“Not today,” Dev said. “We’ve got a party to go to after this, remember. You have time to hit the staging area yet?”
“Not yet,” said Tau. “But it’s filling up nicely. A lot of other people are taking this as seriously as you are: there wouldn’t have been any point in trying to limit crisis management to the intervention team. Everybody wants some of this—the attack teams have been briefing their auxiliaries for days.”
“I take it it’s not just a question of the overtime.”
Tau shook his head. “With these people? You should know better by now. This is their turf, and they don’t take kindly to crooks barging in to mess with it.”
“True,” Dev said. “By the way, I forgot to ask. Where’s Time Magazine Lady?”
“Joss’ people have her over at the Flackery,” Tau said. “She’ll be safely locked down by the time the balloon’s ready to go up. I think they were planning to take her out for barbecue or something.” He smiled a naughty smile. “Someplace with lots of atmosphere, but no WiFi and terrible cell phone reception.”
Dev nodded. “Good. All the same, I think I’d sooner her access permissions had some kind of unidentifiable malfunction for the next few hours. Just to prevent any, you know, journalistic accidents that might follow on someone else unexpectedly getting hold of her login info . . .”
Tau looked aside, whispered briefly to the air. “Done,” he said. “System security’s on it.”
“Good. Then let’s go—”
Dev waved a hand. Immediately the cold green fire of the lava started to flood the shore of the island where they stood, rising until Dev and Tau were knee-deep in it. As it did, the size of the particles in it grew until the letters and numbers and long, long strings of code were clearly visible. Dev lifted up the Sword of Truth and plunged it into the swirl of strings and characters.
The liquid code around the sword’s glow roiled and boiled enthusiastically, now looking less like lava and more like a bowl of unusually green chicken noodle soup. Dev hung onto the hilt, waiting for the built-in analytical functions to throw up some kind of result that he could use. But all the sword would do was lean leftward, indicating that the debugger had detected something peculiar in one of the thousands of interleaving protective routines that were part of the Conscientious Objector system. “Okay,” Dev said to the sword, “what are you reacting to?”
A window popped up in the air beside him and showed him a page of code written in the densest form of executive ARGOT. “This is one of the internal player security routines associated with the assignment and revocation of permissions to enter controlled-access ’cosms,” said the control voice. “It is showing intermittent failure of function.”
“Macrocosm or Microcosm?” Dev said, starting to push his way leftward along through the code stream.
“Microcosm, Dev.”
“Oh really,” he said under his breath.
Tau, pushing along through the lava beside him, threw Dev a glance. “Something?”
“Don’t know,” Dev said. “It’s just that I was up in the Microcosms earlier, assessing some bug reports and such for referral to the brush-fire teams. Thought I was seeing some common threads here and there. Ingress-and-exit-based outages that weren’t making sense . . .”
The two of them pushed along through the current, peering down into it for pertinent lines of code that the system would be tagging for their attention, but seeing nothing. The sword in Dev’s hand finally stopped leaning in the direction they were going, and stood straight upright in the code flow. Dev peered down along its length, not seeing anything. “Where’s the malfunctioning routine?” he said to the system.
“It has ceased to malfunction,” the control voice said. “Now running correctly.”
Dev and Tau stared at each other. “Typical,” Tau said. “The minute the repairman shows up, whatever’s busted starts working again.”
Dev frowned. “Show us the log of the malfunction,” he said.
The window hanging in the air cleared itself and then filled with more code, scrolling down fast and then pausing as each section of the system logs containing a malfunction highlighted itself. Dev waved the window a little wider, and he and Tau looked closely at it. After a moment Tau reached up a hand and pointed at one specific line of code. “There,” he said. “Look at that. A bad call to that routine. Someone who shouldn’t get into that particular space tries to get in. And bounces—”
“But not the way they should,” Dev said, bemused. “They shouldn’t be sent off to that rejection routine. They should be going—” He reached out into the air, and another spill of code started flowing onto another screen. “Over here. So why aren’t they? And where the heck’s the logic that sent them where they went? The field for the referring code is blank.”
