Then the smile flashed out fully. “And between you and me,” James Winters said, “we can always use people who are followed around by plain dumb luck. There’s never enough of that to go around…though by itself, it’s fairly useless. Even the best bullet needs a gun barrel around it.”
Catie nodded.
“Time to get to work,” Winters said. “With any kind of luck, someone’s knocking on Karen de Beer’s door right now, and some of my people are going to be wanting to talk to me shortly.”
“Oh, no…!” Catie said.
“It’s all right,” Winters said. “She won’t be home. What, did you think we were going to sit around and allow her to be intimidated? That the guy shows up is going to be enough for us to act on. George Brickner will certainly testify, later, that he knew about it beforehand. Meanwhile I have other things to do. That server is going to have to be debugged so that the play-offs can go ahead, while still preserving the contaminated version of the code. We’ve got our work cut out for us, and not a lot of time to get everything done. If in fact it can be done in time at all. Frankly, I have my doubts.”
He looked at Catie keenly. “But a question for you before I go. Identify the famous graphic artist responsible for this quote: ‘There is hope in honest error…none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.’”
“Uh,” Catie said, and then closed her mouth again, becoming suddenly aware that this was not intended merely as a quote.
Winters held up his index finger. “One honest error,” he said. “All my people know I’ll allow them that much. Twice, and you get really yelled at. Make a note.”
“Noted,” Catie said, in a somewhat strangled voice.
“Thanks, Catie,” James Winters said, turned, went hurriedly through the door that opened for him in the middle of the Great Hall, and vanished.
Catie got out of her space, and out of virtuality, and let Hal have the machine without even arguing about it, and went on down to her room and just sat there for a while, with the door shut, feeling terrible. I can’t believe how completely I’ve screwed everything up! Yet as a little time passed, and she started to recover from the shock of what had just happened, Catie was forced to admit to herself that the screw up hadn’t been total. Winters had actually been slightly pleased with her…which, frankly, was a better outcome than she had hoped for. It wasn’t that the bouquet he’d handed her hadn’t mostly been thorns, but they were ones that she deserved, and the two or three rather shredded blossoms concealed among them were, Catie supposed, worth it in the end.
She came out of hiding after three-quarters of an hour or so, to find her brother still using the Net machine in the family room. Catie knew she was going to have to talk to George Brickner shortly, but she wasn’t in any hurry about it. She wanted to make sure her composure was back in place. She rooted around in the fridge briefly, came up with a couple of chicken breasts, and made herself a fast meal that was a favorite of her mother’s: the chicken breasts sauteed with butter and a chopped-up onion, and the whole business “deglazed” with balsamic vinegar. In the middle of her cooking, Hal came out of the family room looking slightly glazed himself.
“You seen the news lately?” he said.
Catie shook her head. “I’ve been busy.”
“You’d better go have a look at it.”
“Huh? Why?”
“The sports news. Take my word for it.”
“What?”
Hal just shook his head. “I’ll watch this for you. Go take a look.”
She blinked at that, for it was usually hard to stop Hal from giving you a nearly word-by-word narration of whatever news he’d heard recently, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Catie handed Hal the spatula with which she had been stirring the sauce around while it boiled down, and went in to sit down in the implant chair again.
Once into the Great Hall, she said, “Space?”
“I told him everything,” her workspace manager said. “If you leave now, you may still have time to get out of the country before they seal the borders.”
“Thanks loads. CNNSI, please. Sports headlines, rolling. Latest.”
A moment later the effusive young guy with the wild hairstyle who was doing afternoon and evening news on CNNSI lately was standing behind a desk in front of Catie. “—In an unusual move apparently made for operational reasons, the International Spatball Federation has changed its scheduling for this year’s spatball play-offs.” Behind the anchor, the “background” showed an impressive-looking lineup of implant chairs and very high-end Net boxes and terminals. “The management of Manchester United High announced today that software trouble at their newly installed, multimillion-pound Professional Play Center at Anfield has made it impossible for them to meet the originally scheduled play date of this Thursday. Since the ISF was informed within the mandated twelve-hour emergency notification limit, the team will not forfeit its match with the Chicago Fire. That match has been rescheduled to Saturday, and the Saturday match between the South Florida Spat Association and Xamax Zurich has been moved to Thursday evening by agreement with those two teams.”
“Oh, no,” Catie said softly. They’ll never be ready in time.
Worse. The server will never be debugged in time!
The game is going to have to go ahead…and the people who wanted to ruin the Banana Slugs’ chances to win are going to do just that—
She came back to herself to hear the sportscaster saying, “—this is the third major software failure in two months to assail the new installation at Anfield, which has been dogged from inception to installation by cost overruns and then by hardware glitches, as well as by problems with the new MaximumVolume software and operating system which was developed for Manchester. The first two failures of the system, late in the ‘scheduled’ season, caused one forfeit and one loss due to the failure of center forward Alan Bellingham’s custom player suite during the third half of United’s crucial preplay-off game with Tokyo Juuban and Ottawa. Manchester United shareholders have once again called for an independent inquiry into the team’s dealings with sports-simming software giant Camond, the president of the shareholders’ association once again asserting that—”
Catie sat there in unbelieving dismay, her dinner forgotten. “Space…”
“I was only following orders.”
“Yeah, right. Is George Brickner available?”
“Trying his space for you now.”
There was a brief pause. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Catie.”
“Oh.” Another pause. “Just a minute.”
It was more like a couple of minutes. She waited. When he walked into her space, George took one look at the shocked expression on her face, and paused, and then he just nodded. “You heard.”
“Yeah.”
He sat down in the chair which had been left there for James Winters. She plopped down in the Comfy Chair, but for once it brought her little comfort. “You talked to James Winters….”
“Among various other people,” George said, rubbing his face, “yes.” He looked very tired.
Catie knew how he felt, all of a sudden. “George, why did you do it?”
“Agree to change the schedule, you mean? Because the ISF asked us to. And we didn’t have a good reason to say no.”
“But you did! If you—”
“Catie,” George said, “if we refused to allow the change in schedule — and it was a perfectly reasonable request on the ISF’s part — you know what would happen. People would have started asking questions. Why were we so reluctant? What was going on? And soon enough, someone would have found out. Or else one of the people involved with what was done to the ISF spat-volume server would have started to suspect something…and they would all have folded their little operation up and gone into hiding. After all this trouble, nothing would be solved.”