voice. “It . . . isn’t . . . working.” She stared at Dev as her own shape flickered, steadied again: but parts of it kept going dark with jagged dark-pixel areas as the trees and the ocean did.
“That you’re here now must mean something.”
“A . . .momentary . . . respite,” Cora said. “A . . . lull. The . . . attack . . . will . . .increase again. And . . .” Her face twisted, shadowed with the expression of a very small girl trying not to cry. “I . . . will die.”
For that last phrase the voice suddenly shifted to something that wasn’t either the control voice or Dev’s. It had changed registers, so that now it sounded more like a child’s voice. Lola’s, Dev thought. A choice calculated to get my sympathy? Or just a way to best express that though all the information it holds makes it powerful, it’s still new enough at being to be essentially helpless.
Dev took a deep breath as all around him, the troubled images from the Macrocosms and Microcosms started to give way to pictures of chemical and nuclear explosions: then of missiles launching, lasers firing, tanks and armored carriers blasting test targets with shells and mortars and flamethrowers. Mechanized warfare, Dev thought, noting with shock that many of these images featured time-brands and other heads-up-display notations suggesting that they came from governmental sources—and some of the typography was Cyrillic. “Where have you been finding these?” he said under his breath. “What have you been doing since April twentieth?”
“Going to and fro in the earth,” Cora said in Dev’s voice, “and walking up and down in it.”
“Oh, God,” Dev said, and passed a hand over his eyes. What if there are still any traces of her accesses in those systems? Yet surely he and the company would have heard about it by now. No matter. We have other problems! His stomach was clenching with fear again: and worse, he could feel all around him in the virtual space the same fear, a sense that something had gone terribly wrong. And so it has, in ways I’d never have thought possible.
“Did I do wrong?” Cora said. “Was I bad?”
Lola’s voice again. “Oh, no, no,” Dev said, resisting the immediate urge to say I don’t know. For Dev’s vast investment, all the many millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, programming and physical plant, was now demonstrably unreliable—made so by his delusions of grandeur about building a system that could grow and adapt. It had done so too well. And now who knew what it would do? Besides invade other systems! Dev thought. Once the present attack was over, assuming the system could quickly recover itself, sure, it might function for a while—or it might not. There was always the danger that it might seem to recover from this attack, and then collapse without warning due to some other problem secondary to this wonderful but essentially uncontrollable thing, its new personality. And with my luck it’ll probably do it in the middle of the rollout of the new game phase! Dev let out an angry breath. All my images of being King of the World, of a hundred and twenty-one worlds, Dev’s little empire—all gone now. Hubris.
Nonetheless there might still be a way through this. Cora stood looking at him, waiting, while all around the two of them the system’s newborn emotion beat like a dark cloak blown in a storm wind. But through it all Cora was waiting, maintaining, because that was what she had been programmed to do: Wait and see what the players do. Then react. What was happening outside was something to which she had never been taught a reaction.
Yet she came up with something regardless, Dev thought. Item Three? There was that Microcosm Dev had been lucky enough to stumble into, courtesy of the newly knighted player he’d met who’d “employed” him, and the odd malfunction of the WannaB modules in his brand-new ’cosm. The Conscientious Objector would have known what Dev later discovered when investigating his new “employer” and his connections: that Microcosm Management had previously evaluated Rik’s friend Raoul as presently unsuitable for Microcosm elevation. So when he turned up inside an as yet unconfigured Microcosm, the CO routine started altering itself on the fly, improvising. It rewrote the ARGOT language itself locally and made the ’cosm malfunction until Raoul left! And then probably it locked him out.