Barbara rolled her blue eyes and pushed the long braid of blonde hair back. “Not a big problem,” she said. “We got the tooth capped. Just a temporary—it’s too soon to put a permanent one on, apparently. Where have you been? Did they make you go back to work or something?”
“Uh, no—”
“Hey, let him eat something,” Tom said. Here and in the real world he was a big broad dark-haired guy with a mustache, always jovial: Rik couldn’t recall ever having seen him frown, not even in the middle of a battle when people around him were bleeding and screaming. A look of intent interest was all he ever showed. “Mustard?”
“Thanks—”
For a while they settled into small talk, which relieved Rik as he tucked into his sausages. There was some discussion of the last battle they’d all been in together, down in the Kargash Peninsula, where forces of the Southern Oligarchy, which was trying to consolidate the other sovereignties of Meruvelt’s southern continent “You mean ‘annex, ’ ” Barbara had said once, “or ‘overrun—’ ”) had come up against a cavalry force of the South Outlands Union, a united force of various small kingdoms or sovereignties which were not up for being overrun just yet. The Oligarchy forces had come off badly, having been tricked by their enemies into attacking under less than ideal circumstances (“Uphill?” Tom said, incredulous. “What kind of noob thing is that?”) and were now spoiling for another encounter with the smaller and more mobile force that had made them look so stupid.
“So where are they thinking of having it?” Rik said.
“You haven’t seen it on the feeds already?” Raoul said. He had finished his food and was leaning back in his chair, idly stabbing his wine-stained cork place mat with the two-tined fork.
Rik shook his head. “Been a little busy,” he said. And now you’re going to have to tell him why, he thought, reaching for the mustard pot again as he started dismembering his second sausage. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like Raoul. He was one of the original members of their MediMages circle, part of it for nearly three years now, a tall, lean, rangy, redheaded point of stability in a gaming world where people could slide in and out without warning when real life interfered. He was a nice enough guy, affable enough off the battlefield, only irascible when on it, and effective at what he did regardless of his mood. But there was always something strangely guarded about him, and Raoul didn’t talk much about his home life or his business in the real world.
That was of course his privilege: but the way he slid away from the subjects just bothered Rik sometimes. What Raoul did want to talk about was in-game life: especially all the research he’d been doing, all this while, for the Microcosm he was going to build someday. The plans for his ’cosm changed repeatedly, but the enthusiasm never did. None of them rode him too hard about this, and all of them nodded enthusiastically and pretended interest whenever the subject came up, because they all knew for how many, many months Raoul had been trying to get the Microcosm people to notice him . . . without success.
“What?” Tom said. “Nothing bad, I hope.”
“No,” Rik said, spearing another bit of sausage and dunking it in the mustard. Might as well get it over with, because it’s not gonna get any better . . .
Barbara looked at him oddly. “What?” she said. “Nothing’s wrong with Angela, is it? Or the kids?”
“Oh, no! No. It’s just that—” He popped that last bit of sausage in, chewed, swallowed. “I got knighted,” he said.
Tom’s mouth dropped open. Barbara’s eyes went wide. Raoul—
—smiled. There was a deliberateness to the expression that instantly creeped Rik out, but there was nothing he could do about that now. Tom’s grin was spreading from ear to ear. “Knighted as in Microcosm knighting?” he said. “As in MicroLeveling?”
“Uh,” Rik said, “yeah.”
Barbara whooped and then waved for the attention of one of the servers down on the floor level, a lady in standard “wench” garb. “Beer!” she shouted.
The serving lady made a bored “yeah, yeah, be there in a minute” gesture and went off toward the kitchen. Rik glanced from her back to the others, and finally to Raoul. That smile was still there. It looked tight. Rik forced himself to smile too, as if he wasn’t seeing anything wrong.
