Death Match

6

She took the predictable amount of teasing about being late for dinner, and Hal punished her for this slight on her father’s cooking by the most straightforward means possible — eating most of the lasagna and leaving Catie just enough for one serving, and nothing at all for seconds.

When she complained, her father threw his hands up. “It’s all I could do to get him to leave the pattern on the plates,” he said. “At least there’s some sauce left. Make some pasta.”

Normally a turn of events like this would have left Catie furious. Tonight, though, she simply made pasta, completely confusing Hal, who had been expecting — looking forward to, in fact — a far more explosive response. When Catie finished gobbling up her pasta and went straight back into the family room to use the Net machine, she heard Hal saying under his breath to her father, “You think she’s coming down with something?”

She ignored him, got straight back into her workspace, and got back to work reviewing Caldera. Several hours passed, at the end of which her brain was buzzing with commands and obscure syntaxes that she had never thought she’d need any time soon.

But I need them now, she thought, getting up out of the Comfy Chair at last and picking up, from the floor beside the chair where she had left it, Mark’s shining green key.

She pulled down a window to check the schedule he had sent her of the maintenance schedule for the ISF server. Theoretically no one would be in there until tomorrow morning sometime — local time, anyway. That was the afternoon for her, since the server itself, and most of the techs who managed it, were on the West Coast. All the same, Catie was twitching as she held the key up. “Space?” she said.

“You’re gonna get in trou-bllle…you’re gonna get in trou-blle….” her workspace manager sang, sounding entirely too gleeful about it.

“Not nearly as much as Mark Gridley’s gonna be in when all this is over,” Catie said grimly. “He’s gonna wish the Sureté had kept him to play with. Listen, you, just open a door to get me into the ISF server. The specs for the gateway are all right here. Don’t deviate, or I’ll pull your wires out, tie them to the tree in the front yard, and chase you around it.”

“Uh,” said her workspace manager. An open gateway popped into existence in front of Catie. Through it she could see darkness, with green lines drawn through it, running away to eternity….

“Keep this open in case I need to leave in a hurry,” Catie said.

“I, for one, intend to disavow any knowledge of your actions,” said her workspace manager helpfully.

“You do that,” Catie said, and stepped through the doorway into the dark of the spat-volume server’s space.

She spent her first few minutes there just standing, looking around her, listening, for any sense or sign that anyone else might be here. But Catie heard nothing, saw nothing, but the Cartesian grid running off in its single plane into the empty darkness. Finally she lifted the key and pushed it into the darkness.

Obediently it cracked open before her to show her the keyhole. She turned it, and found herself, not standing in space this time, but floating inside the spat volume at the heart of the “space station.”

“Workspace manager…” Catie said.

“Listening, visitor.”

“Please show me the schematic of the server software that I viewed when I was last here.”

The image of the spat volume around her faded away, leaving her standing on the Descartean plane again. But this time the server’s software structure towered up in front of her once more, a skyscraper’s worth of code, all represented once more as squiggles and bright colors and straight lines and wavy lines and spheres, like a spaghettiand-meatball dinner with aspirations to architecture. Catie heaved a big sigh. “All right,” she said to herself, “time to start trying to figure this thing out….”

She sat down on the green-lined “floor” and considered where to begin.

Elsewhere, hidden away in the depths of virtuality in a dim blue-lit bar that might or might not have genuinely existed somewhere else, two men more thoroughly wrapped in shadows than ever sat on either side of one of the marble tables and studied it and their drinks, trying to avoid having to look at one another. Even here, wearing seemings, neither of them raised his voice above a whisper…though the anger in their whispers plainly indicated that both of them would have liked to shout.

“…They shouldn’t have scored at all! Next time—”

“Forget next time for the moment! We’re not done with last time. And they did score.” Darjan was glaring at Heming. “What do I have to do to get through to you how important this is? You need to have these routines correctly implemented by Thursday, and the people handling them clued in about what needs to be done, or there’s going to be more than just your ass on the line, my friend.” The words were spoken in a way that had nothing friendly about it at all.

