Death Match

to. Seeing it again now, it began to bother her more than ever. If there was a form of art she preferred above all others, it was portraiture, and after a lot of studying of faces, over time, she was beginning to get a sense of whether the face in question was (for lack of a better phrase) comfortable with itself. George’s face was not, and Catie kept wondering why.

“Well,” he said, watching one last reporter getting into Melendez’s face again, “at least that’s over. Now we start getting ready to go into the lottery.”

Catie raised her eyebrows at that. “You’re going to have to coach me here a little, George…I’m still new to this game. Though I think I heard some of the reporters going on about this earlier.”

“Oh. Well, at the quarterfinal level, the teams that have ‘survived’ that long go into a lottery to determine who plays who in what order. Originally, it was a way of avoiding accusations that one team or another was using undue influence to have first crack at the spat volume on the Space Station.” He waved away one of his teammates who was coming at him and Catie with one more champagne bottle. “Pete, why don’t you drink some of the stuff? Nice vintage, no calories!”

The answer was a rude noise, after which Dalton departed to squirt someone else. “…Anyway, later they kept the same routine to make sure that time slots in the dedicated ‘sealed’ server were distributed fairly, since the security protocols in the single server only allow one game to be played at a time. A spat tournament isn’t something you can stage over multiple venues, like a real-world sport. At least it couldn’t be done so far. That may change now. With money pouring into the sport the way it has been, they’ll be able to afford to set up and maintain at least one more dedicated server, maybe two. One of the good things that’ll come of all this sponsorship, I hope, eventually.”

George sighed then. “At least the hardware upgrades will be good if the software is improved…the stuff we have is already getting kind of clunky. In particular, there are problems handling the larger ‘crowds.’ That’s an increasingly thorny issue, and it’s going to get worse as the virtual ‘gate’ gets bigger and more and more people are attracted to the sport.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re longing for the good old days when spat was smaller, and only a few aficionados would turn up….” This was something that Catie had heard from at least one of the commentators over the past couple of weeks.

George laughed at her. “Are you kidding? This time, right now, is going to be looked back on in twenty years as spat’s golden age. I like it the way it is.” Then his face clouded. “I’d like it better still, though, if we’d won today. We should have.”

“But you didn’t.”

George looked at her sharply. “You don’t understand me,” George said. “I wasn’t saying, ‘I wish we’d won.’ I was saying, ‘We should have won.’” He looked at Catie to see if she was getting what he was saying, and he lowered his voice. “Especially in the second half. The force we applied to the ball, the way we were handling it, should have produced a certain given result then…and it didn’t. Something was wrong in there. I felt it again in the third half…which was why I was insisting on so much contact, and only shooting at goal from up close.”

Catie understood him, and what he was saying unnerved her. “You’re saying that the feel of the virtual spat space, the way it was behaving, had been interfered with somehow.”

He nodded.

Catie shook her head. “I know there are games where that happens on purpose. The way a golf greenskeeper can alter the ‘lie’ of the greens to make a hole harder to play…or the groomers at a bowling alley can varnish or wax the alleys to make the ball behave one way or another. It even happens in baseball…the guys who mow the lawn do the infield to favor their team’s hitting tendencies.”

“That’s legal, within limits, and for those games. But in spat the server is maintained by a central authority, not by the individual teams, and the spat volume’s behavior is supposed to be neutral.”

“So to change the way the scoring surface was acting…it would mean that someone had to tamper with the server,” Catie said, also keeping her voice low. “But that’s supposed to be impossible. The servers are sealed, aren’t they?”

“They’re supposed to be,” said George. “But exactly what that means in operational terms, I haven’t the slightest idea. Do you?”

Catie didn’t, but she resolved to find out, and she knew someone who could make the issue as clear to her as it needed to be. “No,” she said. “Not at the moment.”

George nodded. Catie looked at him and got the clear sense that he knew more about what she was up to than he was letting on, but he was being cagey about it. Maybe he was wise…for there was always the possibility, in any virtual encounter, that one was being listened to. Even encryption was not always everything it was cracked up to be. For some of the more routine forms of encryption, the “soft” ones, various law enforcement organizations held back-door keys…and not even law enforcement, Catie knew, was immune to occasionally being compromised. When you came right down to it, even law enforcement officers were just people, and people, however regrettably, had weaknesses that could occasionally be exploited by those with the inclination to do so.

“Tell me how it felt to you,” Catie said after a moment.

“Like the ball was bouncing wrong,” George said. “As if the virtual ‘rotation speed’ of the spat space had been altered without warning. Not a whole lot. But when you work in microgravity for long enough, you get to know the feel. We’ve had astronauts in to check it for ‘reality,’ and they’ve always said it was right on.”

Catie nodded again. “Meanwhile,” she said, “did you get my move?”

“Just pregame.” George gave her an amused look. “Conservative.”

“If you can tell that much about me from just one move,” Catie said, “you’re pretty good.”

“That’s what they tell me,” George said, and gave her a superior look, which he couldn’t hold — a moment later he was laughing.

“When’s the lottery?” Catie said.

“Tuesday evening,” George said. “Usually it’s not a big deal…but I hear it’s going prime time this year.” He was still smiling, but once again that expression of guarded concern was in his eyes.

Catie looked across the room at Hal, who had recovered quite nicely from his late arrival at the game, and was now gazing down into Mark’s jar with interest. A second later he took it from Mark and headed in Catie’s direction. Time to put on her game face…. “When you send your next move along,” she said, “I’ll get in touch, and we can have a little chat.”

George nodded. “I’ll look forward to that.”

“Cates,” Hal was saying, “how can you tell it’s asleep?”

Catie smiled.

Elsewhere, in a virtual bar far away, it was no longer afternoon, but night; and two shadowy forms sat on either side of a marble table, under the blue-tinged mood lighting, and eyed one another coolly.

“Lucky for you they drew,” Darjan said.

Heming kept himself still, and didn’t gulp…though he felt like it. Chicago’s draw had been entirely too tight a thing. “I can’t understand why they didn’t win,” he said.

Darjan gave him a dry look. “Maybe our principals’ enthusiasm is misplaced,” he said. “The team was given the equivalent of nearly half an hour’s worth of free goals. They weren’t able to make any decent use of the time. Whatever that may suggest to us, it’s suggesting other things to the people who’re most interested in what they do next. We’re going to have to look at more robust forms of intervention.”

“Still, they got into the play-off pool anyway,” said Heming after a moment. “The draw is Tuesday. The odds of them being matched off against South Florida again are minuscule.”

“Forty-four to one is not minuscule,” Darjan said quietly. “Two point six billion to one, like a respectable lottery, the same chance you have to be hit by a meteorite, now that’s minuscule. Forty- four to one is too damn good. And no matter who South Florida plays, their odds are still too damn good. This has got to be sorted out, Heming. Fast. What are you doing about it?”

Heming didn’t quite squirm, though he wanted to. “Some people are going to go have a look at the South Florida team members’ Net machines,” he said. “‘Routine maintenance.’”

Darjan sat quiet for a moment. “That sounds like a thought,” he said finally. “As long as you’re not planning anything so infantile as having the machines fail in the middle of a game.”

Heming looked briefly horrified. “Uh, of course not. Little changes, though, in the programming of each.