John Golden: Freelance Debugger Read Free Page B

and she answered it.
    “Hello, Delphi,” Sarah said, over the desktop's speakers. “It's nice to meet you.”
    Delphi blinked, looking from me to her screen and back. “Is this some kind of prank?”
    “If so, it's foo led me for four years,” I said.
    “ John's got it more or less right,” Sarah said. “I've been stuck in here [24] for a while now.”
    — [24] To be honest, it has some real advantages. Example: for all you know, right now I could be running a simulation where my virtual body is massaged with scented oils by a trio of well-muscled young gladiators. I say things like “stuck in here” to make the meatbags feel better.—
    “ I offered to buy you one of those little robots to ride in,” I said.
    “Those things fall over when they try to climb stairs,” Sarah sniffed. “You'll have to carry me until we get a little closer to Blade Runner.”
    “You're really...in there?” Delphi said, looking now at laptop bag. “Can she see me?”
    “Not at the moment,” I said. “I have a camera rig I wear if I need it.”
    “But that's...” Delphi sat back in her chair. “That's incredible!”
    I shrugged. “It's the sort of thing that happens when you go chasing down burrows. After a while, you get used to it.”
    ~
    Delphi excused herself for a moment to get us some coffee and find me a chair. While she was gone, I muttered to Sarah, “How does it look?”
    “It's a big system,” she said in my ear. “A proper analysis is going to take a while. But I can already tell you there's definitely a burrow here somewhere, and not a friendly one.”
    “Not a grazer [25] , then?”
    — [25] A benign category of fairy that skims bandwidth and cycles for its own purposes but does no other damage.—
    “ No such luck. I don't want to leap to conclusions, but I'm guessing it's some kind of gremlin [26] . There's too much damage for it to be accidental.”
    — [26] A less benign category of fairy that intentionally tries to wreck the system it inhabits.—
    “ Wonderful.” It's always better to negotiate a critter out of its burrow if you can manage it, but that probably wasn't going to be an option if we were really dealing with gremlins. “Anything else?”
    “ I'm still analyzing, but Delphi seems to be correct about the system boundaries. They're well-defended, and I'm not seeing any obvious breaches.”
    “ Interesting.” At that point Delphi reappeared, so I muttered, “Keep looking,” and moved to help her with the chair. Once we were both seated and equipped with coffee, she turned the monitor in my direction and started calling up system performance graphs.
    “ We think it started about three days ago,” she said. “But the day before yesterday is when the alarms started going off. See the falling effective-cycle rate? That night I did a system flush and started checking the direwalls. But when we brought everything back up...” She tapped the screen, where the green line representing the number of uncorrupted processor cycles began to drop precipitously. “Right about here we started getting more serious failures; data corruption, even some hardware problems. That's when I told the boss we had an emergency on our hands.”
    “ Wait,” I said. “This was yesterday?”
    She nodded.
    “Then why did he wait until this morning to get in touch with me? You must have debuggers here in the city.”
    Delphi rolled her eyes. “First he tried shouting me down. Told me that it was impossible. I had to practically get down on my knees and beg before he'd look at the graphs, and then he accused me of screwing up the perimeter security somehow. It wasn't until last night that he realized something was seriously wrong and he couldn't get out of it by pointing fingers.”
    I frowned. Falmer was in the security business himself. Surely he would know that time was critical in this sort of situation?
    “ So they've had at least three days to dig in,” I said. “And you haven't found anything at