Reconfigure (11 page)
He mumbled a few thoughts under his breath. There wasn’t anyone to talk to in his office cube, but it helped him think.
He opened the hotspot on the screen and saw a linkage between errors in automated system counting and apparent camera recording faults. It was an odd correlation and one he needed to follow. It seemed that the records indicated a camera fault with a frame jump on a surveillance camera. Also a supermarket stock control had exceeded its wastage and theft tolerance figures. In addition an ATM was reporting a loss in delivery of money. The stock control detail view showed the loss of stock at the store, apparently it was Marmite? A filed police report had caused the arrest of an employee on suspicion of theft. His employment contract was then terminated and no further action was taken. The ATM report was of £400 missing and had just been flagged. Surveillance footage and customer records were pending, due in a few minutes, should he press the request button.
He gave another little mumble for good measure.
The surveillance video with an apparent frame jump started with a view of a set of bins, it indicated this was owned by the food provider Greggs. It was not the high quality content that he was used to. This was just a feed from a tertiary source. The system was not specifically linked on the grid of CCTV that criss-crossed the country. There were ways and means to listen into other peoples systems. This must have been one of those. A male figure arrived at speed into the scene. Turning and dropping something and reaching into his coat for what appeared to be a knife. As the assailant stepped forward the image froze. A generated bounding box framed the knife on his screen. The next frame stepped. The bounding box still surrounded the knife but it was now on the floor, away from the figure. The frames stepped back and forth like a comedy flip book. The knife jumped backwards and forwards. A sub process of video analysis had concluded the frame rate of the camera and the position of the knife were an anomaly. He was certainly interested in what had happened here, but he needed to play the rest of the video.
“Bing!" That viewing would have to wait, he parked the hot spot, dragging it into his to do collection folder on screen. He now had a major hotspot appearing that the priority warning ping had alerted him of. This was a priority one situation. The word fraud highlighted the hotspot. The CCSO was there to stop crime, crime against their clients. Large scale fraud or theft from the corporate coffers needed to be dealt with, and quickly. Only by keeping an eye on everything and everyone could they make sure they kept their money where it needed to be, with them.
Roisin carried on walking, she played with her filtering, refreshing, tracking and movement warnings. The other pedestrians, pets and cars all providing great test fodder. She was able to walk and operate the screen at the same time, as were countless other people. They weaved out of one another’s way using an apparent sixth sense. Most other people focused on their own screen and if not they were spaced out listening to their favourite tune or book of the moment, in ear buds or over size fashion statement headphones all hinting at who was listening to what content.
It was still a dull day, but not an unpleasant one to be out in. As she reached the park the air got noticeably lighter and easier to breathe. She headed towards the pond just a few hundred meters in from the park gate. It was her favourite spot. She made for an empty bench and sat down, shuffling her over the shoulder cartoon bag to act as an arm rest and to save sitting on it. She watched the virtual duck cubes on her iPhone screen and enjoyed the sight of some of them drop lower than the height of the water cube as they dived for food. She remembered something she had over heard from a passer by who explained, jokingly to a friend, the birds were not diving under water they were returning to their normal place. The ones we see have dived upwards, the rest lived under the water. A curious twist on the view of the World and which way is up. She rotated her virtual view 180 degrees. The upside down duck objects were on top now.
She was at the playing around stage, kicking her heels, what to do next? It was not that the novelty had worn off, but she was scared of doing anything too big and getting it too wrong. Wandering around helping the homeless was a great thing to do, though not very scalable? Super powers! What a drag! The peace of the pond was helping her think. Having turned it upside down on her view, she hit Reset. The alternative Universe under the water returned to its normal position. She then realised what she needed to do. She had been considering that RC and the powers it had were hers. What was she going to do with those powers? Roisin realised that she had just been given a ride on this roller coaster. The ride might end at any time. She needed to find the source. She needed to find RC and understand who or what it was.
