Omnitopia Dawn (43 page)

Jim’s smile went lopsided. “Maybe not. But if the bad guys pull two or three times as much again out of us today or tonight, as I think is most likely the goal—and if borrowing to cover ourselves isn’t an option, as even short-term loan money isn’t as easy to access as it used to be—then Chapter 11 becomes a possibility. There’s only so much loss of liquidity the SEC will let us get away with before shutting us down for an investigation.”

“Even if I cash in my personal assets to back us up?” Dev asked.

Slowly Jim nodded. “I was factoring that in.”

Dev swallowed. One of the dangers of being the seventh richest man in the world was that you started believing you were immune to this kind of thing. Then the universe did something to surprise you, and you learned better.

“All right,” Dev said. “Let’s see how it goes. You have a few emergency plans in the shot locker already, if I know you—”

Jim nodded again. “And I can always sell my car too . . .”

Dev looked at his best friend and raised his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said. “We can take public transport for a while if we have to.”

They sat quietly for a moment. “You need me to appear on any of these money shows?” Dev said.

Jim shook his head. “No, they’d take that as a sign that something was seriously wrong.”

Dev laughed. “And it’s not?”

“You know what I mean,” Jim said. “No, you just carry on as usual. In fact, that was Tau’s message to you for today. Carry on as if the rollout is your main business, stay out of the code levels until you’re sent for, and act normal. Or what passes for normal with you.”

“
That
sounds like Tau,” Dev said.

“I would have used the same phrasing,” Jim said. “So go do your thing. In particular, I hear you have to go eat some ice cream.”

Dev’s stomach flip-flopped harder than ever. “Oh, God. Have you got any antacid?”

Jim reached down under the desk and handed Dev a half- full bottle of Pepto-Bismol. “This works better.”

“Boy, are you a hard case,” Dev said, unscrewing the cap. “Right out of the bottle? Is there rehab for Pepto heads?”

“Company medical will handle it, if there is. Assuming we still have a company at the end of the day . . .”

“Cheers,” Dev said, and drank a hefty swig of the stuff. After a moment he handed the bottle back and said, “I
will
be sent for, I take it?”

“When you’re needed, absolutely,” Jim said. “Tau told me that you get better results with an army by withholding the presence of the general until the worst possible moment. He says that if Napoleon had ever learned not to grandstand, we’d all be speaking French right now.”

“The benefits of a continental education,” Dev said, standing up.

Someone tapped on the door. Jim touched his desk. The door slid open.

Helga was standing there. “Jim, I didn’t want to disturb you while you were with Dev—”

“It’s okay, Helga,” Dev said. “We’re done.”

She nodded. “I had a call from Alain over in Tau’s office. He says, ‘Tell them the second wave has started.’ ”

Dev gulped. Jim nodded, got up, pulled the napkin out of his collar. “Are the Bloomberg people ready for me?”

“They were late getting in, but they’re down in the suite and they’ll be ready in five minutes.”

“Thanks.”

Helga vanished. Jim and Dev headed for the door. “So just remember,” Jim said, “it’s all under control. We’ll take care of everything. All you have to do is act normal. Okay?”

Dev nodded. Jim patted him on the shoulder and turned right, heading for the teleconferencing suite and singing softly under his breath, “We’ll meet againnnn . . . don’t know where, don’t know whennnn. . . .”

Dev gulped again and headed for the stairs.

D
EV HEADED OUT ACROSS THE CAMPUS on the bike feeling strangely hollow inside, like someone who’d been to the doctor and told that he had cancer . . . and then in the next breath had been told that there was nothing he could do, but also not to worry.

It was useless.
But the least I can do,
he thought as he rode,
is keep myself under control while they fight my fight. First things first—

He rode back to Castle Dev and parked the black bike in the last spot at the end of the rack. There were now twice as many bikes on site as there had been when he’d left, scattered on the lawn, parked on the pathway, and leaning against the inside of the arch. People were heading in and out at speed, too busy even to talk to him—which was alarming by itself.
Never mind,
he thought.
Too much to do today. Get a grip and let’s get on with it.

