“Hal?” she said.
“What is it, Cates? I’m busy.” Her brother appeared from behind a cabinet, carrying an Erlenmeyer flask and a few glass-stoppered bottles over to a workbench that, to judge by the stains on it, had seen better days. Hal was wrapped in a high-collared white lab coat, and except for the bottles, he looked entirely like someone who might start stitching pieces of people together without warning, without much attention being paid to the principle of informed consent.
“This a private project,” Catie said, coming down the curved stone stairs around the outside of the tower, “or something for school?”
“Both,” he said, putting the flasks down. “You interrupting me just for spiteful personal pleasure, or as a public service?”
“Both,” Catie said, giving him a look. “I didn’t think you’d be done with the postgame show already….”
“It was shorter than they expected,” Hal said, taking the stopper out of one of the bottles and sniffing it. “Which was just as well, since while I was watching I solved a problem that’s been bugging me for a while, and now I can get on with this.” He put the stopper back into the bottle and paused to make a note on a pad on the table.
He paused and looked up, frowning. “Catie, I hate to say it, but this is one moment when I don’t feel like discussing spat.”
“All right! Just very quickly…do you think you’re gonna be able to work something out with your friend?”
Her brother turned his attention back to his work, but he was grinning now. “Had a look at the
Catie made an annoyed face, then realized there wasn’t any point in it. Maybe it was for the better if Hal thought she had a crush on this guy. He’d then go out of his way to see that they met, so that he could see Catie gush and then ride her about it later. “Whatever. When can we set it up?”
“Talk to me tomorrow. If I don’t get this to work out, my organic chemistry grade is gonna suffer.”
Catie became more curious still, for her brother didn’t often discuss his schoolwork with her. “What’re you doing?”
“Creating life in a test tube, what else? Cates,
She contemplated sticking around to tease him a little more, in order to extract some revenge for last Tuesday, when he had been running the same number on her…she sighed, deciding it wasn’t kind to give him trouble, especially when schoolwork was at issue. “Vanishing,” she said. And she did.
Catie found herself standing again in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building, looking around at the opulent pillars and mosaics, all gleaming softly in some warm afternoon slanting light. “Hey, Space!” she said.
“Listening with bated breath for your lightest word, boss.”
“I was cleaning,” said her workspace, and her chair appeared in the center of the space. Catie made her way over and flopped down in it, tucking her legs underneath her. “And you really ought to get that thing reupholstered. Look at the fabric!”
“Reupholstered,” Catie said in a reflective sort of voice as she sat down and looked up into the overarching golden glow of the main dome with its upward-spiraling square recesses, a glorious restatement of the old dome of the Pantheon in Rome. “Possibly with your hide.”
The clear sky showing through at the top of the dome went abruptly cloudy, and lightning flickered in it, intended (Catie thought) as sarcasm. “Oooh, I don’t like the sound of that,” said her workspace.
“I just bet you don’t. Show me that graphic I was working on last night.”
“You don’t want to see the mail first?” The workspace manager somehow managed to sound injured.
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, all right. Just the icons.”
They appeared on the floor all around her, scattered over the mosaics, along with icons of other kinds: three-dimensional representations of books which represented ongoing pieces of research, piles of sketches or canvases each of which “meant” some piece of art Catie was working on, and virtmail messages which presented themselves as piles of paper with sketches of people or things on them in various media. It was a rather involved and untidy filing system, but Catie had no patience with the stylized representations that a lot of the mail-handling softwares offered you, little cubes and rotating spheres and other such Platonic-ideal solids. Catie liked ideas to look like real things, not abstractions, even if the preference did make Hal snicker and call her a Luddite.
She beckoned one of the piles of messages over. It picked itself up off the floor and sailed through the air to land in her lap. Catie picked up the first sheet, glanced at it. It featured a gaudy, much-scrolled engraving, which harked back to the old-fashioned paper money of the mid-twentieth century, and framed inside the scrollwork were the words YOU MAY BE A WINNER!
Catie breathed out patiently and held up the piece of “paper.” She wasn’t even going to bother telling its content to reveal itself. “This is something else I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” she said to her workspace, annoyed. “I told you, I don’t want to see advertising, no matter how many zeroes it has on it.”
There was a silence, the machine “pretending” to think and react to a request which Catie knew it had already successfully processed some hundreds of milliseconds ago — and the pretense somehow made her smile. She had to admit that Mark Gridley was good at producing a program that made you react to it as if it were intelligent, even when it wasn’t.
“Couldn’t help it that time, boss,” the space manager said after a moment. “It camouflaged itself as a message being returned to you after having been sent from here to some other address, then unshelled itself on being admitted, and nuked the shell.”
Catie sighed. There was nothing to be done about that tactic. It was an old favorite among the senders of “spam,” or unwanted commercial e-mail, and every time the mail-handling programs found a way to prevent a given tactic, the spammers always found some other way to construct a shell that would fool your system into letting their ads and scams through. She held up the piece of “paper.” It incinerated itself in her hand in a swirl of blue fire and went to dust. “How many more of those am I going to find in here?” she said.
“Probably about six, boss,” said the management program, for once having the good sense to sound chastened.
Catie turned the next couple of “pages” over and immediately found two more ads, one from someone who wanted to sell her carpets. She thought about handing that one on to her mom, then decided against it. There were already too many virtual decorating brochures cluttering up her mother’s workspace, along with various partially assembled “try-out” versions of the back of the house, so that her mom’s space was beginning to look like a construction site itself at times. Catie skimmed the carpet message out into the air, where it caught fire and rained down in a dust of instantly vanishing ash, to be followed a moment later into bright oblivion by a message from a Balti take-out place in Birmingham.
The fourth piece of “paper,” though, featured a sketch of Noreen Takeuchi, a particular friend of Catie’s who lived outside Seattle and whom she’d met in passing at an online software exhibition. The sketch showed Noreen rendered in “pastels,” a tall, muscular girl whose mane of chestnut brown hair, tied up high in an optimistic ponytail, was always betrayed by gravity within a matter of minutes. Noreen was as hot on the art of virtual imaging as Catie was, and (to Catie’s mild annoyance) was probably better at it than she was, but the two of them were too interested in sharing and comparing imaging techniques to ever develop much in the way of rivalry.
Catie picked up the page and hung it up in the air, off to one side of her chair. There it held itself flat as if
