Death Match

2

The monthly regional Net Force Explorers meetings could turn into a real mob scene sometimes, so Catie liked to get to them early when she could. But that evening she was almost foiled in this intention by her mother, who, just as Catie was heading back down to the family room, came edging in through the kicked-open front door with her arms full of shopping bags, and also with several canvas bags full of books hanging from her, so that she looked like some very overworked beast of burden. “Oh, honey, help!” her mom said. “The groceries—!”

Catie hurried down the front hall to her and did her best to relieve her mom of the two heaviest bags, which were just about to fall out of her mother’s arms. “Mom, why can’t you leave stuff in the car and just make another trip?”

“I thought I could manage it,” her mother gasped as they staggered together into the kitchen and dumped everything on the table. Catie shook her head as they straightened up and dusted themselves off. “Supermom,” Catie said in a chiding tone.

“Oh, sweetie, I just hate making two trips, you know how it is….”

“Inefficient,” they said in unison. Catie smiled a slightly rueful smile. Her mother worked at the Library of Congress as an acquisitions librarian, and had spent the first two years of her employment trying to work a reorganization of the basic stacks system through the library’s monolithic bureaucracy. Now, six years later, having been promoted to senior acquisitions librarian in charge of classical literature, she was still at it — for while efficiency was not precisely one of Colleen Murray’s gods, it was at least a minor idol before which she bowed at regular intervals, in the name of making the world in general work better. This being the case, Catie knew she was something of a cross for her mother to bear, for Catie felt in her soul that it was wrong to have a house, or a life, look from minute to minute as if you were expecting to have Architectural Digest come in to do a photo shoot. A little randomness around the edges, a little easygoing clutter here and there, in Catie’s opinion, made things look less artificial, more natural and human. And since they get that way anyhow, in the normal course of things, your nerves don’t get shredded trying to prevent the unavoidable….

Now the table looked more than random enough even for Catie. Books and foodstuffs shared it about evenly, and Catie started divvying them up, paying more attention to the books, with an eye to keeping them safely away from the food. The first few volumes she picked up seemed to be printed in Greek, and another was in a lettering she didn’t recognize. “What’s this?” she said. Its title seemed to say RhOIQEA AFOI–ITUW, except that some of the letters looked wrong: the L was backward, the F had an extra stroke underneath the short one, and the h was hitched up between the P and O like some kind of punctuation mark with delusions of letterhood.

Catie’s mother was loading a couple of gallons of milk into the fridge. She paused to peer around the door. “Oh. That’s the King James Bible translated into Tataviam.”

Catie gave her a look. “Didn’t know you were into science fiction, Mom. Which series are the Tataviam from? Galactic Patrol?”

Her mother laughed as she shut the refrigerator door. “It’s not a created language, honey. It’s native to the Los Angeles area. The Native Americans there had about a hundred languages and dialects. Highest density of languages per square mile in the world, supposedly.”

Catie shook her head and put the book down. She had been about to ask her mother why she’d brought this particular book home, but it occurred to her that listening to the whole answer would probably wind up making her late. Her mom picked up a pile of cans of beans and vegetables from the table, stacking them up carefully in her arms, and took them over to unload them into one of the undercounter cabinets, while Catie went through the other books — mostly works of Greek and Latin classicists like Pliny and Strabo and Martial.

Her mother meanwhile finished with the cans, got herself a glass of water, drank it in a few gulps, and pulled the dishwasher door open. “I’m empty!” said the dishwasher in a tone of ill-disguised triumph.

“Isn’t that super,” Catie’s mother said, putting the glass in and closing the dishwasher again. “Your brother’s finally beginning to get the idea. Perhaps my life has not been in vain.”

Catie smiled gently and said nothing. “Mom,” she said, “anything important you need to tell me before I make myself socially unavailable?”

Her mother looked thoughtful. “Nothing leaps right out at me. What is it tonight? Net Force Explorers meeting?”

“Yeah.”

“Have fun. I’ll take care of the rest of this.” Catie smiled again, a little more broadly. She knew her mother preferred to take care of the groceries herself, so that she wouldn’t have to accuse her daughter of “misshelving.” “Where’s your dad?”

“Incommunicado. In the studio.”

“Painting?”

“That, or plastering,” Catie said. “Hal reported faint scraping noises. But it’s probably just painting, since I forgot the spackle on the way home, and so did Hal.”

Her mother sighed. “Okay. Where’s Hal taken himself, by the way?”

“He may still be on the Net with his post-spatball game show. I didn’t check.”