Out on the pond she saw a little sail boat, all alone and still. There was hardly a wisp of wind to fill its miniature sails. A father and his young son, probably about 3 years old, were pointing at the boat, willing it to return to the bank. Roisin dragged the small cube labelled FloatingToy across to Human6 and Human7, hit Apply, stood and turned to walk home. The child clapped and cheered with unbridled joy, unaware that the World didn’t work like this normally. The dad stood bolt upright turned to his left and said in a slightly raised voice “Did you see that?”
There are always bugs in code. There are always bugs in any system. Some of them are plainly obvious. Roisin generated as many as she fixed. She was lucky though, many were just glitches. She had always been careful with the end result of the code even if she was a little harebrained and reckless in pure engineering terms. She was now fixing bugs. Some of the ordinal layering had gone awry, she noticed, in the ranges of objects. She had spotted it when dealing with the hole in the wall earlier. The camera movement needed a little more smoothing. A minor update for extra slickness and a good feel.
Roisin did a recheck of the major functions, her friends Coin and Cap getting the brunt of the fun and games. Then, just for old times sake she popped back to Twitter in the browser. Mainly to see what had been going on in the World. She had been so focussed on FMM that she had almost gone off the grid. She Tweeted, “Odd couple of days in the Zone coding, coming up for air." No one knew her double play on the word Zone, referring to both Flow and her new toy. She felt clever.
There was a meme, there was always a meme. Some odd quirk, image or video idea. It had blown up overnight. She had missed its initial inception but it was in full swing. There were videos appearing and animated GIFs all over the Web with a similar theme. The first one she saw, and it made her chuckle, was a Vine of a man stood at the bar in a pub. He had adopted the foot up on the brass kick bar hand on hip, other hand in front with a pint, position. Except there was no pint there. There was a cloudy pint of bitter, a good way from him to his left. As the Vine played he appeared to be trying to stand very still. The Vine ended with the pint glass very much in his hand and no frames in between. At which time he turned, smiled wildly, drank and returned to his starting position. As the Vine looped the pint disappeared, ready to reappear for another sip and grin and so on. The cheesy grin and the forced edwardian gentlemen pose definitely was funny. The hashtag #joyhere was linked to the Vine. She clicked on the #joyhere tag to see a constant stream of things being zapped towards people, sandwiches, game controllers and even dance partners. Like all good Twitter storms it then led to a number of posts by people analysing the phenomena. Countless top ten #joyhere spam sites wanting users to click from page to page to get the most ad impressions they could from the mini craze. One of the Tweets did link to the apparent original #joyhere. It showed a father and son calling to a toy yacht just on the border of the camera view. The yacht suddenly re-appears in front of the boy who squeals with delight. The camera zooms in on the 3 year old’s equivalent of a cheesy grin. Just out of shot she heard an older male voice say, “Did you see that?" The Internet had gone crazy for the toddler’s reaction to what everyone assumed was a camera trick. The reaction was infections and joyous. Hence the meme of people apparently bringing joy from over there to over here.
She watched the video again, carefully working out where she would have been in the shot. This was no time to be getting Internet famous! This was a real world bug! A huge great fat bug in the system. She had just thrown a little happiness to a small boy who had lost his yacht. Yet, of course, someone was pointing a camera at the event. Yes! They were going to share it with all and sundry. She didn’t want any attention. She checked, she was not in the frame, not of this video anyway. There was no telling if other footage, from what she assumed to be the mum’s camera, might have a thoughtful young(ish) lady sat on a bench with a cartoon bag and an iPhone. She wasn’t going to be able to make the meme die. Any attempt to take stuff down or hide it and the Streisand effect kicks in big time. No, she realised, her target of tracking down RC would have to come after she had tracked down the owner of this footage and made sure she was not in any of it. This sort of attention, even overnight and the World’s press would be clambering to piggy back on its fleeting and niche success.
It took a while on YouTube to find what looked like the original poster of the video. As with all these memes they were not just referenced, there were copied, spliced and reissued by all sorts of people attempting to get views on their channel. The average user had no time nor legal resources to protect their content. There she was, FaithDevonshire90. It was the same Twitter handle as the YouTube handle too. Wow she had a lot of video views. 1.3 million so far. The monetisation process had kicked in. Trying to watch the original video led to another video popping up before. You can skip the ad in 3 seconds, so she did. Just to be sure Roisin watched the whole video. She was not in any of it.
