Everything went dark, then filled with light again, and the two of them found themselves looking at a wall. It reared up as high above them as they could see, and ran off to what seemed infinity in both directions. It appeared to be made of red brick, and some wit had posted up on it a neatly lettered sign that said: FIREWALL.
'Everybody's a comedian,' Mark said, walking alongside the wall for a little way, examining it. 'Let's see what we've got here. C3? Caldera? Levolor?' He patted the wall, felt one of the bricks. 'Nope, it's Fomalhaut. One of the lousiest programming languages of the decade. Why in the world did they use Fomalhaut for this?'
Charlie stood watching Mark kick the wall once or twice in an experimental kind of way. 'What's the matter with the language?'
'Terrible structure,' Mark muttered. 'You have to really like doing things over and over to use Fomalhaut. Look at this-' He glanced up and down the length of the wall. 'In any normal virtual programming language, a wall like this would be set up with one command that you then told to repeat itself however many times, and then you would tell it where to stop, or to seal itself up. In Fomalhaut, you have to do every single command separately.' Mark shook his head. 'Each of these'-he kicked another brick-'represents a separate command. Really dumb.'
'So why would they have used it, then?'
Mark shrugged. 'Oh, some people might think it was better for security. More trouble, they would think, to have to disassemble a 'wall' brick by brick, you couldn't just subvert one. But plainly it didn't occur to them that sooner or later a more sophisticated way to deal with this protocol might come along. Or that someone else who knew the language really, really well-'
Mark reached out behind him, plucked something out of the empty air. It was a crowbar.
Charlie had to laugh. ' 'More sophisticated'?'
'Yeah, don't laugh. You'll see. Meanwhile-' Mark stood there and touched one brick. It lit from within, revealing what looked like a little churning square of boiling alphabet soup, all letters and numbers. 'Right.' Mark said. 'And this one-' He touched another brick, farther down, the wall. It revealed another oblong full of soup. 'Uhhuh. One more-'
The third brick revealed the same contents. Mark stood there for a moment. 'Someone here,' he said with satisfaction, 'got real sloppy. These aren't all separately written instructions. They've been cloned from a single one. Jeez, a lazy Fomalhaut programmer. What's the point? Why use an obsessive-compulsive language, and then not obsess?'
Mark shouldered the crowbar and grinned at Charlie. 'Never mind,' he said, 'we're in business.'
He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
From some distance away came a tiny sound, like a faraway screech of surprise. 'Aha,' Mark said, cheerful. 'Come on, that's what we're after.'
He started to jog to their left, down the wall. Charlie followed him. 'Look,' he said, 'what are our chances of getting caught in here?'
Mark grinned as he trotted along. 'No better than one in a hundred at the moment.' Charlie instantly broke out in a sweat. He preferred much longer odds. 'I mean, think about it, Charlie! Programmers are a spoiled bunch these days. They work what they used to call 'banker's hours.'
Nobody in the coroner's office in some little county building in Maine is going to be hanging over their terminal at eight-thirty in the evening waiting to see if someone breaks in or not! If the system is even housed in the same building, which isn't necessarily the case. And their automatic system security is junk. I know, because I broke through it five minutes ago. I pretended to be its system administrator, and my penetration manager gave it a nice set of circular instructions to play with, based on its own check cycle… so right now it's doing the machine equivalent of staring in the mirror and telling itself that everything is fine. And here we are.'
Mark stopped and pointed at a brick high up in the wall. 'See that?'
That particular 'brick' was glowing red hot. 'Kind of hard to miss,' Charlie said.
'That's the instruction all these other ones were cloned from. Now then.' Mark started to walk up the air as if there were stairs there. With the crowbar he pried out that particular brick and caught it in one hand as it fell.
The wall started to crumble. Charlie jumped back, out of reflex, but as the wall tottered outward toward him, the bricks began to fade: By the time they reached the 'floor,' they were vanishing like fog in sunlight. A moment later he and Mark were looking out across a vast hall full of thousands of beige filing cabinets.
'Wow, imaginative,' Mark said, sounding unusually dry. 'Somebody in the data-processing department here really gets off on their work.'
He walked down out of the air again, tossing the single glowing red brick in his hand as he did. 'We'll hang on to this,' Mark said. 'We'll want it to put things back the way we found them when we're ready to go.' He shoved the brick into the air between them. It vanished.
Charlie started walking among the lines and lines of filing cabinets. 'This is the visual paradigm the people who work here have been using?' he said.
'The default, yeah,' Mark said. 'It may make it easier for you to search. The clerking staff'll probably have left some markers for themselves, to make it easier to find things. But boy, oh, boy,' and Mark chuckled, 'at times like this, do I ever get seized with the desire to redecorate.'
'Please don't,' Charlie said, walking among the filing cabinets and looking at the little cards inserted in their drawer-fronts.
'Oh, come on, Charlie. Let me just leave a potted palm in here somewhere. I'll even tie a big red ribbon around it.'
'No!' 2004 2005, read one cabinet: 2005–2006… Charlie walked along the line of cabinets, looking for 2024.
'Just kidding,' Mark said. Charlie wondered about that. 'Aha,' he said, and grinned at himself. Mark's turn of phrase was catching. '2020. '
The 2024 cabinet was the fourth one down. Charlie pulled its top drawer open, and suddenly there were five other cabinets standing next to that one. 'January through May,' he said.
He headed for May, opened that cabinet up, and started riffling through the files there. Delano, he thought. Richard Delano. May third…
The file was there, a plain manila folder. Charlie pulled it out.
Instantly the air around him and Mark was full of windows. One of them showed a file structure 'tree,' full of files all of whose names began with DELANO. Another few windows showed pictures: crime scene shots, pictures of someone's house, probably Delano' s. Then one more window said STATE PATHOLOGIST'S REPORT.
'Yes, indeed,' Charlie said softly. 'Mark, can I copy these into your workspace?'
'You can copy them right back to yours, if you like. I've still got a link open.'
'Both, then. I want to make sure the data's safe.' 'Consider it done.' A big bright gold hoop appeared in the air and set itself on fire. 'Chuck anything you want copied through that: It'll make copies both places and then refile itself.'
'Good.' Charlie glanced at the ring, amused, then reached out and, with one finger, poked the window with the pathologist's report. It opened out into a series of still more windows, with screenfuls and screenfuls of text, and in one window, images of the body at autopsy. Charlie looked at this somberly, then turned his attention to the text.
'He looked real young,' Mark said, from behind him, softly.
'Yeah. This was the sixteen-year-old,' Charlie said as he read hurriedly down through the report, skimming it, and finding the words he had suspected he would find: Strangulation. Self-inflicted-
'Right,' Charlie said, and folded the window down small, and chucked it through the ring. The ring flared. The window vanished. Charlie gathered all the information together again which had come out of the original file, and threw it, too, through the ring. Then he closed the file drawer.
'That it?' Mark said. 'You sure you don't need anything else?'
'Not from here. But we've got five other places to hit, still.'
'Gonna be a short, dull night for me at this rate,' Mark said, sounding disappointed. 'Never mind.' They walked away from the filing cabinets again to the point where they had first entered, and Mark plucked that red brick out of its hiding place in the air. 'Be fruitful and multiply,' he told it, and dropped it on the floor.
A moment later there were two of it, and then four, and eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four… Within about thirty seconds the wall had completely rebuilt itself, even to the sign that read FIREWALL. 'Mark-' Charlie said warningly, for the sign was now upside down.
