Cyber Rogues (78 page)

Corrigan and Evelyn had just moved to a house in Fox Chapel, a higher-income, professional residential area a few miles north of Blawnox. They threw a great housewarming party for their friends from CLC and elsewhere, and to add to the fun had one of the EVIE realscaping teams go through the house to capture the interior from all sides and angles for addition to the ever-growing database for the “simworld” of Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. So now, Corrigan explained to everybody, they would be able to relive the party all over again by coupling into EVIE when they got back to work tomorrow morning.

On the night of the announcement that COSMOS was on hold, Corrigan came home somewhat the worse after a celebratory drink or two in town. “Maybe Mister Tyron isn’t so much of a big wheel after all,” he said, sporting a cigar along with a satisfied smirk as he delivered the news. “It’s like Vic Borth said: his field is just visual imagery. Toys. But this thing we’re talking about now is going to need real know-how. It’s getting out of his league.”

Evelyn was less sure of that, but wrote Corrigan’s brashness off to the effects of the drink and the strain that he had been under. Anyway, she didn’t want to spoil the party. “Sit down and I’ll get you a coffee,” she said, forcing a smile. “Have you eaten yet?”

Corrigan stabbed his own chest with a thumb as he lowered himself heavily into an armchair. “If there’s big money to be made out of all this, maybe I’ll get to claim a share too now. Maybe we’ll see who’s who, eh?”

Evelyn’s smile faded as she went through into the kitchen. She wasn’t sure that she liked the side of Corrigan that was beginning to show itself. And she was nervous. She didn’t think that somebody like Tyron would give up so easily—nor the kind of people that he had behind him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Maurice came into the still room as Corrigan was changing out of his work jacket and into his street clothes. “Where are you going?” Maurice demanded. “You’ve got another two hours left yet.”

There were times when it was fitting for Corrigan to carry on taking orders from, and working for, a computer animation, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to ask permissions or have to make excuses. “Not tonight,” he said, pulling on his topcoat. “There’s too much to explain, and you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. It’s quiet, and Sherri can handle it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

Far from satisfied, Maurice followed Corrigan out into the corridor. “There is such a thing as proper procedures, Joe. You might show the courtesy of clearing it with me first.” Lilly was waiting by the door from the Galahad Lounge, and moved across to join Corrigan as he appeared. “Oh, so it’s like that, is it?” Maurice went on behind him. “You can’t just walk off the job for a date, Joe. I mean, hey, what is this? This isn’t gonna go away in the morning, you know. Just who in hell do you think you
are
?”

They came out onto the street, with its usual assortment of caricatures, crazies, and zombies. “I’ve been looking for you all over,” Corrigan muttered as soon as they were away from the doors. “You’ve had me worried, I can tell you.”

“You know where I am. What was so difficult?” Lilly’s voice was clipped and bitter. Clearly, she was not over her indignation—at the deception, and him as the only accessible target representing those responsible. The latter was compounded by his defending the situation, which she interpreted as bland acceptance. He got the feeling that she had come to him only as a last resort.

“I tried to, a few times. But I couldn’t find the place again. They’ve changed parts of the city that weren’t scaped. I tried to get you at work, but I couldn’t find it listed.”

“Why all the trouble? What worried you so much?”

“I didn’t know what might come into your head to try next.”

“Did you think I might try suicide or something as a way out?”

As a matter of fact, Corrigan had. After all, no physical harm could come to an external operator from causing an internal surrogate to permanently deactivate itself. But for all anyone knew, the knowledge and the trauma of the event might leave some adverse psychological imprint. It was something that the system designers had talked about, but in the end been forced to leave as one of the many unknowns that the experiment would entail.

“Somehow it didn’t seem like you,” Corrigan replied. Lilly didn’t respond. He went on. “I was concerned that you might try to disrupt the experiment. Oh, I don’t know how, exactly. . . . Set fire to the city, start a riot, preach revolution from street corners—mess the whole thing up somehow. And that would have been a shame, because it’s all doing so incredibly well—despite the flaws.”

