Omnitopia Dawn (47 page)

Delia didn’t even breathe.

“So,” Dev said. “What am I supposed to do with you?”

She swallowed. “Let me off with a warning?”

He bent an unusually dark look on her. “Normally I’d feel that a gift for irony is a useful attribute in a journalist,” Dev said, “but right now I strongly suggest that you not push your luck.”

Delia held still and concentrated on not saying anything else stupid.

“Now I suppose,” Dev said, pushing his hands into his pockets, “that what you’re suggesting would probably sort very nicely with the corporate image. Joss would be pleased, I’m sure. But the truth of the matter is that somebody’s attacking my company today, trying to rip off millions of my dollars, not to mention ruining my players’ virtual experience. And, leaving aside what happened last night, here you arrive in the middle of it and start feeding what you think is sensitive material—oh, come on, my people didn’t play you
that
completely, did they? Yes, they did, and they all get raises, assuming I have anything to give them raises with tomorrow, those little scalawags—feeding secrets to Phil Sorensen!
And
to someone else whose name we’re not sure of yet, but we will be by the end of the day. But Delia . . . Delia Harrington . . .” He sighed. “There’s a name that’ll be all over the news this evening. And one that will never appear over a byline again at any publication more elevated than the
Podunk Plain Dealer and Grain Silo News
.”

Delia could find nothing useful to say.

“Phil,” Dev said, looking at her from under what suddenly seemed unnaturally threatening eyebrows, “is a smart man. But cheap. He was never willing to swing out and spend what it really took to fund a project, which is why he’s where he is today. And he is certainly not going to spend one red cent saving
your
reputation or your job, not when he sees—or thinks he sees—how sloppy you were. Nor in such a mood will he care that your present situation is the fault of someone in his own security structure who got overzealous and used you because he knew the boss was using you and probably wouldn’t give a damn.”

Dev heaved a sigh. “But, you know, I too had a mortgage once. I too had spotty freelance work. I know how it can warp your brain when you see that the fridge is empty and you don’t know how you’re going to fill it again. So I am going to send you out to keep doing what you were doing when you first came here, while I contemplate whether to turn Jim Margoulies loose on you or just pitch your sorry little ass out onto Mill Avenue with a press release detailing the good work you’ve done here the past day or so. Because, by God, if
Time
magazine can screw with my share price, I can sure as hell screw with
theirs,
and the ghost of Henry Luce be damned!”

Delia just stood there.

“Well?” Dev said.

Delia’s mouth was dry. It took her a long while to get the words out. “I’m sorry.”

“We’ll see,” Dev said. “System management?’

There was another of those strange long pauses. “Here—Dev.”

She saw his Adam’s apple go up and down as he swallowed. “Please exit Miss Harrington to the number two comm suite in the PR building in ten seconds,” he said.

“Working—Dev.”

He glared at Delia. She shivered. She had never thought to see so ferocious, so terrible a look from this previously calm, affable man. “Just be clear,” Dev said, and waved an arm around him at the chalk cliffs, the high cloud-tattered sky, the smoke on the horizon, the pale queen watching it all on horseback atop the hill, the armored people watching it from the bottom. “
This
is what you’ve been helping to put a nail in. Not a cream puff corporate magnate. Not an overvalued trophy wife. Not a rich-bitch baby girl who’ll never know a hungry night—and what baby girl should? But
this
.
These
people.
Their
beer money,
their
one night out,
their
moment of freedom from a day of toil. I hope you’re happy.”

And suddenly she was sitting by herself in the conference suite again, and Jim Margoulies, dark-eyed, dark-browed, dark-expressioned, was standing there at the other end of the table where Dev had been sitting and now was not.

“Let’s go somewhere and talk,” he said.

On the White Cliffs of Dover in Gloriana, Dev was talking to the Little Bird again. It was speaking to him in Tau’s voice. “It’s bad, Big D. Worse than we thought.”

“How much worse?”

“
Much
much worse. An order of magnitude. We’ve got not one wave of attacks coming in, but two. The second one’s a new one. Standard distributed-denial-of-service attack, designed to block up everything both incoming and outgoing. The DDOS is even interfering with some of the wave of attacks that we
were
expecting.”

Dev swallowed hard. “So the two attacks aren’t coordinated, then.”

“Nope. Or rather, the timings are suspicious—the second set of guys seem to have known when the next attacks from the first set were coming through—but the methodologies are different, and the new guys don’t seem to be trying to avoid messing with the older ones.”

Dev passed a hand over his face, stared at the sweat on it. “What can we do?”

“Fight it. On the fly, like I said this morning: with live attacks, homebrewed to order. They’ve got numbers and greed, but we’ve got creativity and commitment. Today we’ll see which one wins. Get on down here: we need our Napoleon now.”

From somewhere behind Tau, Dev could hear shouts in the system coordination room in Castle Dev. “The system is going down—”

“Protect the core!”

“We’re trying—”

Oh, my God,
Dev thought.
Meltdown. The thing we thought couldn’t really happen: it’s happening.
“I’ll be right down,” he said. “Where do they want me?”

“Better get down to the CO. It’s what needs support, and I’m busy here. That means you.”

“On my way,” Dev said.

A moment later the hard short turf atop the White Cliffs of another Dover was slowly springing up again where Dev had stood.

D
EV KNEW THAT in hundreds of office spaces and cubbies around Omnitopia’s campuses worldwide, the reality of the situation involved people reading scrolling code and feverishly analyzing it, then hastily devising countermeasures against the invasive protocols and attacks that were assailing his servers’ boundaries—trying to strangle their contact with the outer world and Omnitopia’s millions of players while insinuating their way into the deepest regulatory and accounting structures of the game. But again the imageries his people were using to help them do that work, the myriad of personal shorthands they’d fabricated to deal with hackers and intruders before, were gathered at the boundaries of Omnitopia to meet the foe.

