Death Match

5

Eventually she got offline and went looking for her dad. His studio door was open a crack, which meant it was all right for him to be disturbed—“as if I’m not disturbed most of the time” was his usual line, “at least, to judge by what your mother says.” Catie pushed the door open a little and found her father standing in the middle of the studio, the CNNSI artwork on its easel pushed off to one side for the moment, while he stood under the spotlight with the digitizing camera on its tripod, apparently changing a lens.

“You busy, Dad?” Catie said.

“Just thinking bad thoughts about Zeiss,” he said. “Come on in.”

“What’s the matter?” She came over and looked curiously at the lenses her father had laid out on the small table nearby, big, black-cased, knurl-edged things.

“Aah, the new lens is still showing chromatic aberration around the edges,” he said.

“The one they just sent you as a replacement?”

“Yeah,” her father said. He looked with distaste at the lens he was holding in his hand. “There are two possibilities, and neither of them is great. Either the replacement suffers from the same problem as the original wide angle — which is just possible — or there’s something wrong with the camera. Naturally that’s what Zeiss is going to claim when I send this lens back to them. And the second camera’s in the shop, so I can’t test the lens to see if it fails in the same way.” He frowned. “And I need the wide-angle for this — the other lenses can’t get the whole painting in one shot. And I refuse to waste time trying to shoot this picture in pieces. It never matches up perfectly, no matter how hard you try….”

“If you’d done this in virtual space, in Pinxit or one of the other rendering programs,” Catie said, knowing perfectly well what the response was going to be, “you wouldn’t have this problem.”

“I hate Pinxit,” her father said, with some relish. “Its user interface is a complete waste of time. And if I’d never married your mother, I wouldn’t have you standing here making fun of me while I’m going insane in the name of art, either. So let’s not play the If game.” He gave her a rather dry look, but it was still affectionate. “Meanwhile, did you come in here just to make fun of my creative genius being stymied, or was there something else?”

“Uh, yeah.” As briefly as she could without leaving out anything important, Catie described to her father the visit she had just had from James Winters.

While she was talking, her father plopped himself down on the paint-spattered couch and sat there turning the offending camera lens over and over in his hands. When Catie finished, he looked up at her for a few moments and didn’t say anything.

Catie stood there and tried to conceal the fact that she was twitching slightly.

“And?” her dad said.

“And what?”

“What do you think you should do?”

“I want to help,” Catie said.

Her father started turning the lens over in his hands again. “Your mother’s attitude,” he said. It was something of a joke in the family that Catie seemed to take a whole lot more after her mother than her father. “You think you can make a difference?”

“I think I might be able to,” Catie said. “It’s worth a try.”

Catie’s dad raised his eyebrows and gave her a look she couldn’t quite decipher. “Is this opinion entirely motivated by the desire for justice and fair play,” he said, “or does it have something to do with George?”

Catie flushed. “Naturally it has something to do with him,” she said, “but, Dad, it’s not what I think you’re thinking. If you are thinking that.”

“What,” her father said, “that he’s a little old for you?”

Now she laughed at him. “Of course he’s a little old for me. It’s not that kind of interest, Dad. Maybe—” The sudden realization brought her up short. “Maybe it’s that I feel a little sorry for him.”

“Huh…?” Her father looked surprised. “Why? When he’s suddenly becoming a national celebrity, and he could be rich if he wanted to?…And probably will be, no matter what his intentions are,” her father added. “They have a way of getting to you, the sponsors, the big money…if they want you. Time is on their side.”

Catie filed that thought away for consideration later. “It’s more like that he’s a little lonely,” she said. “He has friends, there’s no problem there…but I get a feeling that he doesn’t discuss the stuff that’s going on with the team with them all that much. If he suspects there’s a problem, maybe he’s afraid of involving them.”

“But not afraid of involving you,” her father said, suddenly sounding a little fierce.

“If I hadn’t made it plain I was interested,” Catie said, “he wouldn’t have taken the issue much further. I’m sure of that.”

Her father sat there for a few more moments, turning the lens over in his hands. “Well,” he said eventually, “your mom’ll be home from the library in a couple of hours…she and I will have a talk then.” He gave Catie another of those undecipherable looks. “Hold off on talking to George for the time being, okay?”