Lilly stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at him incredulously. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” She shook her head. “I’ve heard of loyal servants of the System, but this is unreal. I mean, they’ve stolen twelve years of your life, and all you can do is stand there defending them like Horatius on his bridge and say—”

Corrigan raised his hands protestingly. “No. Look, it’s not the way you think. We haven’t really lost twelve years.”

“Not lost? What would you call it, then?”

“I didn’t mean like that. It hasn’t—”

“Do you call being surrounded by this lunacy every day living a life?”

“Let me finish. . . .” Corrigan looked around. There was a small coffee shop, not too crowded, a short distance from where they were standing. He took Lilly’s elbow and began steering her in that direction. “We can’t talk like this. Come on, let’s take the weight off our feet in there. A cup of something might calm you down before you break a spring or something, too.”

“. . . and we finally settled on a factor of 200. A day to us is only seven minutes outside. A whole week is less than an hour. So the twelve years that you’re so hyped up about works out at about three weeks. . . . Hell, Lilly, you’re a scientist. What we’re going through is a unique experience. Three weeks isn’t a lot to exchange for it.”

Lilly, hunched over the opposite side of the small corner-table, sipped her coffee and sighed. Corrigan’s words had had some effect. At least she was listening. She indicated their surroundings with a glance and a motion of her head. “So this is all an accelerated dream. We can afford to sit here and talk about it. It isn’t losing us much.”

“If we sat here for the next hour, it would be a whole eighteen seconds out of your life,” Corrigan said.

Lilly fell quiet for a moment, reflecting on that. “You people might have told us,” she said.

“Tyron didn’t mention it when you were interviewed in California?”

Lilly shook her head. “They didn’t tell us a great deal about it at all.”

“Maybe they did tell you after you got to Pittsburgh,” Corrigan said. “But then somebody sprung this memory suppression, and it got lost with the rest.”

Corrigan felt more at ease for the first time in days. It seemed that he had saved the project and would have good news to report the next time Zehl contacted him. The thing now was to get Lilly back into playing her role normally. He made a conscious effort to discharge the atmosphere by being casual, resting an elbow on the edge of the table and draping his other arm along the back of an empty chair next to him.

“Out of curiosity, what gave it away?” he asked her.

“You mean how did I see through the simulation?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, not because of any one thing that you could put a finger on. Lots of little things.”

“But there must have been something that clinched it.”

Lilly stared into the distance and tried to think back. “I think it was cracks in a sidewalk,” she replied at last.

“You’re joking.”

“No. . . . I do remember a couple of days in Pittsburgh before it all goes blank—when the group from California that I was with first arrived. There was a briefing and some preliminary tests.”

“Okay.”

“Well, I spent some of my free time wandering around, taking in the sights. I like the older, East Coast cities—they’re all so much alike in California. Anyway, I was standing watching something in one particular small street—it’s not all that far from here—that had lots of old, cracked paving stones in the sidewalk, and I noticed that the pattern of the cracks near the base of a lamp outside an antiques store looked like the coastline of Labrador.”

Corrigan shrugged. “What about it?”

Lilly drank from her mug, frowning with the effort of trying to keep clear what had happened around that time. “Soon after that it all gets lost. That was when the intensive tests began, and we were supposed to have had the breakdown and the rest of it. . . .”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Much later, after all the therapy and rehabilitation, when I was out and about again, I ended up one day in that same street. The stones were still old and cracked, so they hadn’t been replaced—but the pattern wasn’t there.” She raised her eyes and looked across at Corrigan. “And that was when a lot of other strange things that I’d been noticing started making more sense. It was a simulation. The system had the data to create realistic views of that street; it knew that the street had old paving stones, and that old paving stones would have cracks. So it put cracks in them. But it didn’t put in the right cracks.”

Corrigan looked at her, astonished. “And that was it?”

“That was it.”

