Omnitopia Dawn (28 page)

And said, “Oh, my gosh, you’re Delia Harrington, aren’t you?”

Did he actually say “gosh”?
was her first thought, and she had to control her urge to laugh as he came over to her and shook her hand. “That’s right,” Delia said.

“Oh, good,” Dev said. “I’m okay with faces but I get a little mixed on names sometimes . . .”

He actually looked at you when he shook your hand, and the smile seemed genuine. This was dangerous. It was something Delia had seen before in politicians, the instant sincerity, absolutely believed by the purveyor—until the need to believe it in front of a specific person went away. It could be very winning, and the more won over Delia found herself feeling, the less she trusted the emotion.

“Listen, I’m really sorry we had to reschedule,” Dev said. “I hate having to make people wait.”

“Oh, no, no problem . . .” Delia said, somewhat disarmed against her will. “You’re very busy of course . . .”

“It’s just been one of those days: with the launch coming up, everything’s been getting screwed up at the last minute. I barely had time to see my daughter at lunchtime before things started to go south . . .”

That approach put her back on course, emotionally at least. The Family-Man ploy was one of the things that Delia found hardest to swallow about the whole Dev Logan picture, when it was well known that the child had hot and cold running nannies and a toy budget probably approximating the GPD of a small country. “Well, family time’s so important, after all . . .”

“So is keeping commitments,” Dev said. “Sorry again. But at least the delay would have left you a little time to have some lunch. You did get something to eat, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I stopped over at the cantina—” Various Omnitopia staffers she’d spoken to over the course of the morning had said, “You have
got
to get over there,” and once inside, she’d seen why. The multileveled twenty-four-hour dining facility reputedly modeled on the Baths of Caracalla, staffed by purloined star chefs and their minions and used as a training site by European hotel schools, would have been anybody’s candidate for one of the Restaurant Wonders of the World. Yet it had felt as casual as a small- town diner—laughing and joking going on in the corner booths, people playing cards at one table, here and there a sofa with some guy sleeping on it, or a girl working on a laptop and eating a roast beef sandwich while her Labrador made sad starving-doggie eyes at her. And the food offerings had stretched all the way from simple high-piled bowls of fruit to four-course extravaganzas of every ethnicity . . . while still proving capable of delivering that most deceptively simple and difficult dish, the perfect three-egg omelet. “Normandy butter,” the young Asian chef who made it for her had said, shrugging a perfectly French shrug. But Delia had suspected that the omelet’s perfection had more to do with knowing just when to stop. Once again, as the chef had turned away, she’d gotten a sense of an entirely different flavor of Really-Likes-Working-Here Syndrome . . . but in this case, having missed breakfast, she’d been able to put it aside.

“That’s good,” Dev said. “Come on, let me show you around here a little, and then we can talk.”

He gestured her to the archway: they went through together. “And you’ve spoken to Joss and Tau,” Dev said. “Those meetings at least went all right.”

“Yes, they were very helpful,” Delia said. They had in fact been two of the most carefully spoken people she’d ever interviewed. Of the PR guy, she could have believed this, and was prepared for it. But Tau Vitoria was supposed to be an overenthusiastic software geek stuck in a perpetually collegiate attitude toward his work and his friends, much given to practical jokes and weird hours. Delia had not been at all prepared for the slick- looking, soft-spoken, extremely tailored young gentleman who took her hand and did not actually kiss it, but bowed over it with a formality that somehow managed to be genuinely youthful and charming. Multilingual, well-read, obviously well-educated despite the number of universities he had apparently been thrown out of for bad behavior, Tau had been almost too large a set of contradictions for Delia to cope with at one sitting. She had been both relieved to get away from him, and strangely eager to have another run at him and see if she could crack that glossy exterior and find some dirt under it, or at least dust. “Tau,” she said, “in particular—”

Dev grinned. “Everybody,” he said, “hits Tau and bounces. I bounce every day. Here, let’s go in the side way—”

He led Delia along a path through the courtyard that led to the base of a broad space between two of the west- side towers and a wide set of dark-glass doors that slid aside for them as they approached. “You probably know from the PR what this building’s like already,” he said. “Family quarters, executive offices, and the master corporate suite—”

“There are more people in here than in any one other building on campus, aren’t there?” Delia said as they headed across a sculpture-studded sandstone floor and up a wide staircase along the back wall.

