Death Match (2003)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 18 Clancy

  Wow, Catie thought, he really is intense about this, whatever it is. Her curiosity threatened to get the better of her, but for the moment she put it aside. "Hal," she said to her brother, "look, about Brickner..."

  He paused and looked up, frowning. "Catie, I hate to say it, but this is one moment when I don't feel like discussing spat."

  "All right! Just very quickly...do you think you're gonna be able to work something out with your friend?"

  Her brother turned his attention back to his work, but he was grinning now. "Had a look at the People interview, did you? So did half the girls your age in the country."

  Catie made an annoyed face, then realized there wasn't any point in it. Maybe it was for the better if Hal thought she had a crush on this guy. He'd then go out of his way to see that they met, so that he could see Catie gush and then ride her about it later. "Whatever. When can we set it up?"

  "Talk to me tomorrow. If I don't get this to work out, my organic chemistry grade is gonna suffer."

  Catie became more curious still, for her brother didn't often discuss his schoolwork with her. "What're you doing?"

  "Creating life in a test tube, what else? Cates, pleeeeze..."

  She contemplated sticking around to tease him a little more, in order to extract some revenge for last Tuesday, when he had been running the same number on her...she sighed, deciding it wasn't kind to give him trouble, especially when schoolwork was at issue. "Vanishing," she said. And she did.

  Catie found herself standing again in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building, looking around at the opulent pillars and mosaics, all gleaming softly in some warm afternoon slanting light. "Hey, Space!" she said.

  "Listening with bated breath for your lightest word, boss."

  Only features, huh, Catie thought as she made her way across the beautiful mosaics and down the hallway that led to the main reading room. I'm going to find a way to get Mark for this...eventually. She came out into that great octagonal space, all lined two stories high with shelves, and glanced around. Her own "workspace" proper was out in the middle of it, where the big circular mahogany-built reference and stacks-access island would be, but here and now the space was empty. "Yeah, well," Catie said, "if you're paying such assiduous attention to me, you broken-down box of spurious instructions, why isn't my chair where it should be?"

  "I was cleaning," said her workspace, and her chair appeared in the center of the space. Catie made her way over and flopped down in it, tucking her legs underneath her. "And you really ought to get that thing reupholstered. Look at the fabric!"

  "Reupholstered," Catie said in a reflective sort of voice as she sat down and looked up into the overarching golden glow of the main dome with its upward-spiraling square recesses, a glorious restatement of the old dome of the Pantheon in Rome. "Possibly with your hide."

  The clear sky showing through at the top of the dome went abruptly cloudy, and lightning flickered in it, intended (Catie thought) as sarcasm. "Oooh, I don't like the sound of that," said her workspace.

  "I just bet you don't. Show me that graphic I was working on last night."

  "You don't want to see the mail first?" The workspace manager somehow managed to sound injured.

  She rolled her eyes. "Oh, all right. Just the icons."

  They appeared on the floor all around her, scattered over the mosaics, along with icons of other kinds: three-dimensional representations of books which represented ongoing pieces of research, piles of sketches or canvases each of which "meant" some piece of art Catie was working on, and virtmail messages which presented themselves as piles of paper with sketches of people or things on them in various media. It was a rather involved and untidy filing system, but Catie had no patience with the stylized representations that a lot of the mail-handling softwares offered you, little cubes and rotating spheres and other such Platonic-ideal solids. Catie liked ideas to look like real things, not abstractions, even if the preference did make Hal snicker and call her a Luddite.

  She beckoned one of the piles of messages over. It picked itself up off the floor and sailed through the air to land in her lap. Catie picked up the first sheet, glanced at it. It featured a gaudy, much-scrolled engraving, which harked back to the old-fashioned paper money of the mid-twentieth century, and framed inside the scrollwork were the words YOU MAY BE A WINNER!

  Catie breathed out patiently and held up the piece of "paper." She wasn't even going to bother telling its content to reveal itself. "This is something else I've been meaning to talk to you about," she said to her workspace, annoyed. "I told you, I don't want to see advertising, no matter how many zeroes it has on it."