He sat back, nodding. All for the want of a nail . . . “I noticed similar things from time to time, too. I put it down to my own faulty memories.” He shrugged, as if accepting the need for some kind of explanation. “That was what all the authority figures in my life had been telling me for years.”

Lilly looked at him doubtfully over her mug. “You know, for someone who was involved from the start, there seems to be a hell of a lot that you don’t know,” she remarked.

“I’m not really in any better situation than you,” Corrigan said. “We talked a lot about the pros and cons of suppressing the surrogates’ memories, but as far as I was always aware, the decision was not to go with it. So what must have happened is that top management of the project set up another group to implement it secretly. . . .”

“But I thought
you
were project top management,” Lilly interrupted.

Corrigan waved a hand. “Okay, maybe I should have said company top management. There were all kinds of people involved in Oz, both inside CLC and out—it was a hugely complicated undertaking. . . . Anyway, the idea was to make reactions to the simulation valid. But I always thought it was the wrong decision. Things work better if you know what’s going on.”

Lilly stopped him again. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that you didn’t
know
about it—that there was going to be any memory suppression?”

Corrigan shook his head and showed his hands appealingly. “I couldn’t be allowed to, could I? Think about it. If a surrogate knew in advance what the intention was, he’d see straight through any attempt at a cover story. If it was going to be done, that part
had
to be done by other people—without my knowing. Sneaky, yes. But what other way was there?”

Lilly tapped her spoon absently against the side of the mug, frowning to herself and watching it in a distracted kind of way. Corrigan realized that she was far from appeased. She had let herself be led into a diversion about the project’s early days and cracks in paving stones to give herself time to mull over the things he had said earlier.

Finally she shook her head and said, “It still doesn’t add up, Joe. You said you were one of the principal architects of this experiment, right? It practically grew from a proposal of yours in the first place.”

Corrigan had a premonition then of where she was leading. Suddenly he felt less comfortable. “Right,” he agreed.

“And yet, twelve years into it, you could still be taken in?” Lilly stared at him disbelievingly. “If this was anything at all like the experiment you expected, you’d
have
to have recognized it. Even if your memories of actually commencing it were suppressed, you’d know enough to figure out what all that business early on had been about. The only explanation has to be that the possibility of a simulation that would keep running for years never entered your head. Therefore, it must have gone way past anything envisaged in the plans that you knew about. Maybe the reason I saw through it first was that I didn’t know what the simulation was
supposed
to be.”

Corrigan had to nod—he had said as much himself when they talked before at Lilly’s place. The first phase was supposed to have consisted just of progressively more elaborate tests. A comprehensive, extended simulation of the kind they were in wouldn’t follow until much later. “Nothing like this was even scheduled,” he admitted.

“Well, it seems
somebody
scheduled it,” Lilly said pointedly.

In short, had he ever been as in control of things as he imagined? And if he had not, then who had been in control?

And still was?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The CLC Board decided to go with the proposal to attempt evolving an Artificial Intelligence by means of machine-directed animations learning to mimic human surrogates in a virtual world. The project was designated “Oz,” and to begin with, half a floor was allocated to accommodate it in the IE Block at Blawnox. This did not mean abandoning COSMOS, however, since an all-neural interface as envisaged from COSMOS would be essential for coupling in the human surrogates for Oz. Hence, COSMOS was recast as a subsidiary goal in the greater plan.

The COSMOS part of the program was left under Tyron’s management, as had been the original intention, and the overall direction of Oz entrusted to Pinder, with Corrigan heading up the groups responsible for developing the animation-driver software. Peter Quell, Pinder’s deputy, stood in as acting head of the rest of the R & D division. The most obvious aspect of this arrangement was the temporary nature of Pinder’s overseeing role in getting Oz off the ground. When he returned to his regular job as R & D chief, an opening would be left for a permanent technical director for the Oz project. And just as clearly, the only two real candidates for the position would be Corrigan and Tyron.