“So we’ll have them ratchet the response up a level or two.”

“Better make sure it’s ratcheted up enough….”

“Too much,” said Heming hotly, “and it’s going to start being obvious to the players. Then where will you be? You’ll have an independent investigation breathing down your back before you know what’s happened. Or worse still, Net Force will get involved. And then you, my friend, will find out what having your ass on the line really looks like.” He watched Darjan for his response.

Darjan just stretched his legs out and turned his glass around on the table a couple more times. “Get it handled,” he said. “There are enough bucks being bet on Chicago at the moment that it has to be right. The gentlemen upstairs want plenty of point spread on this result.”

“Look, I told you, it’s being handled right now. Correction has already been put in, and the techs are training on the ‘twinned’ server right now. They’ve even suckered some spatball players into helping them test the volume.”

“Are you crazy? If the ISF—”

“One of the people who’s been around to reassure them is ISF…or so they’ve been told. Our corporate connection.”

Darjan still looked uneasy. “If word of that gets out—”

“It won’t. Our connection has impressed on all his minor-league ‘helpers’ how important it is to keep the news about the new server quiet, so as not to spoil the big publicity push when ‘the people funding it’ make the announcement. But the testing has been going on for a couple of days now, and the players haven’t noticed a thing. You can practically pull the ball out of their hands and they assume it was their fault somehow.”

Darjan mulled that over. “All right. I wouldn’t mind seeing one of these test sessions.”

“I can set that up for you any time. They’re testing this afternoon, in fact. You can be an invisible watcher.”

“All right.” He took a drink of his virtual martini. “There hasn’t been anyone messing around with the genuine ISF server, has there?”

“No need. Their own people don’t have any reason to be there now. Their own routine checks have all passed off without incident. And there’s no reason we would put our own operatives in there, or anywhere near it, so close to the play-offs starting. There’s no need for it anyway. The ‘remote controls’ from our mirror server are all installed and ready to go.”

“Then why didn’t they work last time?” Darjan said. “Dammit, that should have been another clean win for Chicago. Is that damn team that inept?”

Heming frowned. “They can’t all know about the ‘adjustment,’” Heming said. “Unfortunately, a lot of them are honest. The team captain’s dropped some broad hints in the right ears, but that’s all he can do without having their own coach on his case. What do you want him to do, take out an ad on CNNSI saying ‘This is how the volume has been fixed so we can win?’ All he can do is direct play toward situations that our monitor can use to best advantage. After that, it’s still up to the team.”

Darjan breathed out, annoyed. “I suppose,” he said. “Well, I’ve made a visit or so myself in the past few days to see what can be done about the ‘honesty’ issue from inside several of the teams. We’ll see how those pay off.”

“And don’t forget about those ‘maintenance’ visits I told you about,” Heming said. “The installation of the conditional switching in the South Florida players’ Net machines. We’ve got three in already. Some of these guys are fairly anxious to make sure their machines are serviced before the play-offs…they’ve been making it easy for us, and we should be able to get the whole team seen to before they play anybody. The eavesdropping buffers we’re installing will telegraph the players’ physical movements to our monitor handling the mirror server a half a second or so before they go to the real one, and give our own handling routines a chance to react to their plays before they even actually happen in the spot volume. Think of it as insurance. Whatever happens, it’s a technology we can use elsewhere after these play-offs, in all kinds of sports.”

Darjan still didn’t look entirely reassured. “Well…it had better just go right this time, Heming. Otherwise your people and my people are the ones that will take the heat…and you and Iare inevitably going to get singed. If not burnt to a crisp.”

Heming shook his head. “Look, I understand your concern, but it’s handled. Come by this afternoon for the ‘training session’ and see.”

Darjan nodded, still frowning, and had another drink. Around the two of them, the shadows folded in close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Workspace management,” Catie said.

“Listening, visitor.”

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

“Done.” The structure vanished.

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

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

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

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

“The final f—”

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

“Uh, yes, ma’am, right away, ma’am.”