“Fine. You go do your thing, Catie. I have to look these over and see if we need to order copies for the department.”

“Mom, they shouldn’t make you take your work home,” Catie said, frowning.

Her mother chortled at her. “Honey, it’s not that they make me, it’s that they can’t stop me. You know that. Go on, get out of my hair.”

Catie went down to the family room and shut the door, then settled into the implant chair again, lined up her implant with it, and clenched her jaw to activate it.

Instantly the room vanished, and Catie was sitting in an identical chair surrounded by the spectacular polished pillars, shining staircases, murals and mosaics which filled the gold-brown-and-white “front hall” of the Library of Congress. Her mother used a similar entry to her workspace, as a lot of her colleagues did. They felt a natural pride in having as part of their “turf” one of the most spectacular and ornate buildings in the entire Capitol District, a gem of the Beaux-Arts tradition, more like a palace than a library. Catie, though, simply liked the palatial aspect of it, and the sense of everything in it having been made by people’s hands, not by fabricating machines or computer programs.

She got out of the chair and started up the grand staircase to the gallery that overlooked the main reading room. “Hey, Space!” Catie said as she climbed.

“Good evening, Catie,” said her workspace in a cultured male voice.

“Any mail for me?”

“Nothing since you last checked in.”

“Nothing? In three whole hours?” That was mildly unusual.

“Would I lie to you?”

“Not if you wanted to keep your job,” Catie said, while knowing perfectly well that her workspace management program was about as likely to lie to her as her brother was to unload the dishwasher without being reminded.

“I live in fear of firing,” the management program said, dry-voiced.

Catie raised an eyebrow. She had asked one of her Net Force buddies to tinker with the program’s responsiveness modes some weeks back, and very slowly since then she had started to notice that it was developing what appeared to be a distinct strain of sarcasm. “Good,” she said as she came to the top of the stairs, “you do that.”

At the head of the stairs she stood in the big doorway there and looked through it and down. At this spot, in the real library, there was a gallery along the back wall of the main reading room, with a glass baffle to keep the readers from being disturbed by the sound of the never-ending stream of tourists. But in Catie’s version of the library there was no glass, only a doorway leading down into whatever other virtual space she should elect to visit. For the moment the door was filled with a swirling, glowing opalescent smoke effect, something Catie had designed for her mother as a “visual soother,” a distraction pattern for when she had to put someone on hold at the office.

“What’s your pleasure?” the management program said to her.

“Net Force Explorers meeting,” Catie said. “The usual address.”

“Net Force,” said her management program, and the smoke began to clear away. “I don’t think they suspect anything yet, so don’t blow it.”

I definitely need to talk to the guilty party about this, Catie thought. She stepped through the doorway, pausing on the landing of another stairway which formed to let her down into the big, echoing, empty space on the other side.

It wasn’t precisely empty. There were probably about fifty other kids there already, milling around and chatting, while above them hung suspended in space, glowing, a giant Net Force logo. It was ostensibly just as a courtesy that Net Force had set aside virtual “meeting space” on its own servers for these meetings. But Catie sometimes wondered whether there was some more clandestine agenda involved, some obscure security issue…or just a desire to “keep an eye on the kids.” For her own part, she didn’t much mind. There’s always the possibility that there are some of the “grown-ups” in here strolling around in disguise, listening to the conversations of the junior auxiliary and noting down which of us seem promising…. A moment later Catie put the thought aside as slightly paranoid. Yet, thinking about it, she decided it wouldn’t particularly bother her if that were happening. Catie firmly intended to wind up working for Net Force one day, doing image processing and analysis, or visuals-management work of one kind or another. If the cutting edge, in terms of excellence, opportunity, and potential excitement, was to be found anywhere, it was there. If someone from the adult side of Net Force wanted to look her over with that sort of work in mind, it was fine by her. The sooner the better, in fact….

Meanwhile, she had other fish to fry. Or one fish, a small one. As she came down the stairs to floor level, she paused, glancing over the group beneath her. A few faces she knew, a lot she didn’t, not that that had ever bothered her. She always left one of these meetings with at the very least a bunch of new acquaintances—

And there was the one she wanted to see. She finished coming down the stairs and walked around the edges of the small crowd, greeting a couple of people she knew as she passed — Megan O’Malley, Charlie Davis — and then walked over to her target from behind quietly, with the air of someone approaching a small and possibly dangerous animal without wanting to unduly frighten it.

“Hey, there, Squirt!” Catie said with an edge to her voice.

