Death Match

7

In a huge darkened space filled with the rustle and breathing of expectant people, one man in a dark All Over suit stood at a “virtual podium,” a reading window floating about chest height and tilted toward him. Off to one side, two other people stood by a table on which was a large cut-crystal bowl shaped like a spatball and containing a number of small opaque plastic balls.

“If our guests would go ahead and stir the choices—”

The two celebrity guests, a handsome tall dark man in a formal kilt and jacket with jabot and a blond woman wearing an electric-blue dress that covered her completely and yet left absolutely nothing to the imagination, both plunged a hand into the crystal bowl and started stirring. From somewhere a dramatic drum roll started to fill the space.

The stirring went on long enough and energetically enough to convince the most skeptical viewer that there was no way either of the celebrities in question could have picked a specific ball on purpose. “First choice, please!” said the ISF president, who was acting as the master of ceremonies.

The woman and man each came up with a ball and handed it to the ISF president. This worthy, a short earnest-faced gentleman of Eastern extraction, proceeded to crack the balls open one at a time. From the first one a small spark of light burst out, floated up into the air, burning and growing, spinning and throwing off sparks like a Catherine wheel, and gradually turned into the famous red M and owl logo of one of the play-off teams.

“First to play in the quarterfinal series: Manchester United High—” A roar went up from the gathered Man United fans as the ISF president cracked open the second ball. Another spark of light shot out of it, leaped up into the air, and after a certain amount of shining and spinning, turned into a stylized flame surrounded by the letter C.

“—plays the Chicago Fire!”

Shrieks of delight from the Chicago contingent. The two logos charged at one another in the air, did a brief waltz around one another, and finally settled down to hang above and to the left of the ISF president.

“Second choice, please!”

The celebrities stirred the bowl again, each picked a ball, and once again handed them to the ISF official. He cracked the first of the two balls.

A streak of light arched up out of it and exploded into a miniature fireworks display overhead; after a few moments the fire faded away to show a stylized green grass-hopper and the letters XZS. “In the second match, Xamax Zurich—”

The ISF president cracked the second ball open. The fireworks that went up were white at first, then turned yellow and black, leaving a yellow oval with two black spots at one end of it. “—plays South Florida Spatball Association!”

“Well, good,” Darjan said, sitting back in his implant chair with a satisfied expression.

“Listen,” Heming said to him, from nearby in the darkness of their joint experience of the lottery draw. “Didn’t you hear what I said? They’ve been in the server!”

Darjan waved one hand in a languid way.

“What’s the matter with you!” Heming said in an angry whisper. “If Net Force should find—”

“They nosed around for four days straight and didn’t find anything,” Darjan said, unconcerned, as he watched the draw for the third team to play begin. “We own somebody on the ISF’s server maintenance team. He was looking over the Net Force geeks’ shoulders the whole time. They went right through the system structure and couldn’t find a thing wrong with it.” And Darjan smiled.

“That they told your guy about, maybe!” Heming said. “What if they just want to catch our ops actually using the ‘flipflop’ instructions?”

“That’s not going to happen,” Darjan said. “The server issue is handled. Stop worrying about it, and just make sure those conditionals get used properly.”

“And in the third match, the Rio de Janeiro Rotans—” said the ISF president.

“You saw the tests,” Heming said.

“Tests are one thing,” Darjan said. “Just make sure your people function at least that well on Thursday. What about those ‘repairs’ to the South Florida team’s Net boxes?”

“—play the New York JumpJets—”

More shouting came from the selection ceremonies. “Which means that the Los Angeles Rams play Sydney Gold Stripe in the fourth match. And here’s the play-off schedule—”

Heming scowled and waved the volume down. “Almost all done,” he said. “The only ones not done now are the captains and two of the forwards. They’ll be done today or tomorrow…plenty of time.”

