Death Match - Diane Duane [83]
Catie was out of practice in microgravity, but all the same she found a patch of daylight in one particular mob, and worked her way through it. There was George, still in possession of his jersey.
Catie threw her arms around him and hugged him hard.
He held her away, and grinned at her. It was not an expression of perfect joy by any means. There was pain there. But there was also profound satisfaction…and a touch of mischief.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew!”
“Gotcha,” said George.
Catie began to pummel him as unmercifully as if he’d been her brother. But it didn’t last. His teammates and their families and other hangers-on seized George and propelled him toward the suddenly open side of the spat volume, chanting “Parrot! Parrot! Parrot!”—making for the locker room in triumph, as if South Florida had won.
But then, Catie thought, as she went along with them, in every way that counts most it has…
Much later, in the locker room, when all possible interviews had been given, and everybody from the media had been evicted, well soaked with virtual champagne, and when the space had been sealed and the outer shell of the virtual environment encrypted, they came face-to-face again.
“You knew,” Catie said again.
“Of course I knew,” George said. “But I couldn’t tell you.”
“There wasn’t time,” Mark Gridley said, appearing from one side, “and my dad made him agree not to tell. I wanted to tell you, but my dad—”
“Threatened his life,” said a voice that Catie didn’t recognize. “Occasionally it has an effect.”
Catie turned around and saw a handsome man of Thai ancestry, in casual clothes: a man with an unsurprising resemblance to Mark. Jay Gridley, the director of Net Force, came over to George Brickner and stuck his hand out. “That was one hell of a game,” he said.
“Thanks,” George said, and shook Gridley’s hand. “Champagne?”
“Inside, not outside, please. Not that it takes more than an eyeblink’s time to change clothes on the virtual side of things, but I have a lot of work left to do tonight, and once I’ve been drenched in any kind of champagne, real or unreal, it seems to remove my administrative edge.”
Someone found Jay a glass. He lifted it in an informal toast to George and his team, and drank.
Catie, meanwhile, had turned to Mark. “If you don’t tell me what you guys did,” Catie said, “I’m going to do a lot more more than threaten your life.”
“The players’ own machines were the easy part,” Mark said. “Net Force teams got at them all quietly over the past few days and put in ‘transparent’ routers to other Net boxes, circumventing the local sabotage. But there was still the ISF server to deal with. Since time was so limited, the best course of action seemed to be to set up another spat server, a substitute, using the ISF’s own licensed software. Then we completely duplicated the tampered ISF server to it. After that, we debugged the code in the original server. We were up all night.” Not that there was any way to tell this by looking at Mark. He was flushed with triumph, a triumph that had a wicked edge to it. “We finished about two and a half hours ago. But there was still more to do, then. The ISF had convened its server certification people in secret. They came in and checked the duplicate server over, and certified it. Finished up twenty minutes before the game, while the pregame show was still running.”
“Geez,” Catie said. “But how did they—? The certification procedures—I thought you had to—”
“Check every line of code by human oversight? No machines? Yeah. It was close. There was not a single Net Force geek who slept last night, anywhere on the planet.” Mark grinned. “There are a lot of spatball fans on the Force….”
Catie considered all this. “So the bad guys, the people who had installed the false variables in the usual server…”
“…Thought they were operating on the usual server, where gameplay was