The figure actually jumped a little, and turned. A slight young boy, young especially when you considered that a lot of the other kids here were older by at least several years, tending toward their late teens. But Mark Gridley was no more than thirteen: dark-haired, dark-eyed, with Thai in his background and the devil in his eyes. “Ah,” Mark said. “Ah, Catie, hi, how are you…”

“You’re here early,” Catie said.

“Slumming,” Mark said idly.

“Oh, yeah,” Catie said. Since she’d first met him at one of these meetings, she’d been aware that Mark was obsessed with the idea that somehow, somewhere, he might possibly be missing out on something interesting. Even being the son of Net Force’s director was just barely enough “interesting” to keep him going, so that Mark routinely went looking for more. He was always early to these meetings, though he went out of his way to make it look accidental.

“How’s the artwork doing?” Mark said, with the air of someone who wanted to distract her from something. “Still fingerpainting?”

Catie grinned a little, and flexed those fingers. “Hey, everybody in the plastic arts has to start somewhere,” she said. “It’s what you do with the medium, anyway, not what everybody else does with it. Besides, it never keeps me away from the image work long.” She knew perfectly well that Mark knew this was her forte. There were few Net-based effects, in the strictly visual and graphical sense, that Catie couldn’t pull off with time and care. No harm in him knowing, either. Who knew, he might mention it to his father, and his father might mention it to James Winters, the Net Force Explorers liaison, and after that anything might happen. Networking is everything, Catie thought. “And how about you?” she said then. “The French police give up on you finally?”

Mark scowled, and blushed. He had gotten in some slight trouble recently when traveling with his dad, and those of the Net Force Explorers who knew the details were still teasing Mark about the episode, half out of envy that Mark had time to get in trouble while staying somewhere as interesting as Paris, and half out of the sheer amusement of watching him squirm — for Mark was hypercompetent on the Net and hated to come out on the wrong side of anything. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “But enough about my scrapes. You’re the one who’s always getting yourself scraped up.” He tilted his head back and pretended to be peering at Catie’s elbows and knees.

She laughed at him. Catie had long been used to this kind of comment from her friends, both those at school and even those who were also Net Force Explorers. She had been in soccer leagues of one kind or another almost since she was old enough to walk, partly because of her dad’s interest in the sport, but partly because she liked it herself. Then, later on, as virtual life became more important to her, Catie began to discover its “flip side”—that reality had its own special and inimitable tang which even the utter freedom of virtuality couldn’t match. There was no switching off the implant and having everything be unchanged or “all better” afterward. Life was life, irrevocable, and the cuts and bruises you carried home from a soccer game were honestly earned and genuine, yours to keep. Some of her friends thought she was weird to take the “real” sports so seriously, but Catie didn’t mind.

“To each his, her, or its own,” her father would say, chucking aside some rude review of one of his exhibitions, and picking up the brush again. Catie found this a useful approach with the virtuality snobs, who usually had what passed for their minds made up and tended not to be very open to new data.

“Nope, nothing new to exhibit,” Catie said. “Except for a new interest. A slight one, anyway. Spatball.”

“Huh,” said Mark, glancing around. The space was beginning to fill up fast now, a couple of hundred kids having come in over the space of just the last few minutes. “The last refuge of the space cadet, one of my cousins calls it.”

“It might indeed be that,” Catie said. “I’m in the process of making up my mind. Meanwhile, Squirt, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“Yeah?”

“My workspace management program is beginning to sass me.”

“Oh?”

Mark looked completely innocent. It was an expression which struck Catie as coming entirely too easily to him. “It’s getting positively sarcastic lately,” she said. “This wouldn’t be anything of your doing, would it? Some little bug you slipped in?”

“There are no bugs,” Mark said virtuously, “only features.”

“Yeah, well, this ‘feature’ has you written all over it.”

He acquired a very small smile. “Just a little heuresis, Cates. It only does what it sees you doing. So if it’s getting sarcastic—”

She took a swipe at him, and missed, mostly on purpose. At the same time, Catie had to grin a little. “So the computer’s chips are turning into chips off the old block, huh. Cute. One of these days you’re going to do something too cute to allow you to live any longer, Squirt.”

He gave her a look that suggested he didn’t think this was all that likely. The problem was, Catie thought, that he was probably right. Assuming that he survived through his teens — for Mark’s “scrapes” were many and varied, so that Catie thought it was probably miraculous that his parents hadn’t simply killed him by now — the talent that got him into the scrapes would eventually take him far. For all his tender years, Mark was a native Net programmer of great skill, one of those people who seem to be born with a logic solid in their mouths and are better at programming languages than spoken ones. There was very little that Mark couldn’t make a computer do, and the more complex the computer was, the more likely Mark was to deliver the results. But he would also find a way to enjoy himself in the meantime…and his enjoyment could occasionally also mean your annoyance, if you let him get away with it.