“Good.” Darjan’s smile persisted, and it wasn’t particularly pleasant. “Not that they’re likely to be a problem again in play. Xamax should wipe them up nicely even without help. But some of the principals want them out of the play-offs right away…they’re still pissed off at the ‘Kiwanis kids’ having the nerve even to get into the same volume with Chicago last time, much less draw with them.”

“Fine…we’ll take care of it. What about your invigilator?”

“I have a call to her scheduled for this afternoon, just before she goes to pick up her little honey from school. She’ll play our side, I think.”

Heming chuckled. “Well, then, we’ve got everything sorted out. This should be an interesting week….”

Catie came home from school in a most unaccustomed rush. Normally she took her time on the combined ride and walk, letting herself depressurize after the day’s work. Today, though, she came plunging in through the side door as if she were being pursued by wolves, and ran straight into Hal, nearly flattening him.

“Hey, look out, what’s the matter with you?” he yelled at her. “Hey, not in there, I was going to go online, you can’t—!”

Catie never heard what he said. She was in the implant chair, her implant lined up, within a matter of seconds. A few breaths later she was standing in the Great Hall. “Space—” she said.

“There you are,” said her workspace manager. “I’ve been worried sick. There’s a virtcall waiting for you. James Winters.”

“Oh, thank heaven. Mr. Winters—”

He stepped straight through into her space. “Catie. Sorry I couldn’t talk to you this morning. There were some things going on in the office.” He glanced around. “Are we private at the moment?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Do you have encryption?”

“Yes,” Catie said, “I use DeepSatchel—”

“Would you turn it on?”

“Space?” Catie said.

“Listening.”

“Go to encrypted mode and match to the remote encryption protocol.”

“Done.”

“Thanks,” Winters said.

“And give Mr. Winters a chair!”

The same one he had used last time appeared. He seated himself. “Did your mother tell you she was going to speak to me, the other day?” Winters said.

“Uh, yes,” Catie said. “It’s been kind of busy — we haven’t had a chance to touch base since then. We keep missing each other.”

“The curse of modern life,” Winters said. “We’re more connected than we ever were, but no one seems able to keep in touch, even in the same house. Well, anyway, she’ll have told you that she and your dad were happy enough for you to be working on this business, as long as due care was taken. Which obviously I promised her it would be.”

He bent a rather thoughtful look on Catie. She instantly broke out in a sweat.

“Uh,” she said. “Mr. Winters, I have a couple of things to tell you. But first of all, did you read what I sent you? It’s really important.”

“I read it,” he said. “We’re handling it. Some of our people are not too far from Karen de Beer’s house right now. We’ll be watching carefully to see if we can identify any visitor she has today…and whether they can be immediately identified or not, we’re going to have a little talk with them after they leave. Nothing to do with the visit, of course. There are very few people on this planet who’re perfect drivers, and some of our best operations on this continent start with the assistance of police officers who all of a sudden get very interested in someone’s broken taillight, or the thickness of the tread on their tires.” He smiled a very small smile. “Meanwhile, do you have anything else to tell me? My people and I have a busy evening ahead of us.”

“Uh…Yes,” Catie said, after what felt like one of the longest pauses of her life.

And then Catie told him about her access to the ISF server, and what she had found there.

During the fifteen or twenty minutes it took her to describe what had been going on, Catie watched Winters’s face with increasing concern and could see nothing there at all. He might as well have been a carved statue, for all the reaction he showed. It was rather terrifying. Some change of expression might at least have given Catie a hint as to how to slant her story to her own best advantage while still telling him the truth. But Catie realized very quickly that Winters was not going to help her out that way, not by so much as a millimeter’s worth of shift in the set of his face. So she told him the truth, as dryly as she could, with as little embellishment as she could manage; and then, when she ran out of truth, she just stopped.

Winters looked at Catie for a while without saying anything. It was probably only a few seconds. It felt like several years. And then he spoke.

“The gravitational constant,” he said. His tone of voice, to her astonishment, was almost admiring, and not of her, as far as she could tell, but of the people who had sabotaged the ISF server. “Talk about hiding something in plain sight.”