“Okay,” Catie said. “But we’re playing chess. If a move comes through—”

Her father allowed a slight smile to emerge. “All right,” he said, “deal with that, obviously.” He got up. “Mean-while I have to get on the Net and try to get some satisfaction out of Zeiss, who will doubtless tell me that I’m out of my mind, and why should they replace this optic again….” The smile turned into a very sour grin. “‘Customer service’…another of the great implied oxymorons of our time. Go on, honey, scoot out of here.”

Catie scooted.

She paused long enough to make herself a tuna sandwich, and while she was making it, considered her options. I might have to hold off on talking to George for the moment…but there’s nothing to prevent me talking to Mark Gridley. Assuming I can find the little twerp.

Catie finished the sandwich and had a Coke, then went off to the family room and sat down in the implant chair, and just vagued out for a moment or so. Her eye fell on the crack in the corner of the room, by the bookcase. Is that thing getting bigger? she thought. Really must mention it to Mom. Her father might do repairs and so forth around the house, but it was her mother who usually noticed such things needed to be done, and got them organized. She was, in most ways, the silent power in the family. Though Catie’s dad might come down hard in one direction or another, he rarely did so without consulting her mother first, except as regarded small things. And how’s she going to take this business with George? I wonder, Catie thought. Her mom could be unusually protective, sometimes. A little too much so, by Catie’s way of thinking. But then, if as Dad says we’re so much alike, it would seem that way to me, I guess….

Catie sighed and lined up her implant with the Net box, activating it. A moment later she was standing in the Great Hall, looking at her beat-up comfy chair, along with piles of e-mails and art projects that she hadn’t yet finished filing. It’ll have to wait. “Space—” she said.

“What, you again?”

She smiled grimly. “Get me Mark Gridley.”

“Checking his space for you now.”

She stood there looking at the various pieces of completed and half-completed artwork lying on the floor in their “iconic” forms. When was the last time I sat down and actually did some art? Catie thought. She could think of about fifty things that needed to be done to the Appian Way piece, especially after the talk she’d had with Noreen the other day. She hadn’t even had time to unshell the Luau lighting program—

Her own space suddenly dissolved away to darkness. A second or so later that darkness began to lift again, like a slow dawn, but though the ground under her feet, a dusty, pockmarked surface, began to pale, the “sky” did not.

A moment later Catie saw why. The sky was black, and full of stars that burned, unwinking, unhampered by any breath of atmosphere. The dusty, pale ground was more than just pockmarked. It was scattered with little chunks of rock, something porous and light-looking, like pumice, and the pockmarks weren’t just potholes, they were craters. The nearby ones were small, but there were bigger, walled ones further off — ancient impact craters, their insides impossible to see from where Catie stood, though here and there a “splash peak” from some ancient gout of lava caught in the act of recoalescing with its crater’s briefly molten bottom still stood up above the rim.

She looked around her, very impressed. Off to her left, nearly new, there was the Earth, a bright, blue-burning crescent, and ever so faintly its dark side, North America and the Pacific mostly, was lit by moonlight, the old Earth in the new Earth’s arms. Catie smiled slightly, and finished her turn.

There, off to one side, in the bottom of a crater about the size of a football field, stood a half-circle of white columns, in the fluted Doric style — Catie had done more than enough columns in her Appian Way piece, and knew Doric from Ionian when she saw it. Some of the columns were broken at their tops, and their capitals had fallen here and there. Other columns which should have completed the circle lay higgledy-piggledy on the ground like felled trees, shattered in their fall. In the middle of the circle, where the fluted remains of several columns lay across one another and left a little space, Mark Gridley was sitting on one column, as if on a bench, and leaning back against another. In the empty space before him a display window hung, and he was watching a football game.

Catie strolled over to him, raising dust, and stood by him for a moment, looking at the image. “Is this preseason,” she said, “or post?”

Mark snorted. “Who can tell anymore?” He looked over his shoulder at her. “Sorry I’ve been hard to find lately.”

“Don’t sweat it, Squirt, I’ve been busy, too.”

“So I hear.” He waved at the viewing window, and it went blank. “James Winters said you needed to talk to me about some things.”

“Yeah.” She sat down on another of the columns, making herself as comfortable as she could on the ridges. “At the moment, I need to know just what makes a ‘sealed’ server sealed.”

