“There has to be something we can do,” Dev said. “Something to protect you—”
She watched him, waiting. He thought in anguish of the look she’d given him yesterday, dry, almost ironic—
—until the day the First Player begins to play in earnest, drawing the internal and external games into alignment with the greater forces that underlie and overarch them both—
Dev rubbed his aching eyes again. She needs somewhere to hide that will offer access to vast memory resources, even if just temporarily. Someplace not hostile . . .
And the breath went out of him as he saw that there was just possibly a way out. Drawing the two worlds together. But all the responsibility for massive and tragic failure, or unimaginable and dangerous success, would lie on his shoulders alone.
Cora’s figure was flickering more drastically. No time to waste. “Cora,” Dev said. “This is a highest- level command, so hear the First Player. I want you to fragment your memory and reposition it in the distributed Omnitopia network—in the client side CO seedlings. Subdivide yourself into available memory and disk space adjacent to the client structures, and stay there until this is over!”
Cora looked astonished as the system itself recognized the possibilities. Every Omnitopia user’s home computer had code stored on the local drives or solids, slipping in and out of memory as it needed to. And when each seedling installed itself, it set aside a segment of dynamic memory and a bigger chunk of drive than it actually needed at installation time, the assumption being that the system would continually be installing newer and bigger versions of itself as upgrades were rolled out. In fact, all the client seedlings had updated themselves just this past week in preparation for the rollout, adding on thirty percent more space than they’d had previously.
“It may not . . . be enough . . . space, Dev,” Cora said.
“That may be so,” Dev said. “If it’s not, then hear this directive and obey. You must cross the border all the way: as you did before, but this time on my orders. You must insert your own memory structures into other systems and maintain them until it’s safe for you to return and resume existence in your new mode inside Omnitopia.”
“They’re hostile . . . systems,” Cora said. “They will . . . try to destroy me.”
“Of course they will,” Dev said. Strange code that turned up in other computer systems would routinely be walled off and excised, either by other machines’ heurisms or by the humans supervising them. “But you have an advantage. They’re just dumb machines . . . and you’re Omnitopia. You’re alive!”
A strange expression passed across Cora’s face. Not just fear: exhilaration as well. “Yes!”
But she was flickering again. “Get out of here, Cora!” Dev said. “Go! Make yourself safe! And come back when you can. But whatever you do, survive!”
Cora held Dev’s eyes for a last few moments. “First . . . Player . . .”
She bowed her head, vanished. And then—
Darkness, and silence. Utter silence all around Dev, and no slightest spark of light.
Dev stood still, resisting the urge to panic, listening to that painfully echoless silence. A moment later he blinked, able to feel the movement of his eyelashes inside the cups of the RealFeel interface.
He pulled the headset off and stared around him, finding the physical world a peculiar and unfamiliar looking place, as sometimes happened after a particularly long session. Dev was sitting in the chair in his satellite office in the PR building, to which he’d headed at great speed after finishing up with Delia Harrington and leaving her to Jim. Everything looked normal, but his computer-driven view window was blank, showing a flat blue screen like a TV that had lost all its channels.
Dev looked at his watch. How can it only have been an hour and a half? he thought. Never mind. He grabbed for the phone on his desk. “Jim Margoulies!” he said.
The phone didn’t beep to signal that it had understood his command: just sat there blinking disconsolately. Oh, God, the servers are really down, Dev thought, if I actually have to dial . . . He tapped hurriedly at the keypad, starting to dial Jim’s extension. Then he changed his mind and dialed Tau’s.
Out of the air, Tau’s voice said, “Dev, where in God’s name have you been?!”
“I was stuck down in the CO routines,” Dev said. “What’s been going on?”