Death Match

constant calls to outside servers, and comments.”

The structure shimmered like a cityscape with cloud sweeping over it, parts of it going vague, others burning bright in various colors. The unique instructions Catie ignored for the moment. She wanted first to look at the simple things again, the image calls and variables. There were fewer of them, and once she’d gone over them and gotten rid of them all, she could get on with examining the unique code and trying to understand it. Which is going to take me until after the play-offs, probably…

But for the moment Catie put that self-defeating thought away and made herself busy with the image calls nearest her. One by one she started checking the instructions again, referring them back to the images they called. The syntax was straightforward enough — a “connect” command, the identifier for the command to which it interfaced, a “call” command, the name of an image file, the size of the file, a specification for the size of its “display” as related to the frame of reference of the person experiencing it virtually, and a list of other files which would display “adjacent” to the file in question, changing as the one in this particular command line changed. Slowly, in flickers, unpredictably but in fits and starts that got more frequent the longer she did it, the “whole vision” of each command strand began to reassert itself. She was seeing them as single constructs, whole commands, not needing to spell them out laboriously, piece by piece. It was like the difference between reading one word at a time and taking a sentence as a whole. Catie started to speed up, pushing herself faster. It’s working. It’s actually working—

She finished going over the image calls in that region of the program in a fairly short time, and then stood there looking down from her height at all the rest of it, almost afraid to stop for fear that this new way of seeing the program might forsake her. But what else is there really for me to do here? I should get out. At least, though, now I can pass this problem back to Mark with confirmation that the image calls are clear. No one is going to blame me if I can’t make much of the rest of this….

Catie breathed out, feeling a kind of satisfaction even though she hadn’t found anything really useful.

But, still…

Then, there alone in the darkness, she grinned. It wouldn’t hurt to spend just a little more time, just to make sure the new perception wasn’t a fluke.

“Down one,” Catie said to Tom Clancy’s Net Force Death Match pseudo-surface she was standing on. It obediently sank down a layer.

Catie grabbed another line of text, another image insertion call, she thought — then realized she had the wrong color of text: this one was a physical management command, one that handled the way people moved in this space. And a moment later, to her delight, she “got it” whole, without any real trouble — command, argument, force specifier, vector specifier, constant of mass, gravitational constant, constant of local light-speed in this medium, atmospheric density. Catie cracked the string of text like a whip, so that it burned briefly bright and dropped down all the additional notations and values for the constants, and she ran them through her fingers, pleased. She’d read this line as easily as the image calls, with all its dangling strings of digits and repeating decimals—

Catie paused for a moment, gazing down at one of the strands of digits hanging down from her hand from a glowing capital G, slightly larger than the other letters in that strand: the symbol for the gravitational constant. Below it the digits swung and dangled like a glowing chain: 6.6734539023956342…e- 11₁, with the units signature “N m²/kg²” hanging there, like a charm, at the end.

…Now what the heck’s the matter with this? For it didn’t look right somehow. She had had occasion to use the gravitational constant once or twice when building the Appian Way scenario, because otherwise you couldn’t walk through it correctly…and even the birds that flew through the scene wouldn’t fly correctly until G was correctly in place. The fleeting thought of the former “George the Parrot” and his Gracie, and their chicks, made Catie smile a little at this connection, for she’d looked up the videos George had mentioned, and had seen the initial problems the birds had had in microgravity.

But Catie looked at that long decimal value of G now and couldn’t understand the difference between the way it looked at the moment and the way it had appeared when she installed G into her simulation of ancient Rome, plugging it in via a live link from the “best current value” reference kept on the Public Ephemerides server that was jointly managed by the National Bureau of Standards and the Naval Observatory. She’d noticed a particular pattern to the fraction, a patch where the digits 3 and 9 repeated,…393939, three times, and the peculiarity of the pattern had amused her. But now it went… 39023956. And there was an extra digit at the end of it. What’s that, an exponent or something? But what would it be doing there? Anyway, the digit was below the main line of figures, not above it. A footnote? Since when do constants have footnotes?

“Where is this constant plugged in from?” Catie said.

“The constant is sourced locally,” said the ISF server management program. “No remote link.”

That’s weird. Why go to the trouble to store it in this server when reference sources outside have the “freshest” version of the value? “What does that digit refer to?” Catie said, putting her finger on it, so that it glowed.

“Subsidiary instruction call,” said the ISF server management program.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Catie said.

“Subscript digits are an optional command syntax expression in Caldera,” said the server manager. “This is a ‘legacy’ expression common in earlier versions of the language and now routinely replaced in current command syntax by either the Boolean or expression or the ‘’ symbol and angle brackets enclosing the referent line or zone number.”

Catie digested that for a moment. “Display the subsidiary instructions being called here,” she said.

A text window opened off to one side, displaying about thirty command lines, one after the other. Catie started to read them.

They were all different versions of the gravitational constant. In some of them the numerical value varied just a little. In some, the variation was huge. What was even stranger was that many of them had an added string of data attached to them, vector specifications, as far as Catie could tell.

She shook her head, perplexed. If I’m reading this right — these instructions, when they’re called, would not only change the force of gravity in a space where they were brought into play, but change the direction in which it was pulling. Even the biggest of the numbers were relatively small. Catie wasn’t sure whether the changes would much affect something as massive as, say, a human being.

But a spatball—

Catie swallowed. George said it. The ball didn’t feel right. It didn’t go where it was supposed to.

And now she abruptly understood why. Because someone, at the right time, was invoking these changed values for the gravitational constant.

That’s — that’s—! The first word that occurred to Catie was illegal, though the word was faintly comical, used in this situation. Nonetheless, it was accurate; Catie was positively indignant at the sheer fraudulence of it. You can’t just change the laws of physics! And Catie couldn’t think of anything more basic to the way that objects in this particular frame of reference would operate.

And it’d be easy to miss. After all, who thinks about the gravitational constant? It’s a constant!

…I’ve got to call Mark!

She checked her watch. It was eight in the morning. Any other time she would have thought “It’s too early.” Now, though, Catie thought, If he’s not up, it’s about time he was! But she wasn’t comfortable about calling him from in here.

“Space,” she said.

“Listening.”

It’s gotten so it feels weird not to be insulted, Catie said, and couldn’t quite repress a smile despite the seriousness of the situation. “Save this configuration for me, voiceprinted again. Then close everything down.”