Catie, unable at the moment to do anything else, just nodded.

“So,” Winters said. “Where do you think this takes us?”

Catie gulped, then got control of herself again. “Sir, George said the changes in the way the ball was behaving weren’t constant. He said sometimes it seemed to act oddly, and sometimes it didn’t. That, taken together with all those different ‘definitions’ of the constant, makes me think that there’s someone, outside the server, using a remotely connected routine that acts as a kind of a switch. They watch the game, and throw the switch when it’ll do the team they’re backing the most good. Then they immediately put the constant back the way it should be again, so that no one will notice.”

Winters nodded. “It does seem likely.” He sat there brooding for a moment. “It would require some sophisticated programming calls to communicate with an outside source, probably some kind of mirror server, without triggering the ISF space’s own alarms that its home server is being tampered with. But it could be done. Certainly it can be done, because it would seem it has been.”

He looked at Catie then. “The one good thing about all of this,” he said, “is that you’ve succeeded, through a combination of persistence and sheer dumb luck, in isolating a problem that our whole investigative team, and even Mark Gridley, couldn’t find.” Then the look turned chillier. “While also trespassing into a private server space, accessing copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission, tampering with proprietary software, and possibly contaminating a crime scene.”

Catie gulped again as the face she had been wishing would show some kind of expression, a few minutes ago, now showed one all too plainly.

“That said,” Winters added, in a tone that was just slightly milder, “without what you’ve done, we wouldn’t have any way to prove it was a crime scene. So that weighs down the scale a little in your favor. But I wouldn’t get overexcited about that at the moment. Catie, this is not how we do business. This kind of stunt all too often results in criminals walking free when they would otherwise go for a long healthy sojourn in a residential facility with bars on the windows. Evidence must be acquired legally, right down the line…not just because that’s how we get useful results in our business, but because it’s right to do it that way. You follow me?”

Catie nodded, dumb.

“Now I have to work out how best to proceed here,” Winters said, and looked down at his folded hands, and was quiet for a few moments.

Catie stood there and said not a word. The silence in the Great Hall became deafening.

“The audacity of it,” Winters said then, “is just admirable. God knows how many virtual sports might have been subverted by this simple technique. But these guys have rolled it out too soon, on someone’s orders. Somebody with a favorite team got a real big bug up their — got very annoyed about something, and insisted that this big gun be deployed here and now…in a spatball tournament?” He shook his head. “I would have waited for the Fantasy Super Bowl. There’s real money in that. Spat’s barely taken off yet, by comparison.” Winters fell silent again.

“But what do we do now?” Catie said. “If we remove the instructions, that’s going to be great for South Florida, maybe, but it’s a one-time fix. Whoever put the altered instructions there will know we’re on to them, and go straight underground. You’ll never find out who did it, and they’ll just try it again, somewhere else, somewhere that’s not as well policed.”

“Yes,” Winters said, rocking back in his chair. He was silent for a moment, and then finally he said, “Best case would be to let them trigger their ‘switch’…while we have a tracer routine in place to catch them in the act. If indeed we can install such a thing. If there’s time. And assuming it won’t somehow invalidate the whole tournament.”

Winters sat still, looking into space for a moment. “I think we don’t have much choice this time,” he said. “We’re going to have to call in a big intervention team…and Mark as well, I think; his dad won’t be wild about it, but even he’s going to see the necessity, I would guess. And even with him, and all our best people, this is going to be a mess. A very, very lively day or three.”

“Can’t you just plug in standard variables to replace the bad ones?” Catie said.

“I wish it were that simple. If there wasn’t going to be anyone watching to see whether their carefully installed ‘fix’ was working properly, I’d say yes. Unfortunately we don’t have that option. It’s almost certain that they’re watching the server closely to see if anyone tampers with it, and it’s equally certain that they’ll have booby-trapped their own routines to alert them if anyone messes with them. The one good thing is, they’ll have been watching our earlier investigation, and will have assumed that we didn’t find anything. Correctly.” His look was momentarily grim. “It would be nice if that makes them a little careless. But we can’t count on that. And meanwhile everything has to seem to be working just as they want it to until the very last minute, until they put their own people in place to throw the switch….”

