“What kind of negatives?”
“He kicked a griffin once,” said Rik, “and another time he broke into the back of a tavern and stole a firkin of wine.”
Angela blinked. “Uh,” she said. “Okay, maybe I’ll cut him some slack until I understand what’s going on around here.” She looked up at the little sun, and past it to the blue, blue water seemingly hanging up there in the sky. “I really like that . . .” she said. “Whatever else you do, don’t lose the way that looks. And all those little fires way up there. That’s really neat.”
Rik grinned. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so too. So we agree about something right off the bat.”
Angela nodded, smiled. “Just like we agreed this morning that someone needed to go to the store, because the fridge is looking empty . . .”
“I’ll go,” Rik said.
“No way, Mr. Big In- Game Employer,” Angela said. “You stay here and have your last full day of play. Tomorrow’s work, remember . . .”
“Don’t remind me.” Rik got up. “Don’t forget the olive oil.”
“It’s on the list,” Angela said. “Who’s gonna cook tonight?”
“I’ll do that,” Rik said. “Pull out some hamburger and I’ll do the famous meatballs.”
Angela grabbed him and kissed him. Then she wiggled her lips around. “Weird,” she said. “Can’t feel anything. It’s like I’ve had novocaine.”
“We’re gonna have to get another RealFeel headset,” Rik said.
“Oh, no,” Angela said. “I can just see it. Both parents sitting around with earplugs in and eyecups on? The kids would run riot.” She looked around. “How do I get out?”
“Like this. System management?”
“What is it, Rik?”
“Open a door for Angela, please? Access my office.”
A doorlike dimness, lit by buzzing pink neon, opened in the bright air. “Right through there,” Rik said, “and go out the way you came in. You sure you don’t want me to come along and bag?”
She waved him away. “Later,” Angela said, and went through. The door closed behind her.
Rik sighed and sat down on his rock again. He’d found it was more pleasant to do clerical work out here in the air and sunshine and wind than it was in his office. “Screen, please?” he said. “The log analysis I was working on earlier.”
“Here you are, Rik,” the system said, and the screen appeared next to him.
Rik started going over the logs again. There was no point in sending the techie guys a long e-mail full of uncertainties: he wanted to be able to tell them exactly what seemed to have gone wrong with his space.
Rik’s eyes were watering half an hour later, but he couldn’t stop, mostly because he was getting frustrated: and frustration tended to make him more determined to find out what was wrong, not less. Several times he had paused to make slight changes in the way he was reading the logs, so he wouldn’t get so used to watching the data scroll by that he missed some detail simply through the reader’s version of highway hypnosis. He changed font sizes and colors, he went from serif to sans-serif fonts, he changed the logs’ background colors, and then—laughing out loud because he stumbled across the control accidentally after a couple of days of looking for it on purpose—he changed the logs from “normal output” to “verbose.”
Rik blinked at the torrent of data that was suddenly flowing down from every stored time point. “Whoa, freeze!” he said, and the scrolling times and events held still in the frame.
“Voice navigation assistance is available,” said the control voice.
“Oh, good,” Rik said under his breath, because he felt like he could use it. “Can you narrow this down to the times when I had people in the space with me?”
The display zoomed in on the log and blanked the upper third and bottom third of it.
“Okay, better,” Rik said. “Show me the difference between the way the baseline interior structure routines were running before we all came in, and how they were behaving afterward.”
“Nominate a time point at which you would like the second group of behaviors to begin displaying,” said the Omnitopia control voice.
“Uh—” Rik beckoned to the display, and it zoomed in. He peered at it. “Minute thirteen.”
That was just thirty seconds before Rik first stepped into his Microcosm. Rik stepped closer to the log, squinting at the line after line of instructions to the ’cosm’s interior programming. “And make this wider?” he said. “Maybe six feet.” Some of the command lines were very long, and as the display resized itself, Rik rubbed his eyes and sighed again. “And make me a chair, okay?” He moved away from the rock.
“The one from your office?” said the control voice.
“That’ll do.” The chair appeared: Rik sat down in front of the screens. “Go on, scroll again . . .”