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

And what human minds can devise…

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

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

“Yup,” Catie said.

“The one I’m thinking of?”

“Yup,” Catie said. She started making tea for herself, not unaware of her mother’s eyes on her.

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

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

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

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

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

“You mean the authorities haven’t come for you yet?”

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

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

“No, just flag me as unavailable unless it’s my mom or dad or Mark.”

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

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

“Voiceprint ID confirmed,” said the server. “Representing structural model.”

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

“What a mess,” Catie said softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Verbal input,” she said to the ISF server manager.

“Accepted,” said a woman’s voice, dulcet and calm.

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

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

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

She finished going over the image calls in that region of the program in a fairly short time, and then stood there looking down from her height at all the rest of it, almost afraid to stop for fear that this new way of seeing the program might forsake her. But what else is there really for me to do here? I should get out. At least, though, now I can pass this problem back to Mark with confirmation that the image calls are clear. No one is going to blame me if I can’t make much of the rest of this….

Catie breathed out, feeling a kind of satisfaction even though she hadn’t found anything really useful.

But, still…

Then, there alone in the darkness, she grinned. It wouldn’t hurt to spend just a little more time, just to make sure the new perception wasn’t a fluke.

“Down one,” Catie said to Tom Clancy’s Net Force Death Match pseudo-surface she was standing on. It obediently sank down a layer.

Catie grabbed another line of text, another image insertion call, she thought — then realized she had the wrong color of text: this one was a physical management command, one that handled the way people moved in this space. And a moment later, to her delight, she “got it” whole, without any real trouble — command, argument, force specifier, vector specifier, constant of mass, gravitational constant, constant of local light-speed in this medium, atmospheric density. Catie cracked the string of text like a whip, so that it burned briefly bright and dropped down all the additional notations and values for the constants, and she ran them through her fingers, pleased. She’d read this line as easily as the image calls, with all its dangling strings of digits and repeating decimals—

Catie paused for a moment, gazing down at one of the strands of digits hanging down from her hand from a glowing capital G, slightly larger than the other letters in that strand: the symbol for the gravitational constant. Below it the digits swung and dangled like a glowing chain: 6.6734539023956342…e-11₁, with the units signature “N m²/kg²” hanging there, like a charm, at the end.

…Now what the heck’s the matter with this? For it didn’t look right somehow. She had had occasion to use the gravitational constant once or twice when building the Appian Way scenario, because otherwise you couldn’t walk through it correctly…and even the birds that flew through the scene wouldn’t fly correctly until G was correctly in place. The fleeting thought of the former “George the Parrot” and his Gracie, and their chicks, made Catie smile a little at this connection, for she’d looked up the videos George had mentioned, and had seen the initial problems the birds had had in microgravity.

But Catie looked at that long decimal value of G now and couldn’t understand the difference between the way it looked at the moment and the way it had appeared when she installed G into her simulation of ancient Rome, plugging it in via a live link from the “best current value” reference kept on the Public Ephemerides server that was jointly managed by the National Bureau of Standards and the Naval Observatory. She’d noticed a particular pattern to the fraction, a patch where the digits 3 and 9 repeated,…393939, three times, and the peculiarity of the pattern had amused her. But now it went…39023956. And there was an extra digit at the end of it. What’s that, an exponent or something? But what would it be doing there? Anyway, the digit was below the main line of figures, not above it. A footnote? Since when do constants have footnotes?

“Where is this constant plugged in from?” Catie said.

“The constant is sourced locally,” said the ISF server management program. “No remote link.”

That’s weird. Why go to the trouble to store it in this server when reference sources outside have the “freshest” version of the value? “What does that digit refer to?” Catie said, putting her finger on it, so that it glowed.

“Subsidiary instruction call,” said the ISF server management program.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Catie said.

“Subscript digits are an optional command syntax expression in Caldera,” said the server manager. “This is a ‘legacy’ expression common in earlier versions of the language and now routinely replaced in current command syntax by either the Boolean or expression or the ‘’ symbol and angle brackets enclosing the referent line or zone number.”