He fell silent again, musing, for a few moments. Then he looked up at Catie. “On to other things…You told me,” Winters said, “that your friend’s been very cooperative.”

“More than that,” Catie said. “He knows who I’m working for.”

“You didn’t tell him—”

“Of course not!” She got control of herself immediately. “But I’m sure he knows, all the same. He’s a smart man. And, if the information he’s been passing me is any indication, he’s absolutely willing to help.”

“That’s useful,” Winters said. “We’ll see how useful in a while.” He looked up at Catie again. “But the most important thing. He didn’t give you any sense that there’s anyone on his team who’s been involved with this?”

“Not at all.”

There was a long silence. “All right,” Winters said. “We’ll have to take it that way for the moment.” He sat back, folding his arms.

“I should say,” Catie said, “that I’m sorry.”

There was a long silence, one that froze her heart. “Yes,” Winters said. “You should.”

Catie swallowed.

“A question, though…I would have thought,” Winters said, “that it was mostly the imagery end of things that you would have been looking at.”

“I thought so, too,” Catie said. “That’s how I started. But it all looked just as it was supposed to. And once I got started, I—”

“Couldn’t let it go,” Winters said in unison with Catie.

She fell silent again.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s a familiar theme. I have about ten thousand coworkers with the same problem. It has its place. But that urge has to be controlled, that stubbornness, and used wisely, used responsibly.” He frowned. “Catie, you overstepped the mark. And more, you may even have manipulated Mark into letting you do it.”

“I manipulated—?” she started to say, and then stopped herself. If anyone was doing the manipulating, she thought, it was that little Squirt of a Gridley! But that probably wouldn’t have been a tactically advantageous thing to say at this point, even if she could have worked up the nerve.

“Which takes some doing, it has to be admitted,” Winters said, in a less annoyed tone of voice. “Mark’s precocity tends to blind people to his own weaknesses…of which he has a few. But we’ll leave that to one side for the moment. The problem right now is to work out what to do with the information you’ve found. May I use your system to make a couple of calls?”

“Please feel free. Space?”

“Just waiting for you to tell me what to do, boss.”

She saw Winters’s eyebrows go up. “Please make Mr. Winters a privacy space, and connect to whatever address he asks you for.”

“Done.”

The air around where Winters was sitting went opaque in the swirling blue pattern that Catie had designed for her mother’s “hold” function. For about five minutes she sat there and castigated herself for rampant stupidity, while the blue smoke swirled. Finally it evaporated, and Winters walked out through the blue smokescreen. “Thanks, Catie.”

“You can kill that, Space,” Catie said.

“Yes, O Mistress of All Reality.” The smoke vanished.

Catie scowled, furious. Winters looked startled, and then suddenly started laughing, and didn’t stop for some seconds. Catie lost her anger, while at the same time wondering whether she was off the hook.

“This is what you get for letting Mark Gridley near your machinery,” James Winters said, when he finally found his breath again. “I wish you luck getting rid of the ‘improvements.’”

“I can see where I’m going to need it,” Catie said.

Winters looked around him. “You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I leave without taking this discussion much further. I have a lot to do…. We’ve got to independently verify what you found in such a way that it can be salvaged as evidence. I may disagree with your methods, but I’m thankful for your findings, you know.”

“I understand. I’m sorry I caused you trouble.”

“I accept the apology,” Winters said. “But, by the way…I quote, ‘What do we do now?’…”

Catie stood silent again, completely nonplussed.

Winters smiled again…a small, dry smile that was nonetheless a great relief to Catie. “The attitude,” he said, “is possibly an augury of things to come. We’ll see how you shape up. Talented image wranglers are valuable, yes. And they’re a dime a dozen. But what we can always use are people who’re willing to stretch outside their specialty and take a risk because they just can’t let the job at hand alone, when they know it has to be done.”

