lazing by some seaside with a cold drink in his hand, partying when he liked, and never doing anything that looked like work again. And by Saturday, I’ll have it. By Saturday afternoon, having been given lots of helpful instructions about how best to lose yourself in the system despite its best attempts to keep track of you, he would be on his way out of Georgia, on the first of a number of planes, trains, and automobiles to anywhere—and finally on his way to the place in the sun that life owed him.
Danny waited, watching the black screen. Momentarily, the type came through. FINISHED.
And that was all there was. This was the only sad thing about the plan for Danny. He’d always been a gregarious type; he enjoyed playing the Great Game with others, talking about it, laughing about it. But there was no one, absolutely no one he could share this with. And of course, he understood the reasons; but it was sad all the same. Brag rights would be so sweet. Even afterward, if he wanted to stay free and wealthy, he could never say anything about having been part of The Day the Black Hats Won. It was really very, very sad. In fact, his handler had advised him to give up Omnitopia entirely. It’s a goddamn shame, Danny thought. After I finally got my mage up to level thirty-five.
A little sadly, Finished, he typed.
The black screen went white: the browser window closed itself. Danny reached down and punched the computer’s reset button to make sure the broadband router’s logging function failed to shut down correctly. That would mean that all the morning’s sessions on this machine would fail to log as well. Ricardo would give him grief about it, but the machine occasionally committed this error on its own, so Ricardo wouldn’t be able to specifically blame Danny for it.
The machine started rebooting. Danny got up, stretched, and went to the window to look out at the sun blazing through the smog, and the lunchtime traffic, and the hot air dancing over the parking lot. In his mind he could already see a much different sun, shining down on white sand, a blue sea beyond it, a cold drink in his hand. A mint julep, he thought. I’ve never had a mint julep. But I’m going to have one soon.
Danny turned away from the window and, methodical as always, started straightening the padded envelopes in the bin by the scale.
The employees called Infinity Inc.’s main New York-area manufacturing and R&D facility “The Flats,” not so much as a reference to the wilderness of North Jersey salt marsh all around it, but because it was (they said among themselves on the company infranet’s chat area) just a little too small inside for you to be able to see the curvature of the earth. Phil—checking on the infranet chat under a pseudonym, as everyone knew he sometimes did—had at first been slightly offended by the nickname when he’d heard it. But the reaction had worn off over time, as none of his employees seemed eager to dump their jobs just because of the facility’s size.
He was standing on the balcony outside the executive office suite at the building’s west end, looking down over the shop floor—a sprawling quarter-mile long vista of cubicles grouped in nodes of four, eight, and sixteen, depending on how many subteams, teams, or groups they were housing, along with various “pick up and go” group meeting modules for employees whose job descriptions made it more sensible for them to move from area to area in the course of the day’s work. Some of them were making their way around the floor even now on razor scooters or on one or another of Infinity’s little fleet of Segways, and the huge place hummed under the high roof with a soft clamor of conversation, the sound of people getting on with business in a place designed to keep them on track. It was a heartening view. Phil liked his people working where he could walk or ride around under one roof and see them all without having to run all over the landscape, at the mercy of the traffic or the weather.
Where is he? Phil thought, pulling his phone out of his pocket to see if he’d missed a text. But nothing new showed on the screen. He’s not going to like it if he makes me come looking for him. Well. Give him another