  There was a silence, the machine "pretending" to think and react to a request which Catie knew it had already successfully processed some hundreds of milliseconds ago--and the pretense somehow made her smile. She had to admit that Mark Gridley was good at producing a program that made you react to it as if it were intelligent, even when it wasn't.

  "Couldn't help it that time, boss," the space manager said after a moment. "It camouflaged itself as a message being returned to you after having been sent from here to some other address, then unshelled itself on being admitted, and nuked the shell."

  Catie sighed. There was nothing to be done about that tactic. It was an old favorite among the senders of "spam," or unwanted commercial e-mail, and every time the mail-handling programs found a way to prevent a given tactic, the spammers always found some other way to construct a shell that would fool your system into letting their ads and scams through. She held up the piece of "paper." It incinerated itself in her hand in a swirl of blue fire and went to dust. "How many more of those am I going to find in here?" she said.

  "Probably about six, boss," said the management program, for once having the good sense to sound chastened.

  Catie turned the next couple of "pages" over and immediately found two more ads, one from someone who wanted to sell her carpets. She thought about handing that one on to her mom, then decided against it. There were already too many virtual decorating brochures cluttering up her mother's workspace, along with various partially assembled "try-out" versions of the back of the house, so that her mom's space was beginning to look like a construction site itself at times. Catie skimmed the carpet message out into the air, where it caught fire and rained down in a dust of instantly vanishing ash, to be followed a moment later into bright oblivion by a message from a Balti take-out place in Birmingham. Why do they insist on sending these things to people on the next continent over? Catie thought. Idiots...

  The fourth piece of "paper," though, featured a sketch of Noreen Takeuchi, a particular friend of Catie's who lived outside Seattle and whom she'd met in passing at an online software exhibition. The sketch showed Noreen rendered in "pastels," a tall, muscular girl whose mane of chestnut brown hair, tied up high in an optimistic ponytail, was always betrayed by gravity within a matter of minutes. Noreen was as hot on the art of virtual imaging as Catie was, and (to Catie's mild annoyance) was probably better at it than she was, but the two of them were too interested in sharing and comparing imaging techniques to ever develop much in the way of rivalry.

  Catie picked up the page and hung it up in the air, off to one side of her chair. There it held itself flat as if pasted up against a window. "Space," she said, "is Noreen online right now?"

  "Checking," said her workspace manager. It paused a moment, then said, "Online, but occupied."

  "Maybe not as occupied as she looks," Catie said. "Give me voice hail."

  "Hail away," said the workspace manager.

  "Noreen," Catie said, "you got a moment?"

  The "pastel" drawing of Noreen abruptly grew to full size and went three-dimensional, flushing into life as Noreen looked up and out of the "drawing" at Catie. Then the background changed, too, showing what looked like the depths of a forest, and Noreen in the middle of it, with the palette-routine window of the "BluePeriod" virtual rendering program hanging behind her.
"Catie! I was wondering if you'd call tonight. Got a minute to look at this?"

  "That long anyway," Catie said. Noreen turned to do something to her rendering, probably to save it, and Catie got up out of her chair and stepped through the drawing into Noreen's workspace.

  It took her a second to get her bearings as she looked around her. "Wow," Catie said, "you've really come a long way with this...."

  Noreen smiled a dry smile, tired but pleased, and paused to rub her eyes. "This is really getting to be 'the forest primeval....'" she said. "And I feel like I've beenat it about that long."

  The forest rendering in which they sat was a project for Noreen's honors art certification course at her high school in Seattle. Noreen had her eye on a degree from one of the big art colleges after she graduated, something like the Fine Applied Computer Arts degree that the Sorbonne and ETZ were offering. But to even think of getting in the doors of one of those places, you had to produce a "journeyman" work of sufficient artistry to get the attention of instructors who saw the best work of thousands of insanely talented people in the course of a year, and were in a position to pick and choose. The work genuinely had to be art, too. There was no simply letting a "simm" program multiply the same prefabricated stylistic elements over and over again to be dragged and dropped where you wanted them. Instead, an artistic rendering involved the careful choice and piece-by-piece modification of code you wrote yourself, all of it then being fed into one of the major rendering programs, and tweaked until the effect was perfect.

