Death Match

knew the underlying structural code, the “bones.” In her earliest virtual work, this had been a matter of preference, and she had worked as she pleased, with what languages and utilities she pleased, ignoring the “hard parts.” However, now that she was beginning to approach professional levels of work, she could no longer allow herself the luxury of such preferences, at the risk of marginalizing herself and limiting the kinds of artwork she could do. Catie was having to come to terms with those underlying “bones,” and with the concept that an environment sometimes had to be built from the inside out. She was beginning to work out how to handle this new way of constructing images and simulations — she had no choice — but she knew that for a good while now it was going to make her brain hurt. Catie eagerly awaited the “paradigm shift” when it would all, suddenly, make sense, and the two ways of constructing virtual imagery would unite and knit themselves into a seamless whole…but she had no hope of having this happen to her in time to do her any good in this particular situation. I’m just going to have to muddle through the best I can….

“Okay,” Mark said, “here’s the Caldera structure.” And he turned the key again.

The image of the spat volume disappeared. It was replaced by a towering construct of lines and curves and helices and geometrical solids of light, reaching up and up and up into darkness. Every one of those objects or lines meant a line of code, or a set of instructions based somewhere outside of the program itself, “Oh, no,” Catie said, and covered her eyes for a moment, just sheerly overwhelmed. I hate abstract code presented this way, I hate it! And just look at all this! There had to be hundreds of thousands of lines of code here….

“Sorry, Catie,” Mark said, but he sounded a little be-mused by her distress. “It’s the naked code, yeah, but it’s simpler to look at it this way than if you objectify it. That just complicates matters. If you want, I can try to find you another paradigm….”

“No,” Catie said, “maybe it’s better if I just try to make sense of it this way.” She stared up at the construct, craning her neck. It seemed to be about the height of the Eiffel Tower. After a moment she said, “Is there a legend?”

“Sure,” Mark said, and fiddled with his invisible “controls” again. A “legend” window popped out to one side of where they stood, showing examples of the graphical structures used to indicate the program’s code, and next to each one a text description of the kind of code involved — structural, procedural, object-specific, referential, and so on. Catie stared at it with some dismay. It was going to take her days to come to grips with this.

“Is there a way to highlight the strictly image-related lines and linkages?” she said. Better to start with the parts she would be immediately familiar with, Catie thought, and then work inward to the less familiar ones.

“Sure,” Mark said. He reached over to the legend window and touched the taskbar down at the bottom. It immediately displayed a master menu with a grid full of glowing icons, one of which looked like a small picture in a frame. The construct in front of Catie changed, about 80 percent of the curves, lines, and squiggles fading away to shadows of themselves, and leaving a great number of solids of various shapes shining in various colors.

“There you are,” he said. “The ones in a single color are single images or stills; striped or shaded ones are composites or motion clips. You can have the construct slide itself down through the ‘plane’ we’re standing on, or move the plane up and down, to get at a given image. Take it out of the construct and it’ll expand itself in the space and show you the image or 3-D construct. When you do that, an editing window drops down at the same time. But I wouldn’t edit anything if I were you.”

“Before I knew what I was doing,” Catie said, “definitely not. And probably not even then.” She looked up at the massive structure. “James Winters suggested to me that you’d been working with this for some while….”

Mark nodded. “It’s complex, but not beyond managing,” he said. “Mostly I’ve been working with the senior Net Force program analysts to look for signs of tampering — we’ve been comparing the code against the initial archival copies of the server program, and the more recent backups, to see where there’ve been changes.”

“And you haven’t found anything to suggest what’s going on?”

Mark shook his head, and scowled.

“Did you look at the image calls?”

“We gave them a once-over, yeah, to see if whoever was tampering might have tried to make it ‘look like’ one thing was happening, say a near-miss on a goal, when something else should actually have happened instead. But we didn’t find anything of that sort.”

So much for my first bright idea. And my main area of expertise…and any hopes of figuring this out in a hurry. Catie was suddenly filled with dismay. She had given James Winters her best “I know what I’m talking about” performance, and it was all going to come to nothing. She was going to look like a complete fool…. Well, maybe I will…but I’m gonna do my darndest to be useful anyway. For George’s sake, if nothing else.

“Tell me something,” Catie said. “Are you strictly supposed to be in here at the moment?”

“Wellllll…”

“Never mind,” Catie said. “I should have known.”

“But I just can’t let it be,” Mark said. “You know how it is, Catie! You start working on something that matters…and you can’t let it be.” He gazed up at that towering structure with an expression that suggested the same kind of frustration that Catie felt from just looking at it. “I’ve been all over it with the experts, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong. We know somebody’s messing with the server’s programming somehow…we’re sure they are. But we can’t find out how. If you can turn up anything, anything at all, no matter how small or odd it seems to you…”

Catie sighed. “Mark, I’ll do my best. But I’m going to need a fair amount of time with this.”

“Lucky for you the server’s down, except for testing, until Thursday,” Mark said. Ceremoniously he presented her with the shining green key that symbolized the access routine. “I’ll give you a copy of the testing schedules, so you can avoid those times, if you want to. Otherwise, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Catie privately thought that this injunction left her entirely too much room to maneuver. “You said that access to the space is usually a triple-key business,” she said. “I take it that this little gadget”—she hefted the key—“gets around that.”

“It does,” Mark said. “It also makes the bearer operationally invisible. Even if the invigilators came into the server while you were working, and you had that with you, they shouldn’t be able to tell a thing.” He looked rather pleased.

“And your dad knows about this?”

“Um — as I said—”

“Right,” Catie said, and sighed. “I’ll keep my incursions to an absolute minimum, and I won’t meddle with anything I do find. But if as you say no one’s going to be running a game on the server until Thursday, I should have at least a little time….”

“Let me know if you find anything at all,” Mark said. “Here, lend me that for a moment.”

She handed him the key. Mark pushed it once more into his little flap in space. A moment later they were standing once more on the moon, with the crescent Earth back in the sky again, among the fallen columns.

Mark handed Catie back the key, and she slipped it into her kilt pocket, glancing around her. “I have just one question for you,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She waved one hand at the columns. “What’re all these about?”

“Uh…” Mark looked suddenly shy, an expression that sat very oddly on him. “I’m rebuilding it.”

Catie blinked, for she had begun to recognize the worn and pitted look of these columns. “You’re going to rebuild the temple of Apollo at Corinth?”

“Uh, yeah,” Mark said. “It’s to go with that.”

He pointed. Catie looked in the direction Mark was indicating…and saw, off in the distance, a twin of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral, towering up against the hard, jagged black horizon like a giant child’s block dropped there and forgotten.

Catie had to smile.

“Right,” she said, and declined to tease him…for the moment. It was always adorable to find that someone you thought of as utterly practical was in fact a romantic, in love with that first great venture off the planet. “Mark, are you going to be working at this for a while more?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The key you have is a copy.”