He headed for his car. If he could get home without being pulled over by a state trooper, he’d be fine. And he was gonna drive real careful. . . .
Graham Land, the Weddell Sea
Antarctica
High over the ice, Jay Gridley considered the geekiness of programmers. He’d long known that while people in most professions tended to enjoy in-jokes, programmers in general tended to take it to the extreme.
Like this VR, for instance. It wasn’t his, but somebody had put a lot of thought into it. A lot of silly thought . . .
Down below, thousands of Adelie penguins waddled about, moving little chunks of ice from a huge white pyramid in the middle of their rookery. Adelie penguins were the ones most associated with the classic “tuxedo” look—black and white with the white ring around their eyes.
What Jay was really doing was looking at a huge records database at MIT. He’d come to see if he could check the data logs from the Troy game. Those records had naturally been stored and archived—put “on ice,” so to speak.
Ice tended by penguins. Geek joke one.
Men dressed as arctic explorers stood in a huge queue in front of several desks, each one manned by an identical green-garbed figure with black question marks stenciled onto his fur costume. The explorers were actually information requests—from a variety of sources—and the green figures were the processors that directed searches via penguin to the ice cathedral.
The guys behind the desks were out of the old Batman TV show.
The Riddlers and the Penguins. Joke two.
But flacking the metaphor even further was that each of the portly penguins much resembled “Tux,” the famous penguin mascot of the Linux operating system.
Said mascot had been named not due to its appearance, but due to the fact that a man named Linus Torvald had written the key kernel of the OS—itself based on another operating system called Unix. The name for the penguin had apparently come from Torvald Unix. Which were in-jokes three, or four, depending on how you looked at things.
And the final self-referencing gag in this scenario—at least the last one that Jay saw—was that the VR scenario was actually being run on a cluster of Linux-based systems.
It was a little over the top, but he understood it. If you can’t have fun, why bother?
In his current guise, Jay was a Skua gull, one of the natural predators of Adelie penguins, the eggs and young ones anyhow. He flapped his wings and soared slightly higher, watching the queue below.
He didn’t much care for nonhuman VR avatars, but this scenario required it. The security on the database was extensive. On the other hand, there were always weaknesses.
In this case, the programmer had wanted to keep the scenario realistic. It would have been more secure to restrict the VR avatars to just the penguins, riddlers, and requesters. But the programmer had been fixed on keeping the scenario more realistic, which meant a few Skua gulls flying overhead, leopard seals in the water, whales, the works.
Which had left Jay a way in.
So here we was, having dropped his request for information on the back of one of the explorers below—in the usual gull way. When said explorer reached the riddler desks, he’d include Jay’s request with his own.
My piggybacked request. If his gull avatar could have grinned, it would have. Instead he let out a craw.
Within the scenario the request wouldn’t be checked. But when the penguin brought the information back, it would be checked before being given back to the explorer.
So Jay had to grab it from the penguin before it got there.
He looked again. His explorer was at the request desk.
The man made the request, and Jay watched as the riddler handed a slip of colored paper to a nearby penguin attendant. The penguin walked away from the desk and toward the giant ice pyramid.
Jay glided along, letting out gull cries as seemed appropriate.
The penguin made its way to one of the pyramid entrances and disappeared inside. Now all Jay had to do was wait for the penguin to come back.
There were thousands of penguins here, and they all looked alike. How was he going to know when his came back out?
The request paper. The VR resolution was sharp enough that he could see the coded order number.
Penguins waddled back and forth, in and out of the pyramid, through the entrance, which was about halfway up. The steps up the side were incredibly shallow, made for the tiny strides the penguins took, which meant the pyramid was much wider than it was tall.
Jay took his time, soaring up and down the walkway, tracking each penguin that came out, dialing his vision in to check the order numbers.
There.
There was his tuxedoed bird.
Skua gulls were the natural predators of Adelie penguins, but they tended to only attack young or old and sickly ones—healthy adults were not usually on the menu.
So while the sight of a diving gull might not stand out in the scenario, seeing one dive on a full-grown healthy penguin would probably set off some kind of alarm.
Then again, once he had his data he could drop out of the scenario. He just had to get it and boogie.
Jay dove.
Some avian sense warned the little waddler. It tilted its head to the side and saw him coming. The penguin leaped over the edge of the walkway and belly-first onto the icy pyramid, using its stomach like a sled.
Jay tightened his wings and increased his speed.
Almost there . . .
The penguin shot up a short incline and then was airborne.
What?
Penguins couldn’t fly—!
And this one didn’t either—it coasted briefly before falling and splashing into the water below.
Damn!
Jay dove into the water, morphing from Skua gull to leopard seal as he hit.
If the penguin had seemed fast on land when it was sledding, it was like a rocket now, little wings flipping out, propelling it like some kind of formal-wear torpedo.
Jay focused on his seal body.
They swam around submerged pieces of ice, through silvery schools of fish, faster and faster.
Jay realized that he wasn’t going to catch it.
Well, hell. How did leopard seals get by without starving?
Wait a second—something he’d read about cautious penguins—how they didn’t want to jump into the water and risk being eaten. But . . .
Jay slowed and let the penguin swim on ahead.
Most successful attacks happened when the penguins were least cautious—coming back onto land.
Jay circled back, went up for a fresh breath, then sank and hid behind a chunk of iceberg. He waited with a predator’s patience.
Thinking he had outrun his attacker, Tux eventually made a big loop and headed back to shore. Jay spotted him a couple minutes later—fortunately, the paper was waterproof, the number still visible. It was his, all right.
Jay waited until the penguin was almost to the ice before he made his move.
Compared to the earlier chase, it was easy. He pounced and grabbled the little bird with his seal teeth.
Gotcha, Opus!
Unfortunately, after all that, catching Tux didn’t do him any good. The bird turned out to be hollow—a simulacrum. Not a real data carrier, but a fake. It took Jay all of two seconds to determine that it wasn’t a penguin at all—it was a mouthful of red herring.