as strong in accounting as it might have been were the company more oriented toward protecting its money than protecting its gameplay. Everything else had to be about people: what people would notice was happening, how fast they would notice it, and where, and when.
But the longer they took, the better, because that would be collateral damage time for all the eagerly waiting clients, and bonus time for the Collective itself. Most of the clients simply wanted to hurt Omnitopia for one reason or another—political, social, personal—and didn’t care about the money all that much except as a symbol for pain inflicted in that most basic corporate/international sense, the fiduciary. The clients wanted the company to fail, or people in it to be hurt or get fired, or stock markets to respond in specific ways to the financial damage. That blinded all the corporate and national clients a bit, and made things easier for the Collective. Yes, the clients would get their money—at least, what they would consider significant proportions of it—always masked by errors in reckoning carefully introduced by the Collective itself. That skim stayed home and would be divvied up among those in this little windowless room and the other two like it who’d done the actual work: part of their achievement bonus.
After that, after the clients had earned out, came the pure bonus period during which (again, after the Collective’s surreptitious skim) some of those who’d been most forthcoming in helping build the zombie network would be recompensed. The rest—hundreds of thousands of greedy or stupid users who’d volunteered to get in on the action without thinking things through—would be thrown out of the speeding sledge in waves, their network addresses suddenly becoming visible when they were supposed to have been concealed, and theoretically erased logs and other useful information suddenly remanifesting themselves on hard drives all over the planet. The poor dupes would never know what had hit them. They would just suddenly hit the snow, and the wolves of world law enforcement would fall on them with glee and rip them up.
The remaining users—“used” was probably a better word—less greedy than the pre-chosen victims, maybe less stupid, possibly just lucky, would each win his or her little personal lottery out of the funds that would be scooped in over the course of the Great Omnitopia Robbery. These people, the thousands of unseen enablers and connectors to other computer networks of use in this exploit, would keep or lose the funds they were paid depending on how smart they were about grabbing it out of their accounts, diving for cover (with the slight and sometimes regrettably incomplete advice they’d been given about how to hide), and not coming up for air again until the first wave of law enforcement had passed over them.
And then, of course, we have to vanish too. But how long will the retasking of timings take . . . how long for the King Zombies . . . and then. the secondary network . . . hmm . . .
Pyotr glanced down at George, but George was unfocused, his arms folded, looking out sightlessly at the room. Of course George had known Pyotr long enough now not to rush him during one of these moments of calculation. But right now he looked unusually disconnected even for George at his most patient.
George looked up suddenly. “What?” he said.
Pyotr smiled at him. “You were completely zoned out.”
George rubbed his eyes. “I believe you,” he said. Sleep had not been the friend of any of them for most of these last seventy-two hours, despite everyone’s understanding that they needed to keep sharp for the hours to come.
“What will you do?” Pyotr said.
It was a question that most members of the Collective didn’t ask one another. Until the Venture was complete, knowing too much, knowing almost anything, could be dangerous. But we’re so close . . . and we’re at the top of the heap. If I don’t satisfy my curiosity now, I may never get the chance.
“Do?” George said.
“Afterward.”
George shook his head. At first Pyotr thought this meant there would be no answer, and George was always Mr. Security, so this didn’t surprise him. But then George let out a breath.
“I am going to have a little farm,” he said. “A smallhold, halfway up a mountain somewhere in central Europe. There will be chickens in the front yard, scratching. Maybe a flock of geese for security. I’ll raise my own vegetables and maybe have a