Death Match (2003)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 18 Clancy

  Catie nodded quietly for a moment. That kind of feeling was the reason she played soccer, and why she had stayed with the same team of kids from Bradford Academy and the general D.C. area, even when she had opportunity to move to a better team. Sportsmanship, and companionship, expressed through the sport itself and the aftermath, mattered. She raised her eyebrows, then. "Somehow," Catie said, "I don't think that aspect of it is something you've said a whole lot about to the media lately."

  "I tried once or twice," said George. "One guy asked me who wrote my speech. Another of the interviewers wanted to know, was I thinking about running for office?" The flicker in George's eyes this time was not a happy one. "I don't talk that way to reporters anymore. Competitiveness, ruthless competitiveness, that they understand. But joy...?" He trailed off, shaking his head.

  Catie made a wry face. "Trying to teach a pig to read," she said, "wastes your time, and only annoys the pig."

  George burst out laughing, and Mike and Hal both looked at him.

  "What was that punch line again?" Mike said. "I missed it."

  "Nothing," George and Catie said, more or less in unison.

  Catie was immensely relieved when Wendy arrived to ask who wanted dessert. Hal, as always, was game. Catie often wondered where he put all the calories he ingested in a day, and how he always failed to show any sign of them afterward. For herself, she passed, content to finish her soda, and George and Mike asked for coffee.

  "What time's the press conference?" said Mike, making the writing-on-a-notepad gesture to Wendy when she came with their coffees.

  "Two-thirty," George said. "We'll all stand around in the lobby of their headquarters, trying to look like we really want to be there. They'll have 'real' jerseys there for us to wear, to illustrate what the virtual ones are going to look like." He gave Catie an amused look. "Whether they'll fit anything like as well as the virtual ones is another question. And then there'll be another grilling from the media people, under those hot lights...and then we'll have to go virtual and do it again. A couple of hours' worth of interviews, at least, when we should all be in the cubic, practicing. And then back on the plane and home again...."

  "But can't you just play the game from up here?" Hal said, surprised. "The sponsor must have Net facilities you can use!"

  "They probably have a lot better ones than anything the team has," George said, nabbing the bill from the newly returned Wendy before anyone else had a chance at it, "but I don't care about that, and neither does the team. When we're playing, we all prefer our own Net setups at home. It takes valuable time to get used to someone else's rig, and you never feel quite comfortable...and what happens if something goes wrong with it in mid-game? If your own Net machine malfunctions, that's one thing, and maybe you'll know what to do about it. Get up and kick it, or jiggle the phone cable, or whatever. But play a tournament-level game in a strange building, using a strange new machine? No, thanks. I'll admit the extra travel time is a nuisance, but if it gets us home before midnight, that's going to be good enough for me and the rest of the team. We'll manage."

  Catie thought she could see his point. George fished around in his pockets and came up with an ElectroWallet card, handed it to Wendy. "Please take ten," he said, and she went away smiling even harder than she had been, which Catie would have thought impossible.

  George looked over at Hal. "So have you got your 'seats' sorted out for the game tomorrow?" he said.

  "Yup...took care of it yesterday."

  "Not a bad idea," George said. "The reservations computers have been having trouble with last-minute bookings, the last game or so, they tell me. But do you want to swap your seats for positions in friends-and-family space, down close to the heart of things? We've got room."

  Hal was delighted. "Can we really?"

  George glanced at Catie. "No problem. Suit you?"

  "Suits me fine," she said. "I always like a close look at a winning team."

  "Then it's settled. When you're online this evening, check the team server and give it your seat locations. It'll make the swap. Look, I'm sorry we have to go, but the new sponsor would get pretty cranky if the captain was late for the big press push. And if I know these guys, they're going to want some time privately with us before the public part of the proceedings." George got up.

  They all headed for the door, where George was handed his ElectroWallet by Wendy. There was a little crowd of the diner staff all waiting there with her by the door to shake George's hand, and as they went out to the street, Hal muttered to Catie, "We ought to come back here later in the week and see if the service is still this good."

  She smiled slightly as Mike said his good-byes and headed for his car. He would be driving George to the press conference.

  "Listen," said George, shaking Hal's hand, "it's been good meeting you." To Catie, as he shook her hand, he said, "I really enjoyed this. Stay in touch."

  "Sure." She smiled politely enough, while at the same time thinking, I bet you say that to all the--

  "I mean it," George said, and once more there was something about the way he said it that brought Catie up short. It was not exactly urgency in his voice--but at the same time, she couldn't get a handle on just what it was.

  "Look, wait a second," George was saying. He fumbled around in his pocket and came up with a business card, one of the kind with a Net-readable chip embedded in it: you dropped it onto your Net machine's reading pad, if your machine had one, and it read the embedded address automatically. Or you could always simply read it into your machine off the card.

  "Here's my Net address," George said. "It's always nice to run into someone who likes the sport for itself, and isn't blinded by the surrounding hype. If you have time, I wouldn't mind chatting with you occasionally. Or alternately, having the occasional game of chess. I don't have time for tournament play, heck, I don't have time now for proper meals, most days...but move-by-move would be fun."

