Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page B

crashing for a few hours and turning up unrepentantly late for work) had resumed her research for the article on the vigilante approach to illegal immigration control that had most recently been occupying her time. And nothing further had happened until a week after the all-nighter, when just before lunch she got an unexpected phone call from somebody down in corporate travel, saying, “So can you fly on the nineteenth?”
    “Fly where?” Delia said, completely stumped.
    The e-mail confirming that Time ’s senior commissioning editor was sending her to Omnitopia arrived in her inbox while she was still trying to figure out who the travel lady was really trying to reach. The remainder of the morning went by in a haze of amazement, delight, and a strange kind of angry satisfaction. Somebody upstairs agrees with me, Delia thought. Somebody upstairs thinks that there’s something worth finding out.
    Time to start digging.
    She had spent the following week in a flat-out research blitz, reading absolutely everything she could find that had been written about the Dev Logan—the biographies, authorized and not, all the newspaper articles in any major paper for the last three years, and the output—that was the kindest word for it—of countless industry magazines, website columnists, and bloggers. By the time Delia was finished, she was probably one of the planet’s best-read experts on Omnitopia’s boss. And Delia noted—partly because it bemused her somewhat—that the more she found out about Logan, and the more positive it all made him look, the less she liked him.
    That’s a reaction I’m going to have to control, she thought, or it’s going to ruin this thing. But she felt confident she’d be able to manage. In her time she had interviewed Russian Mafia chieftains, homegrown murderers, white-collar fraudsters, suspicious and angry politicians, and had in all cases managed to leave them with the sense that they were dealing with someone who would tell their stories fairly and accurately. Sometimes that had even been true.
    But in none of those cases, she thought now, gripping the rental’s wheel as tightly as she’d been gripping her seat’s armrests, had I just come off a flight like that!
    A blue Dodge pickup changed lanes in front of her unexpectedly, veering in front of her. Delia braked skillfully, leaned on the horn, shouted “Idiot!” then checked the lanes around her, signaled, changed lanes herself, and blew past the Dodge. Come on, come on, she thought then, forcing herself to breathe more slowly, calm down. This is the worst time for this! You have got to get a grip. You’ll be there in twenty minutes. Breathe.
    She breathed. She drove. The sky, which had been turbulent with clouds only half an hour ago while she was still picking up her luggage, was now almost completely empty of them, and the blue of the sky was turning hard and clear, while all around her a butterscotchy morning light spread itself over what landscape was visible past the beige gravel, sand art, and cactus plantings of the freeway.
    That freeway actually went right past the Omnitopia campus, though there was no direct access. So the flatness of the Phoenix-area landscape being what it was, Delia caught sight of a few of the fabled “dreaming spires” from a few miles away. The phrase was a joke, she knew. The place was built mostly in the primarily horizontal Southwestern stucco-and-tile idiom, and no building on the campus was more than six stories high, that being part of the company’s gentlemen’s agreement with the city of Tempe when they first mooted the huge development. Though no one would’ve been surprised if the city’d agreed to let them build the Empire State Building all over again, knowing what kind of money this company was going to bring into town.
    It had indeed been a sweetheart deal by anyone’s reckoning. Tempe had been only one of eight cities to begin campaigning for Omnitopia’s business when the