Death Match (2003)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 18 Clancy

  Two hours later Catie was still staring at the server software construct, from about halfway up its height--she had moved the "floor" up to look more closely at the way the solids symbolizing the images of the spat volume were hooked into the Caldera command substructure--and wondering, from the pain in her head, whether she was coming down with a migraine. Probably not, she thought. Mom said Gramma always said she felt sick before one. And I don't feel sick...just stupid.

  She rubbed her eyes and stood up for the first time in an hour or so. I guess I have to admit that Mark's right. It's not the imagery that's at fault. I've looked at all the "canned" images in the routine, and all the code for the imagery that's created "on the fly." Nothing's wrong with the code. The problem has to be somewhere else.

  There's nothing else I can do but start looking at all the rest of this to see if I can turn anything up.

  But if the Net Force people haven't seen anything...what in the world makes me think that I'm going to? Just more overconfidence. She blushed at the thought of what she was going to say to James Winters when they debriefed at the end of all this. "Sorry, I bit off more than I could chew, I don't have a clue what's going wrong."...So much for my chances of ever actually getting a job working for this man, or his organization....

  Catie stood there with her arms folded for a while, realizing that she might be looking at the beginning of the death of a dream. And what else do I do with my life if Net Force doesn't want me? Catie thought, despondent. The time after high school, which had looked like a whole spectrum of new beginnings, now started to look like a dead end. I guess I can find some kind of entry-level job in advertising art, something simple, or--

  Then Catie shook her head, feeling angry and helpless for the moment, but not quite beaten yet. The future would take care of itself, but right now there were other things to think about. For one thing, I'm getting moody...it's blood sugar, probably. I need a break.

  "Workspace management," Catie said.

  "Listening, visitor."

  "Hold this imagery in nonreadable memory for me, locked to my voiceprint. When I return, reset it."

  "Done." The structure vanished.

  Catie pushed the key into the darkness, and the gateway into her own space opened up again. She stepped through gratefully and waved it shut behind her. Immediately she felt a little more relaxed. All the while she'd been there she couldn't get rid of the idea that someone from the ISF was going to pop out of nowhere and demand to know what she was doing there. Or--in her more paranoid moments--she imagined that one of the shadowy people who'd been tampering with the space in the first place might come across her. She shivered at the thought.

  Catie chucked the key onto the Comfy Chair, and yawned. She was going to have to turn in soon, but meantime there were still problems to handle before bedtime. She was going to have to get some kind of report together for James Winters, regarding what George had told her. There were a few odds and ends of schoolwork that she still needed to handle...nothing serious, fortunately. And as she looked over at the chessboard, she realized that she'd promised George another move, and for all she knew, he was sitting up waiting for it, glad to have something to distract him from the tensions surrounding the "lottery" draw in the morning...and other things.

  She looked over the chessboard, taking a moment to more closely examine George's last move, and the state of the board in general. It was getting crowded toward the center of the chessboard as the beginning of the "mid-game" settled in. A lot of pieces were set to attack a lot of other pieces...but neither of them had started the shin-kicking yet. It was as if George was waiting to see what Catie would do, whether she was going to become the "aggressor" in this game. Though he's already getting pretty aggressive himself, Catie thought, eyeing the way George had set his bishops up to control the diagonals. Still...why wait to let him start the carnage? I'm sure in a mood to start a little myself at the moment.

  George was presently using one of his knights to threaten a couple of Catie's pawns in a "knight fork," but one of her own pawns was advanced far enough to be a threat to the knight in turn. Her attention until now had been on developing other pieces of her own. Now she let out a long annoyed breath, thinking Why not? She moved the pawn over one square diagonally, taking George's knight, and picked it up and carried it off the board to set it down on one side. "Space?"

  "The final f--"

  "Don't say it," Catie said, grim. "Just don't...I'm not in the mood. Send him that move, and make it snappy."

  "Uh, yes, ma'am, right away, ma'am."

  Catie sat down in the Comfy Chair again and contemplated the chessboard...but she wasn't really seeing it, for having made her move, her mind had now immediately reverted to the earlier problem. All that code. But I have to find a way to look at it and see if I can turn something up. I can't get rid of the idea that the imaging calls are being manipulated in some way that we're not anticipating.

  And what human minds can devise...

  Yawning, she got up again, went offline, and got up out of the implant chair to go make herself some more pasta.

  Catie was up at about six the next morning. Her father was asleep, but she actually caught her mother in the kitchen, making one last cup of coffee before heading to work. "Got a project in the works, honey?" her mom said, stirring the coffee in her big British Museum mug as she made her way to the kitchen table, where the usual pile of books was waiting to be taken back to work.

  "Yup," Catie said.

  "The one I'm thinking of?"

  "Yup," Catie said. She started making tea for herself, not unaware of her mother's eyes on her.

  "Well," her mom said, "be careful." And she didn't say anything else, possibly perceiving that Catie wasn't worth much until she got some breakfast in her, and was going to be careful anyway. She finished her coffee in silence, taking just a few minutes to stand in front of the fridge and read the headlines from the Washington Post that were scrolling down the LivePad, then she picked up her books and her shoulderbag, kissed Catie, and headed out the door.

