Cyber Rogues (92 page)

“Sure. But we need to go over the initialization checklist for tomorrow.”

“It may have to be postponed with this other business. I’ll let you know later this morning.”

“Okay.” Barry shrugged and turned to leave, just as Judy reappeared from the direction of the conference room.

“Judy, can you switch this through? I need to take it inside,” Corrigan said as she came back to her desk. She nodded as she sat down, and tapped a couple of keys. Corrigan went into his office and picked up. “Hello? Mr. Ulsen?”

“Yes. You left a message yesterday for Mr. Sylvine to call you?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, he’s out of town right now and not due back for some days. Can you tell me what it’s about? Maybe I can help.”

Corrigan thought quickly. Seventeen or eighteen hours had gone by since he had made the call from Main Reception, when he and Lilly returned to Xylog the evening before. In the world outside, that would be a little over five minutes. Sylvine had no doubt decoupled after the dinner the evening before that (an additional seven minutes earlier) to make his report, which was why he wasn’t replying. Although “Ulsen” might not necessarily be playing an active role in the simulation, he was coupled into the system, since he was able to synchronize with Corrigan. But he would be a temporary liaison, there to provide a contact of sorts; he would be able to disconnect and talk to the outside.

Corrigan said curtly, “Look, whoever-you-really-are. No bullshit, okay? I know the score. The memory erasure of the first run didn’t work. Get this whole thing terminated immediately. Do you understand?”

There was a long, creaking pause. “I’ll have to consult—”

“Consult, nothing. There isn’t anything to consult about. In case you aren’t aware of it yet, one of the surrogates just checked himself out. The rest can follow. Whoever’s behind this are facing enough lawsuits to paper CLC’s Head Office with already. You tell them that it stops
now
! Out.” Corrigan slammed down the phone and stood looking at it. He was conscious of a feeling of anticlimax. So that was it? After all the talk, all that he had been able to do amounted to no more than issue a demand into a phone and hang up. And now, back to the interminable waiting. All of a sudden, Hatcher’s uncompromising solution was beginning to look clean and decisive by comparison. Not prepared even to consider the demeaning passivity of waiting, he had gone straight over to the offensive. Probably he was causing consternation outside, right at this moment. Anything that Corrigan might do now would be merely a supporting action.

Then the sound of new voices came from outside the office door, which Corrigan had left open. He looked away from the desk and saw that Harry Morgen and Joan Sutton had arrived. Morgen was talking to Judy and pointing at a configuration on her screen that looked from a distance like Corrigan’s call-log format. Sutton was standing behind him, gazing about at the surroundings as if she had never seen them before. Then Morgen, in the process of uttering something, brought his right hand up to touch his temple with a finger in an odd, flicking motion, vaguely suggestive of a lazy salute. Corrigan had seen that mannerism before somewhere.

Corrigan walked slowly across the office and stopped in the doorway, studying them. Neither they nor Judy had noticed him yet.

Then he remembered where he had seen that temple-touching mannerism before: Zehl! Dr. Zehl had had the same unconscious habit. And, therefore, Graham Sylvine—since Corrigan had already concluded that they were the same person. So Morgen had been the outside controller who had masqueraded as Zehl and Sylvine. That much made sense—Morgen was a firm Tyron follower. The only thing that didn’t answer was if
this
Morgen was another animation re-created from system profiles, like Pinder and Barry Neinst, or a projection of the real person, coupled in. If he was real, then maybe Corrigan had his channel to the outside standing here, right in front of him.

CHAPTER FORTY

Judy stopped what she had been saying as she saw Corrigan moving out from the doorway of his office. “Oh, here he is now.” Morgen and Sutton turned toward him and exchanged perfunctory greetings. Corrigan watched their faces as they spoke. As with Barry Neinst, there was no way of telling from outward appearances.

“People over at Head Office are trying to get hold of you, Joe, but you haven’t been getting back to them,” Morgen said. “With the project about to go live, that seems strange. Is everything okay over here?”

Corrigan was conscious of their eyes searching his face like mapping radars, almost as if they were trying to divine the true person behind the surface imagery as much as he was of them. Considering the events since the previous evening, Morgen’s remark seemed curiously insensitive. And Corrigan thought he knew why. Here was his opportunity.

