At least, she knew her real body was doing that. But her present body—which felt bizarrely like her real one: it’s gonna take me a while to get used to this RealFeel thing—was sitting on a rock at the edge of a flowery meadow, under Indigo’s closed- in sky. The sunlight shone down buttery yellow on the landscape, an afternoon color, even though the little interior sun was at a height which normally would have been associated with noon. It can’t help that, Angela had thought when she’d come in earlier this evening and had first had time to just sit still and look at things without Rik chattering at her. It’s stuck in the middle of everything, after all. So you can’t get the change in light from the change in angle, the way it is in the real world. But the color, that you could mess with. . . . And so she had spent the early evening (home time) fiddling with the one modular piece of the universe’s ARGOT stack that controlled the way sunlight displayed over any given spot. She had finally managed to get it to the point where it started out low-level and slightly dim as if seen through dawn haze, then brightened up through morning levels and noontime heat and brilliance: then slowly diminished to an afternoon glow, and then faded out entirely. Now all I have to do is figure how to roll this effect right around the inside of the sphere. With seasonal changes . . .
Angela sighed and stretched as she looked out over the meadow, amused as always by the way it slowly sloped up into the odd upturned interior horizon. She was beginning to see how this kind of design could start growing on you. It’s amazing that Rik hasn’t been more stuck on this than he has, she thought, dropping her gaze to the rock she sat on, brushing at the gritty top of it with one hand. As she looked at it, a flower down by the side of the rock caught her eye. Now where did he get these? she thought, reaching down to pick one. Some module he imported? She looked closely at the flower in her hand. This looks so generic. The flower was apparently modeled on a daisy, but close inspection showed it to be more like a ten year old’s sketch of a daisy than anything else. The leaves were plain ovals and the petals came together in a blank circle that didn’t have any fine structure to it at all, no stamens or pistils, just a yellow circle. Well, we can certainly do better than this. Sure, maybe people are just going to be fighting in here, but if anybody ever stops to smell the flowers, there should be flowers for them to smell, not just these plastic-looking things!
And how do you manage smell?
“System management?” she said.
“Yes, Angela?”
“Pull me some docs on how to give things a smell, okay?”
“Displaying a basic scent tutorial now.”
A frame opened in the air near her, and Angela was just glancing toward it when she caught sight of somebody in the distance, coming toward her across the meadow—and it wasn’t Rik. What the heck? she thought—and then recognized who it was. Oh my gosh, it’s what’s his name, she thought, standing up hurriedly. Dennis.
The strange shambling little figure came through the flowers toward her in his peculiar raggedy coat of many colors. So strange, she thought. He doesn’t have to look like this! People can look whatever way they like in Omnitopia . . . But it wasn’t her place to judge, and anyway, for all she knew, it all had some secret meaning for him.
Dennis came up to her, stopped a few feet away, and bowed. “Milady,” he said.
“Dennis,” she said, “you don’t have to be miladying me! Just call me Angela. What’s up?”
“I have a message for you.” He started fumbling around among the rags. As he did, Angela caught a most pronounced really-needs-a-wash scent that made her open her eyes wide. It can’t be the way he smells, that has to be somebody’s programming . . . But why would he want to smell that way? Unless, again, it’s all part of some role he’s playing, some game . . .
After a moment, “Aha,” Dennis said, and came out with an envelope. “Here—”
Angela took it, examining it with bemusement. The envelope was made of a very heavy cream paper with a rough edge on the flap, the kind you would normally see used for a wedding invitation or something similar. “What’s this?” she said, turning it over. The front, apparently hand addressed by someone using dark blue-black ink, read: “Mr. Rik and Mrs. Angela Maliani and Family.”
“Better open it and find out,” Dennis said. And he grinned at her.
There was something odd about that grin. And wait—how does Dennis know who Rik really is? Rik only told him he was Arnulf. Angela opened the envelope, pulled out a piece of folded paper, more of that rich thick cream-colored stuff, with the Omnitopia alpha and omega embossed in the middle of the front of it. Some kind of invitation? She opened it and a piece of tissue paper fell out of the middle; it had been protecting the beautiful engraving on the inside of the card.
Dev Logan and Omnitopia Inc.
cordially request the honour of your attendance
at the opening ceremony celebrating
the Expansion of the Macrocosms
and subsequent festivities
Omnitopia Main Campus
Tempe, Arizona
Drinks, buffet dinner and entertainment
from 5 p.m. onwards
Formal presentation and Opening of the New Worlds
at 8 p.m. (Noon Japan Standard Time)
June 21, 2015
Evening formal or casual
R.S.V.P
“What on Earth . . . ?” Angela said under her breath. And at that moment her in-game e-mail signal chimed. Angela looked up in increased surprise. “What is it?”
“Shall I read the mail?” said the control voice.
Angela looked at Dennis. He was watching her with interest out of those watery old eyes of his. “Who’s it from?” Angela said.
“Frank Sandringham, executive assistant to Dev Logan,” said the control voice.
Angela’s eyes went wide. “What? I mean, go on, read it.”
