Omnitopia: Dawn

  Phil stood still, listening to the waves. After a moment one more sound added itself: the two-tone foghorn of the Montauk Point light-house, surprisingly carrying tonight through the damp air. For some reason, the mist made it sound sadder than usual, and the sad sound stirred an analogous, irrational sorrow in his gut.

  He pushed through the curtains, walked out naked onto the terrace and stood there, feeling the slightly chilly wind on his skin, ignoring the way the hair rose on him at the touch of it. You’ve forgotten what life’s for! the furious voice said, years ago, worlds away. You’ve forgotten fun, you’ve forgotten joy, and whenever you see anyone else having any, you try to get between them and it, and your jealousy drives them away! This isn’t what we’re about! There’s more to our business than money, or there would be, if you hadn’t blown it all out your butt!

  You’re talking about blowing our money? The way you’ve been spending—

  I’ll sure as hell never be spending again, not after today, because every penny I put into this business is gone, and not because I spent it!

  He could still feel the rush of cold that ran through him with those words, the incredulous sense that he actually might have gotten something wrong. Phil shook his head and sighed: then leaned on the railing and looked out toward the invisible sea. Why is all this coming up now? he thought.

  But that was a shrink-type question of the type he’d long since given up asking himself. The one time he’d had a brush with psychotherapy, about five years ago, the shrink had been most unhelpful. “The basic position of the human mind,” he’d said, “is, ‘I am blameless. ’ And when you hear your mind saying that to itself . . . then you know the sound of deception. Because we are none of us are blameless. What distinguishes us is how we handle blame, even whether we handle it.” That kind of negative thinking had, after a few sessions, struck Phil as incredibly unhelpful: so after the first month he’d dumped the guy and had never gone back.

  Phil, for God’s sake, why didn’t you listen to Jim? Jim knew what he was doing! Why does anybody hire a Harvard MBA and then ignore him! He told you what the markets were going to do and they did that. He told you that you needed to change brokers and get our capital out of those convertible funds, and you said you were going to do that, and you didn’t do that. And now all our capital is gone, and we can’t bring the new game out, and my whole investment is lost, and all the work the team and I did is for nothing! You knew what you had to do, and you did nothing! Why did you do that?!

  In the heat of that now ancient-seeming moment, Phil hadn’t been able to find an answer that made any sense. Then the fight had gone off into other, far more personal, more damaging territory, and any attempt to explain himself would have been brushed aside. But eventually Phil realized both that he had never trusted Jim Margoulies’ judgment, and that he had had no good reason on Earth not to. He hadn’t discounted Jim’s advice because he thought it was wrong or misguided, but because he honestly thought Dev took Jim more seriously than him. Because Dev and Jim had been friends for longer. And the more Dev denied it, the more I couldn’t believe him—the more it seemed that Dev really did trust Jim more than he did me, and I could never win in that relationship, never even pull equal—

  —and when you can’t win, you leave, his shrink had said to him. Not as a question for once, framed in the nonattributive manner beloved of shrinks everywhere, but a conclusion, drawn out in the open because even the patient had said as much himself and couldn’t possibly be so obtuse as to have missed the message.

  Which of course had been the real reason he’d left the shrink, as he was plainly never going to win there, either.

  All I wanted to do was prove that Jim wasn’t God, that he could be wrong occasionally, that my instincts were as good as his. Okay, I was the one who got it wrong! I would have admitted that eventually! We would have clawed our way back up the ladder eventually, we’d have made it work again if he’d just have committed to stick with me and let me help pull us out of the hole! We’d have been the winners someday! But Dev hadn’t been willing to give Phil a second chance. That was what Phil still regretted the most about that terrible fight, which had ended everything between them except litigation. And there was no way back, now. Too much bitterness, the ashes of the burned bridges long scattered . . .

