"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 tool
ing 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.
Corrigan tried to inject some measure of perspective but received a firm "not now" signal from Hamils. Borth gave no indication of wanting a detailed technical explanation of either project. It made Corrigan wonder what he was doing here at all. He suspected that the reason was primarily for effect: to maintain an image of CLC's corporate responsiveness. Therese Loel knew of the huge potential market within F & F's client base, and had mentioned the DNC program simply to be sure that nothing of possible relevance was missed. Borth had asked for a specialist; the company had obliged. Now everyone was reading too much into it.
"Have you seen our research organization down at Pittsburgh?" Hamils asked Borth.
"I've been to the head office in the city a couple of times, but never out at the labs, no," Borth replied.
Hamils inclined his head for a moment. "Maybe we could offer you a trip down there to see what goes on?" he suggested. "Then Joe's people could show you the whole state of the art. What do you think?"
"Sounds good," Borth replied. "I'd like that." He glanced at his colleagues. They seemed interested. "We'll all come," he announced.
Hamils looked pleased with the morning's work. "Joe will set it up when he gets back," he said. "Okay, Joe? Can you fix that for us?"
There it was at last: a direct question. What else was Corrigan supposed to say? "Sure, I'd be happy to." He forced his expression to remain calm and composed. "That would be no problem at all. But we are in changeover mode to the new project just at this moment. . . . Could we schedule it for a little later in time?"
Chapter Thirteen
"You come home at some unearthly hour, and all you've done since is drink coffee. No sleep, nothing to eat. Why can't you admit that it's a textbook case of delayed shock response, following your recent emotional trauma?"
"Horace, shut up. You don't know what you're talking about. In fact, you don't know anything about what's going on at all."
"There's nothing to be ashamed of, Joe. It's perfectly normal. The symptoms were described exactly by Fenwick Zellor in—"
Corrigan flipped the manual override on the kitchen monitor panel to "off." Then he returned to his chair at the table, topped up his mug, and resumed contemplating the design of floral bunches and foliations on the wallpaper opposite.
Although he was looking away from it, he knew that above the work surface behind him was a spice rack fixed to the side of a cabinet—a flimsy, wooden affair of two shelves and supporting ends, holding an assortment of small glass jars. It was outside the range of his immediate attention—as far as could be ascertained from outward appearances, anyway—and the likelihood of anything else in the room affecting it in some way in the next few seconds was vanishingly small. That meant that it would rank low in the probability tables constantly being updated by the program that tried to guess which features of the surroundings were likely to be objects of action or change in the immediate future.
The number of discrete objects needed to make up a simulated world that aspired to be in any way authentic was stupendous. Every one of those objects had, associated with it, a list of latent attributes that might require activating at any time, according to circumstances. A book taken randomly off a shelf and thumbed, for example; a rug kicked back across the floor; a candy bar broken—all would involve the sudden revealing of new information that had previously been hidden. The number of conceivable ways in which a given situation might develop in the next instant was so astronomic that no method of organizing the data could make all of the possible continuations equally available for processing in the time necessary to create smooth, realistic transitions: the computers couldn't generate dirt and worms under every square foot of grass in Pennsylvania all the time, just in case somebody were to decide on a whim to pick up a shovel and dig a hole somewhere.
So what the system did was identify the most likely continuations, based on its accumulating experience of how people tended to behave, and make sure that the pertinent descriptors would always be the fastest accessible. Thus, there was a small but not insignificant possibility that the mug in Corrigan's hand might slip and shatter—and the pointers to such details as the internal structure, texture, and fracture modes of the porcelain would therefore be high in the current access tree. There was a bowl containing two oranges an arm's reach away from him on the table, and the distinct possibility presented itself that he might decide to peel one of them; subfiles defining the properties and behavior of the pulp, fruit, juice, and pips would all have been shuffled up to ready-access status when he arrived in the vicinity and sat down. Similarly for the pages of the magazine lying underneath the fruit bowl, the contents of the pockets of his jacket, slung over the back of another chair, and the details of the palm of his hand, resting on the tabletop—in case he chose to turn his hand over and look at it. But for the spice rack behind him—out of sight, and not something
that a person would normally pay attention to. . . .
In a slow, natural movement, consciously suppressing muscle tension and keeping his gaze on the far wall to avoid signaling any intentions to the eye-tracking software, he set the mug down and leaned back in his chair. Then, abruptly, he leaped up and whirled around, in the same movement shooting out a hand to smash one of the spice rack's ends outward.
If his attention hadn't been totally focused, alert for every detail of what happened, he might well have missed it, even then. But for someone who knew what to look for, everything was wrong. For a brief instant—barely perceptible, but definite—there was a break in the movement of his hand just as it touched. The sting and the sound came a fraction too late. And there was a fleeting moment of blankness in the break before the detail of splintered wood and the exposed grain added itself. He stared, oblivious to the clattering of spice jars falling on the countertop and rolling off to the floor. When he pried off one of the shelves hanging by an end and snapped it experimentally, the effect was perfect. He dropped the pieces onto the counter and sat down again at the table.
So it was true.
He snorted humorlessly to himself as Lilly's words came back: "It makes too much sense . . . Way too much." Wasn't he, she had said, being just a little too insightful for someone who was supposed to be crazy?
Of course, it was too much of a coincidence that both he and she, involved in the same project twelve years ago, should have undergone similar psychologically disrupting experiences, and afterward have perceived a world severely distorted to begin with but steadily improving with time.
And that both he and she should suffer from an impaired sense of smell. The first cranial nerve, the Olfactory, serving the most primitive of the senses, is the only one to synapse in the cerebrum. They had never been able to carry the DNC interfacing level beyond the thalamus.
And that in all this time their travel options should have been limited for "medical" reasons. The preparations for Oz had included a major program of systematically recording and encoding all the architectural, geographic, and other visual details of the city—a process known as "realscaping"—in order to re-create any scene realistically in a virtual presentation. But there had to be limits. The program had covered only Pittsburgh and the surrounding area—and the effort entailed by that had been massive enough. In addition, Xylog merged its database with others compiled by cooperating organizations that had carried out similar schemes elsewhere. One of those had been Himomatsu Inc. of Tokyo, which explained how Corrigan had been able to "visit" Japan four years previously.
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