“He was one of our key people,” Corrigan said. “And now the city’s making a fad out of it. It
does
alter the perspective of things a bit.”

His vagueness was deliberate. Involuntarily, Joan Sutton glanced at Morgen with a bemused look, and he returned one that was just as mystified.
They didn’t know!
And in that instant Corrigan knew that they were real-person surrogates. The way that Sutton had seemed awed by the surroundings should have told him sooner.

For had they been Morgen and Sutton animations—permanent denizens of the simulated world—they would have been present since yesterday, and hence aware of what had been dominating the news. But Morgen, as Sylvine, had left only twelve minutes ago, outside-time, which would have given him barely enough time to report from his last visit, agree on the next objectives, and reenter. The fact that he had reappeared so soon, as himself, and bringing Joan Sutton with him, suggested that something irregular had been detected by the controllers on the outside. That would fit with why they were checking on Corrigan’s behavior.

He looked at them coldly, making no attempt to hide the rancor that he felt. “You don’t know what’s been going on, do you?”

Morgen tried to feign a puzzled look. “How—”

Corrigan cut him off with a disdainful wave. “Don’t try any acting, Harry—it’ll save us all a lot of breath.” He nodded back toward the doorway of his office. “Let’s go inside.” He extended an arm. Morgen’s face was apprehensive. Sutton shot him what looked to Corrigan like an accusing look, and he sensed that all was not smooth between them. They went through. “Hold all calls, Judy,” Corrigan said, and followed.

Inside, he closed the door behind him and turned on them. “Now let me guess what’s been happening outside. The trait-assimilation parameter settings in the first run were wrong—yes?—which caused the animations to go off on self-reinforcing patterns and create a screwed-up world in which the surrogates—” Corrigan indicated himself with a finger and interjected in a scathing voice, “such as
me
! . . . instead of providing the models, became misfits. Yes,
Doctor Zehl
?”
He glared at them and found that his breathing was heavy. Morgen had paled. His skin looked clammy in the pale light of the office. The system was picking up his physiological responses and projecting them perfectly. Even Corrigan marveled.

He went on. “But even so, the results were so far beyond anything we’d ever imagined that somebody out there decided to run the whole thing again from the beginning with the parameters reset. But that’s where you messed up. You see, the erasure of the first run didn’t work the way it was supposed to. We still remember it—all twelve years of it.”

They stared at him numbly. He continued. “But yesterday, Tom Hatcher decided he’d had enough and wasn’t about to go around again. And do you know what he did? He got a gun and blew away a heap of computer-code cops and security guards out at the airport. By nighttime, it had become the rage all over the city. Later, Tom ran his car up to eighty and pointed it head-on into a truck, so he’s out of it already, and probably giving everyone out there hell.” Corrigan’s face creased into a mocking smile. “And guess what—this morning there’s screwballs doing the same thing all over Pittsburgh.”

The expressions on the two faces in front of him were completely stunned, causing Corrigan’s smile to widen derisively. “You see what it means?” he said to them. “Now the parameters are
over
compensated. The animations are slavishly copying whatever the surrogates do—if you’d looked hard enough around the dinner table, you might have seen it yourself when you were here a little while ago as Graham Sylvine. With surrogates acting rationally in the way everyone assumed they would, that might have been okay. Oz could have worked. But what the experiment never bargained for was any of them going off the rails the way Tom did. Now you’re about to create another world full of lunatics, only this time psychopaths and suicides.” Corrigan tossed out a hand in a dismissive gesture, and the smile vanished from his face. “So it’s over, and lot of heads are going to roll out there. Get it terminated.”

“I did try and tell you,” Sutton began, looking at Morgen. “I said that the—”

Morgen waved her aside in a way that said all that could wait until later. “It was the pressure from the F and F consortium,” he told Corrigan. “They insisted on going straight to a full-world implementation, and they funded additional outside programming to do it. That was what they’d always wanted—a virtual world. They weren’t interested in developing AI. We had to go along to get the backing.”

Corrigan looked at him disdainfully. “What do you take me for? I’ve grown twelve years in the last three weeks. Come on—I want
out
!”

