The Genius Wars by Catherine Jinks Read Free Book Online Page B

all the combs and pins securing it. Her jacket was buttoned up crookedly, and she had forgotten to wear her watch.
    When she and Saul arrived on the threshold, Cadel greeted them with an urgent summons.
    ‘Come here! Look at this!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re not going to
believe
it.’
    The detective sighed. ‘You haven’t even moved since I left, have you?’ he murmured. And Fiona said, ‘I brought your doona, sweetie. It’s in the car.’
    ‘Yes – thanks – great. But I might not be needing it.’ Cadel tapped the screen in front of him. ‘See this? I think it’s a light probe.’
    Saul and his wife exchanged long-suffering glances. Nevertheless, they both moved forward until they were standing directly behind Cadel’s chair.
    ‘I wanted to find a pattern, and I did,’ he continued. ‘There’s a shiny half-sphere in every scene.
Every single one
. I mean, what are the odds?’
    ‘Cadel –’ Saul began.
    ‘No, wait. Just listen.’ Dragging his fingers through his tousled curls, Cadel took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think this is Prosper at all,’ he announced. ‘I think this is a piece of malware.’
    As he’d expected, the reaction was one of total incredulity. Even Angus turned to gape at him. It was Fiona who finally broke the stunned silence.
    ‘What on earth is malware?’ she asked.
    ‘An illegal computer program.’ Saul was shaking his head. ‘Cadel, that’s impossible –’
    ‘What is?’ said Fiona. ‘What are you talking about?’
    ‘It
wouldn’t
be impossible. Not if you had the right skills. Not if you were good enough.’ Cadel began to argue his case. ‘It makes perfect sense. Why else would Prosper always be wearing the same clothes? Why else would there be a shiny ball in every scene?’
    ‘Coincidence,’ Saul rejoined.
    ‘Or protocol settings.’
    ‘
Cadel
,’ snapped Fiona, ‘could you
please
slow down! You’re not making sense. What’s so important about these shiny balls, anyway?’
    ‘Nothing. Unless you’re doing visual effects.’ Cadel paused for a moment, his mind racing.
Thank God
, he thought.
Thank God I read all that online Siggraph stuff
. ‘I only know this because I like to keep up with the latest programming breakthroughs. There’s a lot of amazing mathematics that goes into computer graphics these days.’ Realising that Fiona was in no way enlightened, he changed tack. ‘You must have heard of digital doubles,’ he said. ‘They’re fake people that you stick into real scenes. Computer-generated people.’
    ‘Wait a minute.’ Suddenly the penny dropped. Fiona’s voice became shrill. ‘Are you saying that all those pictures of Prosper English are
computer generated
?’
    ‘I’m saying that they could be,’ Cadel replied. ‘If you want to create a realistic digital double, you need a light map of the whole scene. And for one of those, you have to use a shiny chrome ball.’ His heart sank at the prospect of explaining High Dynamic Range Rendering to someone who didn’t know what malware was. ‘I’m not sure how it works, exactly,’ he admitted. ‘You’d have to talk to an expert. But a chrome ball gives you the real-world lighting data for a specific environment. Without understanding how the light falls, you can’t make it fall properly on your digital double.’
    ‘Except that he’s not a digital double.’ Saul nodded at the computer screen, where Prosper’s grainy likeness had been caught in mid-stride. ‘If that guy was a fake, he wouldn’t be interacting. He’d be walking through walls.’
    ‘Not if he was programmed properly.’
    ‘But –’
    ‘This is
all about programming
,’ Cadel insisted. ‘You can have a thousand people in a scene, and they can be
programmed
to interact with each other. They can be programmed to fight each other, or run away from each other, or respond to variables likewalls or hills … it depends what you want them to do.’ As the detective chewed on his bottom lip, Cadel leaned