1
P-K4
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Catie just stood there, smiling slightly, when she saw it. Pawn to King Four. It was the first move of a chess game — the traditional first move, unless you were feeling iconoclastic. She regarded it for a moment. Hal’s question came back to her: Is he taking a dive at you, or what?
Catie didn’t think so. It didn’t feel that way, somehow. Granted, it tickled her a little that she was being paid the kind of attention by George Brickner that (if the People virtfeature was anything to go by) a significant portion of the girls her age on the continent wished he would pay to them. But at the same time she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that something else was going on.
I’m going to enjoy finding out what it is, she thought. But in the meantime…
“Space,” she said.
“Have we been introduced?” said her workspace manager.
Mark, Catie thought for about the thirtieth time that week, we are definitely going to have words about this. Yet at the same time, she had to admit that there was nothing wrong with the way her manager was functioning. Was it even responding a little faster, a little more flexibly, than it had done before Mark had worked on it? “Just a little heuresis,” he had said. If he’d actually improved the way the machine handled input, making it act more intelligently, maybe the tradeoff in smart remarks was worth it, in the long run.
“I sure hope we have, because I want to redecorate a little,” Catie said.
“About time,” said her workspace in a fussy voice. “Dusting this place just eats up my days.”
Catie rolled her eyes. “Never mind that. I want a chess-board in the middle of the floor here.”
A regulation tournament-size chessboard with the standard Staunton pieces arrayed on it duly appeared at her feet.
Catie looked up into the empty air of the Great Hall, toward the “place” where she routinely conceived of the workspace management program as “living.” Did I say it was being more flexible? “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then you should say what you mean, O Mighty Mistress.”
Well, precision was everything, in art and programming both. The miserable program had a point there, though she wasn’t going to admit as much out loud.
“Right,” Catie said. “Overlay a mosaic representing a chessboard on the mosaics already here. Inset it into the existing floor. I don’t want it sticking up over the present design. The size of the chessboard should be three meters by three meters. Make the squares brown and cream to match the colors of the marble in the pillars. And make me some giant pieces to go with it.”
The mosaic under her feet obediently wiped itself clean. The chessboard, worked in matching mosaic tiles and the colors she had specified, appeared beneath her feet. And then Catie was completely surrounded by chess pieces twenty feet tall, so that she couldn’t stir to right or left, hemmed in as she was by chocolate-brown rooks and knights and bishops.
“Not THAT giant!” she hollered.
“You didn’t say,” the workspace manager replied calmly.
“I’m going to trade you in for a pocket calculator with a liquid-crystal display,” Catie said, “and then I’m going to reprogram that with a rock. Make the queen two feet high, and scale all the rest of the pieces accordingly, and hurry up!”
“To hear is to obey, O Sovereign of the Age,” said the management program. A blink later all the pieces were of a size to fit the chessboard on the floor.
Catie went over to pick up the brown queen and a few other pieces.
“Don’t you want me to set them up for you?” the workspace manager said sweetly.
“No. You just go dust something.”
There was quiet for the next few minutes while Catie set up the pieces, both white and brown. Then she moved white’s pawn out four spaces in front of his king, and stepped off to one side to look at the board and decide how to respond. She could get flashy and try something like the Ruy Lopez opening, or she could just plod along in her own style, without trying to show off. Finally she decided on the second course of action. George would find out soon enough what Catie was made of without her having to drag any dead chess masters into it.
“I want you to record the moves in the usual notation,” Catie said as she picked up her own pawn and moved it out to K4, head-to-head with George’s.
The air over the board shimmered, and Catie found herself looking at a pattern of glowing footsteps hanging there, with various curves and arrows hanging between them.
“Not dance notation, you idiot lump of silicon!” Catie yelled. “Chess notation!”
The window in the air changed to show:
1
P-K4
2
P-K4
“Thank you so much,” Catie muttered. “Virtmail George that move, please, and alert me if I’m online when one comes in from him.”
“No problem. Do you want out-of-Net paging for moves?”
“No, it’s all right. Has Mark Gridley come back in yet?”
“His system still has him flagged as unavailable.”
Great, Catie thought. Well…it can keep a day, I suppose. He was the one who was so urgent about wanting to hear about George Brickner. If he’s not onsite when I’ve finally managed it, well, tough.
But that felt so cold. She sat there wondering. “He said he might run into me at the play-offs,” Catie mused. “Space, check the ISF server and find out if Mark has a seat booked for the game this afternoon.”
“That information is not available because of privacy issues,” her workspace said.
It wouldn’t be, would it…. She sighed.
At that point a huge voice came echoing into the Great Hall. “Catie!”
She sighed again. “Hal,” she said, “lose the visiting wizard act and tell me what you want.”
A large image of her brother’s head appeared in the air, surrounded by billows of flame that swirled and brightened around him when he spoke. “I don’t know, I kinda like it.”
“It’d look even better if you were bald,” Catie said, “but I guess I have to wait a few decades for that. What is it, runt?”
“Pregame show’s starting.”
“Yeah, I know. I was going to experience it from the friends-and-family space.”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s a thought, isn’t it! Okay, let’s—”
“Not until you empty the dishwasher, young man,” said another voice from the outside world, not sounding at all like an apparition from Oz, and not needing to. “And then there’s the small matter of the laundry piling up in your room.”
“But, Dad—!”
Catie tried to keep herself from grinning, and simply couldn’t.
“Sorry, Son, you blew it. You’ve had two days to clean up in there, and knowing you, you’ll plead homework tomorrow if we let it go on that long.”
“But, Dad, the game—!”
“The sooner you finish this stuff that’s been staring at you since four P.M. on Friday, the sooner you’ll see what the Slugs do. Get on it.”
And silence fell.
“Space, honey,” Catie said.