Omnitopia Dawn (6 page)

She remembered staring at her monitor when that e-mail arrived, and reading it three or four times through, absolutely unbelieving.
This was meant for somebody else,
was the thought that kept coming into her head.
I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t love to do it, but—
Yet there it was, and staring at it didn’t make it go away. Finally Delia printed it out, took it home, and spent the next twenty hours in a fugue of desperate typing—partly because she was afraid she might lose the assignment if she took too long submitting the response. All that terrified, caffeine-stoked night, she’d sat hunched over the little kitchen table in her apartment in the New York suburbs, trying to come up with a list that would include not only questions she really wanted to ask but questions she thought her editor would really want someone to ask. As dawn had come up, she had found herself nodding off over her laptop, staring at words that hardly seemed to make sense anymore, absolutely certain that this was the best she could do and that she’d blown it.

Nonetheless, Delia had turned in the response, more an article in itself than a list. If there was anything that interested her about Omnitopia, it was the desire to get past all the authorized biography stuff, past the sanitized corporate hype and the squeaky-clean good-boy image that always seemed to come up whenever you mentioned Dev Logan. There had to be more going on in the background, something more than just luck and hard work, more than a cadre of slavishly loyal coworkers and a pile of unsuspected business savvy. There had to be some shadows, some stuff that nobody was supposed to see. The chance to peer around that closely guarded business, get past the lavish employee perks and the manicured lawns and see if everybody was all
that
happy to be working for the billionaire golden boy of multiplayer online roleplaying games—
that
would be worth something. No company, no corporate entity, and especially no corporate figurehead of such massive wealth and power, could possibly be perfectly clean.

Delia had mailed her wish list away, and (after crashing for a few hours and turning up unrepentantly late for work) had resumed her research for the article on the vigilante approach to illegal immigration control that had most recently been occupying her time. And nothing further had happened until a week after the all-nighter, when just before lunch she got an unexpected phone call from somebody down in corporate travel, saying, “So can you fly on the nineteenth?”

“Fly where?” Delia said, completely stumped.

The e-mail confirming that
Time
’s senior commissioning editor was sending her to Omnitopia arrived in her inbox while she was still trying to figure out who the travel lady was really trying to reach. The remainder of the morning went by in a haze of amazement, delight, and a strange kind of angry satisfaction.
Somebody upstairs agrees with me,
Delia thought.
Somebody upstairs thinks that there’s something worth finding out.

She had spent the following week in a flat-out research blitz, reading absolutely everything she could find that had been written about the Dev Logan—the biographies, authorized and not, all the newspaper articles in any major paper for the last three years, and the output—that was the kindest word for it—of countless industry magazines, website columnists, and bloggers. By the time Delia was finished, she was probably one of the planet’s best-read experts on Omnitopia’s boss. And Delia noted—partly because it bemused her somewhat—that the more she found out about Logan, and the more positive it all made him look, the less she liked him.

That’s a reaction I’m going to have to control,
she thought,
or it’s going to ruin this thing.
But she felt confident she’d be able to manage. In her time she had interviewed Russian Mafia chieftains, homegrown murderers, white-collar fraudsters, suspicious and angry politicians, and had in all cases managed to leave them with the sense that they were dealing with someone who would tell their stories fairly and accurately. Sometimes that had even been true.

But in none of those cases,
she thought now, gripping the rental’s wheel as tightly as she’d been gripping her seat’s armrests,
had I just come off a flight like
that!

A blue Dodge pickup changed lanes in front of her unexpectedly, veering in front of her. Delia braked skillfully, leaned on the horn, shouted “Idiot!” then checked the lanes around her, signaled, changed lanes herself, and blew past the Dodge.
Come on, come on,
she thought then, forcing herself to breathe more slowly,
calm down. This is the worst time for this! You have got to get a grip. You’ll be there in twenty minutes. Breathe.