  “This is not about winning!” Dev had said to him, bitter. When had he ever heard such a tone of voice from the man he used to call, with affectionate scorn, “Mr. Sunshine”? But until now it had always been affectionate, and now everything was going wrong. “There are some things you can’t win, some things you should never try to win, because when you do, you lose everything else. What profits it a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?”

  There had been more, much more. Underlying every friendship, Phil now suspected, down in the darkness where the friendship had its foundations, were secret understandings about the friend that should never be spoken aloud—suspicions or assumptions that it was most dangerous to bring out into the light, especially in anger. And in their anger, both of them had reached down into that darkness and said to each other the things that should never be said, even between friends. And then, memorably, came the offhand, throwaway line that hardly seemed as injurious as everything else Phil had thrown at Dev, the line that ended it all: “The only reason you’ve got Mirabel now is because I let you have her!”

  Quite soon after that Phil had found himself standing in the center of the old Boston apartment, all alone. And as before, so now: here he was, alone as always. Phil could now hardly remember what it was like not to be alone. All his days full of business associates and employees, all his nights full of dates and dinners and photo opportunities and charity gigs—none of them made the slightest dent in the polished, steel-hard skin of his aloneness. Everything he had—his wealth, his success, his fame—were designed to keep him from perceiving how alone he was. Normally, in daylight, in the rush of travel and the nonstop activity of business, they succeeded. But every now and then, like now, the drug wore off. Every now and then Phil saw that Dev, who he’d thought had been the loser in their argument, somehow nonetheless had more of everything than he had, and that Phil was the one who’d lost.

  Now he leaned his head against the damp, bleached wood post that held the terrace roof up over the decking. Without warning, without reason, Phil was aching inside, the original, inconsolable gut feeling of the days and hours after the fight, which his body plainly remembered all too well. If only it could never have happened, Phil thought. But fat chance of that. If only it could be fixed. But it can’t. If only there was something I could do to make it right—

  There was, of course, one thing. And it would only be a start. In his mind he saw himself going up the stairs to Morgan Wise’s office, shutting the door behind him, and saying to her, “I’ve changed my mind. Call it off.”

  Phil took a long breath, trying to imagine the world that might result from such a choice.

  And a wave of sullen fury ran up the shores of his soul and drowned the very idea. What is this midnight regret shit? Phil thought. I do not do midnight regrets. The hell with this. I just need some sleep.

  Phil turned his back on the unseen ocean and went inside, shutting the French windows on the surf and the mournful two-tone horn. A lot to do tomorrow, he thought. A world to change. A game to win: a real game, the life game, the only one that counts.

  He got into bed, pulled the covers up, and shut his eyes against the watching darkness.

  TEN

  THE NEXT THING DEV KNEW, he was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. It was dark, and someone was speaking. “—Labor unions in Australia continue their head- to-head confontation with government negotiators, leaving other major world markets wondering how this will affect the continuing recovery of the Australasian economies and others around the world. And excitement continues to build as what some call the world’s most popular online roleplaying game continues preparing to launch its newest
product while attempting to recover from what could have been the biggest online heist in history. My name is Scott Simon, it’s Saturday the twentieth of June, 2015, and this is Weekend Edition from NPR—”

  The program’s insistently cheerful theme music started to play from the broadband radio box on Dev’s side of the bed. Dev blinked and rubbed his eyes, then looked over to his right. Mirabel wasn’t there.

  Huh? Dev thought, and turned over to look at the bedside clock. It said five oh one.

  Oh my God oh my God has the attack come yet? Why didn’t they call, why didn’t they—

  Dev hurriedly sat up and pushed the covers back. He was still wearing his shirt, but all his other clothes except for his underwear had been pulled off him. I don’t remember that happening! What else have I missed? Oh, please, God, let me still have a company to run—

  He got out of bed, staggered over to a chair across the room that had a pair of his jeans thrown over it, and pulled them on hastily, pausing to sniff: he smelled toast. “Miri?” he said, heading out into the living area.

