“So we’ll have them ratchet the response up a level or two.”
“Better make sure it’s ratcheted up enough….”
“Too much,” said Heming hotly, “and it’s going to start being obvious to the players. Then where will you be? You’ll have an independent investigation breathing down your back before you know what’s happened. Or worse still, Net Force will get involved. And then you, my friend, will find out what having your ass on the line really looks like.” He watched Darjan for his response.
Darjan just stretched his legs out and turned his glass around on the table a couple more times. “Get it handled,” he said. “There are enough bucks being bet on Chicago at the moment that it has to be right. The gentlemen upstairs want plenty of point spread on this result.”
“Look, I told you, it’s being handled right now. Correction has already been put in, and the techs are training on the ‘twinned’ server right now. They’ve even suckered some spatball players into helping them test the volume.”
“Are you crazy? If the ISF—”
“One of the people who’s been around to reassure them is ISF…or so they’ve been told. Our corporate connection.”
Darjan still looked uneasy. “If word of that gets out—”
“It won’t. Our connection has impressed on all his minor-league ‘helpers’ how important it is to keep the news about the new server quiet, so as not to spoil the big publicity push when ‘the people funding it’ make the announcement. But the testing has been going on for a couple of days now, and the players haven’t noticed a thing. You can practically pull the ball out of their hands and they assume it was their fault somehow.”
Darjan mulled that over. “All right. I wouldn’t mind seeing one of these test sessions.”
“I can set that up for you any time. They’re testing this afternoon, in fact. You can be an invisible watcher.”
“All right.” He took a drink of his virtual martini. “There hasn’t been anyone messing around with the genuine ISF server, has there?”
“No need. Their own people don’t have any reason to be there now. Their own routine checks have all passed off without incident. And there’s no reason we would put our own operatives in there, or anywhere near it, so close to the play-offs starting. There’s no need for it anyway. The ‘remote controls’ from our mirror server are all installed and ready to go.”
“Then why didn’t they work last time?” Darjan said. “Dammit, that should have been another clean win for Chicago. Is that damn team that inept?”
Heming frowned. “They can’t all know about the ‘adjustment,’” Heming said. “Unfortunately, a lot of them are honest. The team captain’s dropped some broad hints in the right ears, but that’s all he can do without having their own coach on his case. What do you want him to do, take out an ad on CNNSI saying ‘This is how the volume has been fixed so we can win?’ All he can do is direct play toward situations that our monitor can use to best advantage. After that, it’s still up to the team.”
Darjan breathed out, annoyed. “I suppose,” he said. “Well, I’ve made a visit or so myself in the past few days to see what can be done about the ‘honesty’ issue from inside several of the teams. We’ll see how those pay off.”
“And don’t forget about those ‘maintenance’ visits I told you about,” Heming said. “The installation of the conditional switching in the South Florida players’ Net machines. We’ve got three in already. Some of these guys are fairly anxious to make sure their machines are serviced before the play-offs…they’ve been making it easy for us, and we should be able to get the whole team seen to before they play anybody. The eavesdropping buffers we’re installing will telegraph the players’ physical movements to our monitor handling the mirror server a half a second or so before they go to the real one, and give our own handling routines a chance to react to their plays before they even actually happen in the spot volume. Think of it as insurance. Whatever happens, it’s a technology we can use elsewhere after these play-offs, in all kinds of sports.”
Darjan still didn’t look entirely reassured. “Well…it had better just go right this time, Heming. Otherwise your people and my people are the ones that will take the heat…and you and Iare inevitably going to get singed. If not burnt to a crisp.”
Heming shook his head. “Look, I understand your concern, but it’s handled. Come by this afternoon for the ‘training session’ and see.”
Darjan nodded, still frowning, and had another drink. Around the two of them, the shadows folded in close.
Two hours later Catie was still staring at the server software construct, from about halfway up its height — she had moved the “floor” up to look more closely at the way the solids symbolizing the images of the spat volume were hooked into the Caldera command substructure — and wondering, from the pain in her head, whether she was coming down with a migraine. Probably not, she thought. Mom said Gramma always said she felt sick before one. And I don’t feel sick…just stupid.
She rubbed her eyes and stood up for the first time in an hour or so. I guess I have to admit that Mark’s right. It’s not the imagery that’s at fault. I’ve looked at all the “canned” images in the routine, and all the code for the imagery that’s created “on the fly.” Nothing’s wrong with the code. The problem has to be somewhere else.
There’s nothing else I can do but start looking at all the rest of this to see if I can turn anything up.
But if the Net Force people haven’t seen anything…what in the world makes me think that I’m going to? Just more overconfidence. She blushed at the thought of what she was going to say to James Winters when they debriefed at the end of all this. “Sorry, I bit off more than I could chew, I don’t have a clue what’s going wrong.”…So much for my chances of ever actually getting a job working for this man, or his organization….
Catie stood there with her arms folded for a while, realizing that she might be looking at the beginning of the death of a dream. And what else do I do with my life if Net Force doesn’t want me? Catie thought, despondent. The time after high school, which had looked like a whole spectrum of new beginnings, now started to look like a dead end. I guess I can find some kind of entry-level job in advertising art, something simple, or—
Then Catie shook her head, feeling angry and helpless for the moment, but not quite beaten yet. The future would take care of itself, but right now there were other things to think about. For one thing, I’m getting moody…it’s blood sugar, probably. I need a break.
“Workspace management,” Catie said.
“Listening, visitor.”
“Hold this imagery in nonreadable memory for me, locked to my voiceprint. When I return, reset it.”
“Done.” The structure vanished.
Catie pushed the key into the darkness, and the gateway into her own space opened up again. She stepped through gratefully and waved it shut behind her. Immediately she felt a little more relaxed. All the while she’d been there she couldn’t get rid of the idea that someone from the ISF was going to pop out of nowhere and demand to know what she was doing there. Or — in her more paranoid moments — she imagined that one of the shadowy people who’d been tampering with the space in the first place might come across her. She shivered at the thought.