by Tom Clancy
They stepped through together. Inside the doorway was a wide dark plane, all ruled with green parallel lines crossing one another and stretching to infinity in all directions: a naked Cartesian grid, unfeatured, like a space that hadn’t even been configured yet, and with only two dimensions detailed.
“This is kind of minimalist, isn’t it?” Catie said, looking around.
Mark nodded. “The ISF’s senior programmers seem to like it that way. No obvious cues.”
“I’ll say,” Catie said.
“However,” Mark said, “I am not one of their senior programmers. I prefer my programming a little more objectified. And between you and me, so do their more junior programmers…as you’ll see.”
He reached into the darkness, and then in one gesture flipped a panel of the empty air up as if it were a little door. Under the panel, hidden in the same way that a car’s gas cap might be hidden under the fueling flap, was a square of light, and in the square, Catie saw a big obvious keyhole.
“No use in having a back-door key,” he said, “if you can’t use it occasionally.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an unusually large key, apparently made of some metal that was green in the same way gold was gold-colored. Mark pushed the key into the keyhole, and turned.
The whole Cartesian “landscape” shimmered, wavered…and vanished. For a moment the two of them stood alone in total darkness. Then slowly starlight began to fade in around them, and from off to one side, a great bloom of cool blue light became apparent.
Catie looked that way and took a deep, sharp breath. Under them, in darkness, the Earth was turning. They were standing in emptiness about five thousand miles out, on the “dark side” at the moment. The spatters of light that were the great cities of the North American continent were glowing beneath them. In the Pacific they could see another faint glow of light, silvery and diffuse, and Catie looked over her shoulder to see the full moon looking down at its own reflection, setting, as away over at the other side of the world, another light grew.
Slowly the sun began to climb in growing glory through the atmosphere, the light of it burning red at first as it shone through the air’s greatest thickness, then burning paler, orange, golden, white, and then utterly blinding as it came up over the terminator, and the fire and light of day swept across the Atlantic toward New York.
“Catie?”
“Yeah?” she said, not much wanting to be distracted from this gorgeous view. Whether it was based on real-time imaging or was someone’s reconstruction, it was beautiful.
“Catie!”
“Yeah, what?”
“Duck!”
She looked at Mark and wondered what his problem was…then, at the very edge of her peripheral vision, caught something, another bloom of light from behind them, the wrong direction. Something was falling at her, fast. Out of reflex, she ducked, turning—
Blazing in the new sun, silent as a feather falling through air, it came plunging at them seemingly right above their heads, immense, unstoppable, massive, but still graceful in its motion: a space station, a nonexistent one — for no one had ever actually built a space station along the “traditional” lines that were first mooted in the middle of the last century, a wagon wheel with spars out-reaching from a central hub. The silvery-white-skinned bulk of it passed so close over their heads that it seemed impossible to Catie that it wouldn’t stir up wind and ruffle their hair. But they were in “vacuum,” and there was no wind, and no sound, just the vast mass of the station passing over, passing by, gone — silhouetted now against the steady, unbearable fire of the sun, and receding from them as it plunged on past at thousands of miles per hour, rotating gracefully around its hub as it went.
“Nice, huh?” Mark said, getting up and dusting himself off.
“Yeah, nice,” Catie said, getting up, too. “You might have warned me a little sooner.”
“What, and spoil the effect? Someone here went to a lot of trouble to write that routine. It’s the server-maintenance people’s intro to the space…I thought you might like to see it.”
There was no question that it had been worth seeing, but Catie wasn’t going to admit that to Mark right this minute. She looked after the space station as it receded, noting the structure of the hub. Rather than having a docking facility there, it was just a blind sphere. “Is that spat volume?” she said.
“Yup,” Mark said. “It’s the external ‘restatement’ of the shell that holds the rules for the behavior of the internal volume. The volume’s been instructed to act like the ‘classic venue,’ the original Selective Spin module that they hooked up to the International Space Station. But the designers prefer this for the outside. It’s prettier, and doesn’t look like it was built by a committee.”
There was no arguing that. “How do we get in?” Catie said.
Once more Mark reached into his tame “flap” of empty space and fiddled with a control. Some hundreds of miles from them, the space station froze in place, and the sun stopped rising, then the space station seemed to rush toward them again, at an even higher speed than it had originally swept by. Catie felt like ducking again, but she stood her ground. The station plunged right at them, and then swept through them in a blur of cutaway views too swift to grasp. A moment later she and Mark were standing in the middle of the spat volume at the heart of the station, not even its goal hexes showing at the moment, only a dim silvery light illuminating the cubic while it was in standby mode. The space was anechoic, empty, and just on the borderline of cold.
“This is ‘where’ it happens,” Mark said. “The visual aspect of it, anyway.”
“Maybe we should look at the nonvisual aspect,” she said.
“The code? Sure. It’s mostly written in Caldera, except for the imaging calls.”