Right! She had a Twitter handle and she had RC. Using her regular DM CLI, rather than try and type on the iPhone, she expanded the Zone. She figured the people in the park would be local. They wouldn’t bring a boat from a long way away just for her park. She decided on 5 km range each way to start with. It was the biggest Zone Roisin had yet tried.
She typed.
“Zone -S Range=<1000.0,1000.0,30.0>”
The legacy DM system replied.
@rayKonfigure
Zone set Human <1000.0,1000.0,30.0> <1.0,1.0,1.0>
She went further, this time to delve in to the mass of data from such a huge area she typed.
“Examine Human* | grep @FaithDevonshire90”
It was a rather optimistic approach to look for an object with that handle in it somewhere. Optimism and just trying had got her a long way in life. RC replied to her.
@rayKonfigure
Context ID - Human3590
Designation - Faith Ruby Devonshire
Type Human Composite Object
Subtype Female
Handle - @FaithDevonshire90
Relative Attachments
Clothing
Jewellery
Camera
Phone
Contents
Default
Fractal Location - <2339,4562,31>
Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>
Fractal Iteration Level - <2709>
She had found her! Faith Ruby Devonshire. Roisin had no idea what she looked like, what her life was, but she knew her exact position. She guessed she was a year younger than Roisin too by the ’90 on the end of the unimaginative handle. Now she had to decide if this was a key hole surgery operation, delicately extracting what was needed from a safe distance, or was it going to be a more hands on operation? Getting in close and personal? Her worry was that any long range remote commands might go a bit wrong. After all she was new to this. There was that smiling little boy. Whilst she did not have kids, having never met a compatible geek so far, she still loved them. The joy that kid’s laughter had provided the World shouldn’t be rewarded by her making his house fall to bits or his dad get a memory card spliced into his nose. No! This was going to have to be a hands on operation. With the coordinates she could maybe Translate herself in there? Whoah! Hang on girl, she thought. You have not tried Translate on anything more complex than a jar of Marmite, she reminded herself. After what happened to the thug, the mug and the coin merge the slightest mistake could end this adventure. You can’t hit Reset if every atom in your body is immobilised!
Roisin reset the Zone on her iPhone. She then set one to reach a bit further out from her office and down onto the garden. A few pigeons appeared as cubes on her virtual display matching the small gathering out of the window. She clicked, swiped and Translated a very surprised pigeon three meters to its right. The surprise didn’t last long as it continued to peck at the ground. That works then? Teleportation, it is real!
“Beam me up Scotty.” She said out loud.
That was enough of a test. She was on a mission, an actual mission, to try and clear up this ‘bug’ in a nice way. Live things seemed to cope with a little Translation.
Before the big jump Roisin delicately moved her sphere a mere 0.02 of a unit across on her phone. She had stood up and made sure she had a clear space to the right and the left (just in case). She tried to stand as still as possible, holding the phone in front of her and trying to keep her head forward and looking down across her cheek at the Apply button. Her thumb hovered over it. She looked straight ahead and her thumb made contact with the glass. Her eyes felt an odd sensation as the parallax effect shifted with her view of the World. It was like blinking one eye and then the other, the World jumps about. Except this was both eyes at the same time. She looked around and held her spare hand to her chest mostly to check her heart was still beating. Just like the space race of the 1960s she had gone from inanimate objects moving in space to an organic being, not quite a monkey, but pigeons who were more readily available. Now a full human, the first to Translate in space, her, Roisin Kincade. Her faculties felt as normal as ever. Somewhere in the back of her mind a small requirement for the next version of FMM was forming. It really needed that Star Trek sound effect on these teleports. That part of her thought process knew it was a very low priority task, but it had to be considered. Roisin spotted the thought and started to riff on it. The teleport sound on the application would be easy, but what she really needed to do was generate the actual sound in the actual space that the Translate happened for the full impact. Then she snapped out of it, she was trying to sneak into somewhere. The last thing she needed was synthetic swirling and twinkling sound attracting attention!