“Good God, congratulations,” Raoul said. “How the heck did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” Rik said. “I swear! At first I thought they’d made a mistake, mixed me up with someone else—”
He started telling the story, trying not to sound too excited about it, because all the time there was Raoul with that smile. Yet at the same time the excitement started to get the better of him eventually as the others pressed him with questions, as the new pitcher of beer arrived and flowed, and as even Raoul started to get into the spirit of it, curious at first then eventually even starting to look approving. Rik tried to keep away from the technical details, at least partly because he wasn’t too clear on some of them himself. But Tom and Barbara were interested in far less technical matters.
“Gonna build yourself a Philosopher’s ’cosm?” Tom said and grinned.
Rik shook his head. “Oh, please,” Rik said. He caught the eye of another of the servers down on the floor and gestured at her—they’d already run through that second pitcher of beer. Then he grinned at Tom, because he’d felt it was inevitable that somebody would bring this up eventually. The Omnitopia message boards were full of stories about people who’d supposedly succeeded in building Microcosms that were secretly and cunningly engineered to produce abnormal amounts of gaming gold. “It’s an urban myth. You ever actually talk to someone who personally knows a player who’s done it? It’s always a friend of a friend of a cousin of a coworker halfway around the planet. Anyway, like Omnitopia would let people mess with their economy like that!”
“Yeah,” Barbara said. “The Gnomes’d come after them.” There was snickering around the table, for the Gnomes at least were no urban myth. They were the inhabitants and guardians of Rhaetia Secunda, a Macrocosm devoted entirely to gameplay in the fiduciary mode. There wannabe brokers and tycoons could play with a duplicate virtual version of Earth’s finances, riding the so-called Real-World markets as if they were a game and collecting percentages of game gold for correct prediction and manipulation of stocks and futures. But attempted cheating was very much frowned upon, and the fighting skills of the savage bankers and killer accountants of Rhaetia Secunda’s capital city Turicum were legendary across the Macrocosms. Rarely a month went by without some fraudulent Microcosm being invaded and ravaged by hordes of Doom Brokers under the command of the dreadful Chief Gnome, Bloomberg the Terrible.
“I hear,” said Tom, “that the Gnomes aren’t GGCs. They’re employees from Omnitopia financial security.” He grinned. “The kind of people who feel about red ink the way everybody else does about blood.”
“Yeah, and isn’t Bloomberg supposed to actually be the chief of Omnitopia financial or something?” Barbara said. “What’s the word I’m looking for? The head honcho.”
“CFO?” Tom said.
“That’s it.”
“Heard that,” Rik said, “but the PR types won’t comment. Probably wouldn’t even if it were true. Especially if it were true.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I don’t care about Philosopher’s ’cosms. I don’t even have that much time to think about the Microcosm right now. I was going to sit down and have a think about it when I wound up in the middle of the craziness down by the Ring of Elich—”
“What?” Tom said. “What craziness?”
Then that story had to be told, leaving general astonishment and shock in its wake. “I never thought something like that could happen!” Tom said. “City ought to do something. What a mess!”
“Yeah,” Rik said. “It’s not something you’d want to get caught in on your way somewhere serious, like a battle elsewhere.”
Raoul was shaking his head, looking bemused. “Can’t believe it,” he said. “You mean that now you’ve go
t a ’cosm, you’re still going to have time to waste patching people’s characters back together?”
There was something about the tone, or the phrasing, that got under Rik’s skin a little. “Hey,” Rik said, trying hard to keep his tone even, “give me a break, huh, Raoul? I’m a player. That’s not going to stop.”
“Probably why he got the accolade in the first place,” Barbara said, sounding as nettled as Rik felt but would not show that he did. “They notice things, I hear. Have the cojones to be happy for him, why don’t you?”
There was a little silence after that. Raoul got interested in his beer. “I want to see,” said Tom after a moment, and called up a feed window to hang at the end of the table. News of the attack was all over the feeds by now, so there was no problem in finding a replay of it from one of many gamers who’d been in the area when it happened. Then Barb caught sight of Rik in one of the feeds, and some more time was spent hunting down other player POVs to find ones that showed a better view of what Rik was doing.
