by Tom Clancy
Darjan sat quiet for a moment. “That sounds like a thought,” he said finally. “As long as you’re not planning anything so infantile as having the machines fail in the middle of a game.”
Heming looked briefly horrified. “Uh, of course not. Little changes, though, in the programming of each. Installation of conditionals.”
Darjan was silent for a moment. “That might work,” he said. “As long as deinstallation procedures are included as well. Be a shame if someone went looking at their Net machines’ routines, after the fact, and found something out of the ordinary there.”
“Of course deinstalls will be put in at the same time,” Heming said. “There are ways to do such things that won’t alarm the usual antiviral and system-scan diagnostics. It’s all taken care of.”
“Then get on with it,” Darjan growled. “The first game is Thursday…and it had better go the way our principals want, if South Florida is involved…or they’re going to start taking your intervention, or lack of it, personally.”
This time Heming did gulp, whether he wanted to or not.
Monday afternoon Catie got in from school and went online again to clean up her virtmail, and to make another attempt to get in touch with Mark. It wasn’t like him to be incommunicado for so long, except for his actual school time. He seemed to practically live online, and Catie thought that the only reason he didn’t get in trouble over this was probably that his parents had to spend so much of their time online as well. She stood there in the Great Hall of her workspace and said, “Still nothing from him?”
“Nothing. Should we call the media and tell them the engagement’s off, boss?”
“Fff,” Catie said, a soft sound of annoyance, but it wasn’t serious — she had other things on her mind. I wonder if he’s had to go away suddenly with his dad or something. They do travel a lot—
She plopped down into her beat-up comfy chair and brooded for a few moments. Well, no point in worrying about this any more until I hear from him, she thought. If I—
“Incoming call,” said her workspace manager. “Requesting entry into the space, if you’re available.”
“Who is it?”
“James Winters.”
Catie’s mouth fell open, and she stood up hurriedly. Every member of the Net Force Explorers knew James Winters by sight. He was the group’s liaison to Net Force as a whole, and theoretically on call to anyone in the Explorers if they had some problem. That was the theory, anyway. Every Explorer also knew perfectly well that Winters had other work in Net Force which was far more important than his liaison work, and that it would be stupid to bother him with things that weren’t genuinely crucial. More than stupid: suicidal, at least to your employment prospects at Net Force, if you seriously intended ever to work there…for James Winters was unquestionably going to be one of the committee that decided whether you got hired, and if you had ever wasted his time on purpose, he would certainly remember.
When he came looking for you, however…all bets were off. “Let him right in,” Catie said.
A doorway formed in the air, dark at first, then revealing a rather standard-looking government office with afternoon sunlight coming into it through the stripe-shadows of Venetian blinds, and through the door stepped James Winters. About six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with a Marine brush cut and a thoughtful, chiseled face, Winters stood there in conservative street clothes — cream short-sleeved shirt, dark trousers — and looked up and around him with recognition and (Catie thought) some pleasure. “Afternoon, Catie,” he said.
“Good afternoon!” she said, trying not to sound too strangled as she said it.
He turned around to look at the frescoed ceilings of the Great Hall, and the carved marble pillars. “Nice job. Did you do this from scratch?”
“Uh, yes,” Catie said. “It’s taken a while…but I see a lot of the real building.”
“Yes, your mother works there, doesn’t she,” Winters said, continuing to look upward.
“That’s right. Can I offer you a seat?” Catie said.
“Thanks, yes.”
“Space?”
“One chair coming up,” said her workspace management program, and produced an executive-style swivel chair off to one side of the “giant” chessboard. Winters went to it and sat down, glancing at the game as he did so. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Not at all.”
“Good. Let me start out by saying that this has nothing to do with the Net Force Explorers, as such.”
“Oh,” Catie said. Boy, that sounded intelligent.
Winters smiled, a dry expression. “All right,” he said. “Catie, I see that you had a meeting with George Brickner the other day.”
Catie blinked at that. “Uh, yes. He was in town with his team before the Chicago game.” And Net Force is watching him. How interesting…
“Your brother set that up, I take it.”
“Yes, he’s buddies with one of George’s friends.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a question or two about that lunch?”
“No,” Catie said carefully. “But I hope you’ll tell me why.”
Winters gave her a hard, thoughtful look. It wasn’t an unfriendly one. “Before we get into detail on that,” Winters said, “tell me if I’m up to speed on something. You’ve been working in imagery sciences, haven’t you? Fine arts mostly, but a fair amount of emphasis on techniques for manipulating virtual spaces.”
“That’s right,” Catie said. “Staying at patina-level isn’t much good if you’re going to get seriously involved in sampling and analyzing virtual content. You have to go down to structure-level as well. I may not be a code wizard as yet, but I can recognize from an image what’s been done to it to make it look the way it does, and what else has to be done to change that, or to restore it if there’s been a change.”
