Cyber Rogues (66 page)

After the racks and cubicles, scratched metal desks, and tiled vinyl floors of the environment that Corrigan was used to, it all seemed very glamorous and exciting—a glimpse of the real world, where the events that shaped the news were made to happen. In comparison, the world that he was from looked woefully pedestrian and academic—a behind-the-scenes support facility to serve this, the stage.

Finally, they came to a sumptuous corner office looking out over Manhattan in two directions. It had deep russet pile, integral mahogany shelves and fittings, and framed travelogue scenes looking down over a conference area set off around a circular, glass-topped table. From the immense desks with computer side-tables and recessed consoles, the office was evidently shared by two people. One of the desks was unoccupied. From the other, a man of about Corrigan’s age rose to greet them, smiling genially. He had a trim, athletic build with collar-length yellow hair, and looked aristocratically debonair in a tan jacket and maroon cord shirt worn open with a silk cravat in place of necktie.

“Nigel, how are things?” Hamils pumped his hand. “Is the world still taking good care of you?”

“Never better.”

“You know Henry Glinberg, up from Pittsburgh again to see us.”

“Of course. Hello again, Henry. Did you fly up this morning?”

“Hi, Nigel. Yes. Can’t afford the time to stay over every time. You customers keep us too busy.”

Nigel’s smile broadened, easily, unrepentantly. “How would you pay the rent without us?”

Hamils indicated Corrigan. “And this is Joe Corrigan, from the DNC group at Blawnox. He’s the guy that Jason sent up after Therese Loel talked to Victor.”

Nigel shook hands with Corrigan, languidly yet firmly, without undue assertiveness. “Very pleased to meet you, Joe,” he said. Just a simple business introduction, and yet he conveyed the impression that he really meant it. Style, Corrigan thought to himself. The art of gentility and charm. Something that didn’t come very easily from talking to machines all day.

“Me too,” he responded.

“Nigel Korven,” Hamils supplied. “He’s one of the senior consultants who take care of F and F’s key clients.” Corrigan took that to mean what the sufficiently sophisticated were called, in place of “salesman.”

“So you’re the expert from afar, who’s going to tell us about Direct Neural Coupling and where it’s leading,” Korven said. “It sounds absolutely fascinating. Some people here are extremely eager to meet you.”

“As long as they understand that it’s just for information,” Corrigan said. He was about to explain that the research was still in an early stage, but caught a faint shake of the head from Hamils.

“Do I detect an Irishman?” Korven said, changing subjects smoothly. “Over here permanently, I hope?”

“As far as I know,” Corrigan said.

“Good. That’s something we could use more of.” Korven turned to Hamils. “Well, I think the others are just about ready for us next door. We can go straight on in.” He picked up a folder from his desk and selected a few other papers. “Did you get that house in the end, Mat—the one you wanted?”

“The one up near the bridge, right. Got it for eight grand off the asking, too.”

“Splendid. Your wife must be very happy about it.”

“She’s delighted. First thing is a warming party. You’ll have to come along.”

“I’d love to, Mat. I’ll have to see if I can find somebody pretty to bring along.”

“Somehow I can’t see you without a woman around, Nigel,” Glinberg said as they moved out of the room.

“Oh, but I don’t keep them,” Korven answered. “It’s better to have new ones frequently. They’re so much more pleasant to be around when they’re on their best behavior and trying to make an impression.” He winked reassuringly at Corrigan. “Right, Joe?”

Hamils drew Corrigan aside as they were about to follow the other two out into the corridor. “Let CLC decide what its policy is,” he murmured. “We want these people to feel that we can help them solve their problems. They won’t connect if you make it sound too remote.”

Corrigan nodded. “I’ll remember.”

They went into a room a few doors away, where two more people were waiting at a large central table. Korven introduced Walter Moleno, fortyish, dark-haired and tanned, with a thin mustache: “Our man in Southeast Asia, back on one of his rare visits home.”

Moleno shook his head. “It’s not a place, I keep telling you, Nigel. It’s a computer. They don’t need VR out there. They all live in computers already. I come back for the reality experience.”

“In New York? My God! A bit like going to Kansas for the views, isn’t it?”