Catie gave him a look. “If the management system starts interfering with my space’s functioning,” she said, “I’m going to debug the software with an ax…and then hunt you down and take the lost time out of your hide. Meantime, what’s on the agenda tonight? I didn’t have time to look at it before I came in.”

“Something about a virtual field trip to the new Cray-Nixdorf-Siemens ‘server farm’ complex in Dusseldorf,” Mark said. “They’re going to run a lottery to allow some of us in there to have a look at the firmware. Like the new Thunderbolt warm-superconductor storage system.” He had a slightly hungry gleam in his eye.

Catie nodded. “Sounds like it’s right up your alley. Why should you need to enter a lottery, though? Can’t your dad get you in?”

“Not really,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. “The offer has all the usual ‘not for industry associates and their families’ disclaimer all over it. Besides, I’ve been busy….”

He trailed off a little too soon. Catie was about to ask him what was really going on when she was interrupted by a banging noise coming from the center of the room. All around her, people were making themselves chairs or lounges to sit on, and in the middle of things there had appeared, off to one side, what appeared to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A moment later there also appeared, under the Net Force logo, something that could have been mistaken for the great mahogany half-hexagonal bench in the court chamber of the Supreme Court…except that the center position was occupied solely by a young slim redheaded guy in process blue slikshorts and a LightCrawl T-shirt that presently had the message I’M IN CHARGE HERE, HONEST inching its way around his chest cavity in flashing red block capitals.

“Can everyone hold it down?” he was yelling. “We have to get started….”

Catie glanced up. “Who’s that?”

“Chair for the meeting, I guess,” Mark said.

“I knew that. I meant, ‘Do you know him?’”

“Uh, no. Hey, Gwyn…”

“Hey,” said one of the other kids presently beginning to drift over to where Mark was standing. Catie looked them over thoughtfully, for people that Mark didn’t mind hanging around him tended to be worth knowing. Either he found them intelligent, or they were sufficiently capable of getting far enough past his extreme impulsiveness and mischievousness to notice that he was intelligent. Either of these were characteristics that Catie thought were likely to be useful at some point. What was also moderately interesting was that the kids gathering around Mark all looked significantly older than he…more Catie’s age, in the seventeen-or eighteen-year-old area. Plainly they weren’t concerned about the age difference when the younger kid was as smart as Mark. Or has his connections, Catie thought. Networking is everything….

“Okay,” said the kid who had been banging on the mahogany bench, “we have some announcements first—”

“Who are you?” came the predictable yell from the floor, a ragged, amused chorus of about thirty voices. It always seemed to happen, no matter how many times they all met, to the point where it was now approaching tradition: a speaker would be shocked out of composure by the sight of all those faces and forget to introduce himself.

“Oh. Sorry. I’m Neil Linkoping. As I was saying—”

“Hi, Neil,” came the cheerfully mocking reply from the floor, about a hundred of them this time. Neil grinned and said, “Hi, crowd. Now, as I was saying…we have some announcements first….”

Groans and shouts of “Not again!” ensued. These were traditional, too, because there were always announcements. They were about the only thing that could be counted on to happen at every meeting. Neil wisely ignored the noise from the floor and started to read from a transparent window that popped into existence in the air in front of him. Catie could see the text content, in glowing letters, scrolling down through it. Near where Mark was sitting in what appeared to be an Eames chair of venerable lineage, Catie now made herself a copy of her workspace chair, itself a copy of the very beat-up Tattersall-checked “comfy chair” in the corner of her bedroom, and curled up in it to watch the proceedings unfold.

They did so with many halts, pauses, and interruptions — some genial, some adolescently crass, and some simply constituting demands for more information about one topic or another. Neil slogged his way through them, methodically enough, but with good humor, like someone used to interruptions from some other group, possibly a large family. This was the way things normally went at the regional meetings Catie had attended — a progression of events always verging cheerfully on chaos, but never quite tipping over the edge. After the announcements members might take the floor to talk about a Net seminar they were organizing, or something that had come up in a gaming or simming group, or some other issue that they thought would be of interest to the gathered Net Force Explorers as a whole. People popped in and out all during the meeting to suit their own schedules, though there was a long-agreed consensus that they should keep quiet as they did it. No appearing suddenly in bursts of virtual flame or other distracting manifestations. This rule was occasionally broken, but since breaking it infallibly caused the person who’d created the distraction to be chucked into the virtual “pool” and hence out of the meeting, with no chance of return, people tended not to do it more than once. However, even with all the noise, joking, and chaos, there was always an undercurrent of seriousness at these get-togethers. Everyone at them, or nearly everyone, intended to try to get into Net Force eventually, and the intensity of their intention as a group tended to shake out those who weren’t serious in pretty short order.

