down her laptop and opening it up. “Fine, Mr. Logan.”
He didn’t even bother sighing any more. Dev wasn’t formal with his staff, but some of them took their work seriously enough that they refused to unbend, and Milla was one of the more surprising ones in this regard. “Anything interesting going on in the real world?” Dev said.
She raised her eyebrows at him. “You haven’t even been online yet?”
Dev shook his head. “Such a late night last night,” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“Well, briefly, no,” Milla said. “Those forest fires in northern China, they’re getting them under control. The usual pre-pre-election craziness here, those two Minnesota caucus groups taking potshots at each other over the 2016 primaries . . .”
“They figure out which of them is the legal one yet?”
Milla shrugged. “They’re suing each other. May take a few weeks. A train strike in Italy, the EU is sanctioning those African rebels, the Australian labor unions are rattling their sabers again.” Milla shrugged. “Nothing that affects us directly except the capitol building thing. That’s getting a lot of play.” She smiled, a wry look. “A lot of press opinion saying the place is so ugly that if you really wanted to do something nice for the state, you should’ve just knocked the thing down and built them a new one.”
“Everybody’s a critic,” Dev said, holding out a hand for the files. He put them down on the breakfast bar and started flipping through them one by one. “First thing—”
“The bug list,” said Milla, and handed it to him.
Dev took it with some trepidation, picking up a pen as he did so. Rolling out a new part of an old game was never a simple business. There were always bugs galore, places where the two game structures refused to interleave together correctly no matter how carefully you planned the shuffle. Add to this that it wasn’t just the Macrocosms, the Omnitopian worlds and scenarios designed by the in- house staff, that had to interleave with the new server and game structures, but also the Microcosms built by Omnitopia-approved gamers on the basic platform, but with player-designed tweaks and twiddles. And then there was the master server structure itself, nearly sixty- four yottabytes of the newest bleeding-edge hyperblast memory. Yes, the huge heap of memory had been custom-built and configured by IBM/Intel and Siemens for Omnitopia’s new megaserver configuration. Yes, the memory arrays and server implementations had been tested as thoroughly as anyone could figure out how. But the wise hardware jockey didn’t trust such testing any more than the wise software engineer did. It was only when the hardware and software met at last in full-speed use, where the virtual rubber finally met the virtual road, that the real problems would reveal themselves.
But the list didn’t look any worse than it had yesterday, to Dev’s surprise. Some items had fallen off, some had been added: the software troubleshooting teams on campus here in Tempe, nearly a thousand people all told, were working at full stretch to reduce this list to nothing. Nonetheless, he glared at number three on the list, tapping it idly with his pen.
“A thought about that one, Mr. Logan?” Milla said.
Dev snorted. “That I wish it’d just go away by itself! Or that somebody would find out what’s causing it . . .”
“I’m sure they will.”
I wish I was that sure, Dev thought. Oh, well. He made notes next to a couple of other items on the list, then handed it back to Milla. “I’ll make the usual rounds this morning, but I want some extra time with the intervention groups in Object Village. Tell them to have the trouble-team leaders meet me up there around eleven.”
Milla nodded, made a note. “The ten o’clock meeting,” Dev said, “with the Magnificent Seven . . .”
“Five out of seven are here already,” Milla said. “Natasha got stuck at O’Hare last night—they canceled her flight. I sent the New York jet for her and she’ll be landing at Sky Harbor in about forty- five minutes. Jim is driving in from Taos. His car’s GPS says he’s on I-10 just west of Tonopah. Should be here around nine.”
Dev got up to pour himself some more coffee. “Why can I not get that man to fly?” he muttered.
“He just loves those wide open spaces,” Milla said. “And hates airport security.”
“He wouldn’t get such a bad case of it if he’d just use one of the company planes!” Dev said, stirring the coffee. “And