The Theory of Games (20 page)

Q
: I’ve heard of that, too.

KMO’B: And the whole time I had this stupid song, from when I was a kid, just going over and over in my head. I couldn’t shake it. “One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn’t belong.”

CHAPTER 5.1

Katelynn O’Brian was singing just under her breath, “One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn’t belong.” She was stuck on those two lines and she was repeating them over and over unable to move on to the chorus. She had a well-gnawed pencil in her mouth and a cup of cold coffee in her hand. “There’s something I’m just not getting, Bill,” she said to the dog lying at her feet.

Bill stretched and twisted his head upwards to look quizzically at Katelynn.

“I know what you’re thinking, Bill,” Katelynn continued, “It’s got to be something obvious.” Katelynn continued to stare at the computer screen.

Bill blinked twice, yawned, settled his head in between his big paws and tried to discreetly pass some gas.

Katelynn resumed chewing on the pencil and staring intently at the computer while the invisible cloud of flatulence drifted up to her. She wrinkled her nose. “Eww! Bill! Stinky!” Katelynn gasped. “Let’s get outta here!”

Katelynn fled the office in the little yellow house to the safety and fresh air of the back porch. Bill sheepishly followed. “Okay, Bill, no more broccoli and cheese for you. Let’s just keep this our little secret, okay? Let’s not tell Jake when he gets back.” The dog seemed to nod as he settled back on his haunches.

From the back porch Katelynn could see the third floor window in Morton Hall that Nick had been working at the last night of his life. She could also make out the door that led to what had once been Jake’s office two floors below. “You think it’s got something to do with Jake’s old code?” Katelynn asked the big dog. Bill just wagged his tail.

Katelynn resumed chewing on the pencil and staring at Morton Hall. “What was the code that Nick was looking at on Jake’s machine?” she wondered out loud and then answered her own question, “It was that old tactical simulation program he did years ago for the War College. Great; now where am I going to find a copy of it?”

She looked at Bill, “There’s no getting around it, Bill, we must return to the room of stinky death!” Katelynn laughed. Bill wagged his tail and followed Katelynn into the little yellow house. On the way to the back office they stopped at the refrigerator where Katelynn found a slice of turkey for the dog and a piece of cold pizza for herself. “Cold pizza, Bill,” she said, “the breakfast of programming champions.”

Katelynn and Bill went back to the office - the worst of the fumes had dissipated while the two were outdoors - and Katelynn started her search by randomly pulling boxes of CDs and floppy disks from the closet. Whatever method Jake had once used to archive his old work was soon lost as the contents of each box were dumped on to the floor and piled around Bill. After a good fifteen minutes of fruitless searching Katelynn announced, “Bill, what are we doing? Jake has got to know where the files are!” The dog recognized Jake’s name and furiously started wagging his tail in agreement.

Katelynn pushed her way through the flotsam of Jake’s research until she uncovered the buried office phone and dialed Jake’s cell. Jake’s phone didn’t ring; it just immediately dumped her into his voice mail.

“Sweetie, it’s Kate and Bill,” she after the recorded message beeped, “We’re looking for one of your old files. Give me a call when you get this. We both miss you a lot.”

Katelynn tried again fifteen minutes later. “Sweetie, it’s Kate and Bill, again. You there? We still miss you and love you.”

She dialed Jake’s cell phone three more times over the next hour - “Jake? It’s Kate! Pick up!” But she never got through to him. It was as though Jake’s phone was unable to connect to the network.

It was as if Jake and his cell phone were under a mountain.

CHAPTER 5.2

INTERVIEW WITH MS. KATELYNN MARGARET O’BRIAN CONTINUED

Q
: So you were unable to reach Jakob Grant via his cell phone?

KMO’B: I never got through. He never called back.

Q
: Were you able to locate the missing files?

KMO’B: Yeah, I found them on his hard drive using egrep.

Q
: What is egrep?

KMO’B: It’s a program that will search every file on a hard drive for a particular string. You can tailor the search with wildcard characters and file extensions. I remembered that it was a data structure that was up on the screen in Jake’s old office so I ran egrep with the parameters “star struct star dot c.” It found hundreds of data structure declarations but, eventually, I found the one that Jake wrote for the War College tactical simulation program.

