male voice she had to assume was Frank’s—“Dev Logan has asked me to invite you, Rik, and your family to the opening-night party for the Macrocosm Expansion. I understand that this is very short notice, but you would be most welcome if you’re able to make it. Attached to this mail please find a set of e-tickets good for round trip first class air travel for you and your family from your nearest airport to Phoenix, and reservations at the Mission Palms Hotel and Spa in Tempe for the duration of your stay with us.
“New paragraph. Dev understands that it may be an issue for Rik to get time off work to attend physically at such short notice. He urges you please to get in touch with me if this is the case, and we will do the best we can to overcome any difficulty with his employer—with whom we do a great deal of business, and who we suspect will be happy to accommodate us and Rik in terms of providing him with a night or two off. Otherwise, you will be most welcome at the virtual party, and Dev asks that you please hold on to the e-tickets until a later date when you can visit us in Tempe. Your work with your Microcosm has been of great assistance to Dev over the past few days, and he very much wants a chance to thank the two of you personally, either tomorrow night or at another time more convenient for you.
“New paragraph. Please get in touch with me immediately if you have any questions. Rik will be receiving his own copy of this mail at the same time you’ve received it, so if either or both of you have questions, please get in touch with me immediately and I’ll be delighted to help you.
“New paragraph. Very much hoping that we can see you tomorrow night, I remain, yours very sincerely, Frank Sandringham—”
“Stop readout,” Angela said. The reading voice fell silent. Angela looked at Dennis.
“What do you know about this?” she said.
Dennis looked up at her from under graying eyebrows. “That not just anybody gets invited to these shindigs,” he said. And he smiled at her: a smile totally unlike anything Angela had seen from him before, a look of pure enjoyment.
“Really,” Angela said.
“Really,” Dennis said. And he tugged his forelock to her, and vanished.
Angela stood there silently for a moment, looking at the envelope and recalling the biblical verse about “angels unawares.” Then she looked up at the sky. “Rik?” she said.
“What?” He was right across the interior of the globe, working on some mountain range or other: something about the strata being slanted wrong, he’d said.
“Have you checked your mail?”
“Uh, no. I heard it go off, though—”
“Better check it,” Angela said. “And did you put your good shirt in the wash yesterday?”
“Which good shirt?”
“The white one.”
“Uh, I’m not sure.”
“Never mind. Just check the mail.”
“Okay. Oh, hi, Dennis, what brings you here?”
Angela sat down on the rock again and smiled.
Out on the South Shore of Long Island, a man in a windbreaker stood alone on the beach in the evening light, staring out at the charcoal-colored sea and listening to the sound from a video playing on his PDA.
“—interesting day,” Dev Logan’s voice was saying as he stood up in front of a news channel’s cameras outside the gates of Omnitopia, his hands in his pockets, looking both casual and focused, “but no worse than that. Our system has been restored to normal operation in Europe and most of North America: the Asian servers were hardest hit, but will be restored to full operation by ten a.m. local time.”
An immediate clamor of voices went up from the surrounding press corps. “Is this going to interfere with the rollout of your new product tomorrow night?” someone shouted.
“No,” Dev said. “Our senior staff members tell me they’re confident that all the new features will be ready to go as scheduled, despite other people’s best efforts to interfere.”
“How much money did you lose last night?”
“You’re going to have to ask my CFO about that,” Dev said. “I’ve had my eye mostly on system management issues today. But I’m informed this evening that our losses were much less than originally thought, as many of the fraudulent transfers were either stopped by our own accounting systems, or identified as suspicious and frozen by banking security systems elsewhere. We expect to recover a significant portion of the illicitly transferred funds, between sixty and seventy