He grinned at her, an entirely happy look. “Want to break into one and find out firsthand?”

Catie had to sigh. “Mark, has anyone ever investigated whether you might possibly have some piracy in your background somewhere?”

“Might be, on the Thai side,” Mark said cheerfully. “There were some funny things going on in the Malay Straits late last century….”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

“And my mom told me once that she was related to Grainne O’Malley….”

Who? But Catie refused to ask him if this relationship was a good thing. Once you got Mark started on some subjects, there was no stopping him.

“I’d prefer not to break in anywhere we’re not wanted,” Catie said. “Life is complicated enough at the moment. But I also need to talk to you about some structural issues.”

“That’s what Winters said,” said Mark. “So, shoot.”

“Well, first, the spatball servers. ‘Sealed’ how, exactly?”

“Triple-redundancy controls on access to the code,” Mark said. “And safe-deposit type security on the physical servers themselves — three-key access, with the highest officials in the organization holding the keys. It’s sort of like the way they used to handle missile launches last century. However,” Mark said, and smiled a completely unnerving smile, “any security that human beings devise, human beings can defeat. With time, and care, and enough brains.”

“Fishing for compliments, Mark?”

He didn’t deign to answer that. “As regards the ISF servers, though,” Mark said, “I can save you some time and worry. Net Force has already been through those with a fine-tooth comb.”

“Meaning you, I take it.”

“I went along for the ride,” Mark said. “Nothing showed up.”

“Did the software people who normally maintain the code know that you were coming?”

“No. Well, yes,” Mark said after a moment. “Upper management knew, since we were doing a physical-equipment assessment as well. In fact, the ISF asked us to come in as soon as Net Force contacted them.”

“Then we can assume that ‘lower’ management knew about the inspection, too,” Catie said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Seems likely enough. Assuming ‘worst case,’ anyway.”

“I think you may as well assume it. I suspect your dad would have, anyway.” Catie thought for a moment. “Okay…so they’ll have had time to hide things from you, if anybody on the ‘inside’ wanted to…. Even though you’ve already been in there, I’d like a quick look around in that server. Can you finesse it?”

Mark looked at her for a few moments, a very speculative expression. “Catie, I’m not sure this is strictly the kind of help James Winters had in mind when he brought you on board.”

Catie swallowed. “I can’t help that,” she said. “There are things I need to look at before I can figure out what questions to ask George Brickner. It’s no use wasting his time and mine running down one blind alley after another. And anyway, if I don’t understand the inside of the server technology well enough to know what to listen for, I’m going to be wasting my own time, too…not to mention that I won’t be able to help your friends at Net Force in what they’re trying to achieve.”

Mark thought about that for a moment. Then his face cleared. “All right,” he said. “I know you can be trusted. And there’s no time like the present. Come on!”

He jumped up and led Catie off to one side, away from the fallen pillars. “Yo, cousin,” Mark said to his workspace management program.

“Working.”

“Access doorway. Crapshoot.”

“Opening access now, and logging.” A blue outline appeared in the empty “vacuum” before them, and filled itself with darkness.

“Logging to my storage only,” Mark said hastily.

“Logging limited,” his workspace management program said, and the blackness in the doorway shimmered. A different quality of darkness, with a vague bloom of light in the background, was all that Catie could see through it at the moment.

“That’s so my dad won’t find out about this immediately,” Mark said. “But, Catie, he’s going to have to know sooner or later. So don’t do anything that’s going to make Net Force look stupid later on.”

“As if I would,” Catie said.

“I know. But I have to say it anyway.” The look he gave her was surprisingly fierce, and it amused Catie a little to find that he was so territorial…and pleased her as well. She knew some of the older Net Force Explorers who were friends with him had an idea that Mark might be slightly uncontrollable, even unprincipled, but plainly there were things that mattered to him…and for Catie, this was a source of some relief.

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 all 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.’”

Catie burst out laughing.

“The only condition is that I want you to keep me posted with whatever’s going on,” her mom said. “Don’t hesitate to call me at work if you need me.”

“Do I ever?”

“No comment. But if there’s trouble, I want to be the first to hear about it, unless your dad’s in the house. No sitting on little fires until they’re infernos before you call for help, understand?”

“Okay.”

“Good. So get yourself out of here in an hour or so…dinner’ll be ready then.”