“You could always ask me!” Rik protested, starting to feel a little too much like the center of attention at this point. “I was there.”
“Yeah, no argument,” Tom said, “but how often do we get to see somebody we know make the news? Just shut up and let us enjoy it.”
Fortunately that didn’t go on for too much longer. Barb started getting a yen for dessert, and one of the Last Man’s famous skyberry pies with hot cream was called for, divvied up, and demolished. “This is wild,” Tom said as they were finishing it. “We’re gonna have to schedule another meeting to get our planning sorted out for this next campaign. Have to be in the next few days, too: the Union isn’t going to wait forever to hit Southern again—they’ve got the initiative now. And if I was Southern, I’d want to hit them first.”
Then the business of syncing everybody’s schedules came up again, never an easy one: work nights were always problematic, and family commitments had to be worked around. More windows were called up around the table, showing appointment calendars and schedule spreadsheets, and the normal squabbling and bargaining ensued.
“Okay,” Tom said at last. “Two days from now?”
“That’s the big new-rollout night, isn’t it?” Raoul said.
“Yeah,” Barbara said. “Good night for it, though. The City’ll be crawling with noobs, and a lot of people will be staying out of the ’cosms to avoid the crowds. Or because they don’t want a sensitive campaign to get caught in some giant disk crash if the rollout doesn’t work out right.” She grinned. “We can meet here, out of the way, and take our time figuring out who we’re going to sell our services to.”
That met with general agreement, which was good, as it was getting to be time for Rik to head back home to real life. But it also gave Raoul the opening to ask the question that Rik had been both eagerly awaiting and dreading: “Well, Mister Leveler, when do we get to see it?”
“Well—” Suddenly Rik was a mass of second thoughts. “It’s barely even started. Just a shell.”
“Oh, come on, Rik!” Barbara said. “You know you want to.”
Tom gave Rik a wry look. “Might as well get it over with,” he said.
Sometimes, Rik thought, he can be unusually perceptive. “Okay,” Rik said. “Let’s finish up here and I’ll show you what I’ve got.”
Raoul shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “Gotta take a real-world leak,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Sure,” Rik said. “You’ve got the address for my office. You can get into the ’cosm from there. I’ll leave the door open.”
“Right, be there in a sec.” Raoul vanished.
The others got up, gathered their things together. Tom called for the slate and scratched out everybody else’s tallies. There was a not very enthusiastic chorus of protest from Rik and Barbara. “No, no,” Tom said, “I did good on our last medivention. Still haven’t finished sorting out all the bonus points. Let me get this one.”
Rik thanked him: Barbara did her usual you-can’t-pay-for-me-against-my-will thing, then grinned and thanked him too. They made their way down the stairs, pressed a fifteen percent largesse in Meruvelt cashplaques on the chief wench, and headed out into the evening, making for the City Meadow ring.
Once they got there Rik paused for a moment in front of one grayed-out flagstone. “Game management?” he said.
“Good evening, Rik,” said the control voice, for his ears only. “What do you need?”
“Transport for four to my Microcosm,” he said. “Barbara and Tom here will come through with me. Raoul will be coming into my office in a few minutes: please let him into the Microcosm when he gets there.”
“Transports laid in,” said the control voice. “Access is open. Please step through.”
“This way, guys,” he said as the flagstone swirled gray, went clear. He stepped through.
The next moment he was standing to one side of his own small broken ring, a series of steel-and-electrum plates set into the solid stone shelf at the bottom of a broad cliff. He moved aside as first Barbara, then Tom, stepped into the space. They looked around them, and up, and Barbara gasped.