As the scrolling started. Rik spotted the time-tick for when he’d come into his ’cosm, and then one after the other, his friends.
There’s Tom, and there’s Barbara . . . and then Raoul. And right there, that’s where the sun starts to behave oddly. Now what other calls was the system making around then—
He went over the next few minutes’ worth of data with great care, identifying every single action of the Microcosm’s interleaving WannaB modules as they executed independent routines or interacted with each other. When he was finished Rik couldn’t do a thing but stand there shaking his head, for he didn’t see a single interaction that hadn’t been running smoothly for all the day before that, and wasn’t behaving itself now.
He sat down on the chair the system had made and stared at the display.
Well, I do
not
get this,
he thought.
Because absolutely nothing was different except that Raoul had just come in. There must have been something else going on in the system at large. There was something in that last e-mail about outages or malfunctions in the underlying levels of Microcosm control because of all the new load on the system running up to the rollout . . .
“Where’s the e-mail window?” he said. “The one from my office.”
“Right here, Rik.” It slid around from behind the display of command strings and displayed itself in front of him.
“Run down the stack,” he said. “Thanks.” The stacked mails in the window displayed themselves envelope-first, and he waved them aside as ones he didn’t want displayed themselves. “No, no, no, no, no, yes!” he said. “That one, please, open it—”
It was yet another of many daily e-mails about system issues affecting Microcosms. Rik had elected to take them on a minute-by minute basis rather than as a digest at the end of each day, at least until he was a lot surer about the way his ’cosm was behaving, or supposed to behave. Now he read through the mail and saw nothing whatsoever that had anything to do with the graphics interface troubles he was experiencing, or thought he was experiencing.
Damn,
Rik thought.
Maybe I need to get Jean in here. I’m not all that sure what I’m looking for. . . .
Rik sighed and pushed the e-mail window aside to look once again at his time line. And once again he found himself thinking,
That’s so weird. Raoul comes in, and things start to go south. . . .
For there was a whole series of structural and graphics commands that started to fail in a little cascade, beginning a tenth of a second after Raoul came in, and all going down within a few hundredths of a second of each other.
So weird. . . . Could it be something to do with his software? Some plug-in or configuration that’s running on his home machine?
Rik shook his head.
But what the heck could have an effect like this?
All the Omnitopian ’cosms, Macro or Micro, were supposed to support all the major operating systems, RPG suites, and hardware configurations. That was one of the reasons the game was so successful: it went out of the way to tailor itself to you, rather than making you go out and buy special hardware for it—unless, of course, you absolutely wanted to.
The trouble is, there’s no way to tell what he—
“Excuse me?”
Rik jumped, turned, and was surprised to see Dennis standing there behind him, still in that disreputable boiler suit, still looking disheveled, but also looking abashed. “Dennis!”
“You paid me fifteen,” Dennis said, sounding truculent.
Rik blinked. “Uh, yeah. I’m sorry, is it not enough, I thought we agreed—”
“We agreed on ten,” Dennis said.
“Uh,” Rik said. “I kind of thought it was—you know, sort of a tip—”
Dennis stared over Rik’s shoulder in a vague and embarrassed way, grimaced, and then looked away. “Don’t need a tip,” he said. “It’s too much. I credited you five back. Just so you know.”
“Oh,” Rik said.
Crap,
he thought,
I’ve hurt his feelings
—“Sorry,” he said. “Dennis, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“ ’S okay,” Dennis said, and turned to go. “What time tomorrow?”
Rik had to stop and think. “Oh, God,” he said, “I’m back to work. . . . What time zone are you in?”
Dennis paused. “Eastern.”
“Uh, eight p.m., then. That be okay for you?”
“Fine,” Dennis said, turned, and vanished.
Rik sighed and turned his attention back to the log screens. After a moment he said, “Send a mail—”
“Who to, Rik?”
“Jean Mellie. Subject: Microcosm structural malfunction: possible external causes.”
“Thank you. Ready to transcribe body—”
“Great. Dear Jean, I have a question about some weird behavior in my ’cosm after a group of friends came through. If you’ll look at the attached log file . . .”
