They’d had to. Omnitopia’s Conscientious Objector routine was too damn smart to be taken in by the simple botting techniques of an earlier, kindlier age of spammers. It could immediately recognize a computer that was acting like a bot and freeze it out—shutting down any access from that computer’s network address, and incidentally calling the local cops. The people behind this plan had had no intention of wasting their time on so old and predictable a technique. Instead they were basing the attack on sheer numbers of genuine human beings, which the CO routine shouldn’t be able to profile so easily. If a lot of these logins would be coming from China and other parts of the Far East—places where labor was cheap and there were lots of willing people sitting at keyboards who didn’t care too much about the details of what they were doing as long as they got paid something better than their weekly wage—that was entirely to be expected: it was a resource worth exploiting.
Each person would activate his own or her own share in a pulsed wave of attacks that would come from all over the planet, clogging the Omnitopia servers with resource-heavy demands that would leave certain accounting and cash- inventory routines starved for resources, taking seconds to execute instead of milliseconds. And during those vital fractions of a second, from all over the world, many hands would reach into the virtual cash register while its drawer was stuck open and pull out wads of the green stuff.
Danny smiled to himself in quiet appreciation of the elegance of the scam and its simple audacity. His own nameless and faceless handler had been cagey about the details, but the number of keyboard slaves involved in the attack sequence was apparently somewhere up in the millions. There was no way the Omnitopia people would be able to defend against that completely—especially not at this time when their inside sources had confirmed that the new Omnitopia servers would be vulnerable.
And they were coming into that magic time now, Danny knew. The attacks would be taking place very soon—he’d known just how soon once he got these code groups home. But one way or another, within three days it would all be over. Omnitopia would be looking very stupid, and the Black Hat Ring who’d hatched and carried out this exploit would be famous—or infamous—worldwide if anonymously so. Danny wasn’t particularly concerned about the fame: all he’d wanted was a chance to get out of this loser’s life of minimum-wage jobs and into a life of lazing by some seaside with a cold drink in his hand, partying when he liked, and never doing anything that looked like work again. And by Saturday, I’ll have it. By Saturday afternoon, having been given lots of helpful instructions about how best to lose yourself in the system despite its best attempts to keep track of you, he would be on his way out of Georgia, on the first of a number of planes, trains, and automobiles to anywhere—and finally on his way to the place in the sun that life owed him.
Danny waited, watching the black screen. Momentarily, the type came through. FINISHED.
And that was all there was. This was the only sad thing about the plan for Danny. He’d always been a gregarious type; he enjoyed playing the Great Game with others, talking about it, laughing about it. But there was no one, absolutely no one he could share this with. And of course, he understood the reasons; but it was sad all the same. Brag rights would be so sweet. Even afterward, if he wanted to stay free and wealthy, he could never say anything about having been part of The Day the Black Hats Won. It was really very, very sad. In fact, his handler had advised him to give up Omnitopia entirely. It’s a goddamn shame, Danny thought. After I finally got my mage up to level thirty-five.
A little sadly, Finished, he typed.
The black screen went white: the browser window closed itself. Danny reached down and punched the computer’s reset button to make sure the broadband router’s logging function failed to shut down correctly. That would mean that all the morning’s sessions on this machine would fail to log as well. Ricardo would give him grief about it, but the machine occasionally committed this error on its own, so Ricardo wouldn’t be able to specifically blame Danny for it.
The machine started rebooting. Danny got up, stretched, and went to the window to look out at the sun blazing through the smog, and the lunchtime traffic, and the hot air dancing over the parking lot. In his mind he could already see a much different sun, shining down on white sand, a blue sea beyond it, a cold drink in his hand. A mint julep, he thought. I’ve never had a mint julep. But I’m going to have one soon.
Danny turned away from the window and, methodical as always, started straightening the padded envelopes in the bin by the scale.
The employees called Infinity Inc.’s main New York-area manufacturing and R&D facility “The Flats,” not so much as a reference to the wilderness of North Jersey salt marsh all around it, but because it was (they said among themselves on the company infranet’s chat area) just a little too small inside for you to be able to see the curvature of the earth. Phil—checking on the infranet chat under a pseudonym, as everyone knew he sometimes did—had at first been slightly offended by the nickname when he’d heard it. But the reaction had worn off over time, as none of his employees seemed eager to dump their jobs just because of the facility’s size.