The other person was a woman called Amanda Ramussienne: probably in her mid-thirties, with high, angular features, wavy ginger hair, and alluring, green, feline eyes that caught the light in a way that made it seem to be coming from inside. Her makeup was generous but professional, and the image completed by a beige dress and gold jewelry that blended impeccably and had not come from the neighborhood mall. She spoke animatedly, with lots of expression and gestures, and in some other setting Corrigan would have guessed her background to be theatrical. Korven introduced her vaguely as an “analyst”; from the preamble after they sat down, Corrigan gathered that her work involved contact with the media.

“I had lunch with that awful creature from Time-Life again yesterday,” she told Korven. He smiled a mixture of amusement at her feigned indignation and despair that she should have known better.

“You mean the fat one who smokes buffalo shit?”

“Of
course
the one who smokes buffalo shit. He definitely wants me to go to bed with him. He even had the nerve to say so. . . .” She waved imploringly at the ceiling. “What is so special about this job that I should put up with this? I mean, when is the harassment thing going to be extended to apply to customers too?”

“Why not try seeing it not as harassment but as opportunity?” Korven suggested sagely. “Most
men
would.”

“If it were the sexy, good-looking ones who came on, I might,” Amanda agreed with a sigh. “But why does it always have to be exactly the opposite kind?”

“Who are we waiting for?” Hamils cut in. “Victor?”

“He’ll be in when he’s finished a call he’s on,” Moleno said, nodding. “We thought half an hour here to get to know each other. Then we’ll collect a couple of others and go for lunch.”

“Have we picked a place?” Korven asked.

“Just downstairs.” Moleno looked at the three from CLC. “It’s one of those weeks, I’m afraid. Everyone’s flying with both feet off the ground.”

Hamils nodded. “What kind of mood is Victor in today?” he asked.

Korven turned his head toward Amanda. “Oh, I don’t know. What would you say? Is the beast human today?”

She nodded. “Yes, I’d say so. He wasn’t devouring anyone the last time I saw him.”

“We think he’s human,” Korven told Hamils.

Corrigan looked at Hamils inquiringly. “Victor’s okay,” Hamils said. “But at times he can be a bit . . .” He looked diplomatically to the three F & F people before choosing a word. “What would you call it? Temperamental? . . .”

“Obstinate. Opinionated. Bombastic,” Korven supplied, with the candid air of somebody saying what everyone else knew perfectly well anyway. “But we all love him, just the same.”

“Just don’t argue with him,” Hamils translated. “If he gets something wrong, let it keep and tell us afterward. We’ll straighten it out later.”

There were a few seconds of silence, seeming to say that nothing more could make things any clearer after that. Then Amanda treated Corrigan to one of the smiles that talk-show hostesses use to get the show going again after an awkward hiatus. “How much do you know about the kind of business we do here, Joe?” she inquired.

“Not a great deal, to be honest. Something to do with marketing and forecasting, isn’t it?”

“Those terms are a little obsolete now,” Korven said. “You can charge more for ‘econodynamic trend analysis.’”

“Ah. Yes.”

At that moment the door opened as if on a spring, and a short, stockily built figure marched in and stumped to the end of the table, where he deposited some sheets of printed figures and a notepad. He had a smooth, tanned head fringed by dark locks that reflected a sheen, heavy eyebrows, and a solid, rounded face with pugnacious jaw and chin. His fingers were thick and stubby, with tufts of hair on the backs between the joints, but the nails were well manicured. He was wearing a dark three-piece with hairline stripe and—a rare sight for the day and age—a white carnation pinned in his left lapel. Mat Hamils knew Borth, of course, but Glinberg apparently had not dealt with him directly in previous visits. Korven completed the introductions.

“So you work for Therese Loel,” Borth said, taking in Glinberg with an unblinking stare that gave away nothing. His voice was blunt, direct, straight to the point.

“That’s right,” Glinberg confirmed.

“Harry’s the ESG specialist, based out of Blawnox,” Hamils filled in. “We call him in as needed.”

Borth’s gaze shifted to Corrigan. “But you’re the guy Therese said they’d send up, who knows about the computers that let you play Ping-Pong in your head.”

“Joe’s from the main corporate R and D facility, also at Blawnox,” Hamils supplied.

