“But you didn’t.”
George looked at her sharply. “You don’t understand me,” George said. “I wasn’t saying, ‘I wish we’d won.’ I was saying, ‘We should have won.’” He looked at Catie to see if she was getting what he was saying, and he lowered his voice. “Especially in the second half. The force we applied to the ball, the way we were handling it, should have produced a certain given result then…and it didn’t. Something was wrong in there. I felt it again in the third half…which was why I was insisting on so much contact, and only shooting at goal from up close.”
Catie understood him, and what he was saying unnerved her. “You’re saying that the feel of the virtual spat space, the way it was behaving, had been interfered with somehow.”
He nodded.
Catie shook her head. “I know there are games where that happens on purpose. The way a golf greenskeeper can alter the ‘lie’ of the greens to make a hole harder to play…or the groomers at a bowling alley can varnish or wax the alleys to make the ball behave one way or another. It even happens in baseball…the guys who mow the lawn do the infield to favor their team’s hitting tendencies.”
“That’s legal, within limits, and for those games. But in spat the server is maintained by a central authority, not by the individual teams, and the spat volume’s behavior is supposed to be neutral.”
“So to change the way the scoring surface was acting…it would mean that someone had to tamper with the server,” Catie said, also keeping her voice low. “But that’s supposed to be impossible. The servers are sealed, aren’t they?”
“They’re supposed to be,” said George. “But exactly what that means in operational terms, I haven’t the slightest idea. Do you?”
Catie didn’t, but she resolved to find out, and she knew someone who could make the issue as clear to her as it needed to be. “No,” she said. “Not at the moment.”
George nodded. Catie looked at him and got the clear sense that he knew more about what she was up to than he was letting on, but he was being cagey about it. Maybe he was wise…for there was always the possibility, in any virtual encounter, that one was being listened to. Even encryption was not always everything it was cracked up to be. For some of the more routine forms of encryption, the “soft” ones, various law enforcement organizations held back-door keys…and not even law enforcement, Catie knew, was immune to occasionally being compromised. When you came right down to it, even law enforcement officers were just people, and people, however regrettably, had weaknesses that could occasionally be exploited by those with the inclination to do so.
“Tell me how it felt to you,” Catie said after a moment.
“Like the ball was bouncing wrong,” George said. “As if the virtual ‘rotation speed’ of the spat space had been altered without warning. Not a whole lot. But when you work in microgravity for long enough, you get to know the feel. We’ve had astronauts in to check it for ‘reality,’ and they’ve always said it was right on.”
Catie nodded again. “Meanwhile,” she said, “did you get my move?”
“Just pregame.” George gave her an amused look. “Conservative.”
“If you can tell that much about me from just one move,” Catie said, “you’re pretty good.”
“That’s what they tell me,” George said, and gave her a superior look, which he couldn’t hold — a moment later he was laughing.
“When’s the lottery?” Catie said.
“Tuesday evening,” George said. “Usually it’s not a big deal…but I hear it’s going prime time this year.” He was still smiling, but once again that expression of guarded concern was in his eyes.
Catie looked across the room at Hal, who had recovered quite nicely from his late arrival at the game, and was now gazing down into Mark’s jar with interest. A second later he took it from Mark and headed in Catie’s direction. Time to put on her game face…. “When you send your next move along,” she said, “I’ll get in touch, and we can have a little chat.”
George nodded. “I’ll look forward to that.”
“Cates,” Hal was saying, “how can you tell it’s asleep?”
Catie smiled.
Elsewhere, in a virtual bar far away, it was no longer afternoon, but night; and two shadowy forms sat on either side of a marble table, under the blue-tinged mood lighting, and eyed one another coolly.
“Lucky for you they drew,” Darjan said.
Heming kept himself still, and didn’t gulp…though he felt like it. Chicago’s draw had been entirely too tight a thing. “I can’t understand why they didn’t win,” he said.
Darjan gave him a dry look. “Maybe our principals’ enthusiasm is misplaced,” he said. “The team was given the equivalent of nearly half an hour’s worth of free goals. They weren’t able to make any decent use of the time. Whatever that may suggest to us, it’s suggesting other things to the people who’re most interested in what they do next. We’re going to have to look at more robust forms of intervention.”
“Still, they got into the play-off pool anyway,” said Heming after a moment. “The draw is Tuesday. The odds of them being matched off against South Florida again are minuscule.”
“Forty-four to one is not minuscule,” Darjan said quietly. “Two point six billion to one, like a respectable lottery, the same chance you have to be hit by a meteorite, now that’s minuscule. Forty-four to one is too damn good. And no matter who South Florida plays, their odds are still too damn good. This has got to be sorted out, Heming. Fast. What are you doing about it?”
Heming didn’t quite squirm, though he wanted to. “Some people are going to go have a look at the South Florida team members’ Net machines,” he said. “‘Routine maintenance.’”
Darjan sat quiet for a moment. “That sounds like a thought,” he said finally. “As long as you’re not planning anything so infantile as having the machines fail in the middle of a game.”
Heming looked briefly horrified. “Uh, of course not. Little changes, though, in the programming of each. Installation of conditionals.”
Darjan was silent for a moment. “That might work,” he said. “As long as deinstallation procedures are included as well. Be a shame if someone went looking at their Net machines’ routines, after the fact, and found something out of the ordinary there.”
“Of course deinstalls will be put in at the same time,” Heming said. “There are ways to do such things that won’t alarm the usual antiviral and system-scan diagnostics. It’s all taken care of.”
“Then get on with it,” Darjan growled. “The first game is Thursday…and it had better go the way our principals want, if South Florida is involved…or they’re going to start taking your intervention, or lack of it, personally.”
This time Heming did gulp, whether he wanted to or not.
Monday afternoon Catie got in from school and went online again to clean up her virtmail, and to make another attempt to get in touch with Mark. It wasn’t like him to be incommunicado for so long, except for his actual school time. He seemed to practically live online, and Catie thought that the only reason he didn’t get in trouble over this was probably that his parents had to spend so much of their time online as well. She stood there in the Great Hall of her workspace and said, “Still nothing from him?”
“Nothing. Should we call the media and tell them the engagement’s off, boss?”
“Fff,” Catie said, a soft sound of annoyance, but it wasn’t serious — she had other things on her mind. I wonder if he’s had to go away suddenly with his dad or something. They do travel a lot—