“Nope, nothing new to exhibit,” Catie said. “Except for a new interest. A slight one, anyway. Spatball.”
“Huh,” said Mark, glancing around. The space was beginning to fill up fast now, a couple of hundred kids having come in over the space of just the last few minutes. “The last refuge of the space cadet, one of my cousins calls it.”
“It might indeed be that,” Catie said. “I’m in the process of making up my mind. Meanwhile, Squirt, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
“Yeah?”
“My workspace management program is beginning to sass me.”
“Oh?”
Mark looked completely innocent. It was an expression which struck Catie as coming entirely too easily to him. “It’s getting positively sarcastic lately,” she said. “This wouldn’t be anything of your doing, would it? Some little bug you slipped in?”
“There are no bugs,” Mark said virtuously, “only features.”
“Yeah, well, this ‘feature’ has you written all over it.”
He acquired a very small smile. “Just a little heuresis, Cates. It only does what it sees you doing. So if it’s getting sarcastic—”
She took a swipe at him, and missed, mostly on purpose. At the same time, Catie had to grin a little. “So the computer’s chips are turning into chips off the old block, huh. Cute. One of these days you’re going to do something too cute to allow you to live any longer, Squirt.”
He gave her a look that suggested he didn’t think this was all that likely. The problem was, Catie thought, that he was probably right. Assuming that he survived through his teens — for Mark’s “scrapes” were many and varied, so that Catie thought it was probably miraculous that his parents hadn’t simply killed him by now — the talent that got him into the scrapes would eventually take him far. For all his tender years, Mark was a native Net programmer of great skill, one of those people who seem to be born with a logic solid in their mouths and are better at programming languages than spoken ones. There was very little that Mark couldn’t make a computer do, and the more complex the computer was, the more likely Mark was to deliver the results. But he would also find a way to enjoy himself in the meantime…and his enjoyment could occasionally also mean your annoyance, if you let him get away with it.
Catie gave him a look. “If the management system starts interfering with my space’s functioning,” she said, “I’m going to debug the software with an ax…and then hunt you down and take the lost time out of your hide. Meantime, what’s on the agenda tonight? I didn’t have time to look at it before I came in.”
“Something about a virtual field trip to the new Cray-Nixdorf-Siemens ‘server farm’ complex in Dusseldorf,” Mark said. “They’re going to run a lottery to allow some of us in there to have a look at the firmware. Like the new Thunderbolt warm-superconductor storage system.” He had a slightly hungry gleam in his eye.
Catie nodded. “Sounds like it’s right up your alley. Why should you need to enter a lottery, though? Can’t your dad get you in?”
“Not really,” Mark said, sounding disappointed. “The offer has all the usual ‘not for industry associates and their families’ disclaimer all over it. Besides, I’ve been busy….”
He trailed off a little too soon. Catie was about to ask him what was really going on when she was interrupted by a banging noise coming from the center of the room. All around her, people were making themselves chairs or lounges to sit on, and in the middle of things there had appeared, off to one side, what appeared to be an Olympic-sized swimming pool. A moment later there also appeared, under the Net Force logo, something that could have been mistaken for the great mahogany half-hexagonal bench in the court chamber of the Supreme Court…except that the center position was occupied solely by a young slim redheaded guy in process blue slikshorts and a LightCrawl T-shirt that presently had the message I’M IN CHARGE HERE, HONEST inching its way around his chest cavity in flashing red block capitals.
“Can everyone hold it down?” he was yelling. “We have to get started….”
Catie glanced up. “Who’s that?”
“Chair for the meeting, I guess,” Mark said.
“I knew that. I meant, ‘Do you know him?’”
“Uh, no. Hey, Gwyn…”
“Hey,” said one of the other kids presently beginning to drift over to where Mark was standing. Catie looked them over thoughtfully, for people that Mark didn’t mind hanging around him tended to be worth knowing. Either he found them intelligent, or they were sufficiently capable of getting far enough past his extreme impulsiveness and mischievousness to notice that he was intelligent. Either of these were characteristics that Catie thought were likely to be useful at some point. What was also moderately interesting was that the kids gathering around Mark all looked significantly older than he…more Catie’s age, in the seventeen-or eighteen-year-old area. Plainly they weren’t concerned about the age difference when the younger kid was as smart as Mark. Or has his connections, Catie thought. Networking is everything….
“Okay,” said the kid who had been banging on the mahogany bench, “we have some announcements first—”
“Who are you?” came the predictable yell from the floor, a ragged, amused chorus of about thirty voices. It always seemed to happen, no matter how many times they all met, to the point where it was now approaching tradition: a speaker would be shocked out of composure by the sight of all those faces and forget to introduce himself.
“Oh. Sorry. I’m Neil Linkoping. As I was saying—”
“Hi, Neil,” came the cheerfully mocking reply from the floor, about a hundred of them this time. Neil grinned and said, “Hi, crowd. Now, as I was saying…we have some announcements first….”
Groans and shouts of “Not again!” ensued. These were traditional, too, because there were always announcements. They were about the only thing that could be counted on to happen at every meeting. Neil wisely ignored the noise from the floor and started to read from a transparent window that popped into existence in the air in front of him. Catie could see the text content, in glowing letters, scrolling down through it. Near where Mark was sitting in what appeared to be an Eames chair of venerable lineage, Catie now made herself a copy of her workspace chair, itself a copy of the very beat-up Tattersall-checked “comfy chair” in the corner of her bedroom, and curled up in it to watch the proceedings unfold.
They did so with many halts, pauses, and interruptions — some genial, some adolescently crass, and some simply constituting demands for more information about one topic or another. Neil slogged his way through them, methodically enough, but with good humor, like someone used to interruptions from some other group, possibly a large family. This was the way things normally went at the regional meetings Catie had attended — a progression of events always verging cheerfully on chaos, but never quite tipping over the edge. After the announcements members might take the floor to talk about a Net seminar they were organizing, or something that had come up in a gaming or simming group, or some other issue that they thought would be of interest to the gathered Net Force Explorers as a whole. People popped in and out all during the meeting to suit their own schedules, though there was a long-agreed consensus that they should keep quiet as they did it. No appearing suddenly in bursts of virtual flame or other distracting manifestations. This rule was occasionally broken, but since breaking it infallibly caused the person who’d created the distraction to be chucked into the virtual “pool” and hence out of the meeting, with no chance of return, people tended not to do it more than once. However, even with all the noise, joking, and chaos, there was always an undercurrent of seriousness at these get-togethers. Everyone at them, or nearly everyone, intended to try to get into Net Force eventually, and the intensity of their intention as a group tended to shake out those who weren’t serious in pretty short order.