Death Match

pasted up against a window. “Space,” she said, “is Noreen online right now?”

“Checking,” said her workspace manager. It paused a moment, then said, “Online, but occupied.”

“Maybe not as occupied as she looks,” Catie said. “Give me voice hail.”

“Hail away,” said the workspace manager.

“Noreen,” Catie said, “you got a moment?”

The “pastel” drawing of Noreen abruptly grew to full size and went three-dimensional, flushing into life as Noreen looked up and out of the “drawing” at Catie. Then the background changed, too, showing what looked like the depths of a forest, and Noreen in the middle of it, with the palette-routine window of the “BluePeriod” virtual rendering program hanging behind her. “Catie! I was wondering if you’d call tonight. Got a minute to look at this?”

“That long anyway,” Catie said. Noreen turned to do something to her rendering, probably to save it, and Catie got up out of her chair and stepped through the drawing into Noreen’s workspace.

It took her a second to get her bearings as she looked around her. “Wow,” Catie said, “you’ve really come a long way with this….”

Noreen smiled a dry smile, tired but pleased, and paused to rub her eyes. “This is really getting to be ‘the forest primeval….’” she said. “And I feel like I’ve beenat it about that long.”

The forest rendering in which they sat was a project for Noreen’s honors art certification course at her high school in Seattle. Noreen had her eye on a degree from one of the big art colleges after she graduated, something like the Fine Applied Computer Arts degree that the Sorbonne and ETZ were offering. But to even think of getting in the doors of one of those places, you had to produce a “journeyman” work of sufficient artistry to get the attention of instructors who saw the best work of thousands of insanely talented people in the course of a year, and were in a position to pick and choose. The work genuinely had to be art, too. There was no simply letting a “simm” program multiply the same prefabricated stylistic elements over and over again to be dragged and dropped where you wanted them. Instead, an artistic rendering involved the careful choice and piece-by-piece modification of code you wrote yourself, all of it then being fed into one of the major rendering programs, and tweaked until the effect was perfect.

Noreen had been working on the Forest Primeval for the better part of six months now, starting with a rough concept based in a piny mountain glade of the Black Forest in Germany. But this was a wilder version of one of those glades: an older forest, more dangerous-feeling than the shrinking though carefully tended Schwarzwald that existed today. Noreen was attempting to suggest a forest in which the original forms of this century’s oversanitized fairy tales might still be walking around in the shadows — wolves who might actually just haul off and eat you rather than trying to sweet-talk you first, wicked stepmothers who wouldn’t need three tries to do in a too-beautiful stepdaughter, and castles that cast unnerving shadows over the territory they controlled — a landscape in which the peasants had good reason to carry torches and pitchforks. It was a wonder, this forest, for as you looked around inside it, you could feel eyes looking at you out of the dimness with the gold- glinting forward stare of predators’ eyes; and the shadows gathered themselves together under the deep jade- green silence of the trees, a green that was almost black, and dared you to step into them. Far, far up between the overhanging branches you might every now and then catch a distant glimpse of blue sky, but the sense of that blueness being ephemeral, and the certainty that dark was coming on fast, grew on you as you looked. Catie shivered. The illusion was very satisfying, and it absolutely gave her the creeps.

“Wow,” she said, and sat down in the pine needles to just look around her and appreciate it all. “When do you think it’ll be ready?”

“When it’s done,” Noreen said, and sat down beside her, chuckling. Catie grinned, too, at Michelangelo’s old answer to the question. “But seriously, I’ve got about another month at least to work on the background stuff — the subliminals and so on. And I’m still not sure I’m happy with the fractal generator for the pine needles. Too many of them are too much alike.”

Catie let out an amused breath. Noreen had been rewriting the “pine needle” routine about once a week ever since she started this piece. “You’re going to wind up making every one of them different,” she said, “like nature.”

“I don’t know if that’d be a bad thing, necessarily,” Noreen said, “but it’d mean I’d miss this year’s submission deadline….”

Catie shook her head, looking around her again. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “One thing’s for sure, you’ve got the subliminal stuff handled. I can’t feel anything except the shivers.”

“Yeah, well, I still hate it. The great artists don’t need the subliminals, they do it all with paint and electrons,” Noreen said, rubbing her eyes again, “and if it weren’t for the fact that I know my assessment board is going to have at least three commercial artists on it, I wouldn’t bother. But if you don’t put at least something subby in it, they won’t think you understand the medium at all….” She made a face. “Never mind them, the philistines. How’s your new one coming?”

“Want to see? Come on through.”

“No, it’s okay, the Forest’s saved and frozen for the moment…you can display in here.”

“Sure. Space, bring the Appian Way in here, would you?”

“Are you sure the world is ready for this?” her workspace manager said.

Noreen gave Catie an amused glance. “I’m gonna kill him,” Catie said.

“Your brother?”

“Him, too, possibly. But not in this case. I let a friend tinker with my manager. Never again! Now, listen, you,” Catie said in the direction of the frame of the drawing of Noreen, through which her own workspace could still be dimly seen, “just unfold that piece in here, and make it snappy, before I call NASA and see if they need a spare management system for the Styx probe. See how you like a one-way cruise to Pluto this summer.”

There was no comment from her space management program, but a moment later the dark woods were all hidden away “behind” an image of a long, pillared street, paved in white travertine marble and leading down into a cityscape sprawling and glowing in mellow creams and golds. It was Rome, not the city of the year 2025 but of the year 80, lying spread out in a long summer afternoon, the faint din of half a million people dimmed down under the twin effects of distance and the mist beginning to rise from the Tiber as the day cooled lazily down. Here and there the glint of real gold highlighted the composition, gleaming from the dome of the Pantheon and the crown of the “miniature” version of the Colossus of Rhodes outside the Flavian Amphitheater, the statue that gave the neighboring building the nickname “Colosseum,” and gold also shone from the tops of the masts around the great arena’s circumference, from which the huge translucent “sunroof” was hung. The roof was down at the moment, the Colosseum being “dark” today, and the city lay in something like peace, the roars of the crowds silent for once. A little arrowhead of ducks flew low between two of the Seven Hills, making for a landing in the Tiber. Their passage was saluted from beneath by the screeching of the sacred geese on the Capitoline.

Noreen sat and looked it over for a few moments. “It’s gorgeous,” she said at last.

“I’m glad you think so,” Catie muttered. “I spent all last week hammering on the textures, but I’m still not happy. It’s all too bright and shiny.”

“I thought you said the Romans liked their marble shiny.”

“They did, and I’d like to have this look the way the Romans really saw it. But when I turn the reflective index up that high, it looks fake. Take a look at this—”

They spent some minutes talking about the problem, while Catie pulled down an editing window from midair to change the reflectivity on some parts of the city’s stone, turning it up and down, and once or twice moving the sun around to show Noreen what the problem was. Normally Catie would have been shy about debugging a project in front of someone else like this, even a friend. She preferred to exhibit perfection, or as close to it as she could get. But on the other hand, this problem had been driving Catie crazy for days. Part of the difficulty was that she preferred portraiture and detailed studies of single objects. But landscape was one of the things an imaging specialist simply had to handle well, since so much of virtual experience involved landscape design of one kind or another, and if Catie was going to become accomplished enough at this art to eventually be hired by Net Force as an imaging expert, it was just something she was going to have to master.

“I see what you mean,” Noreen said after a while, sitting back on the worn stone of a little bench which had replaced the pine needles they had been sitting on. She sounded dubious. “I wish I had something to suggest. Other than — have you thought of patching in a lighting routine from a different program? Some of the routines in