  Mirabel was there, sitting at the coffee bar in one of her floppy nightshirts, the silk bathrobe over it all. She had been gazing idly at the screen of one of her laptops on the counter, chewing on a piece of toast. As he came in, she smiled at him and yawned.

  “What the heck are you doing out here?” Dev said, going over to kiss her.

  “You kicked me out of bed,” Mirabel said, giving him a dry look. “Twice. And you kept stealing the covers.”

  Dev moaned. He was a famously restless sleeper when he was stressed, and right now he was way more stressed than usual. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry . . .”

  “Shut up,” Mirabel said. She reached over to one side, where one of his mugs had been sitting on the bar’s hot spot, and pushed it into his hand. “Drink that. I’m going to make you breakfast, and you are going to eat it.”

  Dev’s stomach did a flip- flop. “Uh,” he said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I need to call Tau, because he said—”

  Mirabel rolled her eyes at him. “To tell you as soon as you woke up that unless he’d called by now, there’s been no second attack as yet. And he hasn’t, so there wasn’t. Meanwhile, I know what you’re going to say and I don’t want to hear about your stomach! All the time you claim you’re too nervous to eat, and then it just gets worse later. You’re going to have at least a bowl of cereal. No, don’t even speak to me! Sit down, drink the coffee, have some caffeine if you can’t have a brain.”

  Mirabel got up, pushed Dev down onto the bar stool she’d been sitting in, and went off to the fridge under the back counter. From this she extracted milk, from the cupboard above the fridge a bowl and a box with such garish graphics that it hurt Dev’s eyes to look at it so early in the morning. “What is that?” he said.

  “Something Lolo buzz-sawed me into buying last week,” said Mirabel, sounding annoyed with herself. “She saw some flashy commercial for it. I said I’d buy it for her, but I never said I was going to let her have any of it. You, though, look like you could use a sugar rush to tide you over until the carbs kick in. Here.”

  Moments later Dev found himself eating a cereal that (according to the box) was full of Oaty Goodness, but in actuality seemed to be much fuller of circus-themed Day-Glo marshmallows. “Boy,” he said after a few moments of shoveling the stuff in, “whatever you do, don’t let Lola near this! Might as well just give her IV espresso.”

  Mirabel shook her head as she sat down in the chair beside Dev and reached past him to get her toast, turning her laptop toward her again. “Her staff would not thank us,” she said.

  “It’s my staff I’m worried about right now.”

  “And they’re thinking about you, so relax,” Mirabel said. “I talked to Milla an hour ago. She was on call to Tau until he finally fell over, and after that to Tau’s night support people. But there’s been nothing to disturb you about. She told me the master system security guys were still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Some kind of network problem at the bad guys’ end, she said. Does that make sense?”

  “Enough sense for right now,” said Dev, and pushed the bowl away, astonished that he’d emptied it so quickly. Mirabel pushed his coffee back at him, and Dev slurped at it gratefully: it was so much less sweet than the cereal that the contrast felt like a sudden return to an adulthood that he was now sugar-hopped enough to appreciate. Dev rubbed his eyes and started trying to get his thoughts in order.

  “Don’t think yet,” Mirabel said. “Two things, though, and I’ll write them down for you.” She reached past her laptop for a pad of sticky notes and a pen. “You have to go eat your ice cream for Lolo this morning—”

  Dev groaned. “Ice cream before lunch? Is this the same woman who keeps telling me I need to lose ten pounds?”

  “—and I am bringing you the sandwich at lunchtime, and another at dinner, because you cannot be trusted to put them inside you no matter how many reasonable noises you make.”

  Dev gave her a wounded look. “I’ll do it today, honest.”

  “Yes, you will,” Mirabel said, smiling: but her voice was grim.

  “Now go shower.” She got up, stretched. “And don’t just throw those jeans back on, either. Your staff’ll start talking if the seventh richest man in the world doesn’t change his pants.”