Then the smile flashed out fully. “And between you and me,” James Winters said, “we can always use people who are followed around by plain dumb luck. There’s never enough of that to go around…though by itself, it’s fairly useless. Even the best bullet needs a gun barrel around it.”

Catie nodded.

“Time to get to work,” Winters said. “With any kind of luck, someone’s knocking on Karen de Beer’s door right now, and some of my people are going to be wanting to talk to me shortly.”

“Oh, no…!” Catie said.

“It’s all right,” Winters said. “She won’t be home. What, did you think we were going to sit around and allow her to be intimidated? That the guy shows up is going to be enough for us to act on. George Brickner will certainly testify, later, that he knew about it beforehand. Meanwhile I have other things to do. That server is going to have to be debugged so that the play-offs can go ahead, while still preserving the contaminated version of the code. We’ve got our work cut out for us, and not a lot of time to get everything done. If in fact it can be done in time at all. Frankly, I have my doubts.”

He looked at Catie keenly. “But a question for you before I go. Identify the famous graphic artist responsible for this quote: ‘There is hope in honest error…none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.’”

“Uh,” Catie said, and then closed her mouth again, becoming suddenly aware that this was not intended merely as a quote.

Winters held up his index finger. “One honest error,” he said. “All my people know I’ll allow them that much. Twice, and you get really yelled at. Make a note.”

“Noted,” Catie said, in a somewhat strangled voice.

“Thanks, Catie,” James Winters said, turned, went hurriedly through the door that opened for him in the middle of the Great Hall, and vanished.

Catie got out of her space, and out of virtuality, and let Hal have the machine without even arguing about it, and went on down to her room and just sat there for a while, with the door shut, feeling terrible. I can’t believe how completely I’ve screwed everything up! Yet as a little time passed, and she started to recover from the shock of what had just happened, Catie was forced to admit to herself that the screw up hadn’t been total. Winters had actually been slightly pleased with her…which, frankly, was a better outcome than she had hoped for. It wasn’t that the bouquet he’d handed her hadn’t mostly been thorns, but they were ones that she deserved, and the two or three rather shredded blossoms concealed among them were, Catie supposed, worth it in the end.

She came out of hiding after three-quarters of an hour or so, to find her brother still using the Net machine in the family room. Catie knew she was going to have to talk to George Brickner shortly, but she wasn’t in any hurry about it. She wanted to make sure her composure was back in place. She rooted around in the fridge briefly, came up with a couple of chicken breasts, and made herself a fast meal that was a favorite of her mother’s: the chicken breasts sauteed with butter and a chopped-up onion, and the whole business “deglazed” with balsamic vinegar. In the middle of her cooking, Hal came out of the family room looking slightly glazed himself.

“You seen the news lately?” he said.

Catie shook her head. “I’ve been busy.”

“You’d better go have a look at it.”

“Huh? Why?”

“The sports news. Take my word for it.”

“What?”

Hal just shook his head. “I’ll watch this for you. Go take a look.”

She blinked at that, for it was usually hard to stop Hal from giving you a nearly word-by-word narration of whatever news he’d heard recently, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Catie handed Hal the spatula with which she had been stirring the sauce around while it boiled down, and went in to sit down in the implant chair again.

Once into the Great Hall, she said, “Space?”

“I told him everything,” her workspace manager said. “If you leave now, you may still have time to get out of the country before they seal the borders.”

“Thanks loads. CNNSI, please. Sports headlines, rolling. Latest.”