Winters nodded. One part of Catie’s brain was shrieking at her, Are you out of your mind, you’re only seventeen, how can you possibly be making claims like this so calmly to this man? while another, perfectly at ease, was saying in response, But they’re true. “False modesty,” her father was always telling her, “is potentially more fatal to your career than a bullet in the brain. If you know how to do something, say so. You don’t have to brag, but you do have to tell yourself the truth about what you know how to do; otherwise you can’t make those talents available to others…and if you can’t do that, what good are those talents to you or anybody else?”…Now, Catie thought, she would find out whether her dad was right.
“All right,” Winters said. “That particular aspect of your studies is fortuitous at the moment. Let me backtrack a little. You’ve started following spatball?”
“Yes,” Catie said. “My brother got me into it.”
“He’s been interested for a while?”
“I wouldn’t say a long while,” Catie said, caution overcoming her for the moment. “Some weeks, anyway.”
“Ah, I see…. So here’s what this is about,” Winters said. “Net Force has some concerns about the conduct of the upcoming spatball play-offs. Not just because of the presence of South Florida in them. But the Banana Slugs—” He stopped, and grinned. “I’m sorry. It makes me want to laugh every time I use the name. Have you ever seen a banana slug?”
“Just yesterday,” Catie said. “Several times. At close range.”
“I see you’re overcome with the excitement. Well, anyway…The team’s presence in the play-offs is serving to crystallize out various concerns we’ve had about the conduct of spatball, and some other virtual sports, for a while now. Concerns about the integrity of their gaming environments, for one thing.”
That made Catie stop very still for a moment, thinking of what George had said to her…and the larger implications of his words. When a sport was played entirely in the virtual realm, it became unusually vulnerable to being disrupted by people with a vested interest in one outcome or another. Normally, as in the case of spatball, there were special committ
ees and organizations set up by the governing bodies of such sports, which assigned officials whose jobs were specifically to keep the virtual sports arenas “clean.” The officials made sure that servers remained untampered with, that scoring and monitoring software was working properly and was properly manned and operated during games, things of that sort.
But who watches the watchers? Catie thought. If your officials are crooked, how are the players, or anyone else, ever going to find out?
“Environment integrity has been a problem of sorts ever since this branch of sports got started,” Winters said. “All the umpires, referees, and invigilators for the various sports routinely undergo random testing. Lie-detector tests, drug testing, all the usual routines. It’s not a perfect solution by any means, from the civil rights point of view as well as many others, but it’s worked well enough, by and large. However, it’s never safe to assume that a system like this is working well enough so that it doesn’t need periodic reassessment. When something has become status quo…that’s the time that people start looking for ways to subvert it without the subversion showing. And we have some evidence that that might be happening now.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t want to get into too much detail right this moment,” Winters said. “Among other reasons, I don’t want to take a chance of prejudicing your own ideas, or pushing your judgment in one direction or another. But the indications of interference with spatball have been mounting up over recent months…and now South Florida is going to cause some of the forces involved in that interference to start showing their hands. We’ve been waiting for this for a while.”
“I want to get something clear here. You mean,” Catie said, “that these ‘forces’ are involved in actively fixing games.”
Winters nodded. “There are always people who gamble,” he said. “And the other side of that coin is that there are always people who want to control the gambling, or try to, to make a profit from it. In some cases, like casino gambling, the control is fairly benign. You go in to play mathematical games of chance, with easily predictable odds. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and the house rakes off its ten percent as part of the normal state of affairs. But when gambling starts to try to affect less mathematically predictable games, and affect them a lot more robustly — games with a lot of variables…”
“Like sports,” Catie said.
“Like sports — then matters can get out of hand. Now, people will always bet. It just seems to be part of human nature, something that can’t be wiped out…which is why most governments around the world have legitimized at least certain kinds of sports gambling. From the government’s point of view, if you can’t stamp something out, tax it and attempt to regulate it. But there are always elements that chafe at that control, and who feel that what the government is taxing, they should have a piece of, too. They lay their own bets — sometimes through big syndicates, as a means of spreading the profit around so that it’s not too obvious — and then they influence the sports they’re betting on in any way they dare, to get as close as they can to the results they want.”
“I suppose,” Catie said, “that it would annoy these syndicates if there were sports they couldn’t influence….”
“That’s part of what’s going on in this particular case, we think,” Winters said. “They see it as lost revenue. But also, when they get used to running a racket or a betting pattern in a specific way, and something comes in to upset that pattern, that can annoy the syndicates, too…and occasionally they get annoyed enough to stand up on their hind legs and try to do something about it.”
Winters got up and began to pace. “At the moment, there are at least two syndicates that we suspect have been interfering, or trying to interfere, with spatball over the last couple of years. They’ve kept their interventions small-scale, until now. Co-opting a few players, trying to get them to throw games, or to get their teammates to help them do it…that kind of thing. It wasn’t that successful, as far as we can tell. But even when this didn’t work, the syndicates were making enough money from betting on spatball that it wasn’t worth making a big stink when things went wrong.”
“But then South Florida came along,” Catie said, “and changed the pattern.”