Dev headed upstairs to the living wing first. Once in the sitting room area, he made for the little freezer next to the coffee bar. “Miri?” he said.

No answer: she was out and about on her own schedule now. Dev sighed and opened the freezer. Sure enough, there on top of one of the ice cube trays was a waffle bowl of double chocolate chip ice cream, the contents slumped into a half-melted puddle. He got it out, hunted around the cupboards for a napkin and a plate, shoved the plate and bowl into the microwave, and nuked the ice cream for twenty seconds to make it a little more manageable. Then he shoved a spoon into the whole business and headed out again.

Outside the big polished wooden slab of the entrance to Lola’s suite, Dev just paused and laid his hand against the wood for a moment, feeling his stomach clenching with nerves.
Just get calm,
he thought, taking a deep breath or so.
No matter what happens to you today, no matter what happens to Omnitopia, not a whisper of it needs to touch your little girl, or scare her at all.

He headed into Lola’s suite, finding Miss Poppy sitting in the main leisure area and reading to his daughter. “—and he said, ‘This is Exploding Pop-Tart. He is—’ ”

“Daddy!”
shrieked Lola, and flung herself out of the beanbag chair in which she’d been sitting.

“Lolo!” Dev said, hurriedly putting the ice cream aside. He swept her up just before she could ram into him. Lola threw her arms around his neck and whispered extremely audibly, “Poppy’s reading me
The Wuggie Norple Story!
”

Over his daughter’s shoulder, Dev gave Poppy a resigned look. “Really?” he said. “Can you take a few minutes off from that so I can eat my ice cream that you bought me?”

“With my
own money,
” said Lola, squirming to get down: Poppy put the book down with an expression eloquent of relief, smiled at Dev, and headed back toward the suite’s office. Once down, Lola peered at her dad. “Do you want some fruit? You should have five a day.”

“Oh, really?” Dev said, picking up the ice cream and going to sit down on another of the beanbags. “Where did you hear that?”

“Well!”
Lola said in a schoolteacher- like voice, and sat down on the beanbag on the other side of the low table while Dev started to eat the ice cream. “We had a new teacher yesterday. I forget her name. And she said you have to have five. And then we named all kinds of fruit!”

“So which ones did you name?” Dev said, while in the back of his mind something started shouting,
Sixty-five million dollars, my God, how are we going to recover from this even if everything works out all right? The company’s going to be damaged for years, we’re going to have to restructure . . .
Yet Jim had been fairly calm.
And was he doing that just to keep me from overreacting before I see
Time
Magazine Lady? Oh, God . . .

“—and she said kiwi was a bird,” Lola was saying. “And I said that was silly, it was a fruit!”

Dev suddenly realized that he was looking at the bowl, and it was empty.
Wow,
he thought, and put it aside. “Kiwi
is
a bird, honey.”

Lola favored Dev with a look that suggested he had taken leave of his senses. Looking at her, he found himself unaccountably misting up at the realization of how incredibly like her mom Lola looked sometimes, for Mirabel gave him the same look at least once a day. “It’s a little bird that lives in New Zealand,” he said. “It’s black, and it runs around on the ground because it can’t fly.”

Lola’s expression changed to one of profound sorrow. “Poor birdie!”

“No, it’s all right, sweetie,” Dev said. “The kiwi bird doesn’t mind. It likes doing that. That’s what it’s built to do.”

Lola’s expression now went serious. She put the book down, got up from her own beanbag and came over to sit down beside Dev, looking up into his face with perplexity. “But isn’t it sad when it sees the other birds? Doesn’t it want to be like them?”

“Oh, I don’t think so—” Dev started to say. But Lola shook her head. “No! What if it wants to do something besides what it’s build-ed to do?”

That
one threw Dev for a moment. After a second he shook his head and put an arm around her. “Birds don’t do that, Lolo,” he said. “They’re not as smart as people are. So don’t worry. Birds are happy being birds.”

She looked up at him suspiciously. “Are you sure?” she said.

Her mom again. “Yeah,” Dev said. “I’m sure.”

Lola sighed and sat there for a few moments, thinking that over. “Okay,” she said finally. But then she looked up with a faint frown.

