We were in big trouble.

When we were sure Darla couldn’t hear us except through the keyboard, the Pilot, the Chief, and I conferred. Unthinkingly we huddled in the corner farthest from Darla.

“We changed the parameters, didn’t we? We all saw it.”

I needed the reassurance.

“And it took, Captain.” The Pilot. “I’ve got the new printout right here. See? We moved base mass from input parameter to variable and changed the default at the same time.”

I shivered. “What’s happening?”

“She’s glitched bad.” Chief McAndrews. “When she’s alive she can’t recognize the changes we made. It goes deeper than the data.”

“Can we fix her?”

The Pilot shook his head. “I’m not sure we could even find the problem.”

“Well, how does she store parameters?” The Chief.

“In a file,” said Haynes.

“What kind?”

I demanded, “Are you onto something?”

The Chief shrugged. “When we ask her to display variables, she just reads the contents of a file. Can we get below that, to look at the file structure?”

“We’re about to try,” I said.

Meticulously, we stripped Darla down once more. It seemed to get easier with practice. In an hour we had the puter opened to the level we’d previously reached.

Manual in lap, the Pilot began to search Darla’s memory banks for file directories. ASCII, hex, and decimal values filled the screen, in patterns that were gibberish to my untrained eye. Occasional words such as “EMOTION/OVERLAY”

or “VARIATION/PATTERN” appeared, indicating directory entries for those files.

The Pilot scoured the memory areas indicated by the manual. Finally, he called up two entries, “PARAMETER/INPUT”

and “VARIABLE/INPUT”. Translating the code that followed, he obtained the file sectors. He tapped in the coordinates.

It was a long file, over fourteen hundred entries. He screened each one and quickly moved to the next. The file entries were in English words: “ship length: 412.416 meters”. My attention wandered while we screened through endless data. Abruptly the screen displayed, “End of fiTS SHE’S GOT ON HER, JORY!”

“What the hell was that?” I asked, frightened.

The Pilot bit his lip. “Lord God. I don’t know.”

He tapped the keyboard. The screen flashed, “NOT BAD FOR A GROUNDSIDER, HUH?”

“Go back.”

The Pilot obediently thumbed backward past the two glitched entries.

“Shaft diameter: 4.836 meters. LOOK AT THE TI”

The Chief swore. I listened with respect, learning new combinations I might someday find useful. I said, “Run the three of them together.”

Pilot Haynes displayed the three sectors. “Shaft diameter 4.836 meters. LOOK AT THE TI end of fiTS SHE’S GOT ON HER, JORY! NOT BAD FOR A GROUNDSIDER, HUH?”

“Christ!” blurted the Pilot. “Look at that! They wrote over the end of file!”

“Explain,” I said sharply. “And don’t blaspheme.”

Pilot Haynes colored. “Sorry, sir. In NAVDOS, data is stored in files, usually in alphanumeric characters just like you’d write it. Puters operate so fast, the language interpreters are so sophisticated that there’s no need for compression. It makes it easier for Dosmen to run their checks if all they have to do is display and read the files.”

“So?”

“Files all end with an ‘end of file’ statement. Someone wrote those messages over an end marker. Darla stores the fixed parameters just before the variables. She had no way to tell one from the other. No wonder she’s glitched!”

“But who?” I asked. “And why?”

The Chief said angrily, “Between cruises a ship’s Log is relayed to the Dosmen at Luna Central. If there have been modifications, fixed parameters can change. The Dosmen burn the new stats into the Log, and relay it back. They must have been having fun that day.” The Chief’s face grew redder as he spoke.

“Naval Dosmen?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes, those”--he spluttered--”those damned hackers!”

“Chief!” I said, scandalized. Ever since the Young Hackers’ League invaded the puter banks at U.N. Headquarters and wiped out half the world’s taxes, the term “hacker” was not used lightly.

“That’s what they are!” he snapped. “May Lord God Himself damn them for eternity!”

It was blasphemy unless he meant it literally, and I decided he did. “Amen,” I said, to make clear I interpreted it as a prayer. Then, “Check the nearby sectors. Copy any overwrites you find into the Log.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Chief tapped his console, his face dark. “The bloody Dosmen were skylarking like raw cadets.

Data banks have dead space to write in, but they were careless and burned their garbage into a live file.”

And put my ship in peril.

My voice was tight. “When we get home I’ll file charges against them. If they’re acquitted, I do hereby swear by God’s Grace to call challenge against the offenders.” A foolish gesture, but I was too angry to care.

Dueling had been relegalized in the reforms of 2024, in an effort to control a growing epidemic of unlicensed homicides.

What made my gesture reckless was that I had no idea what martial skills the Dosmen had, and I was committed for my soul’s sake. Choice of weapons would be theirs.

The Chief looked at me in approval. “I’ll join you, sir. I hereby--”

“Be silent!” I rounded on him in fury. “I forbid you to swear an oath!”

“Aye aye, sir.” It was all he could say.

“I’m sorry, Chief. The responsibility’s mine. I have faster reaction time, anyway.”

“Yes, sir.” He glowered at me, annoyed but not angry.

Heavy and middle-aged, he might not survive a duel and knew it. However, the chances of dueling were remote. As soon as we presented our Log to Admiralty a Dosman named Jory would be unceremoniously hauled in for polygraph and drug questioning.

I frowned, as a new thought struck. “Are you telling me the life of everyone aboard depends on a simple file marker? Doesn’t Darla have redundancies? Safeguards?”

“Of course,” said the Pilot. “She’s constantly checking for internal inconsistencies.”

I let his remark hang unanswered. It was the Chief who finally stated the obvious. “Well, at some point she stopped.

Why?”

Pilot Haynes snarled, “Do I look like a Dosman? How am I supposed to guess--” “Belay that!” They subsided under my glare. “Pilot, can we fix the glitch?”

“Rewriting the end of file statement should do it.”

“I don’t think so.” The Chief.

“Why not?” The Pilot and I spoke as one.

“Because Darla didn’t spot the problem herself.” Chief McAndrews took in a deep breath, chewed his lip. “A puter applies math routines to numeric problems, and goes to fuzzy logic programs to decipher what we tell her. That’s how she translates your spoken questions into parameters she can dredge up from a file.”

“And?”

“It’s fuzzy logic that would tell her that base mass and adjusted mass should differ, and to accept the difference. She didn’t figure it out. Anyway, the parameters are certainly stored twice, at least, with backups. As Mr. Haynes said, her internal security checks would spot discrepancies.”

“And they didn’t.”

“Right. She isn’t reading the backups, and something’s skewing nine of her parameters. Without a Dosman we may never know why, but I suspect those damn--those bloody clowns corrupted her fuzzy logic programs, so Darla didn’t know when to apply logic, or when she had a problem. When to call for help.”

I stood to pace, found my knees strangely weak. “Can we cure her?”

The Chief Engineer’s voice was heavy. “If Darla is so far gone she can’t spot a corrupt file marker or warn us of internal contradictions, reprogramming her is way beyond any of us.”

Silence.

“I think he’s right, sir.” The Pilot.

I sat, gripped the armrests. “Complete power down and reboot?”

The Chief shook his head. “It would reset her personality overlays; she’d reassemble as an entirely different persona.