“Oh, joy,” Catie said. She had been working for some time to learn Caldera, one of the main languages that simulation builders and the designers of virtual environments used, because she had to. It was the “framework” on which imagery was hung. But the language was not proving easy for her to master. To get your imagery to move and act as if it were real, the image you constructed had to exchange its motion “calls,” the instructions you built into it, with the program underneath. The two sets of programming had to work flexibly together — but at the moment Catie knew the imaging program, the “muscles” and “skin” of any given environment, a lot better than she knew the underlying structural code, the “bones.” In her earliest virtual work, this had been a matter of preference, and she had worked as she pleased, with what languages and utilities she pleased, ignoring the “hard parts.” However, now that she was beginning to approach professional levels of work, she could no longer allow herself the luxury of such preferences, at the risk of marginalizing herself and limiting the kinds of artwork she could do. Catie was having to come to terms with those underlying “bones,” and with the concept that an environment sometimes had to be built from the inside out. She was beginning to work out how to handle this new way of constructing images and simulations — she had no choice — but she knew that for a good while now it was going to make her brain hurt. Catie eagerly awaited the “paradigm shift” when it would all, suddenly, make sense, and the two ways of constructing virtual imagery would unite and knit themselves into a seamless whole…but she had no hope of having this happen to her in time to do her any good in this particular situation. I’m just going to have to muddle through the best I can….
“Okay,” Mark said, “here’s the Caldera structure.” And he turned the key again.
The image of the spat volume disappeared. It was replaced by a towering construct of lines and curves and helices and geometrical solids of light, reaching up and up and up into darkness. Every one of those objects or lines meant a line of code, or a set of instructions based somewhere outside of the program itself, “Oh, no,” Catie said, and covered her eyes for a moment, just sheerly overwhelmed. I hate abstract code presented this way, I hate it! And just look at al
l this! There had to be hundreds of thousands of lines of code here….
“Sorry, Catie,” Mark said, but he sounded a little be-mused by her distress. “It’s the naked code, yeah, but it’s simpler to look at it this way than if you objectify it. That just complicates matters. If you want, I can try to find you another paradigm….”
“No,” Catie said, “maybe it’s better if I just try to make sense of it this way.” She stared up at the construct, craning her neck. It seemed to be about the height of the Eiffel Tower. After a moment she said, “Is there a legend?”
“Sure,” Mark said, and fiddled with his invisible “controls” again. A “legend” window popped out to one side of where they stood, showing examples of the graphical structures used to indicate the program’s code, and next to each one a text description of the kind of code involved — structural, procedural, object-specific, referential, and so on. Catie stared at it with some dismay. It was going to take her days to come to grips with this.
“Is there a way to highlight the strictly image-related lines and linkages?” she said. Better to start with the parts she would be immediately familiar with, Catie thought, and then work inward to the less familiar ones.
“Sure,” Mark said. He reached over to the legend window and touched the taskbar down at the bottom. It immediately displayed a master menu with a grid full of glowing icons, one of which looked like a small picture in a frame. The construct in front of Catie changed, about 80 percent of the curves, lines, and squiggles fading away to shadows of themselves, and leaving a great number of solids of various shapes shining in various colors.
“There you are,” he said. “The ones in a single color are single images or stills; striped or shaded ones are composites or motion clips. You can have the construct slide itself down through the ‘plane’ we’re standing on, or move the plane up and down, to get at a given image. Take it out of the construct and it’ll expand itself in the space and show you the image or 3-D construct. When you do that, an editing window drops down at the same time. But I wouldn’t edit anything if I were you.”
“Before I knew what I was doing,” Catie said, “definitely not. And probably not even then.” She looked up at the massive structure. “James Winters suggested to me that you’d been working with this for some while….”
Mark nodded. “It’s complex, but not beyond managing,” he said. “Mostly I’ve been working with the senior Net Force program analysts to look for signs of tampering — we’ve been comparing the code against the initial archival copies of the server program, and the more recent backups, to see where there’ve been changes.”
“And you haven’t found anything to suggest what’s going on?”
Mark shook his head, and scowled.
“Did you look at the image calls?”
“We gave them a once-over, yeah, to see if whoever was tampering might have tried to make it ‘look like’ one thing was happening, say a near-miss on a goal, when something else should actually have happened instead. But we didn’t find anything of that sort.”
So much for my first bright idea. And my main area of expertise…and any hopes of figuring this out in a hurry. Catie was suddenly filled with dismay. She had given James Winters her best “I know what I’m talking about” performance, and it was all going to come to nothing. She was going to look like a complete fool…. Well, maybe I will…but I’m gonna do my darndest to be useful anyway. For George’s sake, if nothing else.
“Tell me something,” Catie said. “Are you strictly supposed to be in here at the moment?”
“Wellllll…”
“Never mind,” Catie said. “I should have known.”