“What’re you making?”

“Hey, it’s not my night to cook,” her mother said. “I have some reading to do. Your dad’s making lasagna.”

Catie’s mouth immediately began to water. “Fifty-nine minutes, you said?”

“Why don’t I get that kind of response for my beef stew?” her mother said. “Ingrate! I take back everything I said about how well we’ve brought you up.” And, laughing, she vanished.

Catie spent about half that hour reviewing the copy of the Caldera online manual that she kept in her workspace. Some of the commands she knew well enough, since the imaging tools she used most often shared them. Some were completely unfamiliar, and now she kicked herself for having been so selective about her use of this particular resource…especially because there were aspects of Caldera so powerful that Catie started to get the feeling that she had been making herself work harder than she had to. Now she sat looking at lists of commands that she had very little time to master, and feeling dumber than usual.

When I go in there and start looking that program over, she thought, what’s to say that I won’t look right at the answer and not recognize it because I was too lazy or too unnerved to study this stuff thoroughly—

“Hello?” a male voice said.

Catie’s head jerked away from the manual “pages” that were hanging in the air all around her. The voice had not been that of her father or brother. “George?”

“Can I come in?”

“Sure, if you don’t mind a mess…”

George stepped in out of the empty air and looked around him with surprise, and then pleasure. “I would not call this a mess,” he said. “You built this?”

“I mocked it up,” Catie said.

“Nice job!”

“Uh, I was faking it,” Catie said, feeling that this assessment was more than usually true, while George did what just about every visitor to either the real Great Hall or Catie’s duplicate did — stood there craning his neck at the paintings and mosaics under the ceiling.

“If this is faking it,” George said, “I’d like to see what your real work looks like.”

“Um,” Catie said, biting back about five possible self-critical remarks that she could easily have made. It was the one way she took after her father. Catie preferred to run herself down so that anyone else intending to do so would find that the job had already been done by a resident expert. “Thanks.”

“I had a move,” George said, “but I thought I might bring it over, if you were available, instead of just mailing it in.”

“Sure, go for it.”

George stepped over to the chessboard and picked up a bishop which he had moved out earlier. Now he advanced it a little further along a different diagonal.

“Space?” Catie said.

“I’m so glad we’re on a first-name basis,” said the voice out of the air.

George laughed.

Catie raised her eyebrows. “Log that, will you please?”

The text window hanging in the air promptly added a line:

Catie looked at the move, and also looked at the way George was regarding the chessboard: looking more or less at it, but now suddenly not seeing it, or much of anything else, from the concerned expression on his face.

“Can I offer you a chair?” Catie said.

“Uh, yeah.”

She made him one, a “comfy” one like hers, but not so beat-up, and had her space put it over by the chessboard. George sat down and stretched himself, and sighed a little.

“Did you have a practice today?” Catie said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah,” George said. “Some of the guys have been having their machines checked over by their service providers before the tournament, so we wanted to run them in and make sure everything was okay.”

“I guess that’s why you’re looking like you’re incredibly worried about something,” Catie said.

George looked at her with astonishment. “I wasn’t — was I–I mean, I—” Then he stopped, and smiled, a rather sad smile. “It shows that much, huh?”

“If you painted the words scared and upset on your forehead, it might just give me a clearer hint,” Catie said, “but only just. George, what’s the matter?”

He sighed.

“Pressure’s piling up, huh…?”

“Not just pressure.” George leaned back and looked at Catie and let out another breath. “More than that. Something worse.”

Catie sat and waited, and didn’t say anything.

“Well, I mentioned to you that we had an invigilator call up, didn’t I? That was Karen de Beer.”

“Yes?” Catie said.

“Well, she was invigilating a non-ISF server game. You can’t use the noncertified servers for tournament play, but a lot of teams have licensed the server software from the ISF for use in their informal or ‘fantasy’ play. Though the servers aren’t used for formal tournament play, the ISF sanctions their use in ‘fantasy’ tournaments and informal regionals. Karen went off to invigilate at a game between Denver and Flagstaff, and…” He trailed off.

“And what?”

George was looking even more uncomfortable. “Catie…I really shouldn’t be telling anyone this.”

She opened her mouth to say “Then don’t tell me,” and then closed it. Catie got up, went over to the chessboard for a moment, picked up one of her knights, and moved it to threaten one of George’s front-rank pawns.