Q
: Okay, so you found the file; you found the data structure. Was there anything unusual about the data structure?

KMO’B: Remember how I told you about how data structures are made up of elements?

Q
: Yes.

KMO’B: Well there were ten elements in the data structure. The first nine were what you would expect. The data structure was used to describe a unit in a tactical simulation that Jake designed for the War College. The elements were the unit’s location, the unit’s destination, the unit’s X and Y screen coordinates, the unit type – you know like armor or infantry or whatever – then a Boolean to tell if the unit was selected or not.

Q
: What is a Boolean?

KMO’B: A Boolean is a variable that only has a value of one or zero. Yes or no. True or False.

Q
: Okay, then what?

KMO’B: Then there was a pointer to the next unit in the linked list.

Q
: What’s a linked list?

KMO’B: It’s a way of storing a list of common things; in this case military units. Every unit in the list – I guess you could call it an Order of Battle Table – points to the next unit in the list. It’s just a nerd thing; it’s not important here.

Q
: Okay, go on.

KMO’B: Then the next element was a string of the unit’s name, you know like, “First Armored Brigade” or “Company B” or whatever. Then the next element was the strength of the unit.

Q
: Was that it?

KMO’B: No. The last element in the data structure was what I was looking for. It was the second piece to the puzzle.

Q
: And what was that that?

KMO’B: A variable called Radio Frequency; it had to be a float because it’s a long number with a decimal point. It was a variable that stored the VHF frequency that the unit transmitted on. I didn’t know why it was important; but it was like the stupid Sesame Street song: it was the only thing that didn’t belong.

CHAPTER 5.3

Katelynn turned away from the computer monitor and said to Bill, the dog, “It’s a radio frequency! I don’t know where this fits in but it’s the only thing out of place.”

Bill looked up surrounded by piles of CDs and floppy disks and wagged his tail, not so much in agreement, as in a general “I’m happy for you” kind of way. That’s the way it was with Bill, even if he didn’t understand exactly what was going on, he could still be happy for you.
I’m happy for you! Let’s all have a cookie! When’s Jake getting back? Let’s go to the park!
Thoughts are transitory things for dogs.

Katelynn got up from the computer and went into the dining room where Zoë, Peter and Shelby were working; their laptops on the table were crammed between the detritus of an all-nighter programming session: piles of pizza boxes, scribbled notes and coffee cups. “Listen up guys,” she announced, “there’s something going on in the 3D database. I want you to keep your eyes open for floating point numbers that look out of place.”

“A 3D database is nothing but floating point numbers,” Peter answered, “you know that Kate.”

“You want us to find a floating point needle in a 3D haystack?” Shelby asked, “How ‘bout a clue? What are we looking for, exactly?”

“Radio frequencies of some sort; I really don’t know exactly. Sorry, Shelby,” Katelynn answered sheepishly. “All I know is that they’re going to appear at the end of the data structure; they’re probably crammed into the “unused” element of the data structure.”

“But the ‘unused’ element is two bytes and you said we’re looking for a long float; it’s not going to fit.” Peter said.

“Okay, let’s work the problem backwards, then,” Katelynn reasoned, “let’s write a little routine that checks every time something gets written or read from the end of the data structure; we’ll do some bounds checking.”

“That’s do-able,” Zoë agreed. “And we can write out to a file whatever values get flagged. I’m on it.”

And this is how Katelynn O’Brian unknowingly set in motion the next horrible chain of events.

CHAPTER 5.4

INTERVIEW WITH MS. KATELYNN MARGARET O’BRIAN CONTINUED

Q
: So you had your group look for these unusual floating point numbers in the data structure?

KMO’B: Yeah. Every time some computer function tried to write to the last element in the data structure we flagged it and printed it out to a file. After a couple of days we had a nice list of numbers.

Q
: Do you remember some of the numbers?

KMO’B: 165.7875 was one. 164.8875 was another.

Q
: Have you ever heard of radio frequency Oscar?

