Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

“Phoenix” and “monsoon” belonged in the same sentence. Yet, as she now discovered, every summer the people here endured a period during which in the morning or evening there would be a sudden peak in the humidity, immediately followed by a thunderstorm, which then cleared itself away and left the skies cleansed and the temperature a little lower. On the ground, Delia might have found such a thing pleasant. In the air, though, as the clouds curdled dark around the Airbus and the plane began to rattle around her like a cocktail shaker, it was another matter entirely. Delia had clung white-knuckled to her seat for the next interminable twenty minutes, gritting her teeth and trying desperately to concentrate on what she’d come all this way to do.
    It was, on the face of it, one of those assignments of a lifetime—the kind of thing that, if you got it right, would follow you through your career. But getting it right was the hard part. Especially since I’m still not entirely sure why they picked me. Time magazine had hundreds of “stringer” writers that its editorial staff could call upon for articles, and a pool of twenty or thirty who tended to pull down the plum assignments. Sometimes a given writer got an assignment by dint of his gift with the written word, sometimes because of her seniority, sometimes because of a specific sensibility or slant that he or she might be expected to bring to a subject. But in Delia’s case—at least to her way of thinking, and throwing out any possible self-delusion on the subject—she had no idea how many of these factors might be operating. All she knew was that, a month and a half ago, she’d been asked to submit a list of questions she would like to ask and subjects she would like to investigate with the founder, president, and CEO of Omnitopia Inc.—if she ever got the chance.
    She remembered staring at her monitor when that e-mail arrived, and reading it three or four times through, absolutely unbelieving. This was meant for somebody else, was the thought that kept coming into her head. I mean, it’s not like I wouldn’t love to do it, but— Yet there it was, and staring at it didn’t make it go away. Finally Delia printed it out, took it home, and spent the next twenty hours in a fugue of desperate typing—partly because she was afraid she might lose the assignment if she took too long submitting the response. All that terrified, caffeine-stoked night, she’d sat hunched over the little kitchen table in her apartment in the New York suburbs, trying to come up with a list that would include not only questions she really wanted to ask but questions she thought her editor would really want someone to ask. As dawn had come up, she had found herself nodding off over her laptop, staring at words that hardly seemed to make sense anymore, absolutely certain that this was the best she could do and that she’d blown it.
    Nonetheless, Delia had turned in the response, more an article in itself than a list. If there was anything that interested her about Omnitopia, it was the desire to get past all the authorized biography stuff, past the sanitized corporate hype and the squeaky-clean good-boy image that always seemed to come up whenever you mentioned Dev Logan. There had to be more going on in the background, something more than just luck and hard work, more than a cadre of slavishly loyal coworkers and a pile of unsuspected business savvy. There had to be some shadows, some stuff that nobody was supposed to see. The chance to peer around that closely guarded business, get past the lavish employee perks and the manicured lawns and see if everybody was all that happy to be working for the billionaire golden boy of multiplayer online roleplaying games— that would be worth something. No company, no corporate entity, and especially no corporate figurehead of such massive wealth and power, could possibly be perfectly clean.
    Delia had mailed her wish list away, and (after