But Morgen persisted in the line that had been agreed upon in his excursion outside. “Look, Joe . . . I know that the way it’s been done has been a bit underhanded. . . .”

“
Underhanded!
By Christ, I—”

“Hear me out, please. Look, I know you’ve had a raw deal. But that can all be straightened out. As you just said, this whole project, this process of yours, has worked out way, way better than anything anyone ever dreamed of. If—”

“Right!
You
just said it: this process of
mine
!”

“
I understand what you’re saying, Joe. But let’s not allow the project to suffer just because you’re feeling sore in the short term, right now.” Morgen showed both palms hastily. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying you don’t have good reason. Rerunning and knowing what we know now, it might actually get so close to reality that you can’t tell the difference. That was the original success criterion, remember? And we’re almost there already. After this we can do more realscaping and expand the territory. Maybe tie in a whole list of remote places.” Morgen forced a jocular tone. “Hey, remember that time you wanted to visit Ireland, and Zehl had to pull rank?”

“Somebody seems to have it all figured out,” Corrigan remarked sarcastically.

“See it through,” Morgen urged. “You’ll be more than compensated. It’s already been agreed. We’re only talking about another few days.”

That was too much. “
For you!”
Corrigan exploded. “A few days for you! Don’t you understand what I said a minute ago? Suppression of the first-run memories
didn’t work.
For us, you’re talking about years. I want this thing stopped now, and I want out. So get on with it.”

Morgen shook his head, still unwilling to give up but at a loss for a continuation. “Is there a choice?” Sutton asked him. “From the sound of it, it’s all about to go off into a different brand of craziness in the other direction anyway. It’s time to hold, analyze the data we’ve got, and reevaluate.”

Still, Morgen wavered. After a few seconds of waiting, unyielding, Corrigan pointed out, “You might as well. It can’t work now, whatever you do. I’ll just start tossing people out of the windows, and by lunchtime everyone’ll be doing it. What use is that going to be to your precious backers? It’s over. Accept it. Get us out.”

Finally Morgen capitulated. “I can’t make the decision. It has to go back to the people outside.”

“Okay, but you don’t have to decouple. Use one of the direct gate codes,” Corrigan said. As a transient observer, Morgen would be able to signal the outside via a special calling number like the one that Corrigan had used to leave messages for “Sylvine.” Probably he had recourse to other means, too.

“Better do it, Harry,” Sutton murmured in a tone that said he might as well get it over with. Morgen hesitated, then drew a pocket communicator from his jacket and tapped in a numeric sequence to flag a precoded message that would be transmitted practically instantaneously. Hence he was able to get information out straightaway, which was the option that Corrigan had not had access to.

“You might as well tell them to reduce the time-acceleration down to unity, too, while you’re at it,” Corrigan suggested. “Communication would be a lot simpler. It won’t make any difference now. This run isn’t going anywhere.”

While the time-rate differential existed, however, and allowing for even a couple of minutes’ deliberation on the outside, there would be a considerable delay before any response became known. Joan Sutton was at boiling point, tight-mouthed and sending Morgen daggers looks. Corrigan guessed that she had opposed the decision to reset the simulation and been overruled. Corrigan decided it would be easiest to leave them to it. He had said all he had to say for the time being.

He moved back to the door and opened it to look out. Lilly was back sitting on her chair opposite Judy’s desk. Yeen was standing nearby. He came across when Corrigan appeared.

“Er, Mr. Corrigan,” he said. “There are one or two inconsistencies between your account and Ms. Essell’s—that we’ll need to go over.” Corrigan did his best to look surprised. “I must ask you to be available again later today.”

“Very well,” Corrigan said.

“If you do have reason to go elsewhere, you will leave details of how you can be reached?”

“Of course.”

“Then that will be all for now. Thanks for your cooperation. I can find my own way out, if that’s okay.”

Corrigan smiled apologetically. “Sorry—company rules. Judy, would you take Mr. Yeen back down to Reception, please?” Judy got up and walked away with Yeen in the direction of the elevators. Corrigan shrugged at Lilly in a way that said none of it mattered. The sound of Joan Sutton’s voice rising came through the doorway behind him. Corrigan half closed the door behind him and went over to Lilly.