Death Match - Diane Duane [19]
“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. Why do they insist on sending these things to people on the next continent over? Catie thought. Idiots…
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