In the early morning light leaking in through the bedroom’s venetian blinds, Rik woke with a start to find himself in exactly the same position, but looking at a black screen: the laptop’s batteries had run down. Angela was already up. Fortunately, he didn’t have to get up yet Last month the courier company had moved him onto a variant of what Rik’s colleagues on the loading dock called The Unweekend Schedule—in Rik’s case, Thursday through Monday at work, Tuesday and Wednesday off. Today being Wednesday, he could lie in for a little while, get up, take some time over his coffee, read more of the docs that Omnitopia had sent him.
Out in the hallway, Angela put her head in the bedroom door. He made a little “hi there” finger-wave at her. “I never mowed the lawn yesterday,” Rik said.
“That you’re even thinking about that right now tells me I have married a prince among men,” Angela said. “It’ll keep. You ought to have a little time to play with your new toy.”
“I have married a queen among women,” Rik said.
“So true,” said Angela, and vanished.
Rik got up, showered, dressed, had his coffee, and the first thing he then did, in the relative cool of the morning—since the weather people had been predicting an early-summer heat wave for the Lehigh Valley this week—was go out and mow the lawn. There wasn’t much of it: their little duplex’s front lawn, and the strips of back lawn on either side of their patio and alongside the garage, involved half an hour’s mowing at best. Still, having the job done left Rik in a domestic “state of grace” where he could afterward shut himself into the game room for an hour or so without feeling too guilty about it.
One of the links that had come to him along with the electronic in-game message from the Microcosm people, and the e- mail copies of the material, was an address for what the docs called his “Micro-Mentor.” Logged into his Omnitopia account again, Rik once more glanced through the material. Your Mentor, it said, is a picked Omnitopia employee who’s committed to helping you understand the basics of setting up your Microcosm. Please see the attachment for information on your Mentor’s name, location, and available hours—
Rik was sitting in the little virtual private eye’s office that was his in-game prep space—a beat-up desk and a couple of old chairs, dusty blinds looking down through fly-speckled windows onto a 1950s street in Los Angeles, and a glass- paneled door that had his name painted backward on the glass. Hanging in the air near the desk was his Omnitopia messaging panel, and now Rik scanned down it to see who this mentor might be. Jean-Marie Mellie, Shawinigan, QU—They were in the same time zone, anyway—that was convenient. And next to the lady’s username, the little green dot was flashing: that meant she was online somewhere in Omnitopia. But a female mentor? What’s Angela going to think about this?
That was when the virtual antique phone in Rik’s pre-game space started ringing, the signal that someone inside the game was trying to reach him. It’s probably Tom. Pissed off that I blew him off last night. Boy, wait till he hears . . . He didn’t bother checking the messaging panel for ID, just picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Hi there,” said a male voice. “Is that Rik Maliani?”
“Uh, yeah.” Rik sat there trying to think who the voice belonged to.
“Rik, sorry, I just saw you were online and thought I’d page you. This is Jean Mellie; I work for Omnitopia. I’ve been assigned to mentor you. Tell me if this is a bad time and I’ll call back later. I know you must be pretty busy right now.”
“Uh, no!” Rik said. “Jean, sorry, I thought—”
“I was a girl?” Jean laughed. “Happens all the time. Don’t sweat it. Listen, it’s good to talk to you. How’re you holding up?”
“All right, I think,” Rik said. “Kind of amazed.”
“Makes sense.” There was a pause. “Rik, I have some of your profile info, and I see you’re set up for telepresence via RealFeel. So am I. You want to meet in your new space, and I’ll talk you through some of the basic stuff? If you’ve got time right now.”
“Sure. Give me a minute.”
It took no more than that for Rik to shut down his office and exit into Omnitopia, this time not bothering with his normal route through