“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“And my mom told me once that she was related to Grainne O’Malley….”
Who? But Catie refused to ask him if this relationship was a good thing. Once you got Mark started on some subjects, there was no stopping him.
“I’d prefer not to break in anywhere we’re not wanted,” Catie said. “Life is complicated enough at the moment. But I also need to talk to you about some structural issues.”
“That’s what Winters said,” said Mark. “So, shoot.”
“Well, first, the spatball servers. ‘Sealed’ how, exactly?”
“Triple-redundancy controls on access to the code,” Mark said. “And safe-deposit type security on the physical servers themselves — three-key access, with the highest officials in the organization holding the keys. It’s sort of like the way they used to handle missile launches last century. However,” Mark said, and smiled a completely unnerving smile, “any security that human beings devise, human beings can defeat. With time, and care, and enough brains.”
“Fishing for compliments, Mark?”
He didn’t deign to answer that. “As regards the ISF servers, though,” Mark said, “I can save you some time and worry. Net Force has already been through those with a fine-tooth comb.”
“Meaning you, I take it.”
“I went along for the ride,” Mark said. “Nothing showed up.”
“Did the software people who normally maintain the code know that you were coming?”
“No. Well, yes,” Mark said after a moment. “Upper management knew, since we were doing a physical-equipment assessment as well. In fact, the ISF asked us to come in as soon as Net Force contacted them.”
“Then we can assume that ‘lower’ management knew about the inspection, too,” Catie said. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Seems likely enough. Assuming ‘worst case,’ anyway.”
“I think you may as well assume it. I suspect your dad would have, anyway.” Catie thought for a moment. “Okay…so they’ll have had time to hide things from you, if anybody on the ‘inside’ wanted to…. Even though you’ve already been in there, I’d like a quick look around in that server. Can you finesse it?”
Mark looked at her for a few moments, a very speculative expression. “Catie, I’m not sure this is strictly the kind of help James Winters had in mind when he brought you on board.”
Catie swallowed. “I can’t help that,” she said. “There are things I need to look at before I can figure out what questions to ask George Brickner. It’s no use wasting his time and mine running down one blind alley after another. And anyway, if I don’t understand the inside of the server technology well enough to know what to listen for, I’m going to be wasting my own time, too…not to mention that I won’t be able to help your friends at Net Force in what they’re trying to achieve.”
Mark thought about that for a moment. Then his face cleared. “All right,” he said. “I know you can be trusted. And there’s no time like the present. Come on!”
He jumped up and led Catie off to one side, away from the fallen pillars. “Yo, cousin,” Mark said to his workspace management program.
“Working.”
“Access doorway. Crapshoot.”
“Opening access now, and logging.” A blue outline appeared in the empty “vacuum” before them, and filled itself with darkness.
“Logging to my storage only,” Mark said hastily.
“Logging limited,” his workspace management program said, and the blackness in the doorway shimmered. A different quality of darkness, with a vague bloom of light in the background, was all that Catie could see through it at the moment.
“That’s so my dad won’t find out about this immediately,” Mark said. “But, Catie, he’s going to have to know sooner or later. So don’t do anything that’s going to make Net Force look stupid later on.”
“As if I would,” Catie said.
“I know. But I have to say it anyway.” The look he gave her was surprisingly fierce, and it amused Catie a little to find that he was so territorial…and pleased her as well. She knew some of the older Net Force Explorers who were friends with him had an idea that Mark might be slightly uncontrollable, even unprincipled, but plainly there were things that mattered to him…and for Catie, this was a source of some relief.
They stepped through together. Inside the doorway was a wide dark plane, all ruled with green parallel lines crossing one another and stretching to infinity in all directions: a naked Cartesian grid, unfeatured, like a space that hadn’t even been configured yet, and with only two dimensions detailed.
“This is kind of minimalist, isn’t it?” Catie said, looking around.
Mark nodded. “The ISF’s senior programmers seem to like it that way. No obvious cues.”
“I’ll say,” Catie said.
“However,” Mark said, “I am not one of their senior programmers. I prefer my programming a little more objectified. And between you and me, so do their more junior programmers…as you’ll see.”
He reached into the darkness, and then in one gesture flipped a panel of the empty air up as if it were a little door. Under the panel, hidden in the same way that a car’s gas cap might be hidden under the fueling flap, was a square of light, and in the square, Catie saw a big obvious keyhole.
“No use in having a back-door key,” he said, “if you can’t use it occasionally.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out an unusually large key, apparently made of some metal that was green in the same way gold was gold-colored. Mark pushed the key into the keyhole, and turned.
The whole Cartesian “landscape” shimmered, wavered…and vanished. For a moment the two of them stood alone in total darkness. Then slowly starlight began to fade in around them, and from off to one side, a great bloom of cool blue light became apparent.
Catie looked that way and took a deep, sharp breath. Under them, in darkness, the Earth was turning. They were standing in emptiness about five thousand miles out, on the “dark side” at the moment. The spatters of light that were the great cities of the North American continent were glowing beneath them. In the Pacific they could see another faint glow of light, silvery and diffuse, and Catie looked over her shoulder to see the full moon looking down at its own reflection, setting, as away over at the other side of the world, another light grew.
Slowly the sun began to climb in growing glory through the atmosphere, the light of it burning red at first as it shone through the air’s greatest thickness, then burning paler, orange, golden, white, and then utterly blinding as it came up over the terminator, and the fire and light of day swept across the Atlantic toward New York.
“Catie?”
“Yeah?” she said, not much wanting to be distracted from this gorgeous view. Whether it was based on real-time imaging or was someone’s reconstruction, it was beautiful.
“Catie!”
“Yeah, what?”
“Duck!”
She looked at Mark and wondered what his problem was…then, at the very edge of her peripheral vision, caught something, another bloom of light from behind them, the wrong direction. Something was falling at her, fast. Out of reflex, she ducked, turning—
Blazing in the new sun, silent as a feather falling through air, it came plunging at them seemingly right above their heads, immense, unstoppable, massive, but still graceful in its motion: a space station, a nonexistent one — for no one had ever actually built a space station along the “traditional” lines that were first mooted in the middle of the last century, a wagon wheel with spars out-reaching from a central hub. The silvery-white-skinned bulk of it passed so close over their heads that it seemed impossible to Catie that it wouldn’t stir up wind and ruffle their hair. But they were in “vacuum,” and there was no wind, and no sound, just the vast mass of the station passing over, passing by, gone — silhouetted now against the steady, unbearable fire of the sun, and receding from them as it plunged on past at thousands of miles per hour, rotating gracefully around its hub as it went.