  Noreen had been working on the Forest Primeval for the better part of six months now, starting with a rough concept based in a piny mountain glade of the Black Forest in Germany. But this was a wilder version of one of those glades: an older forest, more dangerous-feeling than the shrinking though carefully tended Schwarzwald that existed today. Noreen was attempting to suggest a forest in which the original forms of this century's oversanitized fairy tales might still be walking around in the shadows--wolves who might actually just haul off and eat you rather than trying to sweet-talk you first, wicked stepmothers who wouldn't need three tries to do in a too-beautiful stepdaughter, and castles that cast unnerving shadows over the territory they controlled--a landscape in which the peasants had good reason to carry torches and pitchforks. It was a wonder, this forest, for as you looked around inside it, you could feel eyes looking at you out of the dimness with the gold-glinting forward stare of predators' eyes; and the shadows gathered themselves together under the deep jade-green silence of the trees, a green that was almost black, and dared you to step into them. Far, far up between the overhanging branches you might every now and then catch a distant glimpse of blue sky, but the sense of that blueness being ephemeral, and the certainty that dark was coming on fast, grew on you as you looked. Catie shivered. The illusion was very satisfying, and it absolutely gave her the creeps.

  "Wow," she said, and sat down in the pine needles to just look around her and appreciate it all. "When do you think it'll be ready?"

  "When it's done," Noreen said, and sat down beside her, chuckling. Catie grinned, too, at Michelangelo's old answer to the question. "But seriously, I've got about another month at least to work on the background stuff--the subliminals and so on. And I'm still not sure I'm happy with the fractal generator for the pine needles. Too many of them are too much alike."

  Catie let out an amused breath. Noreen had been rewriting the "pine needle" routine about once a week ever since she started this piece. "You're going to wind up making every one of them different," she said, "like nature."

  "I don't know if that'd be a bad thing, necessarily," Noreen said, "but it'd mean I'd miss this year's submission deadline...."

  Catie shook her head, looking around her again. "Don't be an idiot," she said. "One thing's for sure, you've got the subliminal stuff handled. I can't feel anything except the shivers."

  "Yeah, well, I still hate it. The great artists don't need the subliminals, they do it all with paint and electrons," Noreen said, rubbing her eyes again, "and if it weren't for the fact that I know my assessment board is going to have at least three commercial artists on it, I wouldn't bother. But if you don't put at least something subby in it, they won't think you understand the medium at all...." She made a face. "Never mind them, the philistines. How's your new one coming?"

  "Want to see? Come on through."

  "No, it's okay, the Forest's saved and frozen for the moment...you can display in here."

  "Sure. Space, bring the Appian Way in here, would you?"

  "Are you sure the world is ready for this?" her workspace manager said.

  Noreen gave Catie an amused glance. "I'm gonna kill him," Catie said.

  "Your brother?"

  "Him, too, possibly. But not in this case. I let a friend tinker with my manager. Never again! Now, listen, you," Catie said in the direction of the frame of the drawing of Noreen, through which her own workspace could still be dimly seen, "just unfold that piece in here, and make it snappy, before I call NASA and see if they need a spare management system for the Styx probe. See how you like a one-way cruise to Pluto this summer."

