Free Omnitopia Dawn by Diane Duane

little extra off this?” she said. “Your percentage of ‘one percent of infinity’?”
    The look Joss gave her was cordial, and very managed. “Any proceeds,” he said, “go to a nominated charity, the same as all the other proceeds from employee-run ’cosms. I favor the Innocence Project, myself.”
    “Touché,” Delia said.
    Joss nodded to her, visibly more as farewell than reaction. “Enjoy your visit!”
    “I’m sure I will. Thanks again for coming down to get me.”
    “Would you like to head on down this way, Miss Harrington?” Robbie said. “I’ll take you upstairs to our nerve center and you can sit down and start asking me questions.”
    “That would be super,” Delia said. But in her pocket, where she’d slipped it, she could practically feel the second card burning a hole in her slacks, eager to be used. Carte blanche to Omnitopia, she thought. And to the story of a lifetime, if I can just figure out how to make the most of this—and find out where some of the bodies are buried.
    Behind her, Delia was sure she could feel thoughtful eyes watching her go. She concentrated on giving no sign that she noticed, and, laughing and smiling, she went up a nearby flight of stairs with Robbie Wauhea, listening carefully to every word . . .

THREE
    R IK MALIANI STOOD IN THE DARKNESS of his Microcosm in Omnitopia and gazed up at the glowing “neon” sign still hanging there unsupported in the virtual air.
    His Microcosm in Omnitopia. The phrase wasn’t through giving him the chills yet. Rik had spent almost all of last night reading through the orientation pack that had come in an e- mail from Microcosm Management. Throughout it, through the dry details of security protocols and pro tem templates and the complications of the royalty agreement— especially the royalty agreement, which included contingency plans involving numbers with more zeroes than Rik had ever seen or hoped to see in his checking account—he’d had to keep reminding himself, You’re not dreaming! This is real! But the belief kept wearing off. He wound up taking the laptop to bed with him, and he lay there reading on it until Angela put the pillow over her head to shut out the light of the bedside lamp. Living up to her name, she hadn’t even told Rik to cut it out and go to sleep, which was just as well, because he couldn’t. Finally he’d turned out the light and just lay there reading by the screen’s light until he at last fell asleep with the laptop still running.
    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