  Dev laughed as he got up: then stopped. “How’d you know about seventh?”

  Mirabel turned away with a wry grin. “You kidding? Your staff leaks to me like a sieve. Now get going. Milla will be here soon.”

  She was there within twenty minutes, as it happened, and by that time the combination of the sugar and the carb- loading followed by a lot of hot water had indeed worked their wonders for Dev. He no longer felt like he wanted to hide under the bed from his staff and his stockholders, though later in the day he might have reason. Milla, to his pleasure, also looked like she hadn’t been up all night, though her expression as she came in was somewhat grim. “Oh, come on, Mil,” said Mirabel as she went out to see if Lola was up yet. “Smile! It might never happen.”

  Milla smiled dutifully enough, but her face reset itself to grim as the door closed behind Mirabel and Milla started opening up her piles of files and started laying out printouts on the coffee-bar counter for Dev to look over. “Bad night?” said Dev.

  Milla rolled her eyes and ran a hand through her short shaggy blonde hair. “You have no idea. Everybody’s in a foul mood, Mr. Logan. Nobody likes the idea of those sonsabitches breaking into our house and going through the drawers. Virtually speaking.” She flushed red.

  Dev kept himself from smiling: it was unusual to see Milla get so passionate about anything. “So where are we this morning newswise?”

  She frowned. “News about the attack is everywhere, as you might imagine. I have a note from Mr. Margoulies. He’d like to see you over at Castle Scrooge this morning.”

  “Frank’s got me scheduled already,” Dev said.

  Milla nodded. “Our share price closed down in the Asian markets,” she said. “Europe is awake, and the share price in Frankfurt and London is jumping all over as the two exchanges watch each other’s reactions and freak out more. Currency instability’s making it worse: the intraday trends are all over the place. The Asia finance analysts think the Hang Seng is waiting to see if there’s another attack by their morning. If there’s not, or if there is and we can handle it quick, we might get some positive bounce off them today. But don’t look for anything big.”

  Dev rubbed his eyes. There we go, he thought; we’re never going to break a thousand in this climate. That’s why Jim wants to see me, to break the bad news. He let his hands fall and let out a long breath. “Okay,” he said, “it’s eight in the morning back East and Wall Street will be open soon. So by the time I see Jim, we’ll have some sense of how the U.S. markets will react. Meanwhile, what’s going on in the media?”

  “Sniggering from the hackers,” Milla said, l
ooking furious as she pushed a printout over to Dev, “but not in any detail that’s particularly useful to us. They’ve issued the same press release electronically to the various public access PR sources, and to all the big papers and TV networks, being very careful to use public anonymizers to cover their tracks. We’re idiots, they own us, yada yada yada.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll see who owns who by the end of the day,” Dev said as he looked over a copy of the press release, which was full of leetspeak terms and number-and-letter spellings that had probably made the older news editors at various wire services send for younger stringers who could do a translation. “What does system security have for me?”

  “They’ve been busy all night following up leads,” Milla said. “And it looks like they’ve got some, because our attackers got a little lazy or a little too cheeky for their own good, and left some markers they may not have known they were leaving. In more than one area. In particular, there are messages piling up for you from the shuntspace crowd—”

  Dev blinked at that. “Why the heck?” he said. “The shuntspaces aren’t public. No one outside the firm even knows about them. A lot of people inside the firm don’t even know about them: those spaces aren’t their business. Why would the attackers be bothering with them? Come to think of it, how would they even have gotten into them?”

  Milla shrugged, shook her head. “I have no idea. But the palace crew have been getting more excitable all night, and Tau has flagged what they’re doing as a high-priority matter of interest, so I’ve forwarded all their messages to your to-do box.”

  Dev got up and stretched. “Tau did say last night that they were picking up some anomalies . . . Who knows. I’ll talk to them. Anything else serious?”