KMO’B: No. Is it the secret communication channel on Sesame Street between Big Bird and the guy who lives in the garbage can?

Q
: I can see why you and Mr. Grant get along so well. You both have the same irreverence for authority. No, Ms. O’Brian, radio frequency Oscar is 164.8875 MHz; one of the floating point numbers on your list. It is also the frequency used by the PPD, the Presidential Protection Division. 165.7875 MHz is radio frequency Baker used by the US Secret Service Field Offices for Presidential and VIP security. You said these floating point numbers were the second piece of the puzzle. What was the third?

KMO’B: The FedEx envelopes.

Q
: I don’t follow you.

KMO’B: FedEx delivered the CD with the 3D database and the bank transfer receipt before Jake got back from Maxwell. Ever think about that? Why would they wire the money before Jake had even agreed to work on their project? It’s impossible for FedEx to move a package from Maxwell to their hub in Memphis and then deliver it before Jake arrived and he flew straight home.

Q
: So what you’re saying is…?

KMO’B: They had to have somebody nearby; somebody in town, somebody who dummied up the FedEx envelope and delivered it.

Q
: And do you know who that person would be?

KMO’B: I do now.

CHAPTER 5.5

Katelynn held the FedEx envelope in her hand and tapped the corner with a fingernail as she thought. The airbill was not one of those that were preprinted by a computer; the sender’s and receiver’s addresses had been entered by hand but it still contained a tracking number in the upper right hand corner. Katelynn brought up the FedEx web site on the computer and ran a trace on it. She was not surprised when the database reported that the tracking number could not be found in the system.

“Bill, it looks like we’ve got another conundrum, here,” she told the dog that was half asleep on the floor beside her desk. “Somebody sent us $20,000 and we don’t have any idea where to send the thank-you note.” Bill did not seem concerned.

Katelynn picked up the phone and called Jake’s cell; after three days the constant redialing whenever she had a spare moment or was lost in thought had become a compulsion with her. She was immediately dumped into Jake’s voicemail as she had been every other time she had called him since she had kissed him goodbye at the airport. She had stopped leaving worried messages the day before and now Jake’s friendly recorded greeting seemed hollow, mechanical and ominous. She could not help but wonder if this would be her last memory of him: a low-bandwidth, scratchy recording like something from an Edison wax cylinder.

Katelynn returned the phone to its cradle by the window and gazed out upon the campus bathed in the autumn light. In the distance she could see Professor Gilfoyle leave Morton Hall and walk out into the quad with the same purposeful stride and perfect posture that she had known since she first came to Mount Mary as an undergraduate four years earlier.

Pudgy, the campus squirrel, waddled out from behind his tree and began to chitter furiously at Gilfoyle who ignored him and walked even more purposefully through the quad towards the little yellow house. “Looks like we’re getting a visitor, Bill,” Katelynn said to the dog and he snuffled out of his sleep and dragged himself to his feet. Bill yawned, stretched and walked over to the back door and patiently waited for Katelynn.

“Professor Gilfoyle, what an unexpected surprise,” Katelynn said sweetly as she opened the door. Bill wagged his tail as Gilfoyle slipped him a biscuit he had secreted in his pocket. The dog knew Gilfoyle as an old friend of Jake’s and from innumerable late night drinking sessions at the house when the two men would discuss poetry.

“Katelynn, aren’t you going to invite me in?” Gilfoyle asked.

“Of course, Professor, where are my manners? Would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, that would be nice,” the Professor answered and slipped Bill another biscuit. Gilfoyle peered around the kitchen door and into the dining room where Zoë, Shelby and Peter were working. “Looks like I’ve found most of my missing students,” he observed and took a seat next to Peter at the table. Katelynn followed after him with a River Rats souvenir mug filled with this morning’s burnt and reheated coffee.

“Where’s Jake?” Gilfoyle asked and looked around. He took a sip from the mug, “Mmmm, good coffee.”

“He’s not here. He’s out of town on a consulting project,” Katelynn answered.

“I’m glad he’s working,” Gilfoyle stated, “Jake’s a brilliant programmer. You kids have no idea how hard it was for me to let him go. It wasn’t my decision; it came from the top.”