For a long moment George sat there, saying nothing. Then he looked up at the dome of the Great Hall and said, “I trust you, Catie. And I don’t know who else to tell…. Some guy came to the door of Karen’s apartment this morning. He said he liked the way she’d handled the game at Denver…and he wanted to know, did she want to make some extra money.”

“Doing what?” Catie said, sitting down again.

He looked at her with an expression that seemed to say, Can’t you guess? “He said he represented some people who wanted Karen to invigilate spat games that they were going to be running out of another server, a private server that his people were going to be setting up. Now, this kind of thing happens…but never outside of the auspices of the ISF. The Federation publishes a list of non-tournament servers that have been inspected by them and passed for use by ISF member teams and team-candidates, spatball groups that are still serving their qualification period. Federation members don’t do invigilation work outside of the ‘passed’ servers; at least, not if they want to stay in the Federation.”

George got up and walked around the chessboard, looking at it. “It’s tricky business, invigilating a spat space,” he said, not looking at Catie. “Besides consulting with the referee before and during the game, you have to make sure that all the parameters for temperature and air density and rotation and friction and elastic collisions and so forth are set correctly in the software, and that they stay that way — that play, or hardware or code errors, which turn up sometimes, don’t alter them, so that play stays fair. There are about fifty sets of parameters that have to be managed during the course of a match, and you have to watch them all, all the time, and be ready to alter them if the computer messes them up. It’s real easy to handle a space incorrectly, get things wrong, if you don’t have enough experience. More…if you are experienced…it would be easy enough to set the parameters wrong on purpose. Or to let other people see how it could be done.”

“And Karen thought they wanted her to do something like that.”

“That, or something similar.” George breathed out, went around to his king’s knight and picked it up, walked out onto the board and set it down. The notation window flickered and said K-KB3. “The guy named a figure…said Karen could start any time.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she’d think about it. She told me yesterday that she was still thinking about it. She works in a convenience store, Catie. The figure was about three times her year’s salary. And she’s by herself, don’t forget, and she has a little girl to support.”

“I don’t suppose he left her a Net address,” Catie said.

“He said he’d come back in a few days and see what she had to say.” George looked at his move as if he was most dissatisfied with it. “He told her not to mention it to anyone, or there could be trouble. She told me…and now she’s scared. But she would have been scared even if she hadn’t told me, she said. And she’s scared for her little girl, too, for Carmen. Karen’s not stupid. She knows trouble when she sees it. She temporized…out of shock, I think. She was never in any doubt that she wanted nothing to do with the offer. But now she’s afraid of what the guy might say if she tells him no.”

Catie swallowed. This was something that James Winters was definitely going to need to hear about. As long as no one notices them contacting her… But naturally Net Force would have ways to do that discreetly.

She swallowed again. “I don’t suppose that anyone else on the team’s had anyone approach them that way,” Catie said.

George shook his head. “If they have, I haven’t heard about it. Got another move?” he said.

“I’m thinking about it.” But strategizing her next move was actually buried behind four or five other, more immediate concerns at the moment.

When she looked up, she found George looking at her again. It was another of those distressed expressions, though this time he was at least trying to hide it. To Catie, the effect was simply as if he now had NOT REALLY UPSET painted on his forehead…and suddenly she knew what the problem was, or thought she did.

“Look, I—”

“George,” Catie said, sounding extremely severe and for the moment not caring, “it’s not like that. You think you have a monopoly on ‘not married, not dating, not gay, and no plans’?”

He just kept looking at her. Then he sagged. “Uh,” he said, “maybe I’m doing you an injustice. It’s just that it’s rare…and seems to be getting rarer…to find friendship, in my situation. Just plain friendship. Sorry.”

“Well,” Catie said, and let it sink in for a moment. “All right. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tomorrow morning is the draw. The play-offs will start on Thursday at the soonest, maybe Friday. Karen’s going to have to do something. I’ve got to find a way to protect my team….”

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Catie said after a moment, “let me know.”

George got up slowly, looking down at the chessboard again.

“Call me when you have a move,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

And he went through the door that had been standing waiting for him off to one side, in the air, and it closed behind him.

Catie sat very still for some while, considering possible moves in two very different games.