Death Match

“How’s the artwork doing?” Mark said, with the air of someone who wanted to distract her from something. “Still fingerpainting?”

Catie grinned a little, and flexed those fingers. “Hey, everybody in the plastic arts has to start somewhere,” she said. “It’s what you do with the medium, anyway, not what everybody else does with it. Besides, it never keeps me away from the image work long.” She knew perfectly well that Mark knew this was her forte. There were few Net-based effects, in the strictly visual and graphical sense, that Catie couldn’t pull off with time and care. No harm in him knowing, either. Who knew, he might mention it to his father, and his father might mention it to James Winters, the Net Force Explorers liaison, and after that anything might happen. Networking is everything, Catie thought. “And how about you?” she said then. “The French police give up on you finally?”

Mark scowled, and blushed. He had gotten in some slight trouble recently when traveling with his dad, and those of the Net Force Explorers who knew the details were still teasing Mark about the episode, half out of envy that Mark had time to get in trouble while staying somewhere as interesting as Paris, and half out of the sheer amusement of watching him squirm — for Mark was hypercompetent on the Net and hated to come out on the wrong side of anything. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “But enough about my scrapes. You’re the one who’s always getting yourself scraped up.” He tilted his head back and pretended to be peering at Catie’s elbows and knees.

She laughed at him. Catie had long been used to this kind of comment from her friends, both those at school and even those who were also Net Force Explorers. She had been in soccer leagues of one kind or another almost since she was old enough to walk, partly because of her dad’s interest in the sport, but partly because she liked it herself. Then, later on, as virtual life became more important to her, Catie began to discover its “flip side”—that reality had its own special and inimitable tang which even the utter freedom of virtuality couldn’t match. There was no switching off the implant and having everything be unchanged or “all better” afterward. Life was life, irrevocable, and the cuts and bruises you carried home from a soccer game were honestly earned and genuine, yours to keep. Some of her friends thought she was weird to take the “real” sports so seriously, but Catie didn’t mind.

“To each his, her, or its own,” her father would say, chucking aside some rude review of one of his exhibitions, and picking up the brush again. Catie found this a useful approach with the virtuality snobs, who usually had what passed for their minds made up and tended not to be very open to new data.

“Nope, nothing new to exhibit,” Catie said. “Except for a new interest. A slight one, anyway. Spatball.”

“Huh,” said Mark, glancing around. The space was beginning to fill up fast now, a couple of hundred kids having come in over the space of just the last few minutes. “The last refuge of the space cadet, one of my cousins calls it.”

“It might indeed be that,” Catie said. “I’m in the process of making up my mind. Meanwhile, Squirt, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

“Yeah?”

“My workspace management program is beginning to sass me.”

“Oh?”

Mark looked completely innocent. It was an expression which struck Catie as coming entirely too easily to him. “It’s getting positively sarcastic lately,” she said. “This wouldn’t be anything of your doing, would it? Some little bug you slipped in?”

“There are no bugs,” Mark said virtuously, “only features.”

“Yeah, well, this ‘feature’ has you written all over it.”

He acquired a very small smile. “Just a little heuresis, Cates. It only does what it sees you doing. So if it’s getting sarcastic—”

She took a swipe at him, and missed, mostly on purpose. At the same time, Catie had to grin a little. “So the computer’s chips are turning into chips off the old block, huh. Cute. One of these days you’re going to do something too cute to allow you to live any longer, Squirt.”

He gave her a look that suggested he didn’t think this was all that likely. The problem was, Catie thought, that he was probably right. Assuming that he survived through his teens — for Mark’s “scrapes” were many and varied, so that Catie thought it was probably miraculous that his parents hadn’t simply killed him by now — the talent that got him into the scrapes would eventually take him far. For all his tender years, Mark was a native Net programmer of great skill, one of those people who seem to be born with a logic solid in their mouths and are better at programming languages than spoken ones. There was very little that Mark couldn’t make a computer do, and the more complex the computer was, the more likely Mark was to deliver the results. But he would also find a way to enjoy himself in the meantime…and his enjoyment could occasionally also mean your annoyance, if you let him get away with it.

Catie gave him a look. “If the management system starts interfering with my space’s functioning,” she said, “I’m going to debug the software with an ax…and then hunt you down and take the lost time out of your hide. Meantime, what’s on the agenda tonight? I didn’t have time to look at it before I came in.”

“Something about a virtual field trip to the new Cray-Nixdorf-Siemens ‘server farm’ complex in Dusseldorf,” Mark said. “They’re going to run a lottery to allow some of us in there to have a look at the firmware. Like the new Thunderbolt warm-superconductor storage system.” He had a slightly hungry gleam in his eye.

Catie nodded. “Sounds like it’s right up your alley. Why should you need to enter a lottery, though? Can’t your dad get you in?”

“Not really,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. “The offer has all the usual ‘not for industry associates and their families’ disclaimer all over it. Besides, I’ve been busy….”

He trailed off a little too soon. Catie was about to ask him what was really going on when she was interrupted by a banging noise coming from the center of the room. All around her, people were making themselves chairs or lounges to sit on, and in the middle of things there had appeared, off to one side, what appeared to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A moment later there also appeared, under the Net Force logo, something that could have been mistaken for the great mahogany half-hexagonal bench in the court chamber of the Supreme Court… except that the center position was occupied solely by a young slim redheaded guy in process blue slikshorts and a LightCrawl T-shirt that presently had the message I’M IN CHARGE HERE, HONEST inching its way around his chest cavity in flashing red block capitals.

“Can everyone hold it down?” he was yelling. “We have to get started….”

Catie glanced up. “Who’s that?”

“Chair for the meeting, I guess,” Mark said.

“I knew that. I meant, ‘Do you know him?’”

“Uh, no. Hey, Gwyn…”

“Hey,” said one of the other kids presently beginning to drift over to where Mark was standing. Catie looked them over thoughtfully, for people that Mark didn’t mind hanging around him tended to be worth knowing. Either he found them intelligent, or they were sufficiently capable of getting far enough past his extreme impulsiveness and mischievousness to notice that he was intelligent. Either of these were characteristics that Catie thought were likely to be useful at some point. What was also moderately interesting was that the kids gathering around Mark all looked significantly older than he…more Catie’s age, in the seventeen-or eighteen-year-old area. Plainly they weren’t concerned about the age difference when the younger kid was as smart as Mark. Or has his connections, Catie thought. Networking is everything….

“Okay,” said the kid who had been banging on the mahogany bench, “we have some announcements first —”

“Who are you?” came the predictable yell from the floor, a ragged, amused chorus of about thirty voices. It always seemed to happen, no matter how many times they all met, to the point where it was now approaching tradition: a speaker would be shocked out of composure by the sight of all those faces and forget to introduce himself.

“Oh. Sorry. I’m Neil Linkoping. As I was saying—”

“Hi, Neil,” came the cheerfully mocking reply from the floor, about a hundred of them this time. Neil grinned and said, “Hi, crowd. Now, as I was saying…we have some announcements first….”

Groans and shouts of “Not again!” ensued. These were traditional, too, because there were