Omnitopia Dawn (48 page)

A long pause: too long a pause. “Here—D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-de-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-v-v-v-v-v-v…”

The sound of the scratched-CD stutter ran cold down his spine.
No, oh, no no no, if basic management goes down we are
really
screwed—“
This is Dev! Senior management override! Shut down all user RealFeel accesses right now!”

“D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d—”

The digital stammer seemed to go on forever. There was no way to tell whether the command had been properly carried out or not. All around him, the view of the virtual battlefield was stuttering too, vanishing in big sporadic dark blocks like a bad satellite TV signal, jumping, freezing, vanishing into black blocks or null- input background blue.
We’re losing it, we’re going to lose everything—

All around Dev the motion of the battle jittered to a halt, started again, froze; and it froze sporadically, starting up again in other parts of the panorama, degrading to hugely pixilated views in yet others. Gradually the blocks of darkness covered more and more of the world around Dev, so that he seemed to be looking through an openwork brick wall in which more and more bricks were being plugged into place, shutting everything away, walling him up. The roar of the battlefield grew more and more distant, the view more and more minimal. Only a few bricks’ worth of life and movement remained, little windows in a rapidly extending vista of solid black. Through those last few openings the sound faded to silence . . . and then they too started to wink out, and a few breaths later the last rectangle of view closed down and left him—

—in darkness.

Dev stood there, just stood very still, trying to figure out where he was now and what was happening. The RealFeel technology was fairly new and hadn’t rolled out too widely yet—the vast majority of Omnitopia users worldwide were still using the classic screen-and-keyboard or screen-and-joystick interfaces.
So most people will be seeing nothing but our standard timeout screen on their own computers’ client programs,
Dev thought. But those who, like Dev, were still using RealFeel—assuming that his shutdown order might have failed, likely enough since everything was going so wrong—would now be stuck in the middle of
this. Thousands of users, maybe, stuck in—is it full sensory deprivation? Oh, God—
The prospect of hundreds of thousands of lawsuits rose up of Dev’s mind, and the sweat went colder all over him, if that was possible. But the thought of unsuspecting players, some of them children, suddenly finding themselves
here
during what should have been a safe gaming experience, was far worse.
Kids shouldn’t be using RealFeel, but they
will
be, you know that—

Dev closed his eyes and took a breath, trying to get some control over himself: then opened his eyes again. This made not the slightest difference to what he could see. He pulled his hands in, tried to feel his own body, and was overjoyed to find his chest was still where he’d felt it last. Dev clasped his hands together, resisting the urge to wring them in distress.
It’s the game version of me I’m feeling,
he thought,
not the sitting-in-a-booth version. So the system hasn’t crashed completely . . . yet.

He turned slowly, looking for any glimpse or flicker of light. Nothing. “Okay,” he said softly into the darkness. The sound of his voice was completely echoless. “System management?”

Nothing.

Dev took a cautious step forward, feeling for it with his foot. In a way it was silly. He wasn’t anywhere physical, and there was no way he could fall and hurt himself. But the old human reactions to darkness and the fear of falling were no less powerful in a situation like this—and the system was, after all, malfunctioning.

“System management!” Dev said again.

Silence. But this time, from behind him, a sudden brief flash, like a dim camera flash going off.

He spun. It was gone.

“What was that?” he whispered.

Silence. Darkness. More loudly, Dev said, “System management!” This time he saw the flash face-on. It was distant; a rectangle of light, seemingly out at the edge of things, though without more detail of the object he thought he’d seen, it was impossible to tell how near or far. It was like a digital photo, frozen, grainy, impossible to make out at this distance.

“Enlarge that!” Dev said.

It vanished then appeared again, not so much enlarged, but just seeming closer, as if it were a poster that someone had moved. A small figure, a blurry background, gray, black, white. But there was something familiar about it . . .

“Enlarge again!” Dev said.

Once again the image vanished, then reappeared, again seemingly closer. A child. A little girl in a sundress. One arm stretched up and out of frame, perhaps holding someone’s hand, the other waving something bulky around . . .

What is that?
Dev squinted at it. “Enlarge again!” he said, and the image flickered out again just as he realized what it was. A stuffed toy, a floppy bunny-shape he knew very well, because he was constantly having to put it through the living suite’s washer due to contact with one sticky food or another.

The floppy toy was unquestionably the indefatigable Mister Dobbles, his whiskers and right ear stitched on again after their last traumatic removal (they were always getting stepped on or caught in doors). And the child’s face was also clearly visible. Dev’s breath caught. It was Lola.

“What the—” Dev whispered.

He started walking toward the image to get a better look at it.
Where did this come from?
he thought. As Dev got closer, he could just barely see the Omnitopia alpha and omega sigil down in the bottom left corner, and in the bottom right, the grainy detail of a security cam date and time stamp. “Enlarge again!” Dev said.

The picture flickered out, came back larger. But this time, as he kept heading toward it, Dev caught a glimpse of some other light source off to his right. Another image had appeared, again black and white, grainy: another security cam image. Lola over in the Omnitopia preschool playroom with a crowd of other children, all of them moving from one little desk to another as part of some group activity.

Another sudden light shone from behind him. Dev turned again. A third image, this time of Lola and Mirabel, walking together down an Omnitopia campus path. But the focus of the image was on Lola—

And now the images were appearing faster and faster, all around him, until the horizons right up to the zenith were nearly completely tiled with them, and they started overlapping each other in digital collage. Lola in the preschool playground, Lola in the schoolroom, Lola in bed, Lola playing with her Uncle Jim and carefully counting pennies and dimes out of her piggy bank . . .