She breathed. She drove. The sky, which had been turbulent with clouds only half an hour ago while she was still picking up her luggage, was now almost completely empty of them, and the blue of the sky was turning hard and clear, while all around her a butterscotchy morning light spread itself over what landscape was visible past the beige gravel, sand art, and cactus plantings of the freeway.

That freeway actually went right past the Omnitopia campus, though there was no direct access. So the flatness of the Phoenix-area landscape being what it was, Delia caught sight of a few of the fabled “dreaming spires” from a few miles away. The phrase was a joke, she knew. The place was built mostly in the primarily horizontal Southwestern stucco-and-tile idiom, and no building on the campus was more than six stories high, that being part of the company’s gentlemen’s agreement with the city of Tempe when they first mooted the huge development.
Though no one would’ve been surprised if the city’d agreed to let them build the Empire State Building all over again, knowing what kind of money this company was going to bring into town.

It had indeed been a sweetheart deal by anyone’s reckoning. Tempe had been only one of eight cities to begin campaigning for Omnitopia’s business when the company announced its intention to purpose-build a hundred acre main facility somewhere in the South-west. Most of the other cities—Taos, Tucson, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Pueblo, Amarillo, and Los Cruces—had, on the face of it, better sites or general offerings than Tempe, so there had been a lot of muttering among them when Tempe had carried off the prize by offering Omnitopia 150 acres of hitherto useless land north of the Rio Salado Park-way and south of the river’s mostly dry wash basin, west of the flood barrier between the basin and Tempe Lake. After the fact, all kinds of sour-grapes speculations were flung about by the losers—some of them smacking seriously of conspiracy theory, like the suggestion that Arizona State University had made Omnitopia some kind of secret deal to let the company rent the ASU science servers when they were done with a clandestine military project that was coming to an end: or that a past president or new presidential candidate from the area had privately bent Dev Logan’s ear and influenced the choice with promises of high-end political appointments to come. Other rumors were more straightforwardly whacko, such as the whisper that the Tempe site had better feng shui than the others
—
this involving some indecipherable gobbledygook about the site being perfectly positioned between air, water, earth, and fire in the forms of Sky Harbor (or the air rights for the contiguous dry wash area), Tempe Lake, Hayden Butte, and Sun Devil Stadium.

In any case, the deal had been done. The City of Tempe had gone away happily counting its very large pile of newly acquired dollars, and only two years after the groundbreaking for the uplift piers, the completed roofs and towers of Omnitopia City had risen on the riverbank and over the dry riverbed—bringing something like six thousand jobs to the Tempe area even after the construction was done, not to mention millions of extra dollars per year in tax income, and all the other money that all those new and fairly well-paid employees pumped into the local economy.

Now Delia swung around the eastward curve of the freeway, past the admittedly beautiful “built butte” of carved and cast sandstone landscaping that concealed the piers holding Omnitopia’s base platform high above the dry wash, and had to shake her head in grudging admiration. The pictures—and even the full-size virtual version of Omnitopia that existed as a Macrocosm inside the roleplaying game for the reference and convenience of both visitors and employees—did not do the reality justice. The many low buildings, here and there with a modest tile-roofed tower rising out of the trees to challenge the surrounding skyline of Tempe, had a look about them both civic and rustic, but rustic in an easygoing, modern way, very much at ease with itself, and individualistic, but casually so. The hot yellow Arizona day and the hard blue sky somehow got drawn down and tangled into that handsomely contrived landscape by the glitter of the sun off fronds and leaves in the groves of subtropical plantings, so that light seemed to be concealed in the landscape, revealed, concealed again. The whole effect was absolutely the opposite of corporate: a parklike kind of place in which people would probably like to live.
And probably wouldn’t mind staying around to work extra hours,
Delia thought.
Just goes to show you that the best money can buy the best design. Especially if the bean counters think it’ll benefit the bottom line
.