He was standing on the balcony outside the executive office suite at the building’s west end, looking down over the shop floor—a sprawling quarter-mile long vista of cubicles grouped in nodes of four, eight, and sixteen, depending on how many subteams, teams, or groups they were housing, along with various “pick up and go” group meeting modules for employees whose job descriptions made it more sensible for them to move from area to area in the course of the day’s work. Some of them were making their way around the floor even now on razor scooters or on one or another of Infinity’s little fleet of Segways, and the huge place hummed under the high roof with a soft clamor of conversation, the sound of people getting on with business in a place designed to keep them on track. It was a heartening view. Phil liked his people working where he could walk or ride around under one roof and see them all without having to run all over the landscape, at the mercy of the traffic or the weather.
Where is he? Phil thought, pulling his phone out of his pocket to see if he’d missed a text. But nothing new showed on the screen. He’s not going to like it if he makes me come looking for him. Well. Give him another five minutes.
Phil wandered down to the end of the balcony and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window at the northward view, over the huge parking lot and beyond. Infinity Inc. Kearny had been built just inside one of the major loops of the meandering Hackensack River, on land Phil had acquired five years previously when the company started getting a good head of steam and he foresaw the need for a far bigger facility that would be able to hold both his development and manufacturing requirements under one roof. Even then, undeveloped, the property had been a good bargain: reclaimed land, cheap even after factoring in the price of detoxing it from the waste chemicals, heavy metals, and so forth, that had seeped into the ground and the water table beneath it from the older industries that had occupied the area prewar. All those industries, shipbuilding and small-scale light manufacturing and so on, had expired of capital loss during the Great Depression, or of inability to keep up with consumer trends in the postwar boom, leaving the local communities chronically short of employment opportunities and desperate for inward investment of any kind. When Phil had come along and offered Kearny Township money for land that until then had been essentially worthless, they’d grabbed the offer with both hands.
And they hadn’t been sorry afterward, especially when this facility opened and hiring began. Infinity Inc. had become one of the major employers in northern New Jersey, and had been able to pump a lot of action into the local economy simply due to I.I. Kearny’s location. It was handy for cheap transport, right by the Jersey Turnpike and the rail yards outside of Newark, and close to the courier and parcel shipping companies that clustered around the fringes of Newark Airport. To Phil’s way of thinking, a tightly consolidated facility like this made far better economic se
nse than some splashy purpose-built greenbelt facility, more style than substance.
Back at the middle of the balcony, he heard the elevator go ding! Phil turned to see his operations manager Link Raglan step out of it—
“Link? Down here.”
He came hurrying down to Phil, a bland- faced blond guy who looked more like a professional wrestler than anything else: burly and massive across the shoulders, with wrists as thick as some people’s forearms, and a neck so big it could be detected only by the presence of a collar and tie around it. Unfortunately these were always under a suit that looked like Link had been shoved into it under pressure. Even on his salary he insisted on buying his suits off the rack, and his notion of what constituted a fit was uncertain at best.
“Sorry, Mr. Sorensen,” Link said as he came up to Phil. “The turnpike was a mess, and I couldn’t stop to text.”
“It’s all right,” Phil said. “Just don’t make a habit of it: I’m going to need you accessible at a moment’s notice when things heat up over the next few days.” They started toward the staircase at the end of the balcony. “Are the people we’re supposed to be seeing ready for us? I can’t stay long. I have to get ready for that charity thing tonight before I head out to the Island.”
“They’re ready,” Link said as they headed down the stairs.
“Good. How are the preload numbers looking?”
“Busy. The download servers are getting hammered with thousands of logins, people trying to hold download slots open.”
“But the system’s dumping them on six-minute latency?”
Link nodded. “To favor the high-speed broadband users, as we planned. The dial- up and ADSL people will be getting a download manager pumped downstream to them in the first five minutes, and when they get dumped, they can log in as many times as they have to in order to pick up where they left off.”
“Good. I don’t want the system getting bogged down in slow downloads like it did on the last expansion. It made our first-day numbers look like crap.”
“No danger of that now, sir.”
At the bottom of the staircase, the usual golf cart was parked. Phil climbed in. Link got behind the wheel, started it up, and hung first a right, then a left to drive down the vehicle-and-mail-cart access path along the south side of the building.
Phil pulled out his PDA and flipped it open for a moment, glancing at the Bloomberg page for Infinity’s stock and noticing with satisfaction that the graph for the day had edged up slightly. Good. All we need is a nice fat hit on the numbers today to make Omnitopia’s splash look a little less splashy. Three points would do; five would be better. But we’re already in a position even just on prelaunch buzz to take the first shine off Dev’s day in the sun. And then, after those first clouds move in, the deluge.
