Be careful, Boss!”
“You too! System management—”
That long pause again, vastly unsettling, while around him the tumult and furor of the battlefield went on. From somewhere nearby came a yell: “Here comes the big wave, this is it, brace up and don’t let ’em through!”
“Here—Dev—”
“Give me access to the CO routines!”
It seemed to take forever for the stairway down into the deeper levels to manifest itself. All around him the fight went on, his own troops pushing away all around him as Dev hurried down the stairway into the darkness. “Keep the battlefield view!” he shouted to the system management program. “And have Cora meet me when I’m in!”
The stairway down to the Conscientious Objector level seemed unusually long. Above Dev the roar of the battlefield faded a little, then started to reassert itself as slowly a duplicate of the “upstairs” view faded in at the horizons of the CO space. At the heart of this level, the great circle of virtual code trees still stood, but its light was flickering, and patches of the great trees’ structures were fading in and out, or missing entirely.
Dev got down to ground level, paused, and looked around him. He was alone on the island in the midst of the sea of code, which lay strangely flat and stagnant all around. “Cora?” he shouted. His voice fell into the silence, and no answer came back. “Cora!”
Nothing. And slowly Dev became aware of an ache in his eyes, and an odd queasiness completely distinct from the stomach flip- flops he’d been feeling for what now seemed like years. It’s the RealFeel system, he thought in horror. It’s starting to malfunction. And why wouldn’t it, considering what else is going on? Which brought up the question of what would happen if Omnitopia players were caught inside when the system went down. There were all these it’ll-never-happen discussions about the RealFeel interface, Dev thought, the sweat breaking out all over him, about what could happen to someone who’s using it if the system fails catastrophically. He looked around desperately for Cora, but there was still no sign of her. Oh, please don’t let the CO routines go down now, that’s the last thing we need! “System management!” Dev shouted.
A long pause: too long a pause. “Here—D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-de-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-v-v-v-v-v-v…”
The sound of the scratched-CD stutter ran cold down his spine. No, oh, no no no, if basic management goes down we are really screwed—“This is Dev! Senior management override! Shut down all user RealFeel accesses right now!”
“D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d—”
The digital stammer seemed to go on forever. There was no way to tell whether the command had been properly carried out or not. All around him, the view of the virtual battlefield was stuttering too, vanishing in big sporadic dark blocks like a bad satellite TV signal, jumping, freezing, vanishing into black blocks or null- input background blue. We’re losing it, we’re going to lose everything—
All around Dev the motion of the battle jittered to a halt, started again, froze; and it froze sporadically, starting up again in other parts of the panorama, degrading to hugely pixilated views in yet others. Gradually the blocks of darkness covered more and more of the world around Dev, so that he seemed to be looking through an openwork brick wall in which more and more bricks were being plugged into place, shutting everything away, walling him up. The roar of the battlefield grew more and more distant, the view more and more minimal. Only a few bricks’ worth of life and movement remained, little windows in a rapidly extending vista of solid black. Through those last few openings the sound faded to silence . . . and then they too started to wink out, and a few breaths later the last rectangle of view closed down and left him—
—in darkness.
Dev stood there, just stood very still, trying to figure out where he was now and what was happening. The RealFeel technology was fairly new and hadn’t rolled out too widely yet—the vast majority of Omnitopia users worldwide were still using the classic screen-and-keyboard or screen-and-joystick interfaces. So most people will be seeing nothing but our standard timeout screen on their own computers’ client programs, Dev thought. But those who, like Dev, were still using RealFeel—assuming that his shutdown order might have failed, likely enough since everything was going so wrong—would now be stuck in the middle of this. Thousands of users, maybe, stuck in—is it full sensory deprivation? Oh, God— The prospect of hundreds of thousands of