for the first time, Dev thought. They were only brought live separately until then. I remember how freaked Tau was, he wasn’t happy about the way the docs were written, he was afraid we might damage the heaps if they came up in the wrong sequence. He was being so obsessive about checking and rechecking the sequencing with the people at Siemens, I thought they were going to take out a contract on him.
But apparently something else had happened on April 20 besides Tau being hunted down and mass- Silly-Stringed by cranky German hardware wranglers. But what?
Without any warning, all the images in the space around him went dark. Dev stood there, suddenly blind again, and now trembling with fear and confusion. What’s this all mean? What’s going on outside? And how do I get out of this? I’ve got to do something, but I don’t know what and I don’t know how . . .
From the darkness around him came a long, low growl. Dev’s head snapped up. Am I getting battlefield sound back? Oh, please let it be that—and please let me get some visual as well!
Nothing came but the growl again, lower.
Then it repeated, but a little higher. Two discrete sounds: rrowwwwrrrrr rrrroooowwwwooooowwwwrrr.
It occurred to him instantly that what he was hearing was a recording being played too slowly. “Speed up!” Dev said.
Ehhhhhhhhh owwwwwwaaaaaaahhhhh.
“Speed up!” Dev said. “Factor of two!”
Deeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhvvvvvv Llllooooohhhhhgaaaaannnnnn.
“Again! Speed up, factor of two!”
Devvv Looogaaannn.
“Again! Factor of two!”
Dev Logan . . .
It was his own voice: his name in exactly the intonation he normally used when logging into the system, an intonation perfectly ingrained in him by long habit even though it didn’t really need to be.
“I’m here!” Dev shouted.
“Here,” said his own voice back to him.
“I’m here! Talk to me!”
“Dev Logan,” said the voice out of the darkness.
“Yes!”
“System management,” said his own voice.
Dev shook his head. What the—he thought.
“Help,” the voice said. “Please—help.”
In the darkness, Dev’s mouth dropped open. The words had that stilted, stitched-together sound that you sometimes heard in systems that used single words rather than full phrases for their communications . It’s like the system’s using separate words in my voice, stuff pulled out of recordings or whatever, and stringing them together to make—
Then the breath went right out of him as he realized what he’d just been thinking.
As if the system was doing something. On its own, without being instructed to.
He tried again to swallow, and again failed. Oh, sure, Omnitopia did lots of self-programming. Those heuristic functions had been built into it from the start because there was no other way the game could function. But it could only use those functions when the system as a whole was fully up and running—which at the moment it emphatically was not. Which meant that what was happening around him now was something else entirely. Something that had never happened before, could never have happened before.
Consciousness?
“Dev Logan,” the darkness said to him, in his own voice, calm but somehow also utterly desperate. “Help.”
Dev stood there shaking.
The memory, he thought. All that memory!
Everyone had known that adding the new cutting-edge hyperburst memory would improve the core system’s function significantly. It was why Dev had insisted on spending so much money on it, even though other companies in the business—especially Phil’s company—had jeered at him, called him insane. Sure, vast numbers of new members would cause any system to experience some service slowdowns. It was just the price everybody had to pay when a network got so big, the competitors said; why get so concerned about it? But Dev grudged his system every second of slowdown. He’d been in too many late-night games, when he was young, where everything hung in the balance, everything depended on being able to finish a task in a given time, or fight at full speed—and had then wound up cursing and losing because of system latency issues, or some server slowdown that left him two seconds too late for some kind of win. So knowing full well what the hyperburst memory was going to cost him, and knowing what the arguments against it would be, Dev had sold it to the accounting people on the strength of how it would so boost signups of Omnitopia’s new phase that they’d quickly recoup the investment. . . .
And that it had done. But now . . . it’s done something else.
It’s made the system start to wake up!
Dev stood there stunned in the dark, completely astounded at the privilege