Death Match - Diane Duane [57]
“Is there a way to highlight the strictly image-related lines and linkages?” she said. Better to start with the parts she would be immediately familiar with, Catie thought, and then work inward to the less familiar ones.
“Sure,” Mark said. He reached over to the legend window and touched the taskbar down at the bottom. It immediately displayed a master menu with a grid full of glowing icons, one of which looked like a small picture in a frame. The construct in front of Catie changed, about 80 percent of the curves, lines, and squiggles fading away to shadows of themselves, and leaving a great number of solids of various shapes shining in various colors.
“There you are,” he said. “The ones in a single color are single images or stills; striped or shaded ones are composites or motion clips. You can have the construct slide itself down through the ‘plane’ we’re standing on, or move the plane up and down, to get at a given image. Take it out of the construct and it’ll expand itself in the space and show you the image or 3-D construct. When you do that, an editing window drops down at the same time. But I wouldn’t edit anything if I were you.”
“Before I knew what I was doing,” Catie said, “definitely not. And probably not even then.” She looked up at the massive structure. “James Winters suggested to me that you’d been working with this for some while….”
Mark nodded. “It’s complex, but not beyond managing,” he said. “Mostly I’ve been working with the senior Net Force program analysts to look for signs of tampering—we’ve been comparing the code against the initial archival copies of the server program, and the more recent backups, to see where there’ve been changes.”
“And you haven’t found anything to suggest what’s going on?”
Mark shook his head, and scowled.
“Did you look at the image calls?”
“We gave them a once-over, yeah, to see if whoever was tampering might have tried to make it ‘look like’ one thing was happening, say a near-miss on a goal, when something else should actually have happened instead. But we didn’t find anything of that sort.”
So much for my first bright idea. And my main area of expertise…and any hopes of figuring this out in a hurry. Catie was suddenly filled with dismay. She had given James Winters her best “I know what I’m talking about” performance, and it was all going to come to nothing. She was going to look like a complete fool…. Well, maybe I will…but I’m gonna do my darndest to be useful anyway. For George’s sake, if nothing else.
“Tell me something,” Catie said. “Are you strictly supposed to be in here at the moment?”
“Wellllll…”
“Never mind,” Catie said. “I should have known.”
“But I just can’t let it be,” Mark said. “You know how it is, Catie! You start working on something that matters…and you can’t let it be.” He gazed up at that towering structure with an expression that suggested the same kind of frustration that Catie felt from just looking at it. “I’ve been all over it with the experts, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong. We know somebody’s messing with the server’s programming somehow…we’re sure they are. But we can’t find out how. If you can turn up anything, anything at all, no matter how small or odd it seems to you…”
Catie sighed. “Mark, I’ll do my best. But I’m going to need a fair amount of time with this.”
“Lucky for you the server’s down, except for testing, until Thursday,” Mark said. Ceremoniously he presented her with the shining green key that symbolized the access routine. “I’ll give you a copy of the testing schedules, so you can avoid those times, if you want to. Otherwise, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Catie privately thought that this injunction left her entirely too much room to maneuver. “You said that access to the space