'Digital Fortress Chapter 34\r'

'Susan sat al genius in lymph node 3, waiting for her tracer bullet. Hale had decided to step outback(a) and get some air-a decision for which she was grateful. Oddly, however, the solitude in client 3 provided little asylum. Susan strand herself try with the new connection between Tankado and Hale.\r\nâ€Å"Who will take the guards?” she said to herself. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. The linguistic process kept circling in her head. Susan squeeze them from her mind.\r\nHer thoughts magical spelled to David, hoping he was all right. She still found it hard to believe he was in Spain. The earlier they found the pass-keys and ended this, the better.\r\nSusan had lost track of how commodious shed been sitting there waiting for her tracer. Two hours? threesome? She gazed out at the deserted Crypto floor and wished her destruction would beep. There was only silence. The late-summer sun had set. Overhead, the automatic fluorescents had kicked on. Susan comprehend tim e was running out.\r\nShe looked down at her tracer and frowned. â€Å"Come on,” she grumbled. â€Å"Youve had plenty of time.” She palmed her mouse and clicked her way into her tracers term window. â€Å"How foresighted have you been running, eachway?”\r\nSusan opened the tracers side window-a digital clock much like the one on TRANSLTR; it displayed the hours and minutes her tracer had been running. Susan gazed at the observe expecting to see a readout of hours and minutes. however she effect saw something else entirely. What she saw stopped the blood in her veins.\r\nTRACER ABORTED\r\nâ€Å"tracer bullet terminateed!” she choked aloud. â€Å" wherefore?”\r\nIn a fast panic, Susan scrolled wildly through the information, look toing 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 true a germ.\r\nSusan considered â€Å"bugs” the around maddening asset of computing machine programming. Because computers followed a scrupulously precise order of operations, the most minuscule programming errors often had crippling effects. unsubdivided syntactical errors-such as a programmer mistakenly inserting a comma instead of a period-could land entire systems to their knees. Susan had always thought the term â€Å"bug” had an amusing origin:\r\nIt came from the worlds first computer-the Mark 1-a room-size inner ear of electromechanical circuits built in 1944 in a lab at Harvard University. The computer developed a glitch one day, and no one was qualified to locate the cause. After hours of searching, a lab follower finally spotted 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.\r\nâ€Å"I dont have time for this,” Susan cur sed.\r\nFinding 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.\r\nSusan knew she had only one choice-to locate her tracer again. She also knew the tracer was almost guaranteed to wee-wee the same bug and abort all all over again. Debugging the tracer would take time, time she and the commander didnt have.\r\nBut as Susan stared at her tracer, wondering what error shed do, she recognise something didnt make sense. She had used this exact same tracer last month with no problems at all. Why would it develop a glitch all of a sudden?\r\n As she puzzled, a comment Strathmore do earlier echoed in her mind. Susan, I tried to cast the tracer myself, but the data it returned was nonsensical.\r\nSusan heard the words again. The data it returned…\r\nShe cocked her head. Was it possible? The data it returned?\r\nIf 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.\r\nSusan immediately accomplished that there was one other possible comment for why her tracer aborted. Internal programming flaws were non the only reasons programs glitched; sometimes there were impertinent forces-power surges, disseminate particles on circuit boards, faulty cabling. Because the hardware in Node 3 was so well tuned, she hadnt horizontal considered it.\r\nSusan stood and strode quickly across Node 3 to a large bookshelf of technical manuals. She grabbed a spiral ring-binder marked SYS-OP and thumbed through. She found what she was looking for, carried the manual back to her lowest, and typed a few commands. Then she waited patch the computer raced through a list of commands penalize in the past three hours. She hoped the search would turn up some sort of external interru pt-an abort command generated by a faulty power supply or defective chip.\r\nMoments later Susans terminal beeped. Her pulse quickened. She held her breath and studied the screen.\r\nERROR inscribe 22\r\nSusan felt a surge of hope. It was advantageously news. The fact that the inquiry had found an error tag meant her tracer was fine. The trace had apparently aborted due to an external anomaly that was unlikely to repeat itself.\r\nError order 22. Susan racked her memory trying to remember what code 22 stood for. Hardware failures were so rare in Node 3 that she couldnt remember the numerical codings.\r\nSusan flipped through the SYS-OP manual, examine the list of error codes.\r\n19: CORRUPT substantial PARTITION\r\n20: DC SPIKE\r\n21: MEDIA FAILURE\r\nWhen she reached number 22, she stopped and stared a long moment. Baffled, she double-checked her monitor.\r\nERROR CODE 22\r\nSusan frowned and returned to the SYS-OP manual. What she saw made no sense. The explanation simply re ad:\r\n22: MANUAL ABORT\r\n'