head and reached out to the coffee cup, then stopped, realizing it was already empty. I’ve been living on this stuff, she thought. These people are getting to me. But it wasn’t so much because of their own caffeine ingestion, though there was plenty of that around. These people all seemed to live their lives at the same pumped, overexcited level, as if everything mattered more to them than it did to most people. They really have drunk the Kool-Aid, she thought last night when she was finally able to stretch out in bed in the hotel with the lights off. What bothered her—if anything did—was her certainty that these people, regardless of the department they worked in, were not only aware of her opinions about them, but amused by them. Her first impulse had been to dismiss this as some kind of bizarre corporate hubris. But that concept had suffered some erosion over the past eighteen hours, for there was no ignoring the fact that these were some of the smartest corporate types, from the highest to the lowest, that she’d ever met, and she had met some pretty low ones in her time.
The glass of the wall slid open door- fashion, and Dev Logan walked in. “Good morning,” he said. “I didn’t keep you waiting too long, did I?”
She glanced up at him, smiling. “Not at all.”
“Good,” Dev said. “The pace around here has accelerated a little today, and I’m going to spend the whole day wondering if I’ve been late for something . . .” He walked around to the RealFeel chair at the other end of the table and sat down in it. There was a brief decorous hum of motors as it shifted its balance and support settings to suit him.
Delia raised her eyebrows. “Are they all programmed to do that?” she said. “Recognize you instantly?”
He laughed. “These? Hardly. But they do recognize anybody who’s sat in them and adjusted them before, and I’ve easily sat in every chair in this building more than once.” He got a rueful look. “I spend a lot more time here than I really want to. But how about you? Did you have time to get used to one of these yesterday?”
“Oh, yes,” Delia said. “I used about every form of input you have. This one—” She pushed herself back in the chair. “It takes a little getting used to.”
“Seems a little too brightly colored?” Dev said. “Everything a little overstated?”
“Well, now that you mention it . . .”
Dev nodded as he reached up for the eyecups. “We tried using more natural colorings,” he said, “but our users overruled us. Said they preferred a more vivid palette. I’ll be spending some of today looking at this month’s palette polls to see what the newest take on the subject is.”
“Sounds scintillating,” Delia said, as she fitted her own eyecups into place and blinked a few times to make sure they weren’t on too tight.
“You have no idea,” Dev said. The droll weariness of his voice surprised and amused her. “Ready?”
“Certainly.”
The darkness fastened down tight around her, somehow darker than the darkness inside the cups. Then Delia found herself actually inside the fabulous “virtual office” she’d heard so much about, with its numerous desks and midair hangings of documents and files. “Goodness,” she said, just standing still for a moment as she looked around. “How do you find anything?”
“I call it,” Dev said, stepping out of nothingness beside her. “I simply say, ‘System management—’ ”
“Here, Dev,” said the Omnitopia control voice.
“Get me the request letter from Time magazine regarding Delia Harrington’s visit, please?”
“Which one, Dev?” said the dulcet voice. “There are three. The first is dated February thirteenth, when the project was first mooted; then March twelfth, when the initial agreement was signed, and June fourteenth when Miss Harrington was assigned and vetted—”
“That’s the one,” Dev said.
A piece of glowing virtual paper floated over to him: he plucked it out of the air, showed Delia the letterhead, and glanced at it for a moment before tossing it out into the darkness again. “See?” he said. “It’s that easy.”
“So there’s something to the statement that Omnitopia’s main effect has been to build you the world’s most effective filing system.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Dev said, grinning. “It has other purposes.”
“But you’re certainly very polite to it,” Delia said.
“It’s always wiser, I think.” Dev glanced around the office as if looking for something. “Better treat matter as soul than soul as matter—which Zen