account that the PR office had given her. But certain that the account was being monitored, and wanting to do a little sleuthing without being watched, she had also slipped in using a standard account bought online with an over-the-counter credit card voucher that belonged to a spare identity she kept for purposes of anonymous research.
“But you haven’t really gotten into anyplace specific long enough to want to spend time there.”
“Well,” Delia said, “I haven’t found where I’m really comfortable yet. I don’t know if I’m wild about the idea of casting myself as some kind of wizard or warrior.”
“No need to,” Joss said. “The system’s set up so that you can find out which ’cosm you prefer and choose a role from inside it. No one has to still be playing Otherworlds Campaigns if they don’t want to. That’s just a staging area for the other games now. Though we do get some players,” and he grinned, “who stay in the old central game world, in Telekil, and never go outside of it.”
That surprised Delia. “Don’t you find that a little frustrating?”
Joss shook his head. “To each their own,” he said as they walked past more and more office pods filled with people sitting in front of screens, standing in front of them, or walking around with headsets on, some of which covered their eyes as well as their ears. “But that’s the whole idea of Omnitopia: that there should be something for everybody. If you can’t find what you like, then just play long enough—or well enough—and you may get a chance to build it yourself.”
That, of course, was the heart of the attraction that Delia suspected was the true cause for Omnitopia’s wild expansion over the last few years. There was nothing like the hope of money, big money, to concentrate people’s minds. “How many people are doing that now?”
They came into a large semicircular work pod at the end of the building. Its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a garden area, and through the trees and shrubs the occasional pink-biked cyclist could be seen passing by. In the middle of this space was a big semicircular desk with a phone, three flat monitors, a couple of comfortable chairs pulled up to the desk, and a statue of a lady in flowing Roman garments blowing a trumpet. A high, curved hardwood credenza stood against the wall. Joss opened a door in it, reached in, and came out with another plastic card. “How many?” Joss said, going to a cupboard in the credenza and opening it. “I haven’t seen numbers for this week, but last week it was—” He frowned, trying to remember. “Eight thousand? Something like that.”
Delia blinked at that. “Eight thousand other universes inside Omnitopia?”
“Well, I know it sounds like a lot,” Joss said, closing the credenza’s door, “but they’re not as complex or as resource- hungry as the Macrocosms. I mean, each of the Macros has had hundreds of people working on it, and in it, for years. In those, you’re talking about virtual landscapes that in some cases are nearly as big as the Earth’s. The Micros are a lot smaller, simply because MicroLevelers can’t spend anything like our kind of man-hours on them.”
He walked back to his desk and picked up the phone, hit a button on its dial pad. “Robbie? Yeah. Miss Harrington is here. Would you come on down and take over for me? Thanks.” He hung up the phone, then rummaged under his desk for a moment and came up with a sticky pad. He scribbled on it for a moment, then straightened and came around the desk again, fiddling with that second plastic card.
“Here,” Joss said, peeling something off it: a curl of plastic. “Can I borrow your thumb for a moment?”
“My thumb?”
“Your right one.”
Bemused, Delia held it out. Joss pressed the card against her thumb, then handed it to her. On the spot where Joss had peeled the plastic away, Delia now saw her thumbprint slowly fade in, developing in dark blue against the light blue of the Omnitopia omega and her printed name on the card. “This is your ‘enter all areas’ pass,” Joss said. “After you’re finished with your talk with Dev today, this is your key to the campus. Wave it in front of door readers to go into any public-access area of any building and some of the private-access areas like cafeterias. Show it to any staff member you want to talk to in order to