How am I seeing this?
Why
am I seeing this? Some malfunction? Everything’s going wrong in the system right now, why not?
But then again, what kind of malfunction would show him nothing but pictures of his daughter?

And Dev’s mouth went dry as dust. Were these images the contents of some file folder that had been hidden until now, only revealed by the massive system crashes that were going on around him?
What is this,
Dev wondered
,
actually starting to shiver.
Evidence of some kind of employee stalker? Or some kind of threat against
her?
Was someone saying, “I know where your kid is, every minute of every day?”

He started to go hot with fury.
No one
on the outside had access to Omnitopia’s interior security video, especially the parts of it that involved the living quarters. That was something Dev had made absolutely sure of from the start. This meant these images would have to be part of some inside job. But the thought horrified him, for the personnel allowed access to such information were rigorously investigated, and the rest of the security surrounding his own surveillance systems was as tight as what he’d set up around—

Dev tried to swallow and found he couldn’t, faced with the thought that his presumptions about Omnitopia campus security plainly weren’t all that sound. And now here was evidence that someone with access to in-house surveillance video had a very unhealthy interest in his baby. Dev’s first urge was to wake up his in-system phone and start screaming at the Omnitopia security people to send a crowd of goons straight over to the crèche and have them make a living wall around Lola—

If I even can. If the phone’s even working. And now how can I be sure I can trust them? If one of
them’s
behind this—

Dev’s mind was whirling. He forced himself to breathe, and try to calm down. But he had no time to: the pictures were changing, old ones flickering out, new ones flickering in. Lola, they were always images of Lola: with her mom, with Dev, getting into the family SUV in the parking lot, going into the Coldstone Creamery on Mill Avenue in Tempe with Mirabel, their minder hanging back by the SUV—

Wait a minute,
Dev thought, his mouth going dry,
how am I seeing that? We don’t have any security camera there—

More pictures appeared, from other security cameras around Tempe, from even farther afield—
Kennedy Airport? LAX? Narita?!—
but Dev kept staring at the image from Coldstone Creamery. Now that he thought about it, he could remember having spotted their camera when he was down there with Mirabel and Lola a few months back.
But how was my system getting into that?
Dev thought, feeling panic start welling up inside him. “How is this happening?” he whispered.

The images kept appearing. There was this comfort: none of them seemed to be standard digital camera images. They were all security cameras of one kind or another. Unquestionably it was still creepy that such a collection of images existed at all.
Who’s interested in her? Somebody in the government? And why?
He started looking more closely at the text branding on the images, trying to track down some pattern. . . .

Slowly something started to occur to Dev as the images kept piling up all around him. There was something about the dates. Some months were completely missing. A few moments’ more examination suggested that all the dates were in the same range, starting in late April of this year. “Enlarge all these images!” Dev said to the darkness. “Enlarge everything!”

And slowly the images started appearing bigger and bigger around him, seeming almost to crowd each other, closing in as if the horizon was closing in too. Dev started turning quickly where he stood, ignoring the images themselves, concentrating on the dates.
April. Late April. May, June, yes, there are May and June dates right up to yesterday, but no March. Not even any early April. All from the middle of the month on. April 20, 21, 22, 24, yes, but nothing earlier than April 20.

He stopped for a moment and rubbed his eyes, which were starting to ache worse because of all the flickering.
Nothing earlier than April 20,
Dev thought.
What was April 20?

It was too clear an indicator of his state of mind that Dev actually had to think about it for several seconds before he could remember.
That was the day the hyperburst memory heaps all went live together for the first time,
Dev thought.
They were only brought live separately until then. I remember how freaked Tau was, he wasn’t happy about the way the docs were written, he was afraid we might damage the heaps if they came up in the wrong sequence. He was being so obsessive about checking and rechecking the sequencing with the people at Siemens, I thought they were going to take out a contract on him.

But apparently something else had happened on April 20 besides Tau being hunted down and mass- Silly-Stringed by cranky German hardware wranglers.
But
what?

Without any warning, all the images in the space around him went dark. Dev stood there, suddenly blind again, and now trembling with fear and confusion.
What’s this all mean? What’s going on outside? And how do I get out of this? I’ve got to do something, but I don’t know what and I don’t know
how . . .

From the darkness around him came a long, low growl. Dev’s head snapped up.
Am I getting battlefield sound back? Oh, please let it be that—and please let me get some visual as well!

Nothing came but the growl again, lower.

Then it repeated, but a little higher. Two discrete sounds:
rrowwwwrrrrr rrrroooowwwwooooowwwwrrr.

It occurred to him instantly that what he was hearing was a recording being played too slowly. “Speed up!” Dev said.

“Speed up!” Dev said. “Factor of two!”

“Again! Speed up, factor of two!”

“Again! Factor of two!”

It was his own voice: his name in exactly the intonation he normally used when logging into the system, an intonation perfectly ingrained in him by long habit even though it didn’t really need to be.

“I’m here!” Dev shouted.

“Here,” said his own voice back to him.

“I’m here! Talk to me!”

“Dev Logan,” said the voice out of the darkness.

“Yes!”

“System management,” said his own voice.

Dev shook his head.
What the—
he thought.

“Help,” the voice said. “Please—help.”

In the darkness, Dev’s mouth dropped open. The words had that stilted, stitched-together sound that you sometimes heard in systems that used single words rather than full phrases for their communications
. It’s like the system’s using separate words in my voice, stuff pulled out of recordings or whatever, and stringing them together to make—

Then the breath went right out of him as he realized what he’d just been thinking.