  Catie was still sitting there about half an hour later, finishing her tea, now cold, and thinking about what George had said to her after "I shouldn't be telling you this." Not "Don't tell anyone else," not "I can trust you not to mention this to anyone," but simply "I trust you." Her conscience had been troubling her a little about the prospect of passing the information on, even though it had been freely volunteered. The feeling of discomfort had kept her from sending off the message to Winters last night, after she had gone online again and composed it. But once again Catie got the feeling that George was asking for help without actually saying so in the clear. Maybe he's just being supercautious about the possibility he's being eavesdropped on. It's possible, I guess.

  She decided to set her concerns aside and send the message to Winters when she got back online. Meanwhile she had to get back to that horrible pile of code and finish looking over the imagery issues, no matter how she wished she could avoid it. She had slept badly, her dreams buzzing and writhing with lines of light that tripped and choked her, spheres and oblate spheres and ellipsoids and discs that dropped out of the tree of light onto her head and made it ache worse than ever. Yet at the same time she couldn't get rid of the idea that she might nonetheless be on the edge of finding out something useful.

  Catie finished the cold tea, rinsed the cup out in the sink, went back into the family room, and got back online. In her space she saw that there had been another move in the chess notation window. BxN...bishop takes knight, she thought. Yes, he's in the mood for shin-kicking too, now. Well, it'll have to wait a little while.

  Catie reached down to the floor beside her Comfy Chair and came up with the "key" again. "Space?" she said.

  "You mean the authorities haven't come for you yet?"

  Catie laughed. I'm going to have to have a look at the management code myself, she thought, and see exactly how Mark programmed in all these rude responses. "No," she said, "though th
e recycling people may be coming for you shortly. I'm sure you'll make somebody a terrific boat anchor. Meanwhile, just open my gateway to the server again."

  The doorway appeared before her, outlined in light in the middle of the Great Hall. "Do you want your calls forwarded?" her space manager said.

  "No, just flag me as unavailable unless it's my mom or dad or Mark."

  Catie slipped through the doorway to stand once more on that wide, dark virtual plain, and paused there, letting her mind rest for a moment in the lines running to infinity in all directions, taking a moment to work out what she should do. She was still nervous, but as far as she could tell there was no one in here. This was another of the times that Mark had denoted as an "empty" period, and well out of hours for the server's staff, who after all out were on the West Coast somewhere. A little early for them to be up, Catie thought. Then again, it's early for me to be up. So let's get on with this....

  "Server management," she said. "Unlock the imagery from my previous visit."

  "Voiceprint ID confirmed," said the server. "Representing structural model."

  It appeared before her as it had the last time, that same massive structure of lines and curves and sections of geometric solids, all piled up in a single towering construct and here and there spilling over in what looked to her like disorganized heaps: a haystack in which the needle she was searching for might or might not be hidden.

  "What a mess," Catie said softly.

  Nothing's as complicated as it looks at first glance, she heard her father saying, some time back, while they had been working on her geometry together. Give it a moment, stand back, take it apart a piece at a time, and don't go to your fears for advice while you work. Use your brains. You've got plenty.

  And when brains run out, she heard her mother remark from somewhere nearby, you can always fall back on stubborn. Sometimes it works nearly as well.

  Catie wasn't sure what there was left for her to "take apart"...at least, that she understood. Still, there were a couple of things she hadn't looked over in regard to the imagery--specifically the "insertions," the place where imaging instructions and calls interfaced with the actual structure of the server program. If you were going to tamper...that would be a good place to do it.

  Not that the Net Force people wouldn't have thought of that, too.... Still, the stubborn was beginning to kickin, and Catie sighed and got on with it.

  An hour or so later she was standing in the "air" about halfway up the structure of the program, and even in virtuality her eyes were beginning to get tired from tracing one connection after another, picking it up, looking to see how it interfaced with the next one along in the "chain." Each time she picked up one of the shining ropes that symbolized a command instruction, she had to pinch it in the place that would reveal its content, and then the actual text of the command would reveal itself in a text window nearby, and she would have to read it carefully, parsing it to see if it made sense in conjunction with the commands immediately preceding it or following it in the chain. The syntaxes were beginning to blur together, the terms had begun to reach that magic point where she didn't understand any of them anymore, the way you can stop understanding your own name if you say it three hundred times in a row.

  Not too much more to do, thank heaven, Catie thought, vanishing one more text window and pausing to rub her eyes.

  She picked up another command strand, a line of rose-colored light, and pinched it.

  The lottery...It was some hours away yet, and she couldn't get her mind off it. The funny thing was that George hadn't seemed too concerned about which team South Florida actually wound up playing first. "In cold analysis, we're all pretty well matched," he'd said, "in terms of general strength. Sure, different teams have different specific strong areas. But we're so good as 'all rounders' that one team, really, is pretty much the same as another as far as I'm concerned." He'd smiled slightly when he'd said it. "We have one thing going for us that none of the others have. We all like each other. We're doing this for fun, because we enjoy playing together. None of the other teams can genuinely make that claim, since all their players are 'bought in,' one way or another."

