Death Match - Diane Duane [69]
Catie breathed out, feeling a kind of satisfaction even though she hadn’t found anything really useful.
But, still…
Then, there alone in the darkness, she grinned. It wouldn’t hurt to spend just a little more time, just to make sure the new perception wasn’t a fluke.
“Down one,” Catie said to Tom Clancy’s Net Force Death Match pseudo-surface she was standing on. It obediently sank down a layer.
Catie grabbed another line of text, another image insertion call, she thought—then realized she had the wrong color of text: this one was a physical management command, one that handled the way people moved in this space. And a moment later, to her delight, she “got it” whole, without any real trouble—command, argument, force specifier, vector specifier, constant of mass, gravitational constant, constant of local light-speed in this medium, atmospheric density. Catie cracked the string of text like a whip, so that it burned briefly bright and dropped down all the additional notations and values for the constants, and she ran them through her fingers, pleased. She’d read this line as easily as the image calls, with all its dangling strings of digits and repeating decimals—
Catie paused for a moment, gazing down at one of the strands of digits hanging down from her hand from a glowing capital G, slightly larger than the other letters in that strand: the symbol for the gravitational constant. Below it the digits swung and dangled like a glowing chain: 6.6734539023956342…e-111, with the units signature “N m2/kg2” hanging there, like a charm, at the end.
…Now what the heck’s the matter with this? For it didn’t look right somehow. She had had occasion to use the gravitational constant once or twice when building the Appian Way scenario, because otherwise you couldn’t walk through it correctly…and even the birds that flew through the scene wouldn’t fly correctly until G was correctly in place. The fleeting thought of the former “George the Parrot” and his Gracie, and their chicks, made Catie smile a little at this connection, for she’d looked up the videos George had mentioned, and had seen the initial problems the birds had had in microgravity.
But Catie looked at that long decimal value of G now and couldn’t understand the difference between the way it looked at the moment and the way it had appeared when she installed G into her simulation of ancient Rome, plugging it in via a live link from the “best current value” reference kept on the Public Ephemerides server that was jointly managed by the National Bureau of Standards and the Naval Observatory. She’d noticed a particular pattern to the fraction, a patch where the digits 3 and 9 repeated,…393939, three times, and the peculiarity of the pattern had amused her. But now it went…39023956. And there was an extra digit at the end of it. What’s that, an exponent or something? But what would it be doing there? Anyway, the digit was below the main line of figures, not above it. A footnote? Since when do constants have footnotes?
“Where is this constant plugged in from?” Catie said.
“The constant is sourced locally,” said the ISF server management program. “No remote link.”
That’s weird. Why go to the trouble to store it in this server when reference sources outside have the “freshest” version of the value? “What does that digit refer to?” Catie said, putting her finger on it, so that it glowed.
“Subsidiary instruction call,” said the ISF server management program.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Catie said.
“Subscript digits are an optional command syntax expression in Caldera,” said the server manager. “This is a ‘legacy’ expression common in earlier versions of the language and now routinely replaced in current command