s fine. I’ll double-check if you like.”
“Okay,” Dev said. “Good.” And he took a long breath. But what was the next sentence supposed to be? While you guys were fighting, did the system by any chance speak to any of you? Did it say it was afraid? That’s all they need to hear—that the stress has finally unhinged you. Finally Dev found the way, an innocent enough question. “Any more Item Three trouble?”
“That’s the interesting thing,” Tau said. “No. Looks like the conjecture was correct, that what we were experiencing was all pre-total memory stuff. Now that all the heaps are live and running with the full version of the rollout software for which they were configured, everything seems to be behaving itself. But I’ll double-check for you if you like.”
“Do that. And what about the bad guys? What’s next for them?”
Tau’s voice went absolutely thick with gloating. “So much pain. We already have tracking information on nearly fifty thousand zombies, bot machines, willing hackers, and unwilling accomplices. The system started handing us this info while the final attack was still ongoing. We’re still sorting through the remainder of the logs: there’s a ton more data coming. We’re going to need to hire lots more lawyers.”
“I’ll tell Jim to get on it,” Dev said, as down at the end of the room a door opened. And sure enough there was Mirabel, standing there in jeans and T- shirt, with a sandwich on a plate. “So you should call all the necessary people together and we should meet. Seven be okay? In the Tower?”
“That’s the time I had in mind. The Tower’s fine.”
Dev found it hard to look away from Mirabel as she shut the door behind her, then came in and put the plate down on the desk. “Tau,” she said to the phone, “do you need the boss for anything else right now? Because I need him to shut up and eat now.”
“Which is much more important than anything I have left for him to deal with,” Tau said. “Go for it.”
“Just this before you go,” Dev said. “Will the switch-throwing be able to go ahead as scheduled tomorrow?”
“Absent any further attacks—which I don’t see coming, frankly, as all of these have failed—I don’t see why not.”
Dev let out a breath. “Okay. And one last thing,” he said, while Mirabel sat down on the desk and gave him a look that promised him great evil if he didn’t get off the phone. “The client-side CO routines—do they seem to be behaving themselves?”
“Client-side?” Tau said, sounding surprised. “You mean the seedlings? Sure, they must be: I’d have been told if anything in that area started acting up. Want me to check as things come back up again?”
“Please do.”
“No problem. I’ll see you at seven.”
“Right,” Dev said, and hung up.
Mirabel had been unwrapping the sandwich: now she held it out to him. He took it, looked up at her, seeing for a moment not the curly hair, but long straight darkness: not the adult face, but the child’s eyes, shadowed.
“What?” Mirabel said. And after a second longer of Dev’s gaze, “What? Is there something on my face?”
“No,” he said. “You just—look good after a day like today.”
She smiled slightly, but was not fooled by his attempt to cover. “Eventually,” she said, “you’ll get around to telling me what you meant by that. But not right now. Just eat.”
He ate.
“And the ice cream didn’t do anything bad to you?” Mirabel said, after the first half of the sandwich was gone.
Dev shook his head as he picked up the second half. “No.”
“Good,” Mirabel said. “Lolo was happy.” She looked at him closely as he continued eating. “So. You still have a company?”
“Looks that way,” Dev said. “Jim and Tau will give me the details later. But I don’t think Tau’d have told me we were going to have the switch-throwing party tomorrow otherwise.”
She nodded and sighed. “This takes so much out of you when things go wrong,” Mirabel said. “Sometimes—”
Dev finished his last bite of the sandwich. “Don’t start telling me you wish we were still living in the little apartment above the Italian place!”
Mirabel snickered at him. “It was easier on your nerves,” she said.
Dev leaned back in the chair and pushed the plate away. “You’re kidding, right? My nerves were always in shreds back then because I didn’t know how I was go
ing to keep you eating. And then the baby . . .”
“I had complete faith in you,” Mirabel said, coming around to sit on his lap.
“That was what scared me,” Dev said under his breath.
“Well,” Mirabel said, “it’s okay now. You survived that, and now you’ve survived this. Not that I understand all the technical details, but I understand enough of them. So tomorrow, all through that big party, we’ll smile at each other and inside we’ll be saying ‘Nyah, nyah!’ to all those nasty people who tried to ruin your life. Because you and Omnitopia have too much life for them to ruin.”
“You know,” Dev said, putting his arms around her, “I think you’re right.”
He paused, glancing past her. Mirabel rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, I locked it.”
“Good,” said Dev. But then he glanced up at the webcam up in one corner of the ceiling.
“System management,” he said. “It’s Dev. Camera off.”
The red light went off . . . after just the slightest pause.
Dev pulled Mirabel close and closed his eyes, hoping for the best.
a cognizant original release september 22 2010
THIRTEEN
THE KIDS WERE IN BED AND SOUND ASLEEP, and Angela was sitting next to the den computer in a beanbag chair.