Dev nodded. “We tried decentralizing it,” he said, “but it didn’t work so well, though the villa-and-courtyard or crofting model does quite well everywhere else on campus. Seems this particular ‘village of the like-minded’ prefers to stay very physically close in the workplace.”

They came out on the landing, and Delia realized that “close” did not look exactly as she’d started to imagine it might on the way in. The distance between the inner and outer walls of Castle Dev on this side was far greater than that between the walls where the archway was, and the four galleried sides of the space they now entered went nearly up to another of the polarized glass ceilings, slanted inward toward the central garden plaza, and at least four stories down below ground level. Nonetheless, all those spaces were as flooded with daylight as if they were at ground level and completely windowed. All of them had desks and glass cubicles and semicircular group work sofas surrounding large round worktables and most of the workspaces Delia could see were busy with people.

Dev leaned over the railing, gazing down into the depths. At the very bottom of the atrium, a fountain played in a rectangular pool; on its charcoal-gray bottom, the ubiquitous Omnitopia alpha/omega symbols faded in and out of visibility in a shimmer of moving water and silvery underlighting. Delia, gazing down into what she could see of the workspaces, said, “This part of the building must go right out into the mesa . . .”

“Support spaces mostly,” Dev said. “It’s not kind to make people work too far underground. And there’s too much temptation for computer people to go nondiurnal as it is. We try to keep people on days, and in daylight, mostly.” He straightened up. “Come on down to my office space.”

“You have one here?” Delia said, heading after him toward a ramp that curved around one side of the galleries. “I thought your main office was on the other side of the building.”

“Oh, yeah. But I have an employee-accessible office space in every building on this campus,” Dev said. “And all our other buildings, worldwide. People have to be able to find me.”

“But doing it virtually must make it easier. You’ve got that famous virtual office space—”

“Sure,” Dev said. “But I still need local places when I’m out and around to dump a briefcase or a laptop. And my colleagues here need somewhere local to walk into when they want me. It’s a courtesy thing.”

They headed down around the curve and out onto the level below the one where they’d been standing. Here Delia glanced up and saw that many light-bending tunnel guides, the source of all that daylight, were set in the ceiling. Dev followed her glance. “Not a perfect solution,” he said, strolling among the sofas and the big comfortable-looking part cubicles where his employees glanced up, nodded or waved at him, glanced away again, “but better than artificial.”

“Even better than your solid light in the parking lots?”

Dev smiled as they made their way into the center of the space, where a wide oval of more cubicles and worktables surrounded a big semicircular glass desk and its matching semicircular sofa. “Couldn’t help that,” he said. “Had to have it. But I’m such a geek, everybody says so. . . .”

He tossed the folders he’d been carrying onto the desk as he came up to it. “You have some stuff you want to show me, I take it,” Dev said, leaning against the desk.

Delia nodded, handing him the one thing that
Time
editorial had sent along with her: the dummy cover of the edition in which Dev’s interview and background article would appear.

He glanced over it. For just a second Delia thought she saw a flicker of something in his expression, a split second of annoyance or surprise: then the expression sealed over. No
, come on, Dev, tell me what you
really
think!
“The typography might not be right yet,” Delia said, hoping to winkle that look out of its hiding place again.

“No, it looks fine,” Dev said, tucking the cover dummy back into its folder. Then he grinned—an expression utterly at odds with the previous one. “It’s a lost cause, you know that? I’m just not photogenic.”

Delia had to restrain herself from looking at him cockeyed.
Are you out of your mind
? she wanted to say.
You’re the eighth richest man in the world, do you seriously think anyone cares if you’re not classically handsome?
But he genuinely looked sheepish.
Is this another of those manufactured moments?
. . . But no. No one could genuinely look that embarrassed at himself if he really wasn’t. Especially not the big-shot head of a multinational.