“Dear Angela,” said the mail—not in the control voice’s voice, but a male voice she had to assume was Frank’s—“Dev Logan has asked me to invite you, Rik, and your family to the opening-night party for the Macrocosm Expansion. I understand that this is very short notice, but you would be most welcome if you’re able to make it. Attached to this mail please find a set of e-tickets good for round trip first class air travel for you and your family from your nearest airport to Phoenix, and reservations at the Mission Palms Hotel and Spa in Tempe for the duration of your stay with us.
“New paragraph. Dev understands that it may be an issue for Rik to get time off work to attend physically at such short notice. He urges you please to get in touch with me if this is the case, and we will do the best we can to overcome any difficulty with his employer—with whom we do a great deal of business, and who we suspect will be happy to accommodate us and Rik in terms of providing him with a night or two off. Otherwise, you will be most welcome at the virtual party, and Dev asks that you please hold on to the e-tickets until a later date when you can visit us in Tempe. Your work with your Microcosm has been of great assistance to Dev over the past few days, and he very much wants a chance to thank the two of you personally, either tomorrow night or at another time more convenient for you.
“New paragraph. Please get in touch with me immediately if you have any questions. Rik will be receiving his own copy of this mail at the same time you’ve received it, so if either or both of you have questions, please get in touch with me immediately and I’ll be delighted to help you.
“New paragraph. Very much hoping that we can see you tomorrow night, I remain, yours very sincerely, Frank Sandringham—”
“Stop readout,” Angela said. The reading voice fell silent. Angela looked at Dennis.
“What do you know about this?” she said.
Dennis looked up at her from under graying eyebrows. “That not just anybody gets invited to these shindigs,” he said. And he smiled at her: a smile totally unlike anything Angela had seen from him before, a look of pure enjoyment.
“Really,” Angela said.
 
; “Really,” Dennis said. And he tugged his forelock to her, and vanished.
Angela stood there silently for a moment, looking at the envelope and recalling the biblical verse about “angels unawares.” Then she looked up at the sky. “Rik?” she said.
“What?” He was right across the interior of the globe, working on some mountain range or other: something about the strata being slanted wrong, he’d said.
“Have you checked your mail?”
“Uh, no. I heard it go off, though—”
“Better check it,” Angela said. “And did you put your good shirt in the wash yesterday?”
“Which good shirt?”
“The white one.”
“Uh, I’m not sure.”
“Never mind. Just check the mail.”
“Okay. Oh, hi, Dennis, what brings you here?”
Angela sat down on the rock again and smiled.
Out on the South Shore of Long Island, a man in a windbreaker stood alone on the beach in the evening light, staring out at the charcoal-colored sea and listening to the sound from a video playing on his PDA.
“—interesting day,” Dev Logan’s voice was saying as he stood up in front of a news channel’s cameras outside the gates of Omnitopia, his hands in his pockets, looking both casual and focused, “but no worse than that. Our system has been restored to normal operation in Europe and most of North America: the Asian servers were hardest hit, but will be restored to full operation by ten a.m. local time.”
An immediate clamor of voices went up from the surrounding press corps. “Is this going to interfere with the rollout of your new product tomorrow night?” someone shouted.
“No,” Dev said. “Our senior staff members tell me they’re confident that all the new features will be ready to go as scheduled, despite other people’s best efforts to interfere.”
“How much money did you lose last night?”
“You’re going to have to ask my CFO about that,” Dev said. “I’ve had my eye mostly on system management issues today. But I’m informed this evening that our losses were much less than originally thought, as many of the fraudulent transfers were either stopped by our own accounting systems, or identified as suspicious and frozen by banking security systems elsewhere. We expect to recover a significant portion of the illicitly transferred funds, between sixty and seventy percent, within twenty-four to thirty-six hours. The rest we’ll have more news on within a few days.”
“Can you tell us anything about the involvement of the FBI and local law enforcement in discovering the source of these attacks on your system?” shouted another voice.
“We won’t be commenting on investigations that are under way,” Dev said.
“There have been rumors in the blogosphere that rival game companies may have been involved in the attacks,” said another voice. “Would you care to comment?”
There was a pause. Phil looked down at the PDA. “On rumors? Hardly,” Dev said. But his glance swept directly across every gathered pool camera. “I will say this, though. There are always people who’re much more willing to believe gossip, especially nasty gossip, than are willing to wait for the truth to unfold itself.”
The clamor of voices started again. Phil let out an annoyed breath, turned off the PDA and shoved it into his pocket. That was meant for me, he thought. Pretending to hold out the olive branch even though he knows damn well what’s going on. Damn him, I’m tired of the self-actualized act! Why won’t he just get up and punch back when he’s been punched? Why won’t he call me and just tell me off to my face? That at least would be a jumping-off point. We could finally get straight with each other, we could start to—
His phone rang. Phil swore, pulled it out, glanced at the name that came up on the screen, punched the talk button. “Yes?”
“Where is our payment?” said the disguised voice on the other end.
“Pending,” said Phil, “while I find out how much I actually got of the service I paid you for.”
