Death Match - Diane Duane [66]
Catie finished the cold tea, rinsed the cup out in the sink, went back into the family room, and got back online. In her space she saw that there had been another move in the chess notation window. BxN…bishop takes knight, she thought. Yes, he’s in the mood for shin-kicking too, now. Well, it’ll have to wait a little while.
Catie reached down to the floor beside her Comfy Chair and came up with the “key” again. “Space?” she said.
“You mean the authorities haven’t come for you yet?”
Catie laughed. I’m going to have to have a look at the management code myself, she thought, and see exactly how Mark programmed in all these rude responses. “No,” she said, “though the recycling people may be coming for you shortly. I’m sure you’ll make somebody a terrific boat anchor. Meanwhile, just open my gateway to the server again.”
The doorway appeared before her, outlined in light in the middle of the Great Hall. “Do you want your calls forwarded?” her space manager said.
“No, just flag me as unavailable unless it’s my mom or dad or Mark.”
Catie slipped through the doorway to stand once more on that wide, dark virtual plain, and paused there, letting her mind rest for a moment in the lines running to infinity in all directions, taking a moment to work out what she should do. She was still nervous, but as far as she could tell there was no one in here. This was another of the times that Mark had denoted as an “empty” period, and well out of hours for the server’s staff, who after all out were on the West Coast somewhere. A little early for them to be up, Catie thought. Then again, it’s early for me to be up. So let’s get on with this….
“Server management,” she said. “Unlock the imagery from my previous visit.”
“Voiceprint ID confirmed,” said the server. “Representing structural model.”
It appeared before her as it had the last time, that same massive structure of lines and curves and sections of geometric solids, all piled up in a single towering construct and here and there spilling over in what looked to her like disorganized heaps: a haystack in which the needle she was searching for might or might not be hidden.
“What a mess,” Catie said softly.
Nothing’s as complicated as it looks at first glance, she heard her father saying, some time back, while they had been working on her geometry together. Give it a moment, stand back, take it apart a piece at a time, and don’t go to your fears for advice while you work. Use your brains. You’ve got plenty.
And when brains run out, she heard her mother remark from somewhere nearby, you can always fall back on stubborn. Sometimes it works nearly as well.
Catie wasn’t sure what there was left for her to “take apart”…at least, that she understood. Still, there were a couple of things she hadn’t looked over in regard to the imagery—specifically the “insertions,” the place where imaging instructions and calls interfaced with the actual structure of the server program. If you were going to tamper…that would be a good place to do it.
Not that the Net Force people wouldn’t have thought of that, too…. Still, the stubborn was beginning to kickin, and Catie sighed and got on with it.
An hour or so later she was standing in the “air” about halfway up the structure of the program, and even in virtuality her eyes were beginning to get tired from tracing one connection after another, picking it up, looking to see how it interfaced with the next one along in the “chain.” Each time she picked up one of the shining ropes that symbolized a command instruction, she had to pinch it in the place that would reveal its content, and then the actual text of the command would reveal itself in a text window nearby, and she would have to read it carefully, parsing it to see if it made sense in conjunction with the commands immediately preceding it or following it in the chain. The syntaxes