NINE
E
LSEWHERE IN OMNITOPIA, a lone figure stepped out of a tangle of shadows into a wide and level landscape lit by a ubiquitous, sourceless pale blue light. In the near distance, tall slender shapes burning brighter than the pale sky reared up against it, clouds of glitter-shot gloom wreathed around their upper reaches. Dev frowned at the sight—not his usual reaction—and headed into the forest of code.
All around him, great trees of light stretched to unlikely heights, their mighty limbs and outreaching branches forming a complex ceiling as bright as a sky. The trees’ trunks were composed of folios and modules of code, stacked in rounds, each module ringed outward with new versions like the rings of a tree. Among the select group of Omnitopian employees who worked with the most basic levels of the game and its servicing programs, there were probably hundreds of ways they could choose to perceive this structure. But for Dev and Tau, this was the only one. It was Dev’s original vision, reaching right back to the times when the major programming languages started to make 3-D representations of themselves possible. When he first designed ARGOT and started writing in it, Dev had intentionally designed its command structures so that they would support this kind of vision: his magic forest, one that cast light instead of shadow, with the trees’ roots sunk in the basic ARGOT substrate, and the uppermost branches interlacing the way the various sub-sub-sub-routines interlaced in gameplay.
At the heart of the forest stood a faintly glowing shadow of the Ring of Elich, more as an orientation tool than anything else. From inside the great Ring reared up the hugest tree of all, the vast-trunked structure of Omnitopia system management, its branches reaching high out of sight into heaven, its roots tangling into the depths. But it too was presently just a shadow, faded out in favor of the rest of the forest. All around the central tree and the shadow Ring stood a hundred and twenty-one lesser but still mighty trees of code, each subtly different from the others, though up until the main branchings the trunks looked much the same. Behind about a third of these trees stood glowing wireframe shadows of each. These were shuntspaces—alternate universes, each perfectly identical to its twinned Macrocosm except for its population. The master Conscientious Objector routine caught players who tried to cheat the Omnitopian game system and shunted them into these duplicate Macrocosms, which were otherwise populated only by other cheaters, game- generated characters with a built-in bad attitude, and those Omnitopia staff who occasionally descended into these “Lesser Hells” to blow off steam by punishing the wicked.
But the shuntspaces weren’t Dev’s major concern right now. There was no sign of Tau just yet, so Dev breathed out and just stood there in the midst of it all for a few moments, turning slowly, looking at the flow of light in the trunks of the Macrocosm-trees and the lesser, more shadowy flickering in the shuntspaces. There were too few peaceful moments like this these days: too little time to hold still and appreciate what he’d achieved.
Miri would say this was the price of success,
he thought.
Well, I don’t care. I hate the price. I just want to play.
Dev sighed.
And there’s my inner three year old talking. Never mind. . . .
He glanced away from the great ring of Macrocosm-trees and their shuntspaces and off to one side, toward the sapling forest in the distance—the rowdy crowd of Microcosms that had sprung up in the fertile ARGOT earth in such a short time. Since Tau hadn’t yet turned up, Dev wandered over that way. In response the virtual landscape poured itself toward him at increased speed until he was standing under the tangled eaves of that energetic young forest. The slender trunks of the sapling forest were not as regular or as elegant as the great piles of Macrocosm code had to be. They straggled, they leaned, their upper branches had bumps and galls—places where some Leveler’s design had tried to get the WannaB version of ARGOT to do something it hadn’t really been designed to do, and sometimes had succeeded. The code got twisted out of shape, got inelegantly assembled, branches tangled rather than interlacing gracefully. But the energy of it was undeniable.
There are people having fun in there,
Dev thought with satisfaction.
And that’s what it’s all about.
He paused by the nearest sapling, laid his hand against it. Instantly the landscape around him was drowned in darkness, and in the dark a new set of images burst across his vision: the shore of a tropically blue ocean with a huge ringed planet rising slant-ringed from the haze and clouds on the distant horizon. Out over the water he spotted a hard glint of light off something moving. Dev squinted at it and saw it was a glider: as it wheeled above that warm bright water he caught another glint of the sun on translucent wings.