“But I just can’t let it be,” Mark said. “You know how it is, Catie! You start working on something that matters…and you can’t let it be.” He gazed up at that towering structure with an expression that suggested the same kind of frustration that Catie felt from just looking at it. “I’ve been all over it with the experts, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong. We know somebody’s messing with the server’s programming somehow…we’re sure they are. But we can’t find out how. If you can turn up anything, anything at all, no matter how small or odd it seems to you…”
Catie sighed. “Mark, I’ll do my best. But I’m going to need a fair amount of time with this.”
“Lucky for you the server’s down, except for testing, until Thursday,” Mark said. Ceremoniously he presented her with the shining green key that symbolized the access routine. “I’ll give you a copy of the testing schedules, so you can avoid those times, if you want to. Otherwise, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Catie privately thought that this injunction left her entirely too much room to maneuver. “You said that access to the space is usually a triple-key business,” she said. “I take it that this little gadget”—she hefted the key—“gets around that.”
“It does,” Mark said. “It also makes the bearer operationally invisible. Even if the invigilators came into the server while you were working, and you had that with you, they shouldn’t be able to tell a thing.” He looked rather pleased.
“And your dad knows about this?”
“Um — as I said—”
“Right,” Catie said, and sighed. “I’ll keep my incursions to an absolute minimum, and I won’t meddle with anything I do find. But if as you say no one’s going to be running a game on the server until Thursday, I should have at least a little time….”
“Let me know if you find anything at all,” Mark said. “Here, lend me that for a moment.”
She handed him the key. Mark pushed it once more into his little flap in space. A moment later they were standing once more on the moon, with the crescent Earth back in the sky again, among the fallen columns.
Mark handed Catie back the key, and she slipped it into her kilt pocket, glancing around her. “I have just one question for you,” she said.
“Yeah?”
She waved one hand at the columns. “What’re all these about?”
“Uh…” Mark looked suddenly shy, an expression that sat very oddly on him. “I’m rebuilding it.”
Catie blinked, for she had begun to recognize the worn and pitted look of these columns. “You’re going to rebuild the temple of Apollo at Corinth?”
“Uh, yeah,” Mark said. “It’s to go with that.”
He pointed. Catie looked in the direction Mark was indicating…and saw, off in the distance, a twin of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, towering up against the hard, jagged black horizon like a giant child’s block dropped there and forgotten.
Catie had to smile.
“Right,” she said, and declined to tease him…for the moment. It was always adorable to find that someone you thought of as utterly practical was in fact a romantic, in love with that first great venture off the planet. “Mark, are you going to be working at this for a while more?”
“Yeah,” he said. “The key you have is a copy.”
“Okay,” she said. “I may be in touch later.”
“Right.” As she turned away, Mark added, “Good hunting.”
I sure hope so, she thought, and stepped through the doorway back into her space.
Catie took only a moment to glance at the chessboard to see if there had been any change there, or whether there was a text window with a new move waiting for her. There was neither, but she heard a soft sound from not far away inside her space, and turned to see what it was.
Her mother was standing at the back of the Great Hall, on the reading room side, looking at something in a glass case. Catie wandered over there to look over her mother’s shoulder. The case contained one of the library’s great treasures, a Gutenberg Bible; each day it was turned to a different page, not just to show off the engravings, but because (as her mother had told her often enough) a book’s purpose is to be opened, and looked at, not kept locked in a vault somewhere…and the rarer the book, the more this was true.
“You home from work
, Mom?”
Her mother was leaning in close to the glass to examine an elaborate letter M, printed in a block of red up against the left-hand margin of the left-hand page. “Half an hour or so ago,” she said. “Your dad bent my ear briefly about your friend George. And Net Force.”
“Uh-huh,” Catie said.
Her mother turned away from the book. “You were telling him that James Winters said this wasn’t going to be dangerous for you.”
“That’s what he said. He also said you should call him if you have any questions.”
“I’ll be doing that shortly.” She looked across the Great Hall to where Catie’s chair sat, with the simulacra of canvases and piles of paper all around it. “But not with questions, really. I trust you to have accurately described what’s going on, and on the basis of that, your dad and I think you should go ahead.”
“Uh, okay.” Catie blinked. It hadn’t occurred to her that matters were going to work out this simply.
“I mean,” her mother said, “if we’ve managed to raise you so that you’re concerned enough, on discovering crooked dealings, to want to do something about them, to stop them — then maybe we shouldn’t be complaining too much about it. Much less trying to stop you, as long as what you’re doing isn’t going to endanger anyone. Especially yourself…” Her look was wry. “And besides, if things go the way you want them to go, after college, and you do wind up applying to enter Net Force — well, a little early involvement couldn’t hurt, could it?”
“Actually,” Catie said, “no. Thanks, Mom…” She slipped one arm around her and gave her a quick hug.
Her mother chuckled and hugged her back. “I know that tone of voice,” she said. “I used to sound that way myself when I was your age and I would think, ‘Wow, my mother’s so much less dumb than she was when I was younger.’”