“Well, never mind,” he said. “Other people on campus will need to see this—Joss and his team in particular—and we’ll have notes for you within a few days. Meanwhile, you’ve got questions for me—” He waved her over to one of a pair of lounge chairs off to one side of the desk.

They sat down. She had a long list, but no set order in which to ask them, so now she picked the one that kept coming up for her and which other interviewers had never seemed to find a decent answer for. “What’s the attraction?” she said after a moment. “What makes Omnitopia work for so many people on so many levels?”

Dev leaned back. “It’s the question everybody tends to answer for themselves, once they’ve been in,” he said. “Not to push it back on you, but what’s appealed to you when you’ve gone in-game?”

“Well,” she said, “I haven’t really been in except in the public exploratory spaces—”

“Oh, no,” Dev said. “You haven’t played?”

“Uh, no, I’ve been talking to people mostly—”

“So come on in with me!” Dev said. “I’ve got a little free time this afternoon.”

She gave him an amused look. “
You
have free time?”

He shrugged. “It was an accident,” Dev said. “I finished up some work early. But also, my PA always schedules me too long for lunch.” He produced a sly look. “Frank has this idea that I need less stress.”

This at least Delia understood. “You strike me more as the kind of person who thrives on it.”

Dev laughed. “Don’t put that in the article,” he said. “You’ll give my staff ideas. But we’ll go in, have a walk around.” He got up.

Delia stood up in considerable bemusement: a guided tour through Omnitopia itself, rather than just its corporate bricks- and-mortar, was something that had never occurred to her might happen. “What’s your preference?” Dev said. “Do you like fully virtual options—the complete sensory immersion experience? Or would you rather keep your distance and get in via keyboard or flat input?”

“Well—” Delia said. “You must have a lot of really nice virtual around here—”

From off to one side, a soft chiming sound began. Dev glanced over at his desk: Delia followed the glance and saw that the dark glass was pulsing with soft blue light. “Oh, no,” Dev said, “I told them to hold my calls—”

He went over to the desk, touched its surface. “Yes?”

Delia couldn’t hear anything happening at the other end of the communication.
Bone conduction?
she wondered.
Or something weirder?
There was no way to tell.

She watched Dev’s expression. It was neutral for a moment, then crinkled down into an annoyed scowl. “Well,” he said, “I guess there’s nothing we can do about that, is there. Okay, what’s his timetable look like?”

Another pause. “All right,” Dev said, “let’s do it that way. I’ll call you back shortly. Right. Thanks.”

He straightened up and sighed, then turned back to Delia. “I’m really sorry about this,” Dev said, “but I’ve had something come up that requires my attention, and the spare time I thought I had has just evaporated. The story of my life for the next couple of days.” He let out an annoyed sigh. “Would you mind if we reschedule this walkabout? Tomorrow, let’s say. I’ll see that we get it done next time.”

“Of course,” Delia said. Then she added, “You’re supposed to do that every day, aren’t you? Visit one Macrocosm or another.”

Dev nodded. “My universe,” he said. “Or universes. I’d be remiss if I didn’t keep an eye on things.”

“I didn’t mean just in the supervisory or workability sense,” Delia said, as they started to walk out toward the atrium again. “There are all these stories in the newsfeeds . . . rumors about how Dev Himself walks through his creation in disguise, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked.”

“Mostly the wicked wind up punishing themselves,” Dev said. “They know our game has a positively skewed ethics structure . . .”

Delia chuckled. “Another of those great pieces of gamespeak,” she said. “Like ‘negative satisfaction.’ ”

Dev shrugged. “That’s one piece of language we need. At the end of the day, it’s all about player satisfaction. Everybody has to win . . . or lose in some way that makes sense to them. They don’t win, I don’t win . . . or, more to the point, my staff don’t win.”

“It’s interesting to hear you put it that way,” Delia said, “since one of the complaints from some of your players is that winning, as such, is impossible. That all they can do is keep playing, and paying you for the privilege of allowing them to play their butts off for little statistically managed minimum feedback rewards, because the game doesn’t have any real planned ending.” She smiled. “Because if it did, you’d stop making money.”