He had seen the echoes of those imageries reflected in the Gloriana Macrocosm, the dark wind rolling up from the south, laden with ships intent on a realm’s destruction. But here and now, all around the edges of the virtual island, they were no mere echoes and were once again a crowd of personal realities met on a common ground, fighting to at least hold that ground and at best to repulse the common enemy—

But it wasn’t happening. Though fighting their furious best in a thousand shapes, human and inhuman, real and fantastic, the mass of the Omnitopian defense was being pushed back and away from the lava moat that for the purposes of this battle defined the boundary between the home servers and the outer world. And this time, though there were at least twice as many defenders, the attacking forces seemed overwhelmingly greater: four times more than last time, five times, seven.

Dev scanned the vast crowd desperately, looking for a familiar shape or personal seeming. In the midst of it all, down by the shoreline and rallying the defenders, he caught sight of a gleam of light off something moving: a banner with the Omnitopian alpha and omega interlaced.
The shuntspacers!
he thought, and started pushing his way toward them.

Normally the simple desire to be among them would have made it so for Omnitopia’s First Player. But the system wasn’t responding normally. He had to push and shove his way through the press of warriors in a hundred shapes, human and beast, alien and man and woman and Elf and Gnarth, until he came out among the Princes of Hell and their system security allies under the blue banner. It was torn and stained with the struggle; the young programmer in the form of a griffin who clutched its pole in one massive claw was battered and wounded. When she reared up, beating her wings in the faces of the dark shapes and fanged maws tearing and slashing at the foremost warriors in the battle line, Dev could see the feathers missing from her pinions, the pointed bird tongue panting out of the huge beak as she gasped for air.

It was young Darlene whom he’d met in the Palace of the Princes of Hell. Dev got a glimpse of her dark eyes in the griffin’s as it turned its head toward him. “Bad timing, Boss!” Darlene shouted at Dev as some of the other Princes stormed past him. “Better get back in the rear, we don’t need you getting compromised right this minute—!”

“I’ll be gone as soon as we’re done,” he said. “How’s the ambush going?”

“Not good!” shouted Giorgio from just behind her. He was wearing the bulky, knobby shape of a gangly fifteen- foot giant in a San Diego Padres uniform, swinging a massive aluminum Louisville Slugger studded with nails. “They took the bait, all right, punched in hard where we wanted them to—and then a lot harder than we wanted them to. A much more massive attack, Boss! Not coordinated, just waves and waves. Every time we plug a few hundred Net accesses that we don’t want them trying to use, another few hundred open up. They’re not just after the money this time. They’re trying to hammer the whole server structure flat. Not just take it down, but also to get inside and destroy the code, kill the game structures from inside—”

“Have we dumped the players out?” Dev shouted.

“Started doing that about twenty minutes ago,” Giorgio shouted back as he swung again. In the wake of the blow, a crowd of Orcish attackers sailed out over the front line, heading for some hypothetical outfield fence. “Can’t do it all at once—takes a while. We got the European servers closed down first, since they were getting hit hardest. North America’s next. Tau’s overseeing the shutdown; he’s got his server support people pulling all the servers he can offline before they crash. They’ll do it by powerdown if they have to.”

Dev moaned, rubbed his face. There were too many things that could go wrong with what Tau was doing, especially if the attacking forces had left worms running inside the servers. Offline they might be, in terms of communication with the outer world, but that wouldn’t stop the process of the destruction of their code. And powerdowns, unless they were done in the right way, could be just as destructive.
Still, the point is to protect the players—“
Okay,” Dev said. “I’m heading down to the CO. Hold the fort here!”

“We could really use a fort right now,” Darlene shouted. “But we’ll make do. Be careful, Boss!”

“You too! System management—”

That long pause again, vastly unsettling, while around him the tumult and furor of the battlefield went on. From somewhere nearby came a yell: “Here comes the big wave, this is it,
brace up and don’t let ’em through!”

“Here—Dev—”

“Give me access to the CO routines!”

It seemed to take forever for the stairway down into the deeper levels to manifest itself. All around him the fight went on, his own troops pushing away all around him as Dev hurried down the stairway into the darkness. “Keep the battlefield view!” he shouted to the system management program. “And have Cora meet me when I’m in!”

The stairway down to the Conscientious Objector level seemed unusually long. Above Dev the roar of the battlefield faded a little, then started to reassert itself as slowly a duplicate of the “upstairs” view faded in at the horizons of the CO space. At the heart of this level, the great circle of virtual code trees still stood, but its light was flickering, and patches of the great trees’ structures were fading in and out, or missing entirely.

Dev got down to ground level, paused, and looked around him. He was alone on the island in the midst of the sea of code, which lay strangely flat and stagnant all around. “Cora?” he shouted. His voice fell into the silence, and no answer came back. “Cora!”

Nothing. And slowly Dev became aware of an ache in his eyes, and an odd queasiness completely distinct from the stomach flip- flops he’d been feeling for what now seemed like years.
It’s the RealFeel system,
he thought in horror.
It’s starting to malfunction. And why wouldn’t it, considering what else is going on?
Which brought up the question of what would happen if Omnitopia players were caught inside when the system went down
. There were all these it’ll-never-happen discussions about the RealFeel interface,
Dev thought, the sweat breaking out all over him,
about what could happen to someone who’s using it if the system fails catastrophically.
He looked around desperately for Cora, but there was still no sign of her.
Oh, please don’t let the CO routines go down now, that’s the last thing we need!
“System management!” Dev shouted.