“Somebody got sloppy . . .”
Dev gave Tau a look. “You or me, buddy? We’re the only ones who deal with this code.”
Tau shook his head. “How many hundreds of thousands of lines of this have we edited in the last few years?”
“More like millions, now,” Dev said. One of the first things Tau had designed for them as a necessary timesaver was an mass-implementation editing tool that would let either of them hunt down a single error in code, correct it, and also correct all the other incidences of that error right across the many lesser code modules that made up the Conscientious Objector as a whole. But that tool could be dangerous for exactly the same reason. One badly corrected routine could cause ripples of trouble right across the width of Omnitopia in everything from accounting to graphics and gameplay.
“Never mind,” Tau said. “We’ll assign blame later. Let’s bookmark this and move on.”
Dev nodded. “Highlight that routine and section and save for later reference,” he said to the system. “Copy the bookmark to Tau’s desk as well.”
“Done, Dev.”
Dev pulled the Sword of Truth out of the lava, shook the light off it to reset its search and analysis routines, and plunged it into the thick emerald light again. It shuddered in his hand, and this time leaned to the right.
Once more they followed it. Once more the sword stopped, and once again a malfunctioning access routine came up that had no business acting the way it was—and stopped malfunctioning just before they began examining it. Tau looked incredulous. “Lend me that thing a moment,” he said.
Dev gave him the sword. Tau waved it around in the air: it reshaped itself into a shorter sword with a heavier hilt, a broader point, and an odd fifteen-degree bend in the blade. “Is it supposed to look like that?” Dev said as Tau plunged the sword back into the lava.
Tau nodded, concentrating. “Kopis,” he said. “Traditional in my old neck of the woods—” as the sword leaned off in another direction. The two of them pushed through the code flow, found a third spot where the sword stood upright, quivering. Tau withdrew it, and a long flow of code followed it up out of the bubbling surface, spreading itself out on yet another screen-surface for examination.
They both stared at the code. “Nothing . . .” Tau said, scowling.
Dev shook his head. “This is entirely too hit- and-run,” he said. “It’s like it’s avoiding us on purpose! Some kind of virus . . . ?”
“How?” Tau said. “The CO is one of the most tightly protected parts of the system. You know how many filtration layers there are between it and the outside!” And not all the filters were mechanical. Many were live Omnitopian employees whose only duty was to patrol the border between Omnitopia’s systems and the outer world, always alert for the system’s warnings that something strange was going on in the demilitarized zone between it and the outer world. And there had been no more warnings about malfunctions than usual this past week, since the virus-writers were mostly waiting for the new rollout to see what vulnerabilities they might be able to discover in the relaunched software.
Dev sighed. “Come on,” he said, “let’s keep on it. We have to find something that’ll give us
a hint.”
Tau shrugged and handed Dev back the sword. Dev plunged it once more into the flow, let it show him which way it felt something strange going on, and followed. But forty-five minutes later, after six or seven more false alarms, Dev could only look over at Tau and couldn’t do anything but shake his head and throw his hands helplessly in the air. “Nothing,” he said.
Tau ducked sideways, the sword narrowly missing his head. “Watch how you wave that thing around,” he said.
“Oh, stop it,” Dev said as they climbed up out of the lava onto the dry land of the CO island, “you’re virtual.”
“It’s still a bad habit,” Tau said. “You might forget yourself and do it for real some night after dinner in the Armory, and then where would I be?”
Dev shook his head and tossed the sword into the darkness around them, well away from Tau. It vanished back into the virtual storage space that the system kept for it. “I guess we’re idiots to think we can find in an hour what the outer-access team couldn’t find in a week of looking.”