Buried in the heart of the campus, mostly concealed by a small forest of imported eucalyptus and other desert-friendly trees, was the chateau-peaked main tower of the so-called Castle Dev, the combined residence and main office of Omnitopia’s “First Player.” Delia caught just a glimpse of it while changing lanes.
Maybe that’s part of what bothers me,
Delia thought as the campus poured past on her right and finally dropped away behind.
All this oh so correct fake populism, this more-ordinary-than-thou stuff, when the guy comes from middling-big money in the first place. It smacks of somebody protesting too much.
She let out a breath as she headed down the off-ramp that would feed into South Mill Avenue. It would take another ten minutes’ backtracking through the middle of Tempe to bring her to the Omnitopia main entrance.

She was expecting some vast acreage of sunbaked parking lot spread out behind one set of guarded gates and in front of another. But instead Delia found herself driving into a large circular space like a cul-de-sac, paved in red-brown flagstones. Surrounding three-quarters of the circle, high raised banks of white and colored gravels decorated in Pima and Maricopa motifs—sun wheels, wise lizards, Kokopelli cane dancers and flute dancers—flanked a wide half-circular flight of golden sandstone stairs leading up to an area like an entry into a public park, but gateless and open. Water from a small square pool at the top of the stairs ran down a carved channel in the middle of the stairs, splashing from step to step into a pool at the bottom. To either side, wide accessibility ramps led up from the circle through the banks on either side toward each of two low tile-roofed stucco buildings and past the buildings, through the open space between them, everything changed. Outside the space, except for that glinting runnel of water pouring down the stairs, everything was bright, dry, arid. Inside, past the two buildings, everything was cool shade and bright splashes of floral color, small paths winding their way under the green canopy through a landscape of low, humanely-scaled, congenial-looking buildings. Delia pulled the car up at the edge of the circle, stopped, and just sat there a moment looking up the stairs, over the border into Omnitopia.
It’s like being parked in Kansas and looking into Oz.

Someone tapped on her driver’s side window. Delia turned quickly and found herself looking at a smiling young brunette woman in a blue linen uniform with the Omnitopia omega logo embroidered on one sleeve. Delia touched the window control, rolled it down. “Uh, sorry, I didn’t know where to park—”

“Oh, no, Miss Harrington,” the young woman said. “It’s not a problem, we’ve been expecting you. If you’ll just drive around there—” She pointed at one of the ramps off to Delia’s right. “Follow the ramp down under the overhang, then hang a right into the guest parking area. Here—” She handed Delia two plastic guest ID badges, one on a neck lanyard. “Park anywhere you like in the ‘A’ area and leave the second card on your dashboard. Somebody’ll be down for you in a few moments.”

“Sure,” Delia said. “Thanks.”

The ramp that led through the sand-painted bank branched off just past it, one side leading up into the pathways of the main campus, the other diving underground through an entrance partly curtained by hanging plants. Delia slowed as she headed downward, expecting a few moments of blindness in the usual sudden parking-structure darkness, but much to her surprise, there wasn’t any. The whole inside of the underground parking area space was lit, maybe not dazzlingly, but by what appeared to be natural sunlight filtered through clouds. Delia turned as she’d been told, found many empty parking spaces all emblazoned with “A”s, and parked in one of them. She then got out of the car to stare, fascinated, at the ceiling. It was completely paneled with squares of some material that glowed with a soft cool light.

From the far side of the parking structure, the sound of a small electric motor approached. Delia looked that way and saw one of the famous pink Omnitopia golf carts coming toward her with a slim young African American man in a polo shirt and chinos driving it. He pulled up next to her. “Miss Harrington?”

She smiled at him and slung the ID card on its lanyard around her neck. “That’s right.”

The young man stepped out of the cart to shake her hand. “I’m Joss McCann: I’m with the publicity department here.”

That brought Delia’s eyebrows up. He wasn’t just “with” Omnitopia publicity here: he was the head of it, and the number two man in Omnitopia PR worldwide. She was astonished how young he was, and then realized that she was probably radiating that astonishment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you to be my ride!”