Death Match

particular book home, but it occurred to her that listening to the whole answer would probably wind up making her late. Her mom picked up a pile of cans of beans and vegetables from the table, stacking them up carefully in her arms, and took them over to unload them into one of the undercounter cabinets, while Catie went through the other books — mostly works of Greek and Latin classicists like Pliny and Strabo and Martial.

Her mother meanwhile finished with the cans, got herself a glass of water, drank it in a few gulps, and pulled the dishwasher door open. “I’m empty!” said the dishwasher in a tone of ill-disguised triumph.

“Isn’t that super,” Catie’s mother said, putting the glass in and closing the dishwasher again. “Your brother’s finally beginning to get the idea. Perhaps my life has not been in vain.”

Catie smiled gently and said nothing. “Mom,” she said, “anything important you need to tell me before I make myself socially unavailable?”

Her mother looked thoughtful. “Nothing leaps right out at me. What is it tonight? Net Force Explorers meeting?”

“Yeah.”

“Have fun. I’ll take care of the rest of this.” Catie smiled again, a little more broadly. She knew her mother preferred to take care of the groceries herself, so that she wouldn’t have to accuse her daughter of “misshelving.” “Where’s your dad?”

“Incommunicado. In the studio.”

“Painting?”

“That, or plastering,” Catie said. “Hal reported faint scraping noises. But it’s probably just painting, since I forgot the spackle on the way home, and so did Hal.”

Her mother sighed. “Okay. Where’s Hal taken himself, by the way?”

“He may still be on the Net with his post-spatball game show. I didn’t check.”

“Fine. You go do your thing, Catie. I have to look these over and see if we need to order copies for the department.”

“Mom, they shouldn’t make you take your work home,” Catie said, frowning.

Her mother chortled at her. “Honey, it’s not that they make me, it’s that they can’t stop me. You know that. Go on, get out of my hair.”

Catie went down to the family room and shut the door, then settled into the implant chair again, lined up her implant with it, and clenched her jaw to activate it.

Instantly the room vanished, and Catie was sitting in an identical chair surrounded by the spectacular polished pillars, shining staircases, murals and mosaics which filled the gold-brown-and-white “front hall” of the Library of Congress. Her mother used a similar entry to her workspace, as a lot of her colleagues did. They felt a natural pride in having as part of their “turf” one of the most spectacular and ornate buildings in the entire Capitol District, a gem of the Beaux-Arts tradition, more like a palace than a library. Catie, though, simply liked the palatial aspect of it, and the sense of everything in it having been made by people’s hands, not by fabricating machines or computer programs.

She got out of the chair and started up the grand staircase to the gallery that overlooked the main reading room. “Hey, Space!” Catie said as she climbed.

“Good evening, Catie,” said her workspace in a cultured male voice.

“Any mail for me?”

“Nothing since you last checked in.”

“Nothing? In three whole hours?” That was mildly unusual.

“Would I lie to you?”

“Not if you wanted to keep your job,” Catie said, while knowing perfectly well that her workspace management program was about as likely to lie to her as her brother was to unload the dishwasher without being reminded.

“I live in fear of firing,” the management program said, dry-voiced.

Catie raised an eyebrow. She had asked one of her Net Force buddies to tinker with the program’s responsiveness modes some weeks back, and very slowly since then she had started to notice that it was developing what appeared to be a distinct strain of sarcasm. “Good,” she said as she came to the top of the stairs, “you do that.”

At the head of the stairs she stood in the big doorway there and looked through it and down. At this spot, in the real library, there was a gallery along the back wall of the main reading room, with a glass baffle to keep the readers from being disturbed by the sound of the never-ending stream of tourists. But in Catie’s version of the library there was no glass, only a doorway leading down into whatever other virtual space she should elect to visit. For the moment the door was filled with a swirling, glowing opalescent smoke effect, something Catie had designed for her mother as a “visual soother,” a distraction pattern for when she had to put someone on hold at the office.

“What’s your pleasure?” the management program said to her.

“Net Force Explorers meeting,” Catie said. “The usual address.”

“Net Force,” said her management program, and the smoke began to clear away. “I don’t think they suspect anything yet, so don’t blow it.”

I definitely need to talk to the guilty party about this, Catie thought. She stepped through the doorway, pausing on the landing of another stairway which formed to let her down into the big, echoing, empty space on the other side.

It wasn’t precisely empty. There were probably about fifty other kids there already, milling around and chatting, while above them hung suspended in space, glowing, a giant Net Force logo. It was ostensibly just as a courtesy that Net Force had set aside virtual “meeting space” on its own servers for these meetings. But Catie sometimes wondered whether there was some more clandestine agenda involved, some obscure security issue…or just a desire to “keep an eye on the kids.” For her own part, she didn’t much mind. There’s always the possibility that there are some of the “grown-ups” in here strolling around in disguise, listening to the conversations of the junior auxiliary and noting down which of us seem promising…. A moment later Catie put the thought aside as slightly paranoid. Yet, thinking about it, she decided it wouldn’t particularly bother her if that were happening. Catie firmly intended to wind up working for Net Force one day, doing image processing and analysis, or visuals-management work of one kind or another. If the cutting edge, in terms of excellence, opportunity, and potential excitement, was to be found anywhere, it was there. If someone from the adult side of Net Force wanted to look her over with that sort of work in mind, it was fine by her. The sooner the better, in fact….

Meanwhile, she had other fish to fry. Or one fish, a small one. As she came down the stairs to floor level, she paused, glancing over the group beneath her. A few faces she knew, a lot she didn’t, not that that had ever bothered her. She always left one of these meetings with at the very least a bunch of new acquaintances—

And there was the one she wanted to see. She finished coming down the stairs and walked around the edges of the small crowd, greeting a couple of people she knew as she passed — Megan O’Malley, Charlie Davis — and then walked over to her target from behind quietly, with the air of someone approaching a small and possibly dangerous animal without wanting to unduly frighten it.

“Hey, there, Squirt!” Catie said with an edge to her voice.

The figure actually jumped a little, and turned. A slight young boy, young especially when you considered that a lot of the other kids here were older by at least several years, tending toward their late teens. But Mark Gridley was no more than thirteen: dark-haired, dark-eyed, with Thai in his background and the devil in his eyes. “Ah,” Mark said. “Ah, Catie, hi, how are you…”

“You’re here early,” Catie said.

“Slumming,” Mark said idly.

“Oh, yeah,” Catie said. Since she’d first met him at one of these meetings, she’d been aware that Mark was obsessed with the idea that somehow, somewhere, he might possibly be missing out on something interesting. Even being the son of Net Force’s director was just barely enough “interesting” to keep him going, so that Mark routinely went looking for more. He was always early to these meetings, though he went out of his way to make it look accidental.