About half an hour went by in this way, and gradually Catie began to realize that nothing being discussed was particularly interesting to her. But there were other matters to think about. Toward the end of another Net Force Explorer’s brief presentation about a new virtual “chip-constant” diagnosis routine for house pets, and an upcoming Explorers charity fund-raiser to cover chipping costs for pet owners who found it hard to afford, that particular Explorer — a blond girl of maybe sixteen — finished up with: “And for all of you who made it here late after celebrating this evening’s victory by South Florida Spat—”

“Yayy!” went a surprising number of voices from the floor, and in the middle of the crowd a small raucous chorus of voices began singing, “What’s that slithering sound you hear?/We are the Slugs, and revenge is near—!” In response, “Fly High Seattle!” yelled one lone voice from the back, and was answered with a fair amount of teasing laughter from all over the room.

Catie raised her eyebrows at that, glancing around the floor. Her gaze suddenly rested on Mark and paused. He had gotten up out of his Eames chair to go have a word with slim, dark, little Charlie Davis, but now Mark was standing near Charlie and looking around the crowd with an unusually thoughtful expression. Seeing that look made Catie start to feel thoughtful herself. You didn’t normally see such expressions on Mark Gridley without good reason. He’s up to something, she thought, knowing that particular focused look too well from her own brother. Just what is he up to?

Neil Linkoping had gotten up behind the bench again and was once more pounding on it. “Anybody else?” he said. “Going once…”

There were already people standing up, already having vanished the chairs they had created for themselves or had arrived in. Catie got up and stretched herself, looking around her. I might have saved myself the trouble, she thought. It was the usual thing, though. As summer came on, a lot of the Explorers got more interested in topics that had to do with vacations, or (while the weather cooperated) the Real World. “Going twice?” Neil said.

“…You going to any more spat games?”

Catie looked around and down. Mark Gridley was standing next to her again.

“Going three times…”

Catie did her best to keep her curiosity, now raging, out of her face. “Probably,” she said. “It has its points. I’m starting to wonder if it’s something I want to play myself. Anyway, my brother wants me to meet a friend of a friend of his who’s a professional spat player. I’ll probably wind up going to the game before we actually meet.”

“Really?” Mark said. “Sounds pretty space. Who is it?”

“Uh, his name is Brickner. George Brickner.”

“Sold for a dollar,” Neil Linkoping was saying to the meeting at large. “That’s it. Meeting’s archived. Next meeting is July thirteenth. Night, everybody…”

All around them everybody was getting up, but for the moment Catie was ignoring them. Mark was looking thoughtful. “South Florida?”

“That’s right. They call him ‘The Parrot.’ Don’t ask me why.”

“Really,” Mark said. His expression was momentarily distant.

“Yeah,” Catie said, watching him curiously.

“Well, maybe I’ll run into you during the tournament sometime,” Mark said.

That surprised her, too. Catie wouldn’t normally have thought that Mark had anything even slightly jockish about him. “Maybe,” she said.

“Do me a favor, though?”

“Sure, what?”

“If you do ever meet Brickner, drop me a virtmail and tell me what he’s like.”

Catie was surprised again. Then she grinned. “Mark, don’t tell me you’re a secret fan of this guy’s….”

Mark’s eyes widened slightly. An embarrassed look? Or something less spontaneous? “Okay,” Mark said then, “I won’t tell you.” And he grinned, turned away, and got very obviously interested in something that tall, slim Megan O’Malley, on the other side of him, was saying to a third Net Force Explorer, a short redheaded guy that Catie didn’t recognize.

For her own part, Catie moved away a little, too, thinking. He didn’t actually answer my question….

And that decided her. She was going to go out of her way, now, to make sure that this meeting with her brother’s friend’s friend would happen…and as soon as possible.

Catie waved good night at Maj Green, halfway across the room and talking fast to a handsome dark-haired young guy. Got to virtmail her about that simming conference. She’s been getting into that kind of thing…. Then she re-created the doorway back into her own workspace. She stepped through it and came out in the gallery over the LOC’s main reading room. There, musing, Catie paused for a moment, then turned and faced the door again. “Hal’s place,” she said.