  Catie looked at his card, looked at him. "Sure," she said. "Any time."

  George waved a little salute at them and headed off toward Mike's car, got in. The two of them drove off. Catie and Hal walked in the other direction, toward the GWU tram station, and found the tram that would head toward home waiting there on layover. They climbed on, and Catie sat down, feeling strangely weary, and yet aware of something at the back of her mind that was poking her for attention, trying to find a way to explain itself and not yet succeeding.

  Hal, though, was shaking his head, looking astonished. "Am I completely out of my mind," he said as the tram started up, turning out of the layover loop and into traffic, "or was he making a dive at you?"

  Catie reached into her pocket, took out George's card again, glanced at it. "I don't think so," she said after a moment. "I think something else may be going on. He might just want someone to talk to who doesn't automatically see him as a spatball player, or a media figure..."

  "Or a serious hunk."

  "I don't know," Catie said.

  What she did know, though, was that as soon as she finished up whatever else her mom wanted her to take care of around the house, she was going to go have a talk with Mark Gridley.

  4

  Why, when you needed to talk to somebody, was it always so hard to find him? Mark was online so much of the time Catie sometimes wondered how he got enough sleep and sufficient calories for fuel. But when Catie got online that evening and sent a call to Mark's space, all she got was an image of Mark standing by himself, spotlit in the darkness, saying, "I'm either not online right now, or I can't talk...so leave me a message, okay?"

  And so she did. But the other thing she found, around noon on Sunday--for she got involved in a long debrief with some of her soccer buddies over the game they had played on Saturday afternoon, after the "celebrity lunch"--was in her workspace, in the middle of Catie's mock-up of the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, when she went in to tidy things up before going off to watch the South Florida-Chicago-Moscow Spartak game. It was a simple text me
ssage in a window, just hanging there and glowing in the early afternoon light, and it read:

  1

  P-K4

  -

  Catie just stood there, smiling slightly, when she saw it. Pawn to King Four. It was the first move of a chess game--the traditional first move, unless you were feeling iconoclastic. She regarded it for a moment. Hal's question came back to her: Is he taking a dive at you, or what?

  Catie didn't think so. It didn't feel that way, somehow. Granted, it tickled her a little that she was being paid the kind of attention by George Brickner that (if the People virtfeature was anything to go by) a significant portion of the girls her age on the continent wished he would pay to them. But at the same time she couldn't get rid of the feeling that something else was going on.

  I'm going to enjoy finding out what it is, she thought. But in the meantime...

  "Space," she said.

  "Have we been introduced?" said her workspace manager.

  Mark, Catie thought for about the thirtieth time that week, we are definitely going to have words about this. Yet at the same time, she had to admit that there was nothing wrong with the way her manager was functioning. Was it even responding a little faster, a little more flexibly, than it had done before Mark had worked on it? "Just a little heuresis," he had said. If he'd actually improved the way the machine handled input, making it act more intelligently, maybe the tradeoff in smart remarks was worth it, in the long run.

  "I sure hope we have, because I want to redecorate a little," Catie said.

  "About time," said her workspace in a fussy voice. "Dusting this place just eats up my days."

  Catie rolled her eyes. "Never mind that. I want a chess-board in the middle of the floor here."

  A regulation tournament-size chessboard with the standard Staunton pieces arrayed on it duly appeared at her feet.

  Catie looked up into the empty air of the Great Hall, toward the "place" where she routinely conceived of the workspace management program as "living." Did I say it was being more flexible? "That's not what I meant."

  "Then you should say what you mean, O Mighty Mistress."

  Well, precision was everything, in art and programming both. The miserable program had a point there, though she wasn't going to admit as much out loud.

  "Right," Catie said. "Overlay a mosaic representing a chessboard on the mosaics already here. Inset it into the existing floor. I don't want it sticking up over the present design. The size of the chessboard should be three meters by three meters. Make the squares brown and cream to match the colors of the marble in the pillars. And make me some giant pieces to go with it."

  The mosaic under her feet obediently wiped itself clean. The chessboard, worked in matching mosaic tiles and the colors she had specified, appeared beneath her feet. And then Catie was completely surrounded by chess pieces twenty feet tall, so that she couldn't stir to right or left, hemmed in as she was by chocolate-brown rooks and knights and bishops.

  "Not THAT giant!" she hollered.

  "You didn't say," the workspace manager replied calmly.

  "I'm going to trade you in for a pocket calculator with a liquid-crystal display," Catie said, "and then I'm going to reprogram that with a rock. Make the queen two feet high, and scale all the rest of the pieces accordingly, and hurry up!"

  "To hear is to obey, O Sovereign of the Age," said the management program. A blink later all the pieces were of a size to fit the chessboard on the floor.

  Catie went over to pick up the brown queen and a few other pieces.

  "Don't you want me to set them up for you?" the workspace manager said sweetly.

  "No. You just go dust something."