“If not idiots,” Tau said, “then just hopelessly optimistic. But we had to try. You and I should find some meeting time for the team tomorrow, though. Show them what we were seeing—” Dev threw him a glance. “Redacted, of course. This wouldn’t be any time to let any more details about the CO routine out where someone might pick something up and release it into the wild . . .”
Dev turned his attention to the hundred and twenty-one trees, alive with light inside the moat, and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, and looked over at Tau with an uncertain expression. “I think you should start thinking about making a short list . . . a very short list . . . of people you think might possibly be trusted with some of this data.”
Tau’s eyebrows went right up. Dev snapped his fingers, and the ground at their feet cracked open again: the stairs to the now upside-down upper level remanifested themselves. “This is a new tune from you,” said Tau as they headed down the stairs together.
Dev let out a breath. “I know,” he said. They came to the landing and paused there as the upper landscape started to rotate around them. “But your time’s already scarce enough. Mine is even scarcer. And it’s not like either of our lives are going to get any less busy. Also, the automatic routines, smart as they are, can only do so much. If we keep the information that we spread around compartmentalized, make sure that no one person has access to too much of it. . . .”
As the upper level rotated into position and they started down the stairs again to its ground level, Tau checked his watch. “I mean,” he said, “that you really hate to give up control, as a rule. Of anything. How long is this mood going to last, and how soon are you going to regret it?”
“How about already?” Dev said as they headed toward the ring of trees surrounding the shadowy Ring and the World Tree rearing out of it. The scene had changed. Dev could see a darkness surrounding the Ring and shutting away the view of the foot of the tree. It was a darkness that moved, restless, and a mutter of voices rose up from it, angry and excited.
As they got closer to the hundred and twenty-one trees of Macrocosm code, behind them the concrete manifestation of the Conscientious Objector routines re- formed on this level. This time the barrier was a wide and shallow river surrounding the island on which the trees stood. It was filled with water that slowly began to wash up over its banks with increasing vigor, as if somewhere a wind was rising. Before them, the darkness around the Ring and the foot of the tree began to surge toward Dev and Tau, and the low roar of angry voices got louder.
It was an army that approached them, but one the likes of which not even Omnitopia had ever seen before. There were maniples of Roman legionaries in its front line, and platoons of blaster-bearing space-age stormtroopers in the traditional white armor. There were janissaries in scale armor and GI Joe types in muddy camo. There were Napoleonic soldiers in colors too bright for any sane man to wear on the battlefield, and Spartan wannabes in leather kilts, and Trojans who owed more to the USC marching band than the windy plains of Ilium. There were knights in Renaissance armor, and Valkyries and Amazons and blue-painted Celts in chariots. And that was just the Earth-based armament—the Omnitopian imports were equally eclectic. There were war tigers from the deserts of Elleban and clone troopers from the buried cities of Dawlglish, bone archers from the caverns under Prowse II and barbpike phalanges from Orinel, a small chelate-armored tank group from Bonzer and underminers from the benighted jungles of Mazarin. There were even Gnarths and Men and Elves of old Omnitopia, the original races of Telekil, all fighting together in one huge, grim, and very unusual war band, for such alliances among the Original Three were unheard of.
All these warriors were Omnitopia system security people who had been involved either in identifying the access routes of the expected big attack, or in devising the various methods that would be used to foil it—the tailored viruses and logic bombs, the bloodhound routines and system-burners. All the weapons they carried, or embodied, or rode in or on, were expressions of the routines they would be using to fight the incoming attackers, and each team or group or individual had chosen the seeming that best suited their particular preference. Some of these people would have doubled or tripled themselves, using “multitask clones” to be able to fight a given enemy in several places at once. Conspicuously in the lead was a regiment of freebooter Gnomes from Rhaetia Secunda—all armed with bloody axes and broad-bladed pike arms, and led by the assistant head accountant for Omnitopia, Michael Spirakis. These were the shapes that the accountancy teams wore on interventions inside Secunda, where the most serious forms of fiduciary gameplay took place. There the War Gnomes of Turicum gamed out the genuine interventions that they used day by day to protect the Omnitopian accounting routines from the opportunist crooks and hackers of the outside world: or they reenacted them to hone their techniques and prepare for the next assault . . . like this one.