Corrigan frowned. There was some confusion already in what Borth had said. DNC coupled direct into the nervous system. The simulated Ping-Pong was something different: a demonstration that the SDC people used to show off their VIV helmet, which utilized the regular senses. But before Corrigan could frame a reply, Borth changed tack:

“Have they told you much about the kind of business we’re in here?”

“We were just about to when you came in,” Amanda said. Her manner had changed with Borth in the room. She was all seriousness and attention now—no longer a vivacious artiste, but suddenly the business professional.

Borth remained standing, and spoke moving back and forth at the end of the table. Presenting to a group seemed to be his natural style.

“We live in a complicated world. All the time, it gets more complicated. Everywhere you look, where people are dealing in long-term plans—in business, in industry, in technology, in politics—more money is having to be put down up-front, the lead times are stretching farther into the future, and what happens at the end of it is anybody’s guess. Bigger stakes; less certain outcomes. In other words, it’s all getting to be more of a gamble.” He paused, looked from side to side, and showed his empty palms, as if inviting anyone who could to dispute that.

“Guess wrong, and you can be wiped out even though nothing was your fault: the bottom drops out of a market that everyone said couldn’t fail; a trend turns around; the public loses interest in some fad that was going to be the rage for the rest of time . . . and nobody knows why.” Borth held up a fan of stubby fingers and began ticking off examples. “How many of you remember the savings-and-loan mess years back, when they poured billions into stacking up downtowns with high-rise office space that nobody wanted? Before that there was the synthetic-fuel thing. Eight billion they blew on it—because the world was about to run out of oil. Then we’re drowning in oil, and the whole thing’s a fiasco. Screenpad Corporation spent eleven years making plans and tooling up, saying they were going to make paper obsolete. There’s still plenty of paper around today, but they’re not.”

He raised an emphatic finger. “
But
. . . if you call the shots right, you can be made for life. Not that many years ago, all the pros laughed when a couple of guys in a garage said everyone could have a computer. Amspace in Texas came up with a cheap, clunky, surface-to-orbit pickup, instead of the Ferraris and mobile homes that the Air Force and NASA had been making, and they created a global space-trucking industry.

“Now look at the things that some people are telling us will be next.” Borth looked around again, appealingly this time. “Nanomachines? Adaptive fiction? Bioregenerative materials? Talking houses? Where do I put my money for the big paybacks ten years down the line?” His gaze came back to rest on the three people from CLC. “You can see the problem—and believe me, it is a problem. That’s where we make our business: helping people out there to make those decisions. And naturally there are other outfits who do the same thing. Sometimes we’re right more often than they are. Sometimes they get the edge on us. Frankly, there isn’t a lot of difference: we all hit at around the same percentage. But I can tell you this: there’s
lots
of money out there,
big
money, just waiting for the first outfit that can come up with a way of doing it better. We happen to think that smarter computers is the way to go. That’s why we’re interested in anything new that CLC has got coming down the pike.”

Borth sat down finally, indicating that he was through. He continued looking expectantly at Corrigan. Corrigan, however, having had his orders, left it to someone else to respond. Hamils launched off into a fairly standard line about Virtual Reality technologies offering new ways for users to interact with data: Through suitable presentation to the user’s senses, information normally handled as abstract symbols could be transformed into the furnishings of a directly perceivable “world.” Processing would then take the form of manipulating those objects via intuitively meaningful actions as used in the everyday world. Glinberg gave the commonly cited example of a bicycle. “To compute the correct angle to lean at for taking a corner at a particular speed requires solving a complicated equation of physics. But the five-year-old kid just
feels
the right thing to do, and does it. Well, the way you do forecasting at present is tackling the problem as numbers; what Joe’s people are working on will give you a bike.”

“So it’s not one of these systems that thinks it knows my job better than I do,” Borth said, assuming the position of one of his clients. “I’m still the best judge of my own business. It simply gives me a better way of seeing the angles.”

“Exactly,” Hamils said.

Which gave a clear and concise picture, certainly. And it was obviously the kind of thing that the customer wanted to hear. The only problem was that it bore no resemblance to what was actually envisaged at CLC. Pinocchio Two was aimed at shifting the coupling level of the existing motor interface to a higher region of the brain stem and adding speech; EVIE was a short-term kluge to gain experience with vision before the whole thing was redesigned to DNC. The kind of thing that Hamils was talking about, if it ever materialized at all, was years away in the future, at least.