Death Match - Diane Duane [44]
Catie raised her eyebrows at that. “You’re going to have to coach me here a little, George…I’m still new to this game. Though I think I heard some of the reporters going on about this earlier.”
“Oh. Well, at the quarterfinal level, the teams that have ‘survived’ that long go into a lottery to determine who plays who in what order. Originally, it was a way of avoiding accusations that one team or another was using undue influence to have first crack at the spat volume on the Space Station.” He waved away one of his teammates who was coming at him and Catie with one more champagne bottle. “Pete, why don’t you drink some of the stuff? Nice vintage, no calories!”
The answer was a rude noise, after which Dalton departed to squirt someone else. “…Anyway, later they kept the same routine to make sure that time slots in the dedicated ‘sealed’ server were distributed fairly, since the security protocols in the single server only allow one game to be played at a time. A spat tournament isn’t something you can stage over multiple venues, like a real-world sport. At least it couldn’t be done so far. That may change now. With money pouring into the sport the way it has been, they’ll be able to afford to set up and maintain at least one more dedicated server, maybe two. One of the good things that’ll come of all this sponsorship, I hope, eventually.”
George sighed then. “At least the hardware upgrades will be good if the software is improved…the stuff we have is already getting kind of clunky. In particular, there are problems handling the larger ‘crowds.’ That’s an increasingly thorny issue, and it’s going to get worse as the virtual ‘gate’ gets bigger and more and more people are attracted to the sport.”
“Don’t tell me that you’re longing for the good old days when spat was smaller, and only a few aficionados would turn up….” This was something that Catie had heard from at least one of the commentators over the past couple of weeks.
George laughed at her. “Are you kidding? This time, right now, is going to be looked back on in twenty years as spat’s golden age. I like it the way it is.” Then his face clouded. “I’d like it better still, though, if we’d won today. We should have.”
“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