As Dev and Tau headed toward the approaching horde, Dev shook his head in amazement. “My God, Tau, half the company’s here!”
Tau chuckled. “It just looks that way,” he said. “There are a lot of multiples . . .”
“Still,” Dev said as they made their way toward Mike Spirakis and his crowd of bloodthirsty accountancy programmers. For an event like this, they had all put aside the three-piece-suit look that the Gnomes normally sported in the tidy cobbled streets of Turicum, a clone of the real-world Zürich. Now they looked more ghoulish than Gnomish—the suits on the bandy- legged, shaggy-pelted bipeds torn to bloodstained yet ceremonial tatters, the monstrous goggle- eyed heads wearing their neckties as headbands, the virtual scalps of scammers and hackers hanging at their belts or (in the case of the most enthusiastic employees) knitted into loincloths or jackets. They looked like nightmares trying to follow their victims into the waking day . . . which wasn’t far from the truth.
Mike came lumbering along wearing the department’s Bloomberg the Terrible persona, a hunched-over, one-eyed, piratical-looking monstrosity somewhat resembling a giant gorilla in what remained of a pinstriped suit—the shirt long gone except for the collar, the jacket missing, and the suspenders holding up trousers that had been reduced pretty much to short-shorts. “Hey, Boss,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” Dev said. “But I thought Jim wouldn’t have either. Where’s the senior Bloomberg?”
“Not here. Uncle Jim’s up in Castle Scrooge, watching the shop in spreadsheet mode. He thinks the markets are going to need some calming down when they get wind of what’s going on down here.”
“He may have a point,” Tau said.
“Conference calls with MSNBC and the real Bloomberg News are setting up right now,” Mike said. “Good thing, because the hackers have just done their first ‘gotcha’ press release.”
Dev swallowed. Regardless of how much warning he’d had of this, now that it was actually starting, he felt like somebody had punched him in the gut. “What d
id they say?”
“Oh, that they own us,” Mike said. “Pretty much what you’d expect. But not true yet. They’re still feeling us out to see what the resistance is like.”
“Is this the real attack happening already?” Tau said, sounding alarmed.
Mike nodded. “It will be. Our first skirmishing troops are out now: they’ve been choking off the initial hostile accesses for about half an hour now. The first hits started coming in from Asia—the usual problem, there are so many unprotected proxy servers over there—and initially we mistook the attacks for more of the usual hacker traffic. But then a pattern emerged: the automated systems and the live Watchers started picking up on it around the same time. Anyway, they’ve been coming at us in stages, feeling us out. But the big wave’s on its way in.”
Dev twitched. “Shouldn’t we be rolling out more attacks? I mean, I don’t like the idea of letting them just roll over us . . .”
“We’re attacking on as many fronts as are smart at this moment,” Mike said. “We don’t want to overextend ourselves. While they’re feeling us out, we attack, yeah, but proportionately. If we overreact and hit one wave too hard, or one part of it, and then don’t have enough held in reserve for the next, we’re screwed.” He looked out past them, swinging his ax idly, watching the troubled water out on the local version of Rubicon as the invisible wind whipped it up. “For the time being I’ve instructed the initial responders to keep their responses muted and scattered—so the bad guys won’t think we actually know what’s happening yet. I want them to roll out their full assault so that we get a minute or so of good clear analysis before we move to take them down across all the time zones. Ideally I want to crash all their systems, but not without making sure we have their IPs traced so Auntie Cleo can sue their network providers blind.”
Dev turned to look across the river. Out there a darkness was forming at the edge of this part of the virtual world. Then he turned back to look at the massed avatars of his Omnitopia staff. “Got a nice turnout for this shindig, anyway.”