A moment later the effusive young guy with the wild hairstyle who was doing afternoon and evening news on CNNSI lately was standing behind a desk in front of Catie. “—In an unusual move apparently made for operational reasons, the International Spatball Federation has changed its scheduling for this year’s spatball play-offs.” Behind the anchor, the “background” showed an impressive-looking lineup of implant chairs and very high-end Net boxes and terminals. “The management of Manchester United High announced today that software trouble at their newly installed, multimillion-pound Professional Play Center at Anfield has made it impossible for them to meet the originally scheduled play date of this Thursday. Since the ISF was informed within the mandated twelve-hour emergency notification limit, the team will not forfeit its match with the Chicago Fire. That match has been rescheduled to Saturday, and the Saturday match between the South Florida Spat Association and Xamax Zurich has been moved to Thursday evening by agreement with those two teams.”

“Oh, no,” Catie said softly. They’ll never be ready in time.

Worse. The server will never be debugged in time!

The game is going to have to go ahead…and the people who wanted to ruin the Banana Slugs’ chances to win are going to do just that—

She came back to herself to hear the sportscaster saying, “—this is the third major software failure in two months to assail the new installation at Anfield, which has been dogged from inception to installation by cost overruns and then by hardware glitches, as well as by problems with the new MaximumVolume software and operating system which was developed for Manchester. The first two failures of the system, late in the ‘scheduled’ season, caused one forfeit and one loss due to the failure of center forward Alan Bellingham’s custom player suite during the third half of United’s crucial preplay-off game with Tokyo Juuban and Ottawa. Manchester United shareholders have once again called for an independent inquiry into the team’s dealings with sports-simming software giant Camond, the president of the shareholders’ association once again asserting that—”

Catie sat there in unbelieving dismay, her dinner forgotten. “Space…”

“I was only following orders.”

“Yeah, right. Is George Brickner available?”

“Trying his space for you now.”

There was a brief pause. “Who’s there?”

“It’s Catie.”

“Oh.” Another pause. “Just a minute.”

It was more like a couple of minutes. She waited. When he walked into her space, George took one look at the shocked expression on her face, and paused, and then he just nodded. “You heard.”

“Yeah.”

He sat down in the chair which had been left there for James Winters. She plopped down in the Comfy Chair, but for once it brought her little comfort. “You talked to James Winters….”

“Among various other people,” George said, rubbing his face, “yes.” He looked very tired.

Catie knew how he felt, all of a sudden. “George, why did you do it?”

“Agree to change the schedule, you mean? Because the ISF asked us to. And we didn’t have a good reason to say no.”

“But you did! If you—”

“Catie,” George said, “if we refused to allow the change in schedule — and it was a perfectly reasonable request on the ISF’s part — you know what would happen. People would have started asking questions. Why were we so reluctant? What was going on? And soon enough, someone would have found out. Or else one of the people involved with what was done to the ISF spat-volume server would have started to suspect something…and they would all have folded their little operation up and gone into hiding. After all this trouble, nothing would be solved.”

It was her own argument, twisted into a horrible shape that she had never imagined, and it stunned Catie into silence. George was quiet for a few moments, too.

“You think I don’t know what you’re thinking?” George said. “Believe me, I feel the same way. It would have been great to get in there and have a chance at winning this tournament, to do a thing that would make spat-ball history. Even a chance of making it to the semifinals — that would have been something to tell our grandchildren about. But if we don’t stop what’s happening to spat, stop it right now, there’ll be no sport to tell our grandchildren about…. Not one worth playing, anyway.” He swallowed. “Sports is about making sacrifices, sometimes. This is one of those times. The team agrees with me.”

“Do they know…?”

He looked at her. “They know enough,” George said. “The Net Force people have been in to check their machines. They’ve been sabotaged, Catie. We can’t touch that, either. We can’t change anything. If we do, the people behind the sabotage will know, and they’ll go to ground somewhere. And who knows, maybe we’ll win…but the sport will lose. And all the people like us who play it for joy, they’ll lose, too.”

Catie looked at George with an ache in her middle that she couldn’t have described in any words. “It’s bad enough that you’re so good-looking,” Catie said after a while, maybe more bitterly than she intended, “but do you have to be a hero, too? It’s just not fair.”