Catie digested that for a moment. “Display the subsidiary instructions being called here,” she said.

A text window opened off to one side, displaying about thirty command lines, one after the other. Catie started to read them.

They were all different versions of the gravitational constant. In some of them the numerical value varied just a little. In some, the variation was huge. What was even stranger was that many of them had an added string of data attached to them, vector specifications, as far as Catie could tell.

She shook her head, perplexed. If I’m reading this right — these instructions, when they’re called, would not only change the force of gravity in a space where they were brought into play, but change the direction in which it was pulling. Even the biggest of the numbers were relatively small. Catie wasn’t sure whether the changes would much affect something as massive as, say, a human being.

But a spatball—

Catie swallowed. George said it. The ball didn’t feel right. It didn’t go where it was supposed to.

And now she abruptly understood why. Because someone, at the right time, was invoking these changed values for the gravitational constant.

That’s — that’s—! The first word that occurred to Catie was illegal, though the word was faintly comical, used in this situation. Nonetheless, it was accurate; Catie was positively indignant at the sheer fraudulence of it. You can’t just change the laws of physics! And Catie couldn’t think of anything more basic to the way that objects in this particular frame of reference would operate.

And it’d be easy to miss. After all, who thinks about the gravitational constant? It’s a constant!

…I’ve got to call Mark!

She checked her watch. It was eight in the morning. Any other time she would have thought “It’s too early.” Now, though, Catie thought, If he’s not up, it’s about time he was! But she wasn’t comfortable about calling him from in here.

“Space,” she said.

“Listening.”

It’s gotten so it feels weird not to be insulted, Catie said, and couldn’t quite repress a smile despite the seriousness of the situation. “Save this configuration for me, voiceprinted again. Then close everything down.”

“Done.” The glowing tower of text vanished.

“Door,” Catie said. Her gateway back to her space appeared before her. She slipped through it, waved it shut.

The first morning sun was glinting through the windows around the top of the reading room dome as Catie made her way back to the Great Hall. “Space!” she said.

“Now what?”

She grinned again. “Get me Mark Gridley, right now. Flag it urgent.”

“Is he even going to be up yet? Growing boys need their rest.” The tone of voice, if not the voice itself, was almost exactly Mark’s.

“Get on it,” Catie said, and picked up from the floor beside the Comfy Chair the piece of paper which stood for the virtmail she had been intending to send James Winters. “And see if James Winters is available, while you’re at it.”

There was a pause. A second later Mark appeared a few feet away.

“Oh, good,” Catie said. “Listen, do you know what I found? There’s—”

But Mark was speaking. “—not available right now, and I’m not sure when I will be. If you’ll leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m free.”

Oh, great! Catie thought. It was a recorded message again. It froze in place when it was done, leaving Mark standing there and looking slightly vague. Now what? I can’t tell James Winters about this! I wasn’t even supposed to be in that space!

But then Catie burst out in a sweat. If Net Force wasn’t told about this right away, there was no telling what might happen during the play-offs. It wasn’t just a matter of whether or not South Florida might win or lose. It was a matter of basic fairness, now, to all the other teams as well…. Not to mention not letting the bad guys get away with it!

And I have to talk to him anyway.

No point in putting it off.

Suddenly James Winters was standing there looking at her. “Uh, Mr. Winters,” Catie said. “I have—”

“—apologies for leaving you a canned message. Unfortunately I’m away from my desk at the moment. If you’d kindly leave a message for me, I’ll return the call as soon as possible. Thank you.”

“Uh,” Catie said. “Mr. Winters, it’s Catie Murray. Please call me back as soon as you can. It’s very urgent. Meanwhile I’m also sending you a report on a conversation I had with George Brickner. This is urgent, too…please get back to me soon. Thanks.”

The image of Winters vanished. Catie glanced over and saw that the one of Mark had taken itself away as well.

“Wonderful,” Catie muttered. There was nothing she could do now but go offline, go to school, and try to get hold of both Mark and Winters from there if she had time.