  "But will that matter at the championship level?" Catie had said.

  "It'll sure matter if we lose," George had said, and laughed. "But we won't wind up hating each other. We can't. We shop for each other, we baby-sit each other's kids and help them with their homework, we go out for dinner together--did I tell you about the Dinner Brigade? A bunch of us are working our way through all the restaurants in the Miami Yellow Spaces. We're into the D's now. A loss at this level will be real public, sure...but we're still going to be friends afterward. And spat is a basis for our friendships, but not the basis."

  He'd leaned back and stretched again. "And on the other side of the equation," George had said, "the friendship might just help us win. We have a level of communication that the other teams don't always seem to have--or else theirs is an artificial thing, imposed, rather than something that grew naturally among the players. Is that enough of an edge? I don't know. The other teams have the advantage that they're professionals--they don't have to have day jobs, they can spend the kind of time practicing that we can only dream about. At the same time...do they spend that kind of time practicing? Maybe not. Like in parenting, there's a question of quality time versus quantity time. We may actually have an edge there. It's a job for them, not fun, the way it is for us...."

  Catie sighed, finished with that particular line of light, picked up another and read the command line in it, the name of the image file to which it attached, the programming instruction to which it interfaced at its far end.

  I just hope he's right. It would be awful if the stress turned out to be too much for them, if their friendships or their personal lives started to come apart because of all the media attention. Like George saying that he couldn't even go to a convenience store without being followed. If I were in his position, I'd grab the first reporter I caught doing that and I'd--

  Then Catie stopped, in complete shock, and stared at the thing she had been running idly through her hands. It was not a line of light after all. It was a text string. She had read it, she had understood it, she had finished with it, and had been about to put it back and pick up another, all without having to go through any laborious translation of the content--

  And suddenly she realized what was happening. It was the paradigm shift, just a flicker of it. It had to be--though it wasn't even slightly as she'd imagined it would be if she ever achieved it. All this exposure to the raw code, which she hated--all the time Catie had been forcing herself to read it directly, something which she had always avoided--had started to force the change, and Catie was finally starting to think in Caldera. It was a revelation, like the day in her sophomore year when, without warning, after two years of classes and fairly uninvolving study simply designed to get her through her language courses with a passing grade, she had suddenly started to think in French. It was as if everything had been turned ninety degrees, somehow, and was being viewed from a different angle, one which had never been available to her before.

  Wow, she thought. I've got to get it back! How can I get it back? Everything was clear, there, just for a moment--

  Catie swept the key through the space in front of her, like a swordsman saluting an opponent, and reduced the huge structure before her to a gigantic tangle of bare code. Mark had been right. Objectifying the code just obscured the issue, concealing the instructions themselves. She needed to deal with them all at the component level.

  Dad was right, she thought, in a different paradigm. It is all just electrons. But if you understand the most basic building blocks of your medium, it doesn't matter whether you're working with "wet" ones or "dry" ones, or how many of them are strung together, or on what kind of framework--

  The code structure of the sealed server's operating programs stood before her now simply as text, hundreds and thousands and millions of lines of it. There wa
s a temptation to panic at the sight of it all, but Catie restrained herself. The nature of programming being what it was, not all these instructions could possibly be unique. A lot of them would be copies of one another. Many of them would also be calling routines from outside the program itself, complex variables or constants that were defined in the Caldera language itself and lived on the master Caldera servers. Given the connectivity of the Net and the hundred-layer redundancy cushion that a "fundamental language" source like Caldera would maintain as part of its server infrastructure, there was no need for an end-user like the ISF ever to worry that Caldera's reference-variable resources would go down, and therefore there would be no need to waste space by keeping those variables and constants in ISF server space.

  "Verbal input," she said to the ISF server manager.

  "Accepted," said a woman's voice, dulcet and calm.

  "Fade down all nonunique instructions," Catie said. "Highlight unique instructions, image calls, variable and constant calls to outside servers, and comments."

  The structure shimmered like a cityscape with cloud sweeping over it, parts of it going vague, others burning bright in various colors. The unique instructions Catie ignored for the moment. She wanted first to look at the simple things again, the image calls and variables. There were fewer of them, and once she'd gone over them and gotten rid of them all, she could get on with examining the unique code and trying to understand it. Which is going to take me until after the play-offs, probably...

  But for the moment Catie put that self-defeating thought away and made herself busy with the image calls nearest her. One by one she started checking the instructions again, referring them back to the images they called. The syntax was straightforward enough--a "connect" command, the identifier for the command to which it interfaced, a "call" command, the name of an image file, the size of the file, a specification for the size of its "display" as related to the frame of reference of the person experiencing it virtually, and a list of other files which would display "adjacent" to the file in question, changing as the one in this particular command line changed. Slowly, in flickers, unpredictably but in fits and starts that got more frequent the longer she did it, the "whole vision" of each command strand began to reassert itself. She was seeing them as single constructs, whole commands, not needing to spell them out laboriously, piece by piece. It was like the difference between reading one word at a time and taking a sentence as a whole. Catie started to speed up, pushing herself faster. It's working. It's actually working--