entitled to have a bad day, experimentally speaking. Meanwhile, Charlie loved the place, the warm wooden gleam and polished-brass shine of it. It was the birthplace of modern medicine, and Charlie was going to be a doctor one of these days… though he intended to become an operative for Net Force as well. The only question was which of these goals he was going to manage first.
Then Charlie sighed heavily. 'Actually,' he muttered, 'the only question is how I'm going to get this stupid thing in front of me to work.'
It was, of course, not a real steam engine, just a mathematical simulation of one. If it _ was built properly, it would look and run like a real steam engine in the virtual world. Now, any workspace software worth its purchase price, if you told it to create such a thing out of nothing, would do just that and not bother you with the sordid details. But Charlie was learning how to write simulations in the programming language Caldera II, the language which virtual environments used to create things out of nothing so that they would behave real. And Caldera was desperately complex, difficult to control, easy to screw up, and otherwise just a major pain.
Charlie was not particularly interested in steam engines. What he really wanted to use Caldera for was to model the activity of neurons in the living human brain. But to create such models in any programming language, even Caldera, was an immensely subtle and difficult business-if you were interested in building models that actually worked like their counterparts in the real world, anyway, and suggested reasons for the way they behaved as they did. The steam engine was one of the 'sample' simulations which came with the most current Caldera software package, and a good place (the software company said) to start practicing before going on to the more involved simulations. The program which the tutorial coached you in writing was one that described in maddening detail the way the virtual environment running it was supposed to act, so that you would put out your hand and feel hard cold brass or polished wood instead of air or fog that just looked like brass or wood, and so that the article you created in virtuality would act like a real thing, obeying real rules of science, and reacting appropriately to whatever you did to it.
That was the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Charlie had so far managed only a steam engine that looked like brass but felt like rubber, and which produced something that looked like steam, but was just cold vapor. He got up from the floor, walked around the engine, looked at it one more time.
'Okay,' he said to the air. 'Main program, routine five…'
A 'window' opened in the air near him, showing the first of the lines and lines of code he had written so far, coached by the tutorial. Somewhere in here there was a statement that was wrong that the debugging routine hadn't found, and that the program thought was a genuine and valid instruction. And it would be, Charlie thought, annoyed, if people built rubber steam engines.
'Scroll down three,' Charlie said. 'Scroll down one. Scroll down one.' He stared for several moments at that particular screenful of text, chewing his lip. After a moment he said, 'Line sixty. Change statement. Old statement: `vis 15 hardness 80 spong 12'. New statement: `vis 15 hardness 120 spong 12.' '
'What the heck is a spong?' someone said out of the air behind him.
Charlie looked over his shoulder. Nick Melchior was there, one of his best friends from school, if not the best. There was something about Nick's sense of humor that meshed well with Charlie's, and besides, Nick seemed never to have seen anything even slightly funny about the idea that a kid from as painful and hopeless a background as Charlie's should be unswervingly set on becoming a doctor. Charlie, for his own part, was always amazed that anyone from as unsettled and insecure a background as Nick's should have been able to do as well at school and be as generally good-natured and good-tempered as he was, when at any moment his dad or the whole family might be uprooted and sent off to some distant foreign place to do virtcam work for one of the major news services.
Nick leaned against the mahogany railing around the 'operating floor' and stared at the engine.
'I could try to explain what a spong is,' Charlie said, 'but I'd just confuse myself. I'm not sure / know all of what it is yet. It has to do with the way this thing reflects light… or at least, that's all I can make of it so far… '
Nick pushed away from the railing and walked around the sim, eyeing it. He was fair-haired, green-eyed, biggish across the shoulders, though not one of the taller kids in Charlie's year-unusual when half the juniors in the class seemed to be shooting up like trees, having hit some weird kind of sympathetic growth spurt. Nick seemed stuck at about five four, and for Charlie, who was stuck at five two and was beginning to wonder morbidly whether he had some obscure glandular disorder, it was pleasant to have the company of someone who didn't look down at him as if from a great height and inquire sardonically as to why he didn't go out for basketball. 'It looksgood,' Nick said.
'Yeah, well, if you put some chest rub in it, it'd make somebody a great cold vaporizer,' Charlie muttered. 'Go ahead, give it a kick.'
'Huh?'
'Go on, kick it. Hard as you can.'
The steam engine had four handsome brass-trimmed wheels with iron tires. Nick walked over to one of them, looked it over, and kicked it, hard. Then he started jumping around. 'Ow! Sonofa-Wha'd you tell me to do that for?'
Charlie stared, dumbfounded. 'Buddha on a bike,' he said, 'did I fix it?' He went over to the next wheel and kicked it too, quite hard, disbelieving-then joined Nick briefly in the dance. 'Oh, crud!'
'Thanks loads, Charlie, like I don't have enough problems today, now I'm lamed for life, too!' Nick was now holding the injured foot and staring at it as if he could see through his boot to tell if something was broken.
'Ow, look, I'm sorry. I fixed it! I guess I must have fixed it, anyway. The train was soft, before, like rubber.' Charlie leaned against the railing near Nick, rubbing his own foot and then bearing weight on it gingerly. 'Sorry!' He stared at the engine. 'What the frack did I fix? I wasn't working on the hardness… '
'You're asking the wrong expert, expert. What you can do, 0 mighty medical talent, is tell me whether my foot's going to be this sore when I come out of virt.'
'Dummy,' Charlie said. 'No. It won't hurt long here, either; you know pain can't be turned up even as high as in real life in here. Just as well. What's your problem, anyway?'
'My foot, clueless one, is-'
'Your other problem. Whatever you were yapping about when you came in.'
'Oh. Just my dad.'
'Are they sending him somewhere weird again?' Char lie boosted himself up to sit on the railing, morosely studying the steam engine.
'No. No, it's just Net stuff.'
Charlie blinked. 'What?'
'You remember Joey Bane's domain?'
'Oh, yeah. Death-o-rama or whatever.'
'Deathworld.'
'Yeah.' Charlie had been through one of its upper levels briefly with Nick a couple of months back, but hadn't gone back. It was one of the more expensive domains to spend time in, and besides, he wasn't a big shadow jazz fan. His musical tastes ran more to hopflight, because of the rhythms, and terzia rizz, which was experiencing something of a comeback after four centuries of neglect. 'So what's the problem?' Charlie said. 'Bills getting too high?'
'Yeah, but that's not most of it. Mostly my mom and dad think it's corrupting me or something.' Nick's good- natured face was twisted somewhat out of its usual placid shape, and as he hoisted himself up beside Charlie, the look lingered.
'You?' Charlie blew out an amused breath. 'Nothing there to corrupt.'
'Thanks loads, Dr. Genius. No, they're just freaked out by the news stories.'
'I missed the news today,' Charlie said. 'It's Saturday.
This is the day I take off from the world, theoretically.' 'To spend time on really important things.'
'James Watt thought so,' Charlie said, he hoped not too sharply. 'I like retrotech. So splash me. Meanwhile, what happened?'
'Somebody killed himself.'
'Someone who'd been doing a lot of Deathworld?'
'Something like that.' Nick rolled his eyes expressively, then paused, briefly distracted by the fresco on the ceiling, of the god Apollo receiving Aesculapius into heaven, while a lot of other gods in togas leaned in to observe,