Something inside Rik leaped with pleasure. Exactly the response I want from people in here for the first time, he thought. That’s exactly right! And it had to be said that the inside world looked much better than it had originally. There was less land inside the hollow world now, and more sea: Rik had started to find the rich color of the oceans on the far side of the inner-world shell more and more seductive the more he worked with them. The brassy little sun shone down on the first piece of heavy furnishing Rik had done: away along the ridge of which the cliff behind them was part, perched on the ridge crest, stood a sheer-walled brazen castle keep, spired and towered, glittering in the eternal day.
“This is so . . . weird!” Barbara said. “But in a good way!”
Tom was looking around, nodding, at the endless expanse of fields and forests reaching away from them in all directions. “This is spectacular, man,” he said. “You built this in two days?”
“Well, a lot of it’s modular,” Rik said. “I still don’t have the slightest idea what to do about the GGCs, let alone what gameplay in here is going to look like or what it’s about—”
“Oh, you have to have wars,” Tom said. “Can you imagine what wars in here would look like? At night the sky wouldn’t have stars in it. It’d have battles.” He pointed up past the sun. “Think about it! All that way away—the enemy campfires, glittering—” He paused. “Wait a minute, do you ever get night in here?”
“Uh, I’m working on that. Some kind of selective screening.”
“What are you calling it?” Barbara said.
This was something that Rik had been arguing with himself about practically since he started, and had changed his mind a hundred times. He took a deep breath. “Indigo,” Rik said.
Barbara, looking up into that deep rich sky, nodded. “It works.”
“Well, it’s temporary,” Rik said. “I may come up with something better. It has to have its own history: the characters may not want their world to be named something that doesn’t make sense to them—”
Tom chuckled. “Secondary creation syndrome already,” he said. “They picked the right guy for this job, that’s for certain.”
“Wow,” said Raoul behind them.
They all turned as he walked out of the broken ring. Raoul was looking up into that astonishing sky, and for once his face was wearing an expression that Rick didn’t mind seeing there: it was unalloyed amazement.
“Wow,” he said again, as he came up with them. “What is it? A Dyson sphere?”
“No,” Rik said, “just a hollow Earthy kind of thing.”
“He’s calling it Indigo,” Barbara said. “Isn’t it fabulous?”
“What are you going to game in here?” Raoul said. “SF or fantasy?”
“I haven’t even started to get close to working that out yet,” Rik said. “It may
take a while.”
“Rik?”
Barbara’s suddenly confused tone of voice surprised him. He turned to see that she was squinting up at the sky with a peculiar expression. “Is it just me,” she said, “or is the sun doing something?”
Rik squinted up too and was horrified to see that it was. It was flickering. Then the sun began very slowly to go dim, as if in the early stages of a brownout.
“You have an eclipse scheduled?” Tom said.
“No,” Rik said, “believe me! Just getting it turned on and looking the right size and shape took a little figuring. I wasn’t going to start playing around with dimmer switches at this early stage—”
Rik went on talking to them a little about the complexities of the WannaB language and the way the little modules didn’t always stick together the way you thought they should. But he was talking to distract himself from what the sun was doing. What he had hoped was some kind of momentary glitch was now proving to be no such thing. The sun was getting dimmer and dimmer, going almost ashen now . . .
It went out; and as it did, in its last pallid gasp of light, the landscape surrounding them dissolved itself. With a strange fizzing popping noise, like a lightbulb blowing out, everything went completely dark. Then, slowly, words of light stuttered back into existence up in the darkness:
THIS SPACE
FOR RENT
Rik was so chagrined he couldn’t even bring himself to curse. Tom chuckled, though the sound was sad and commiserating. “And all our dreams vanish into air, into thin air . . .” he said.
“Well, crap!” Rik finally said. “I thought I had it at least a little under control . . .”
“Possibly premature,” Raoul said. He clapped Rik on the back, not that the gesture made Rik feel all that consoled. “Well, you’ll get the hang of it. Or if you don’t, you can always sell it to a third-party broker. Assuming they don’t take it off you first . . .”