The iridescent blue “hold’ pattern swirled in the doorway, but, rather to her surprise, didn’t immediately dissolve. “Casual visitors are being discouraged,” said Catie’s workspace management program.

“Since when am I a ‘casual visitor’?” Catie said. “Tell him it’s me.”

“No! No! Nooooo!” came her brother’s voice, followed by a terrible but (to her ears) rather artificial scream.

“I give it a six,” Catie said after a moment. “Hal, I’m serious, I need to talk to you for a minute.”

There was a groan on the other side of the virtual interface. Then the “hold” pattern dissolved, and Catie stepped through the doorway, glanced around her — and stood still in surprise.

Normally Hal’s workspace looked like a parts warehouse, full of rack storage shelves which in turn were full of “cardboard boxes,” all symbolic containers for his many files. Catie had spent many hours teasing him about minimalist retrotech, and what kind of person would take a workspace which could look like anything possible that human imagination could devise, and turn it into something like the warehouse end of a catalog store. Now, though, Catie got the feeling that she was going to be able to raise the teasing to a whole new level. A circle of high, gloomy walls built of blocks of splotched gray stone rose up all around her, and all kinds of bizarre electrical apparatus were lined up against them, buzzing and sparking: strange rotating wheels spitting blue-fire electrical discharge, Tesla coils up and down which writhing arcs of electricity slid and sizzled. As imagery went, it was a superlative job. Hal had plainly gone to some trouble to get the proportions right. Even the sound effects were right on. Catie could hear peasants shouting outside, and if she stuck her head out one of the high Gothic-arched windows, she was sure she would see that they had torches and pitchforks. This is hysterical, she thought, but I wonder what brought this on….

“Hal?” she said.

“What is it, Cates? I’m busy.” Her brother appeared from behind a cabinet, carrying an Erlenmeyer flask and a few glass-stoppered bottles over to a workbench that, to judge by the stains on it, had seen better days. Hal was wrapped in a high-collared white lab coat, and except for the bottles, he looked entirely like someone who might start stitching pieces of people together without warning, without much attention being paid to the principle of informed consent.

“This a private project,” Catie said, coming down the curved stone stairs around the outside of the tower, “or something for school?”

“Both,” he said, putting the flasks down. “You interrupting me just for spiteful personal pleasure, or as a public service?”

“Both,” Catie said, giving him a look. “I didn’t think you’d be done with the postgame show already….”

“It was shorter than they expected,” Hal said, taking the stopper out of one of the bottles and sniffing it. “Which was just as well, since while I was watching I solved a problem that’s been bugging me for a while, and now I can get on with this.” He put the stopper back into the bottle and paused to make a note on a pad on the table.

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 to 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?”

“Your meeting with George Brickner,” said the monster. Outside, Catie thought she could faintly hear the sounds of peasants with pitchforks, somewhere out on the First Street side of the Library of Congress, and getting louder. “Saturday morning at eleven.”

“Space?” Catie said.

“Awaiting your beck and call, O Mistress.”

Catie’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t you start learning bad habits from Hal’s space now,” she said. “Meanwhile, make a note of the Net address for the meeting.”

“Brace yourself for a shock,” said her workspace, “but it’s not a virtual address. Delano’s, 445 P Street, Georgetown, phone—”

“Hold the phone,” Catie said. I wonder what’s bringing this guy up all the way here from Florida? she thought. Some business to do with his team…? That had to be it. “What’s Delano’s? Some kind of restaurant?”

“The Yellow Spaces listing says ‘diner,’” said her workspace.

“Huh,” Catie said. “Maybe over by the university.”

“Near Poulton Hall,” said her workspace.

Catie nodded. “Okay, Boris,” she said to the monster, “tell your ‘master’ that the message is received and understood.” She waved bye-bye.

The monster bowed a finishing-school bow, during which its toupee fell off, then it vanished. Catie stood there for a moment with a wry look on her face until the sound of the peasants with pitchforks faded away. Then she bent down to pick up the toupee, flung it into the air so that it caught fire and vanished, and then set about tidying up her workspace, beckoning some of the piles of files and sketches to float in the air around her for sorting. Now I can start finding out just why Mark Gridley was so interested in this guy, Catie thought. And as for whatever slight interest I might have myself…

She grinned and started going through the papers in one hovering pile, idly humming “Slugs’ Revenge.”