  There was quiet for the next few minutes while Catie set up the pieces, both white and brown. Then she moved white's pawn out four spaces in front of his king, and stepped off to one side to look at the board and decide how to respond. She could get flashy and try something like the Ruy Lopez opening, or she could just plod along in her own style, without trying to show off. Finally she decided on the second course of action. George would find out soon enough what Catie was made of without her having to drag any dead chess masters into it.

  "I want you to record the moves in the usual notation," Catie said as she picked up her own pawn and moved it out to K4, head-to-head with George's.

  The air over the board shimmered, and Catie found herself looking at a pattern of glowing footsteps hanging there, with various curves and arrows hanging between them.

  "Not dance notation, you idiot lump of silicon!" Catie yelled. "Chess notation!"

  The window in the air changed to show:

  1

  P-K4

  2

  P-K4

  "Thank you so much," Catie muttered. "Virtmail George that move, please, and alert me if I'm online when one comes in from him."

  "No problem. Do you want out-of-Net paging for moves?"

  "No, it's all right. Has Mark Gridley come back in yet?"

  "His system still has him flagged as unavailable."

  Great, Catie thought. Well...it can keep a day, I suppose. He was the one who was so urgent about wanting to hear about George Brickner. If he's not onsite when I've finally managed it, well, tough.

  But that felt so cold. She sat there wondering. "He said he might run into me at the play-offs," Catie mused. "Space, check the ISF server and find out if Mark has a seat booked for the game this afternoon."

  "That information is not available because of privacy issues," her workspace said.

  It wouldn't be, would it.... She sighed.

  At that point a huge voice came echoing into the Great Hall. "Catie!"

  She sighed again. "Hal," she said, "lose the visiting wizard act and tell me what you want."

  A large image of her brother's head appeared in the air, surrounded by billows of flame that swirled and brightened around him when he spoke. "I don't know, I kinda like it."

  "It'd look even better if you were bald," Catie said, "but I guess I have to wait a few decades for that. What is it, runt?"

  "Pregame show's starting."

  "Yeah, I know. I was going to experience it from the friends-and-family space."

  "Oh. Yeah, that's a thought, isn't it! Okay, let's--"

  "Not until you empty the dishwasher, young man," said another voice from the outside world, not sounding at all like an apparition from Oz, and not needing to. "And then there's the small matter of the laundry piling up in your room."

  "But, Dad--!"

  Catie tried to keep herself from grinning, and simply couldn't.

  "Sorry, Son, you blew it. You've had two days to clean up in there, and knowing you, you'll plead homework tomorrow if we let it go on that long."

  "But, Dad, the game--!"

  "The sooner you finish this stuff that's been staring at you since four P.M. on Friday, the sooner you'll see what the Slugs do. Get on it."

  And silence fell.

  "Space, honey," Catie said.

  "She wants a favor, I can tell."

  Catie was so amused that she didn't much care what her workspace said. "Open a gateway to the friends-and-family space on the ISF server," she said. "And run the usual leave-a-message message if anyone calls for me. I won't be back for a few hours."

  "The Great Programmer be praised," said her workspace, "I can finally get some reading done." A doorway opened in the air of her space, and through it, faintly, Catie could hear the roar of the crowd. She stepped through and waved the doorway closed behind her.

  Two hours later she could hardly breathe. The roar, which had been like the distant sea earlier, had hardly stopped for the whole time she'd been in here, even between the halves. Now the clock was running down toward the end of the third half, there was nothing but a tangle of bodies showing in the middle of the volume, and amid shrieks of excitement and outrage from the crowd, the goal hexes had just shifted again, for the third time in no more than five minutes. It was a standard increased-rotation simulation,
for such things had happened often enough during the "classic" games played in real microgravity, when the needs of some experiment in the outer ring for increased gravity had caused the whole sphere to be rotated faster. Nominally the computer had charge of such events, inflicting them randomly on the players. But at times like this, when there were three teams at full strength in the cubic, all trying to get control of the ball, they produced the maximum possible confusion. The ball wouldn't go where the players wanted it to. None of them seemed to be able to get that vital, instinctive "extra jump ahead" of the program--

  The volume was a mob scene, a whirl of three sets of colors--the yellow and black of South Florida, the red of Chicago, the blue, red, and white of Spartak Moscow. Spartak had possession, its forwards passing the ball down a great-circle curve around the perimeter of the other teams' people; but the crowded center-volume configuration of the last few seconds was already breaking, Melendez and Dawson for South Florida arrowing along toward the live goal that was nearest the end of the great-circle pass corridor that Moscow was using. Spartak had given up on subtlety and was trying for speed, but the belated decision was doing it no good. Chicago, one goal behind South Florida at the moment, was at the same time not beyond simply making sure that it not only scored against South Florida, but kept Spartak from scoring against anybody else under any circumstances--a three-way draw would mean a decrease in its overall "points" total for the tournament, and regardless of the number of games won or drawn, even one point too few could make the difference between winning or losing the tournament if the final games were still tied at the end of penalty or injury time. An extra point in another team's plus column could mean that your own team won on goals but lost on points...and at the end of the day, it was the points that would matter. Chicago might get no more points itself today, but it was going to make sure at all costs that Spartak didn't, either.