Digital Fortress Chapter 34

Susan sit down alone in Node 3, waiting for her tintr bullet bullet. Hale had decided to step outside and get slightly air-a decision for which she was grateful. Oddly, however, the solitude in Node 3 provided little asylum. Susan found herself struggling with the new tie between Tankado and Hale.Who will guard the guards? she said to herself. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. The words kept circling in her head. Susan forced them from her mind.Her thoughts turned to David, hoping he was all right. She still found it hard to believe he was in Spain. The sooner they found the pass-keys and finish this, the better.Susan had lost track 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 terminal would beep. There was only silence. The late-summer sun had set. Overhead, the automatic fluorescents had kicked on. Susan sensed time was raceway out.She looked down at her tracer and frowned. Come on, she gr umbled. Youve had plenty of time. She palmed her mouse and clicked her way into her tracers status window. How long energise you been running, anyway?Susan opened the tracers status window-a digital clock much like the one on TRANSLTR it displayed the hours and legal proceeding her tracer had been running. Susan gazed at the monitor expecting to see a readout of hours and minutes. But she saw virtuallything else entirely. What she saw stopped the birth in her veins.TRACER endEDTracer aborted she choked aloud. Why?In a sudden panic, Susan scrolled wildly through the data, attending the programming for any commands that might have told the tracer to abort. But her search went in vain. It appeared her tracer had stopped all by itself. Susan knew this could mean only one thing-her tracer had developed a bug.Susan considered bugs the virtually maddening asset of computer programming. Because computers followed a scrupulously precise order of operations, the most minuscule prog ramming errors often had crippling effects. Simple syntactical errors-such as a programmer mis happen uponnly inserting a comma instead of a period-could bring entire systems to their knees. Susan had always thought the term bug had an amusing baseIt came from the worlds first computer-the Mark 1-a room-size maze of electromechanical lap coverings built in 1944 in a lab at Harvard University. The computer developed a glitch one day, and no one was able to locate the cause. afterwards hours of searching, a lab assistant finally spotted the problem. It seemed a moth had landed on one of the computers electrical 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 encyclopedia for a single typo.Susan knew she had only one choice-to se nd her tracer again. She alike 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 utilise this exact 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 tried 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 workable? The data it returned?If Strathmore had received data back from the tracer, then it obviously 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 other possible explanation for why her tracer aborte d. Internal programming flaws were not the only reasons programs glitched sometimes there were external forces-power surges, dust particles on circuit boards, faulty cabling. Because the hardware in Node 3 was so well tuned, she hadnt even considered it.Susan stood and strode quickly crosswise Node 3 to a large bookshelf of technical manuals. She grabbed a spiral binder marked SYS-OP and hitch through. She found what she was looking for, carried the manual back to her terminal, and typed a few commands. Then she waited while the computer raced through a list 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.ERROR encrypt 22Susan matte a surge of hope. It was good news. The fact that the inquiry 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 severe to suppose 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 SPIKE21 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 simply read22 MANUAL ABORT