A long silence followed. “You knew how the operation was going to be carried out,” said the voice. “If when we first came to our arrangement you had any second thoughts about what results it might produce, or how the markets might or might not move as a result, you should have made them known. You got exactly what you paid for.”
“I did not,” Phil shouted, “because I paid for those servers to be wiped clean! And what do I get? Nothing but four measly hours of downtime and more positive publicity for the guy who’s supposed to be drowning in negatives and losing his shirt right now!”
“If their system was more robust than you gave us to understand,” said the voice, “that’s your error, not ours. We expect payment within the agreed time window.”
“Or what?” Phil said. “You’ll report me to the Better Business Bureau?”
“Or we’ll find out if your game’s servers are as robust as Omnitopia’s,” said the voice and the receiver clicked loudly in Phil’s ear.
He stared, unbelieving and furious, at the phone, then hung it up and shoved it into the other pocket.
His damn luck again, Phil thought, looking out at the darkening sea. This is just not fair. Not fair at all.
Where can I go from here? What do I have to do to win?
He turned his back on the sea and headed back for the beach house to consider his options. Dev being Dev, he would mistake the present outcome for a triumph. Give him a few weeks, Phil thought, let him think everything’s settling down—and then see what else we might hit him with. This expansion of his is too much too soon. Some weak spot will reveal itself.
It’s not over yet. . . .
The check-in lines at the international airport in Atlanta were never exactly enjoyable, but it seemed to Danny that they were moving more slowly than he’d ever seen them do. The place was thick with people even on a midweek midafternoon, the time that Danny had been advised to fly to avoid delays or unwanted attention.
Ahead of him, the people in the line inched forward toward the uniformed woman up at the counter. Danny sighed and inched forward with them. As advised, he’d packed nothing but a carry-on. He’d be able to dip into his new bank account to buy what he needed when he got where he was going. He was already carrying a healthy wad stuffed into his wallet, what would have been almost a year’s salary for him. It had been difficult for him, when he’d looked into the bank account yesterday morning, to leave the remainder of the money there—an amount that was more like a lottery win than anything else.
The other people, those who’d set this deal up for him, had already taken their cut. Danny had been notified of the amount by e-mail, and that figure too had been one that had taken his breath away. But even after their money came out, he still had a ton more left. The people at the other end had advised him not to withdraw too much while he was still at home; that could make the bank suspicious. But nothing had happened so far, and as the line inched forward again, Danny smiled to himself. Finally. Finally it’s happening . . .
He hadn’t bothered to say good-bye to his boss, or even to tell him what was happening. Danny simply hadn’t gone to work today. His apartment was already empty of everything that mattered to him, all the things that counted stuffed into a storage place last week, and the key stuffed into his landlord’s mailbox along with the torn- up lease. They could keep his security deposit: Danny didn’t care. In his wallet he had the address for the hotel he was staying at in the Keys until he flew out to Bermuda and beyond a few days from now. All his thoughts now were on mint juleps and white beaches, and Danny smiled as the line inched forward again, leaving him with only two people in front of him, a husband and wife who were arguing under their breath about something as they waited for the next counter to open up.
The phone in his pocket was mercifully quiet. For all Danny knew, his boss Ricardo was calling his old number every five minutes, demanding to know where he was. But that phone was now at the bottom of the wretched scummy little lake between the old strip mall and the F
edEx depot. Standing there last night under the yellow sodium lights, throwing the phone in and hearing it splash, had been one of the happiest things Danny had ever done. He smiled again to think of Ricardo railing at his voice mail, threatening Danny with firing and worse. There’s a voice I won’t ever have to hear again, he thought. Thank you, God.
The married couple were waved forward to the counter in front of him. Danny had just time enough to pull out the printout of his e-ticket and his new passport when the lady at the counter over to the left called, “Next!”
He headed over to her, handed her the e-ticket. She smiled. Danny smiled back: she was definitely pretty enough to be worth smiling back at. “Heading for Key West—” she said, and started tapping at the keyboard.
“That’s right,” Danny said.
“Can I see your ID, please?” she said, still tapping away.
Danny handed it over. “Kind of busy today,” he said.
She glanced at him, glanced at the back page of the passport, tapped at the keyboard again, and pushed the passport back to him, smiling. “It’s always busy these days,” she said, turning her attention back to the monitor behind the counter. “Vacation time . . . everybody’s going away . . .” She shook her head, frowned slightly at the monitor, and typed some more. “How many bags are you checking?”
“None,” Danny said. “I’ve just got the carry-on. Is the plane full?”
“Yeah,” the counter lady said, “pretty full, shoulder season’s just about over . . .” She peered at the monitor for a moment. “Here we go. Aisle or window?”
“Uh, window,” Danny said.
She typed for a few moments more, then pushed him across a tag for his carry-on bag. “Just put that around the handle,” she said, and a moment later slid his boarding pass across to him. “Twelve- F, gate D16, boarding time is ten forty-five.” She circled the boarding time on the pass with a colored marker and put a slash through the seat number. “Probably you should just go straight through.” And she smiled at him again. “Have a nice trip!”