“Okay…so they’ll have had time to hide things from you, if anybody on the ‘inside’ wanted to…. Even though you’ve already been in there, I’d like a quick look around in that server. Can you finesse it?”
Mark looked at her for a few moments, a very speculative expression. “Catie, I’m not sure this is strictly the kind of help James Winters had in mind when he brought you on board.”
Catie swallowed. “I can’t help that,” she said. “There are things I need to look at before I can figure out what questions to ask George Brickner. It’s no use wasting his time and mine running down one blind alley after another. And anyway, if I don’t understand the inside of the server technology well enough to know what to listen for, I’m going to be wasting my own time, too…not to mention that I won’t be able to help your friends at Net Force in what they’re trying to achieve.”
Mark thought about that for a moment. Then his face cleared. “All right,” he said. “I know you can be trusted. And there’s no time like the present. Come on!”
He jumped up and led Catie off to one side, away from the fallen pillars. “Yo, cousin,” Mark said to his workspace management program.
“Working.”
“Access doorway. Crapshoot.”
“Opening access now, and logging.” A blue outline appeared in the empty “vacuum” before them, and filled itself with darkness.
“Logging to my storage only,” Mark said hastily.
“Logging limited,” his workspace management program said, and the blackness in the doorway shimmered. A different quality of darkness, with a vague bloom of light in the background, was all that Catie could see through it at the moment.
“That’s so my dad won’t find out about this immediately,” Mark said. “But, Catie, he’s going to have to know sooner or later. So don’t do anything that’s going to make Net Force look stupid later on.”
“As if I would,” Catie said.
“I know. But I have to say it anyway.” The look he gave her was surprisingly fierce, and it amused Catie a little to find that he was so territorial…and pleased her as well. She knew some of the older Net Force Explorers who were friends with him had an idea that Mark might be slightly uncontrollable, even unprincipled, but plainly there were things that mattered to him…and for Catie, this was a source of some relief.
They stepped through together. Inside the doorway was a wide dark plane, all ruled with green parallel lines crossing one another and stretching to infinity in all directions: a naked Cartesian grid, unfeatured, like a space that hadn’t even been configured yet, and with only two dimensions detailed.
“This is kind of minimalist, isn’t it?” Catie said, looking around.
Mark nodded. “The ISF’s senior programmers seem to like it that way. No obvious cues.”
“I’ll say,” Catie said.
“However,” Mark said, “
He reached into the darkness, and then in one gesture flipped a panel of the empty air up as if it were a little door. Under the panel, hidden in the same way that a car’s gas cap might be hidden under the fueling flap, was a square of light, and in the square, Catie saw a big obvious keyhole.
“No use in having a back-door key,” he said, “if you can’t use it occasionally.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an unusually large key, apparently made of some metal that was green in the same way gold was gold- colored. Mark pushed the key into the keyhole, and turned.
The whole Cartesian “landscape” shimmered, wavered…and vanished. For a moment the two of them stood alone in total darkness. Then slowly starlight began to fade in around them, and from off to one side, a great bloom of cool blue light became apparent.
Catie looked that way and took a deep, sharp breath. Under them, in darkness, the Earth was turning. They were standing in emptiness about five thousand miles out, on the “dark side” at the moment. The spatters of light that were the great cities of the North American continent were glowing beneath them. In the Pacific they could see another faint glow of light, silvery and diffuse, and Catie looked over her shoulder to see the full moon looking down at its own reflection, setting, as away over at the other side of the world, another light grew.
Slowly the sun began to climb in growing glory through the atmosphere, the light of it burning red at first as it shone through the air’s greatest thickness, then burning paler, orange, golden, white, and then utterly blinding as it came up over the terminator, and the fire and light of day swept across the Atlantic toward New York.
“Catie?”
“Yeah?” she said, not much wanting to be distracted from this gorgeous view. Whether it was based on real- time imaging or was someone’s reconstruction, it was beautiful.
“Catie!”
“Yeah,
She looked at Mark and wondered what his problem was…then, at the very edge of her peripheral vision, caught something, another bloom of light from behind them, the wrong direction. Something was falling at her, fast. Out of reflex, she ducked, turning—
Blazing in the new sun, silent as a feather falling through air, it came plunging at them seemingly right above their heads, immense, unstoppable, massive, but still graceful in its motion: a space station, a nonexistent one — for no one had ever actually built a space station along the “traditional” lines that were first mooted in the middle of the last century, a wagon wheel with spars out-reaching from a central hub. The silvery-white-skinned bulk of it passed so close over their heads that it seemed impossible to Catie that it wouldn’t stir up wind and ruffle their hair. But they were in “vacuum,” and there was no wind, and no sound, just the vast mass of the station passing over, passing by, gone — silhouetted now against the steady, unbearable fire of the sun, and receding from them as it plunged on past at thousands of miles per hour, rotating gracefully around its hub as it went.
“Nice, huh?” Mark said, getting up and dusting himself off.
“Yeah, nice,” Catie said, getting up, too. “You might have warned me a little sooner.”
“What, and spoil the effect? Someone here went to a lot of trouble to write that routine. It’s the server- maintenance people’s intro to the space…I thought you might like to see it.”
There was no question that it had been worth seeing, but Catie wasn’t going to admit that to Mark right this minute. She looked after the space station as it receded, noting the structure of the hub. Rather than having a docking facility there, it was just a blind sphere. “Is that spat volume?” she said.
“Yup,” Mark said. “It’s the external ‘restatement’ of the shell that holds the rules for the behavior of the internal volume. The volume’s been instructed to act like the ‘classic venue,’ the original Selective Spin module that they hooked up to the International Space Station. But the designers prefer this for the outside. It’s prettier, and doesn’t look like it was built by a committee.”
There was no arguing that. “How do we get in?” Catie said.
Once more Mark reached into his tame “flap” of empty space and fiddled with a control. Some hundreds of miles from them, the space station froze in place, and the sun stopped rising, then the space station seemed to rush toward them again, at an even higher speed than it had originally swept by. Catie felt like ducking again, but she stood her ground. The station plunged right at them, and then swept through them in a blur of cutaway views too swift to grasp. A moment later she and Mark were standing in the middle of the spat volume at the heart of the station, not even its goal hexes showing at the moment, only a dim silvery light illuminating the cubic while it was in standby mode. The space was anechoic, empty, and just on the borderline of cold.
“This is ‘where’ it happens,” Mark said. “The visual aspect of it, anyway.”
“Maybe we should look at the nonvisual aspect,” she said.
“The code? Sure. It’s mostly written in Caldera, except for the imaging calls.”
“Oh, joy,” Catie said. She had been working for some time to learn Caldera, one of the main languages that simulation builders and the designers of virtual environments used, because she had to. It was the “framework” on which imagery was hung. But the language was not proving easy for her to master. To get your imagery to move and act as if it were real, the image you constructed had to exchange its motion “calls,” the instructions you built into it, with the program underneath. The two sets of programming had to work flexibly together — but at the moment Catie knew the imaging program, the “muscles” and “skin” of any given environment, a lot better than she