About a third of the way down the facility’s floor, Link hung a left. In all the cubicles they passed, Phil saw interested eyes peering out at the sound of the oncoming cart’s beeper or the sight of the rotating light on its back. The looks, though interested, weren’t particularly surprised, for Phil was here at least a few times every week—sometimes just wandering up and down among the cubicles, sometimes being driven around, or driving himself—and looking in on this or that department to keep them on their toes. The company HR and psych people had repeatedly emphasized to Phil the importance of being here and being seen to be part of the team. He did it because he knew it was good business to do it, but sometimes it got on his nerves. Whatever happened to just doing your job because you were being paid to do it? All this I’m-one-of-you stuff, they know it’s a sham, I know it’s a sham, why do we need to bother? They’re my employees; why should I have to bribe them to perform? But such was the corporate culture in which Phil now found himself, and rather than incur the bad publicity that would come along with not being seen to be playing the game, he played it. That’s what we’re all about, here, anyway, isn’t it? he thought, resigned. Games.
Link was slowing now. He pulled the cart over and parked. Outside the next island of cubicles on the right, a crowd of ten or twelve employees were standing, all dressed in identical violet II T-shirts emblazoned with the new Infinite Worlds: Threefold logo and the legend ROLLOUT FEVER—BE THE FIRST!
Phil climbed out of the cart and went to meet them. They broke into applause as he headed toward them, and Phil had to grin, even though he suspected the response of being coached rather than spontaneous. Doesn’t matter, be sincere even if you have to fake it. “Hey there!” he said, and made the rounds of the group, shaking everyone’s hand.
“Okay!” Phil said when that was done. “So you guys are the team leaders for the Social Networking Download Stimulus Initiative. Or SNDSI for short . . .“ His attempt to pronounce the vowel-less acronym made them all laugh. “Who makes these names up, anyway? Never mind. Whatever we’re calling it, your section managers have pulled you out of the ranks for this opportunity because they think you and your teams have got the best chatting and blogging and tweeting skills in the company. So today your job is to get out there and chat and blog and tweet up a storm about Infinite Worlds Threefold. And we’ve made it even easier for you by building custom chat, blog, and tweet clients for you. Now, as I understand it, you’ve all had a week or so to break those in?”
Heads nodded all around the group. “Great. All over the world, people are already excited about the hot new product we’re rolling out today, but your business today starting at six p.m., and tonight, and tomorrow until six p.m., is to get them five times as excited as they thought they were! Every time you and your teams blog about the game and someone follows the URL to the download site, every time you tweet about it and they jump to the Twitter- linked address, every time a chatter follows the link you point them to—that login and download will be credited to your account and your team’s. Then, at the end of the twenty- four hours, we’ll total up the logins and downloads. The winning team will be getting not only the place of honor at the rollout party here tomorrow night, but also an extra week of paid vacation this year.” The whole group cheered. “And an all-expenses paid vacation in Hawaii for that whole team and their families to use it on!”
The expressions of shock and delight, the shouts and the sudden outbreak of inter-employee hugging, went well beyond Phil’s expectations: for a moment he was caught off guard and lost the thread of what he’d been saying. But after a few seconds he recovered. “So what you need to do is motivate each other like crazy today and tonight and tomorrow, and remind the gaming world and the whole Internet that Infinity Inc. is the original nine hundred pound gorilla, no matter how many other hairy apes may be running around the place!”
More cheers. One of the employees, a little pigtailed lady, had actually burst into tears at the news about the vacations, and was still wiping them away while jumping up and down for joy. Looking at her, Phil started feeling more uncomfortable than ever, and couldn’t work out why. Doesn’t matter. Time to go . . . “Okay, people,” he said, “good luck! Go for it, and make me and your teammates proud!”
The employees all burst into applause again. Phil waved at them and headed back toward the golf cart, trying not to look like he was hurrying.
Phil climbed back into the cart’s backseat and kept waving at the employees while Link got in, started the cart up, and turned them around. Then he looked over his shoulder and kept waving at the still-cheering crowd until they turned the corner and were out of sight. Annoying as he found the need to “incentivize” his staff, it was still amazing the enthusiasm you could generate by diverting no more money than the company spent for bottled water over a couple of weeks.
Phil let out a breath. “Okay,” he said. “On to other business.” He pulled a little bottle of hand-sanitizer out of his pants pocket, squirted a bit of sanitizer gel into one palm, and gave his hands a scrub. “Is the car back yet?”
“Right outside the west doors now, Mr. Sorensen.”
“Good. I want hourly reports on how they’re doin
g as soon as they get started. I won’t be turning in until late, so don’t skimp on the post-midnight reports, understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Now get me out of here.” Phil sighed. “I have to go be charitable.”
SIX
LUNCH, OF COURSE, did not happen on time, for this was Dev Logan’s life, in which nothing during these three days was going to go according to plan. He hadn’t made it more than halfway across the inner courtyard before his phone went off, and this time it was one of the tailored rings he never ignored, his assistant Frank’s. “Boss—”