Death Match

Catie slipped through the doorway to stand once more on that wide, dark virtual plain, and paused there, letting her mind rest for a moment in the lines running to infinity in all directions, taking a moment to work out what she should do. She was still nervous, but as far as she could tell there was no one in here. This was another of the times that Mark had denoted as an “empty” period, and well out of hours for the server’s staff, who after all out were on the West Coast somewhere. A little early for them to be up, Catie thought. Then again, it’s early for me to be up. So let’s get on with this….

“Server management,” she said. “Unlock the imagery from my previous visit.”

“Voiceprint ID confirmed,” said the server. “Representing structural model.”

It appeared before her as it had the last time, that same massive structure of lines and curves and sections of geometric solids, all piled up in a single towering construct and here and there spilling over in what looked to her like disorganized heaps: a haystack in which the needle she was searching for might or might not be hidden.

“What a mess,” Catie said softly.

Nothing’s as complicated as it looks at first glance, she heard her father saying, some time back, while they had been working on her geometry together. Give it a moment, stand back, take it apart a piece at a time, and don’t go to your fears for advice while you work. Use your brains. You’ve got plenty.

And when brains run out, she heard her mother remark from somewhere nearby, you can always fall back on stubborn. Sometimes it works nearly as well.

Catie wasn’t sure what there was left for her to “take apart”…at least, that she understood. Still, there were a couple of things she hadn’t looked over in regard to the imagery — specifically the “insertions,” the place where imaging instructions and calls interfaced with the actual structure of the server program. If you were going to tamper…that would be a good place to do it.

Not that the Net Force people wouldn’t have thought of that, too…. Still, the stubborn was beginning to kickin, and Catie sighed and got on with it.

An hour or so later she was standing in the “air” about halfway up the structure of the program, and even in virtuality her eyes were beginning to get tired from tracing one connection after another, picking it up, looking to see how it interfaced with the next one along in the “chain.” Each time she picked up one of the shining ropes that symbolized a command instruction, she had to pinch it in the place that would reveal its content, and then the actual text of the command would reveal itself in a text window nearby, and she would have to read it carefully, parsing it to see if it made sense in conjunction with the commands immediately preceding it or following it in the chain. The syntaxes were beginning to blur together, the terms had begun to reach that magic point where she didn’t understand any of them anymore, the way you can stop understanding your own name if you say it three hundred times in a row.

Not too much more to do, thank heaven, Catie thought, vanishing one more text window and pausing to rub her eyes.

She picked up another command strand, a line of rose-colored light, and pinched it.

The lottery…It was some hours away yet, and she couldn’t get her mind off it. The funny thing was that George hadn’t seemed too concerned about which team South Florida actually wound up playing first. “In cold analysis, we’re all pretty well matched,” he’d said, “in terms of general strength. Sure, different teams have different specific strong areas. But we’re so good as ‘all rounders’ that one team, really, is pretty much the same as another as far as I’m concerned.” He’d smiled slightly when he’d said it. “We have one thing going for us that none of the others have. We all like each other. We’re doing this for fun, because we enjoy playing together. None of the other teams can genuinely make that claim, since all their players are ‘bought in,’ one way or another.”

“But will that matter at the championship level?” Catie had said.

“It’ll sure matter if we lose,” George had said, and laughed. “But we won’t wind up hating each other. We can’t. We shop for each other, we baby-sit each other’s kids and help them with their homework, we go out for dinner together — did I tell you about the Dinner Brigade? A bunch of us are working our way through all the restaurants in the Miami Yellow Spaces. We’re into the D’s now. A loss at this level will be real public, sure…but we’re still going to be friends afterward. And spat is a basis for our friendships, but not the basis.”

He’d leaned back and stretched again. “And on the other side of the equation,” George had said, “the friendship might just help us win. We have a level of communication that the other teams don’t always seem to have — or else theirs is an artificial thing, imposed, rather than something that grew naturally among the players. Is that enough of an edge? I don’t know. The other teams have the advantage that they’re professionals — they don’t have to have day jobs, they can spend the kind of time practicing that we can only dream about. At the same time…do they spend that kind of time practicing? Maybe not. Like in parenting, there’s a question of quality time versus quantity time. We may actually have an edge there. It’s a job for them, not fun, the way it is for us….”

Catie sighed, finished with that particular line of light, picked up another and read the command line in it, the name of the image file to which it attached, the programming instruction to which it interfaced at its far end.

I just hope he’s right. It would be awful if the stress turned out to be too much for them, if their friendships or their personal lives started to come apart because of all the media attention. Like George saying that he couldn’t even go to a convenience store without being followed. If I were in his position, I’d grab the first reporter I caught doing that and I’d—

Then Catie stopped, in complete shock, and stared at the thing she had been running idly through her hands. It was not a line of light after all. It was a text string. She had read it, she had understood it, she had finished with it, and had been about to put it back and pick up another, all without having to go through any laborious translation of the content—

And suddenly she realized what was happening. It was the paradigm shift, just a flicker of it. It had to be — though it wasn’t even slightly as she’d imagined it would be if she ever achieved it. All this exposure to the raw code, which she hated — all the time Catie had been forcing herself to read it directly, something which she had always avoided — had started to force the change, and Catie was finally starting to think in Caldera. It was a revelation, like the day in her sophomore year when, without warning, after two years of classes and fairly uninvolving study simply designed to get her through her language courses with a passing grade, she had suddenly started to think in French. It was as if everything had been turned ninety degrees, somehow, and was being viewed from a different angle, one which had never been available to her before.

Wow, she thought. I’ve got to get it back! How can I get it back? Everything was clear, there, just for a moment—

Catie swept the key through the space in front of her, like a swordsman saluting an opponent, and reduced the huge structure before her to a gigantic tangle of bare code. Mark had been right. Objectifying the code just obscured the issue, concealing the instructions themselves. She needed to deal with them all at the component level.

Dad was right, she thought, in a different paradigm. It is all just electrons. But if you understand the most basic building blocks of your medium, it doesn’t matter whether you’re working with “wet” ones or “dry” ones, or how many of them are strung together, or on what kind of framework—

The code structure of the sealed server’s operating programs stood before her now simply as text, hundreds and thousands and millions of lines of it. There was a temptation to panic at the sight of it all, but Catie restrained herself. The nature of programming being what it was, not all these instructions could possibly be unique. A lot of them would be copies of one another. Many of them would also be calling routines from outside the program itself, complex variables or constants that were defined in the Caldera language itself and lived on the master Caldera servers. Given the connectivity of the Net and the hundred-layer redundancy cushion that a “fundamental language” source like Caldera would maintain as part of its server infrastructure, there was no need for an end-user like the ISF ever to worry that Caldera’s reference-variable resources would go down, and therefore there would be no need to waste space by keeping those variables and constants in ISF server space.

“Verbal input,” she said to the ISF server manager.

“Accepted,” said a woman’s voice, dulcet and calm.

“Fade down all nonunique instructions,” Catie said. “Highlight unique instructions, image calls, variable and