“Things aren’t usually,” George said. “But there’s no harm in trying to make them fair for the next guy along.”

Catie could think of no reply to that.

“It’s not going to be so bad,” George said.

“Yes, it is,” said Catie.

George’s face twisted into a pained shape Catie didn’t particularly like to see on it. “All right,” he said, “yes! It is! But we can’t let that stop us. We’re going to give them a fight like they’ve never seen before. We’re going to show the people who put the fix in that the only way to stop us is to fix the game in ways that have never been seen before…and even if we lose, we’re going to play like no one’s ever seen a spat team play before. We’re going to play so well that everyone who sees the game we’re about to lose will shake their heads and wonder what the heck went wrong. Then when they see Chicago play at the weekend, those same people are going to shake their heads and say, ‘They should never have made it this far. Someone must have been cheating the system somehow.’ And that’s the best way for us to respond, the only way that also helps Net Force do what it needs to do about this situation. I don’t like it much. It’s not at all the ending for this season that I dreamed of. The team doesn’t like it much, either. It doesn’t match their dreams. But we’re not going to go quietly. I promise you that!”

They both sat quiet for a few moments, looking in different directions. Then George looked over at the chess-board. “I see you’ve got me in a knight fork,” he said.

“I’ve had you there for three moves,” Catie said.

“You gonna do anything about it?”

“I’ve started doing something about it,” Catie said. “Your bishop.”

“I’m not worried about that,” George said, and gave her a superior look. “Not after the way you threw that last knight away. Anyway, I’m going to take your queen in three moves.”

“No, you’re not,” Catie said.

“Yes, I am,” George said.

“You can’t. There’s no way—” Catie got up and stalked over to the chessboard, glad of an excuse not to have to look at George. She was upset; upset at the unfairness of life, which was about to cheat this guy and his friends of a victory that they deserved. And she hated to have people see her when she was upset.

“There,” she said, and picked up one of her bishops and moved it. The window hanging in the air with the notation of the game changed itself to reflect the move.

George got up and wandered over to the chessboard, looking over Catie’s shoulder at the board’s center area. “Getting messy in there,” he said.

“Not nearly as messy as some places,” Catie said, heart-sore. In her mind all she could see was that great piled-up tangle of code in the ISF server, intricate, complex, and rotten at its core.

George was silent for a moment. “Catie,” he said. “You did the best you could. It’s out of our hands now — your hands and mine. All we can do now is play the game through to the end, and try to do it with some dignity. And in the meantime…I appreciate that you were trying to help. I really do.”

Catie nodded. “Do you have a move?” she said.

He looked at the board one more time. “Not tonight,” he said. “I’ll have a couple for you tomorrow, before we go off to practice. And then one more later.”

“All right,” she said.

George went back to his doorway, went through it, vanished. Catie didn’t turn to watch him go, just looked at the bishop she had moved, and found herself suddenly wishing that the game she had so much been looking forward to would never happen at all.

The last contact between them before the game, on Wednesday night, was made over a voice-only line. They would not now speak again until after the game on Thursday.

“…The neighbors said she left early to pick up her daughter at school,” Darjan said, “and she didn’t come back. She went off to hide somewhere, apparently. She hasn’t come back yet.”

“You going to let her get away with that?”

Darjan laughed. “It’s not vital. There are four other people being worked on in other cities. We’ve got other fish to fry, anyway. When they changed the schedule, everybody had to scurry to make sure that the mirror was working right. There’ll be some people pleased, anyway. The Slugs’ll be out of the running that much faster. How about your end of things? All the South Florida players’ servers taken care of?”

“All handled now.”

“Fine. Let’s go over all the other arrangements one last time.”

Heming laughed. “Always the perfectionist, huh, Armin?”

“Always,” Darjan said. “Just call me fond of keeping my skin in one piece.”

“They don’t pay you enough for the amount you worry,” Heming said.

“No,” said Darjan, “they don’t. Let’s start at the top….”