Roisin stepped back over to her computer and opened up Google Maps. She centred the view on her location. Her target was at <2339,4562,31> not much use to the mapping coordinate system. It, as a coordinate, was in relative metres. She was at <3800,74,23> so it was 1461 meters to the left of whatever her origin rotation was, and 4488 forwards. There was also an apparent height difference of 8 meters. In her projects she had used routines to calculate the distance between points in vector space. She had to calculate the square root of the sum of the individual differences of x, y, z values each squared themselves. A tap on the calculator application, having switched to scientific mode, she saw it was 4791.8. That’s nearly 5 km away she thought.
She was not sure where the idea had been hiding, she must have considered it before? Where was the origin? In the Zone she could set the relative field of view, but her coordinates were <3800,74,23>. Not <0,0,0>. Every system needs its base, but surely it couldn't be that simple that RC was at <0,0,0>? She did some rough calculations again squaring 3800, adding it to 74 squared and 23 squared. The square root was strangely close enough to 3800. 3800.79? That meant that the origin of the coordinate system was actually nearer to her than her current target. She lived just on the edge of town, walking distance to the high street but being a new town it was surrounded by farmland, open space and fields.
Having decided to figure out where RC might be, she had missed the obvious possibility that it was at <0,0,0>. It was another serendipitous and accidentally discovery? She considered the option of stopping off on the way, visit 0 first then hop on over to Faith’s place. It was a ludicrous thought, she had done no research as to what was at the origin and she had a more pressing need to not get discovered. No, ‘Keep the Faith’ plan she thought.
She rotated the Google map so that it fitted the direction she was facing out of her office. She did not face exactly North, but orientating the map to match her direction helped. She zoomed out a little and then headed her cursor about 1.5 km to the left and 4.5 km up. The numbers seemed to stack up for the general distance. The satellite view showed a regular suburban housing estate. Curved lined rows of smart looking detached houses with varying patches of green gardens, ponds and the ever present circular trampolines.
She had two pieces of information to determine if this was the location she needed to head for. The trouble was, as she well knew, you always get a straight line between just two points. The information she was using was just the coordinate system. She opened a new tab and typed Faith Ruby Devonshire into Google. There were a number of different hits but she noticed a Flickr account. She switched to an anonymous browsing tab. No point her Flickr showing up on a whose viewed log. She flicked back to the YouTube she had watched, slightly panicking, but she had not been logged into Google when she viewed it. More relief! Using a forensic approach to digital cleanliness was going to be important. On Flickr, Faith had all sorts of photos, serious artistic compositions, interesting colours and shapes all filled the screen. There were a number of albums but Roisin picked up on ‘New House’. She opened it and she saw a screen full of photographs of the front of a house, the front door open into a hallway, then numerous as yet unfurnished rooms, with clean magnolia paintwork and shiny wooden flooring. On the next page were pictures of a freshly turfed lawn looking back at the house with patio doors wide open. Then a photo of a man, standing in a comedy legs akimbo hands on hips stance on the turf with the house in the background. The next picture was almost an identical shot but the man was replaced by a heavily pregnant lady in a fake vogue pose and huge smile. Roisin scrolled down the metadata and sure enough amongst the details of aperture, exposure time and camera model were the GPS coordinates and a mini version of the Google map she had been looking at before. She clicked the coordinates and the Google map centred over a small green patch of garden amongst the patterned gathering of houses. She flicked back to her original map window, it was a little more zoomed out but she had clearly hit the right estate. Feeling rather smug at her detective work she compared the elevation information between her house and Faith’s. She allowed three metres to account for her first floor office. Google was clever, but not that clever. It was just terrain mapping height. She scribbled 20 on her desk. The terrain difference was about five meters up. That would make her coordinate system z there at about 25 for ground level. Her stats for Faith had said her z was 31? Roisin, switched to street view, dragging the little orange man just in front of Faith’s house. She panned the camera around and saw the extra floors of the town house. It was a multi storey house, a third floor was clearly visible. That would mean Faith had been on the top floor when the Examine ran. Now she was happy. She had more than enough evidence. Things fitted. A GPS to her