“Daddy,” she said, “the kiwi bird is wrong.”

“Huh? How?”

“It should be green,” Lola said. “Like the fruit.”

Dev opened his mouth, then closed it again as Lola went over to pick up the latest, most beat-up copy of
The Wuggie Norple Story
. She flopped down on her beanbag again and started going through the pictures. Apparently the subject was settled for the moment.

Dev got up and glanced over at Poppy, who had just come out of the office again, but before he could say anything to her, his phone started to sing “New York New York”: Frank’s ring. Dev sighed and snapped it open. “Yeah, hi, Frank . . .”

“Getting close to your appointment with
Time
Lady, Dev,” Frank said.

“Right,” Dev said. “Where’ll she be?”

“Delano from PR staff is ferrying her over to the conference input area in the PR building,” Frank said. “That suit you? We can still change it if you want.”

“That’s fine,” Dev said. “I’ll head over. Anything from Tau or Jim?”

“Nothing new,” Frank said. “And if you’re going to ask me about this every five minutes, it’s gonna be a much longer day for the two of us than it needs to be.”

Dev made a face. “Point taken. What’s the rest of the day look like?”

Frank recited a list of appointments with in- house staff, and Dev stood there nodding at these, but his mind was elsewhere—far down in the virtual landscapes of the Omnitopian inner world, where even now his people and the programs running under their supervision were massing for the second-wave attack and their ambush on the attacking programs and hackers.
No,
he thought,
nothing I can do about that right now, so stay focused. Stay in the here and now, not the now and then . . .

“Okay,” he said at the end of Frank’s list. “See if you can clear me out ten or twenty minutes around noon upstairs in my office for Mirabel. She’s been threatening me with force-feeding again.”

“I didn’t mention that,” Frank said. “That’s twelve-thirty to ten of one, just before the meeting with the people from design structures.”

The thought of an hour spent studying Pantone swatches and listening to heated discussions about the psychology of color and its relationship to profit profiles in the Macrocosms made Dev want to yawn. But along with everything else on today’s to-do list, it had to be done.
And maybe it’s what I could use to settle me down . . .
Dev nodded and said, “There was one other thing—”

“I’m all ears.”

“About the rollout ceremony—”

“We finally got the catering sorted out.”

“Not that. Have you looked at the RSVP list lately?”

“Not in the past couple of days—Rowan’s been handling that.” Rowan was one of Frank’s own PAs.

“Would you have her check the guest list for me? Or do it yourself? I was wondering if Stroopwaffel had RSVP’d as yet.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“Thanks.”

Dev folded up his phone and put it away. A little behind him, Poppy was standing quietly, watching Lola as she turned the pages of the beat-up copy of
Wuggie Norple
. She was reciting the story to herself in a singsong voice, not that the part Lola was repeating actually had anything to do with the pages she was looking at.

“How many copies of that do we have?” Dev said under his breath to Poppy.

The young woman smiled. “Five or six. We reorder them from used bookstores as necessary.”

Dev nodded. “You think she needs a bird?” he said. “A green one? So she can be sure that the birdies are happy to be birdies?”

Poppy turned on Dev a smile as indulgent as the ones she used on Lola, but rather drier. “If she brings it up again,” she said, “we can discuss it. But at this age you can make something more important than it needs to be if you make an issue of it. Let’s see what she says over the next few days. We may never hear about it again. If we do, then we can talk it over.”

Dev nodded. “Lolo?” he said. “Gotta go!”

Lola had flopped over upside down on the beanbag, holding the book over her head. Now she looked at him, inverted. “You gotta go to work?” she said. “Poor Daddy!”

It was her mom’s line, but minus the inevitable irony. “Do I get a hug?” Dev said.

Lola put the book aside, scrambled up out of the beanbag, marched over to Dev as he went down on one knee, and threw her arms around him. “Have a nice day!” she said, the imitation of her mom on purpose this time.

“I will!” Dev said, letting her go with difficulty. Lola headed back over to the beanbag, threw herself down on it once more, and instantly became absorbed in the book again.

Dev got up and headed for the door, glancing over at Poppy. “Has Mirabel been here already?”