Death Match - Diane Duane [68]
Wow, she thought. I’ve got to get it back! How can I get it back? Everything was clear, there, just for a moment—
Catie swept the key through the space in front of her, like a swordsman saluting an opponent, and reduced the huge structure before her to a gigantic tangle of bare code. Mark had been right. Objectifying the code just obscured the issue, concealing the instructions themselves. She needed to deal with them all at the component level.
Dad was right, she thought, in a different paradigm. It is all just electrons. But if you understand the most basic building blocks of your medium, it doesn’t matter whether you’re working with “wet” ones or “dry” ones, or how many of them are strung together, or on what kind of framework—
The code structure of the sealed server’s operating programs stood before her now simply as text, hundreds and thousands and millions of lines of it. There was a temptation to panic at the sight of it all, but Catie restrained herself. The nature of programming being what it was, not all these instructions could possibly be unique. A lot of them would be copies of one another. Many of them would also be calling routines from outside the program itself, complex variables or constants that were defined in the Caldera language itself and lived on the master Caldera servers. Given the connectivity of the Net and the hundred-layer redundancy cushion that a “fundamental language” source like Caldera would maintain as part of its server infrastructure, there was no need for an end-user like the ISF ever to worry that Caldera’s reference-variable resources would go down, and therefore there would be no need to waste space by keeping those variables and constants in ISF server space.
“Verbal input,” she said to the ISF server manager.
“Accepted,” said a woman’s voice, dulcet and calm.
“Fade down all nonunique instructions,” Catie said. “Highlight unique instructions, image calls, variable and constant calls to outside servers, and comments.”
The structure shimmered like a cityscape with cloud sweeping over it, parts of it going vague, others burning bright in various colors. The unique instructions Catie ignored for the moment. She wanted first to look at the simple things again, the image calls and variables. There were fewer of them, and once she’d gone over them and gotten rid of them all, she could get on with examining the unique code and trying to understand it. Which is going to take me until after the play-offs, probably…
But for the moment Catie put that self-defeating thought away and made herself busy with the image calls nearest her. One by one she started checking the instructions again, referring them back to the images they called. The syntax was straightforward enough—a “connect” command, the identifier for the command to which it interfaced, a “call” command, the name of an image file, the size of the file, a specification for the size of its “display” as related to the frame of reference of the person experiencing it virtually, and a list of other files which would display “adjacent” to the file in question, changing as the one in this particular command line changed. Slowly, in flickers, unpredictably but in fits and starts that got more frequent the longer she did it, the “whole vision” of each command strand began to reassert itself. She was seeing them as single constructs, whole commands, not needing to spell them out laboriously, piece by piece. It was like the difference between reading one word at a time and taking a sentence as a whole. Catie started to speed up, pushing herself faster. It’s working. It’s actually working—
She finished going over the image calls in that region of the program in a fairly short time, and then stood there looking down from her height at all