“That’s right. Now, by and large, the syndicates aren’t going to go broke just because of South Florida. They don’t bet on just one team to win. They use the normal bookmakers’ ‘spread’ to cover their losses. But South Florida is disturbing the syndicates’ old established pattern. The syndicates we’re watching — well, these particular gamblers are very conservative. They hate to have to develop new plans when the old ones have been working just fine. For the sake of getting rid of this new factor in the odds, we think one or the other of the main betting syndicates is moving to try something — we think they may actually try to tamper with the virtual environment itself.”
He sat down again, hunched forward a little, his hands folded. “Normally they’d shy away from this,” Winters said, “for fear of detection. But if they do this now, and manage to pull it off successfully, then they’ll try it again, in other sports…and the effects down the road could be very bad. Everything from the various ‘fantasy leagues’ that play casually around the world to the ‘real’ leagues that play under virtual conditions could be affected, if we don’t get a handle on this and stop it now. We want to catch the perpetrators with their hands in the cookie jar, conclusively. And the rest of the intervention must be complete, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that we are completely on top of this problem before it really gets going.”
Catie sat there quietly thinking for a moment. “So,” she said, “it would be good if Net Force actually was completely on top of it.”
Winters gave Catie a long, level look, and she abruptly broke out in a sweat, wondering if she had gone a little too far. Then the Net Force Explorers liaison cracked a small and appropriately wintry smile, no more than a couple of millimeters’ worth and only on one side of his mouth, but enough to relieve Catie of the impression that she was in trouble.
“It takes time to put an operation together,” Winters said, “and there are times you concentrate on one aspect of it to the detriment of others. We’re trying to remedy that problem right now.”
“That’s why Mark was asking about meeting George Brickner, wasn’t it.”
Winters sighed. “Whatever else we might seek to accuse Mark Gridley of in the real world,” he said, “subtlety wouldn’t be on the list. Well, never mind, he makes up for it elsewhere. Catie, one of our concerns is whether this attempt to fix the ISF play-offs might extend into the personnel of the teams themselves. ‘Big sports’ are already vulnerable for any number of reasons, and we’re looking into all the professional teams involved in the spatball play-offs as a matter of course. Rio, in particular, and Chicago, have some potentially unsavory connections, which have been sliding around just under the surface. But a nonprofessional team like the Banana Slugs is vulnerable in all kinds of other ways. South Florida, as you know, is composed of fairly ordinary people with fairly ordinary jobs — the most exciting employment any of them holds down is probably the K-9 work that the center forward does for the U.S. Customs office at the Port of Miami — and in such a situation, the prospect of a big payoff for doing something that you would almost certainly never get caught at would tempt most anybody.” He sighed. “Heck, it would even tempt me at the pay my grade pulls, except that I’m widely known to be incorruptible, and besides, I’m sure there’s someone taking a look at my bank account now and then.”
“I’m not sure I’d believe that any of the people on that team would be involved in throwing games,” Catie said. “But I’ve only known them for a couple of days….” Then she glanced up. “One thing you should know, though. When we were having lunch, George Brickner heard me say that I was in the Net Force Explorers. I wouldn’t say the conversation changed tack after that…but I caught a couple of odd looks from him.”
“Odd
, how?”
“It’s hard to say,” Catie said. Indeed, she was still trying to analyze them to her own satisfaction.
“Did he look suspicious of you in some way?”
Catie thought about that. “No,” she said. “Whatever was on his mind, I don’t think it was that. I’m still not sure what he wants, but he’s definitely more attracted than repelled.”
“Hmm…” Winters brooded for a moment. “Well,” he said, “let’s get to why I came to see you. Obviously, I’d like your help in this operation, if your parents will sanction you assisting Net Force as we investigate. I have to add that normally I’m chary of allowing Net Force Explorers to become involved in open cases in any official way. But your access to George Brickner, in a way that would stand up to any outside scrutiny, is a gift in this situation, a gift I’m afraid that I am hoping to utilize. That aside, however, I would judge the threat to be minimal in this case at this point…and, besides, we already have another Net Force Explorer involved.”
Catie grinned. Winters, seeing the grin, rolled his eyes.
“Yes, well,” he said. “Normally we do our best to resist the urge to use Mark as a stalking horse. It’s all too easy to get in the habit of relying on a talent so close to home, and it would be exploitative. Mark has a right to a normal childhood, one that doesn’t involve being the tool, willing or otherwise, of a law enforcement agency.” He raised his eyebrows, a resigned look. “But since Mark seems to routinely and consciously sabotage all attempts by his parents to provide him with a normal childhood, we’re all aware that mostly this is a losing battle. And anyway, there are occasions when it becomes briefly appropriate to temporarily set our scruples aside.”
Catie got up and started to pace a little herself.
“Anyway,” Winters said, “will you think about it?”
“I have been thinking about it,” she said. “For my own part, the answer’s yes. And for George’s part…I have this idea that he may be asking for help, somehow. Maybe he suspects what’s going on. Either way, it sounds like you’d be in a position to help him out.”