Digital Fortress Chapter 34

Susan sit alone in knob 3, waiting for her tracer bullet bullet. Hale had decided to graduation asideside and get some air-a decision for which she was grateful. Oddly, however, the solitude in knob 3 provided little asylum. Susan found herself struggling with the new connection betwixt Tankado and Hale.Who will guard the guards? she said to herself. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. The words kept circling in her head. Susan compel them from her mind.Her thoughts turned to David, hoping he was every right. She still found it hard to debate he was in Spain. The sooner they found the pass-keys and ended this, the better.Susan had lost overcompensate of how long shed been sitting there waiting for her tracer. Two hours? Three? She gazed out at the deserted Crypto floor and wished her edgeinal would beep. There was only silence. The late-summer insolate had set. Overhead, the automatic fluorescents had kicked on. Susan sensed time was running out.She looked down at her tracer an d frowned. Come on, she grumbled. Youve had plenty of time. She palmed her mouse and clicked her way into her tracers status window. How long buzz off you been running, anyway?Susan opened the tracers status window-a digital clock much equal the one on TRANSLTR it displayed the hours and minutes her tracer had been running. Susan gazed at the monitor expecting to try a readout of hours and minutes. But she saw something else entirely. What she saw stopped the blood in her veins.TRACER ABORTEDTracer aborted she choked aloud. why?In a explosive panic, Susan scrolled wildly through the information, searching the programing for any comma butterflynds that might keep told the tracer to abort. But her search went in vain. It appeared her tracer had stopped each(prenominal) by itself. Susan knew this could mean only one thing-her tracer had developed a fluff.Susan considered bugs the most maddening asset of data processor programming. Because data processors followed a scrupulou sly small order of operations, the most minuscule programming fallacys often had crippling effects. childlike syntactical misplays-such as a programmer mistakenly inserting a comma instead of a period-could bring entire systems to their knees. Susan had always thought the term bug had an amusing originIt came from the worlds first computer-the Mark 1-a room-size maze of electromechanical circuits built in 1944 in a lab at Harvard University. The computer developed a glitch one day, and no one was open to locate the cause. After hours of searching, a lab assistant finally scratchy the problem. It seemed a moth had landed on one of the computers circuit boards and shorted it out. From that moment on, computer glitches were referred to as bugs.I dont have time for this, Susan cursed.Finding a bug in a program was a process that could take days. Thousands of lines of programming needed to be searched to find a tiny error-it was like inspecting an encyclopaedia for a single typo.S usan knew she had only one choice-to send her tracer again. She in any case knew the tracer was almost guaranteed to hit the same bug and abort all over again. Debugging the tracer would take time, time she and the commander didnt have.But as Susan stared at her tracer, wondering what error shed made, she realized something didnt make sense. She had used this necessitate same tracer last month with no problems at all. Why would it develop a glitch all of a sudden? As she puzzled, a comment Strathmore made earlier echoed in her mind. Susan, I tested to send the tracer myself, but the data it returned was nonsensical.Susan heard the words again. The data it returnedShe cocked her head. Was it possible? The data it returned?If Strathmore had received data back from the tracer, then it manifestly was working. His data was nonsensical, Susan assumed, because he had entered the wrong search strings-but nonetheless, the tracer was working.Susan immediately realized that there was one o ther possible explanation for why her tracer aborted. Internal programming flaws were not the only reasons programs glitched sometimes there were outside(a) forces-power surges, dust particles on circuit boards, faulty cabling. Because the hardware in pommel 3 was so well tuned, she hadnt even considered it.Susan stood and strode quickly across guest 3 to a large bookshelf of technical manuals. She grabbed a spiral ligature marked SYS-OP and thumbed through. She found what she was looking for, carried the manual back to her ending, and typed a few commands. Then she waited while the computer raced through a dip of commands executed in the past three hours. She hoped the search would turn up some sort of external interrupt-an abort command generated by a faulty power supply or defective chip.Moments later Susans terminal beeped. Her pulse quickened. She held her breath and studied the screen. shift CODE 22Susan mat up a surge of hope. It was good news. The fact that the inquir y had found an error code meant her tracer was fine. The trace had apparently aborted due to an external anomaly that was unlikely to repeat itself.Error code 22. Susan racked her memory trying to recover what code 22 stood for. Hardware failures were so rare in Node 3 that she couldnt remember the numerical codings.Susan flipped through the SYS-OP manual, scanning the list of error codes.19 CORRUPT HARD PARTITION20 DC strengthen21 MEDIA FAILUREWhen she reached number 22, she stopped and stared a long moment. Baffled, she double-checked her monitor.ERROR CODE 22Susan frowned and returned to the SYS-OP manual. What she saw made no sense. The explanation scarce read22 MANUAL ABORT