  There was no comment from her space management program, but a moment later the dark woods were all hidden away "behind" an image of a long, pillared street, paved in white travertine marble and leading down into a cityscape sprawling and glowing in mellow creams and golds. It was Rome, not the city of the year 2025 but of the year 80, lying spread out in a long summer afternoon, the faint din of half a million people dimmed down under the twin effects of distance and the mist beginning to rise from the Tiber as the day cooled lazily down. Here and there the glint of real gold highlighted the composition, gleaming from the dome of the Pantheon and the crown of the "miniature" version of the Colossus of Rhodes outside the Flavian Amphitheater, the statue that gave the neighboring building the nickname "Colosseum," and gold also shone from the tops of the masts around the great arena's circumference, from which the huge translucent "sunroof" was hung. The roof was down at the moment, the Colosseum being "dark" today, and the city lay in something like peace, the roars of the crowds silent for once. A little arrowhead of ducks flew low between two of the Seven Hills, making for a landing in the Tiber. Their passage was saluted from beneath by the screeching of the sacred geese on the Capitoline.

  Noreen sat and looked it over for a few moments. "It's gorgeous," she said at last.

  "I'm glad you think so," Catie muttered. "I spent all last week hammering on the textures, but I'm still not happy. It's all too bright and shiny."

  "I thought you said the Romans liked their marble shiny."

  "They did, and I'd like to have this look the way the Romans really saw it. But when I turn the reflective index up that high, it looks fake. Take a look at this--"

  They spent some minutes talking about the problem, while Catie pulled down an editing window from midair to change the reflectivity on some parts of the city's stone, turning it up and down, and once or twice moving the sun around to show Noreen what the problem was. Normally Catie would have been shy about debugging a project in front of someone else like this, even a friend. She preferred to exhibit perfection, or as close to it as she could get. But on the other hand, this problem had been driving Catie crazy for days. Part of the difficulty was that she preferred portraiture and detailed studies of single objects. But landscape was one of the things an imaging specialist simply had to handle well, since so much of virtual experience involved landscape design of one kind or another, and if Catie was going to become accomplished enough at this art to eventually be hired by Net Force as an imaging expert, it was just something she was going to have to master.

  "I see what you mean," Noreen said after a while, sitting back on the worn stone of a little bench which had replaced the pine needles they had been sitting on. She sounded dubious. "I wish I had something to suggest. Other than--have you thought of patching in a lighting routine from a different program? Some of the routines in BluePeriod are hard t
o configure properly if you've got a lot of textures, the way you have in here."

  Catie breathed out again. "I tried lighting out of One Ear, SuperPalette, and Effuse, but none of them made much difference."

  "Hmm. Not Luau?"

  "Uh, no, I don't have Luau."

  "I'll lend you their lighting 'bundle'--it's transferrable for test purposes. If you like it, register it with them, but at least you can see if it works first--"

  "Catie?"

  They both looked up, Catie with a look of amused annoyance. It was her brother's voice, more or less, but there was something odd about it, a lower timbre than usual. "Yeah?"

  "Message for Catie Murray...Come in, Catie..."

  She threw a glance at Noreen and got up, reaching into the editing window to kill her own composition's display, then snapping it up like a rollerblind to shut it. "I'd better go deal with him," Catie said, "before he follows me in here and starts messing with things. Look, I'll give you a yell tomorrow evening, huh? After I try the Luau routines out. And thanks for the help."

  "Sure thing, Cates. I'll have my space send the program over."

  Catie waved at Noreen and stepped back through the frame of her drawing of her friend. On the other side, back in her own space, she turned and peeled the "drawing" out of the air, then turned toward her chair...and did a doubletake, standing there with the drawing-gateway in her hand. Sitting in Catie's chair was a Frankenstein monster, lanky, big-foreheaded, and slightly green, but, rather unusually for Frankenstein monsters, he was dressed in white tie and tails. He looked rather uncomfortable.

  "Uh. Hi, there," Catie said.

  The monster got carefully to its feet, revealing a red cummerbund and, of all things, red socks under the patent-leather shoes. "My master says to tell you that it's on," said the monster, more or less in her brother's voice.

  "Your master," Catie said, grinning. Hal's sense of humor occasionally broke out in strange forms. In this case, it was his own workspace management program speaking to her in this unusual shape. "What's on, exactly?"