Realtime Interrupt

by James P. Hogan

  "Who has to walk, anyhow? We've got the DART."

  "You need it. Walking would be quicker than this traffic."

  "Do they argue all the time?" Evelyn asked Kathleen.

  "Not all the time. When they do start really arguing, you'll know it."

  * * *

  In Dun Laoghaire, they followed the harborfront past stately Victorian terraces and arrived at the Royal Marine Hotel, where Corrigan and Evelyn would be staying. Immense in scale and magnificent in rendering, it was a fine example of the palatial resort hotels that had sprung up all over Europe around the middle of the nineteenth century—although since saddled with a modern extension in a clash of styles that reverberated all the way along the seafront.

  They entered through an arched entrance lobby with marble columns and staircase, and went through to an enormous lounge, its walls adorned with huge, gilt-framed mirrors and paintings of sailing ships, and one side taken up by picture windows looking out over lawns with the harbor and its granite piers beyond. The place was packed with what looked like a dozen parties merging together and going on at once. People stood five deep around the paneled, L-shaped bar at the far end, and mixed groups, including children, filled the tables and milled about in the spaces between, while rosy-faced waitresses in maroon uniforms battled through it all carrying trays laden with bottles, glasses, and pints of black, creamy-headed stout. The hubbub of voices was overpowering. Through it the strains of a piano and accordion were coming from somewhere at the far end, and a circle off to one side were swaying and singing. Kathleen slipped an arm firmly through Evelyn's. "You'd better hang on to me in this," she said. "Ah yes, there's our crowd now, over that way. Let's see if we can fight our way through. . . . There's your ma, Joe—in the blue. Do you see her?"

  "I do. She's looking well. Is Dad here too?"

  "He should be around somewhere. Probably over at the bar."

  And then it was all hugs, handshakes, and more backslapping. Corrigan's mother, Helen, turned out to be a fine-looking woman, with rich black hair showing a few gray wisps, and high-boned, distinctly Irish features. She was groomed and dressed meticulously in a dark-blue two-piece, and carried herself well, with elegance. Her reception of Evelyn was not unwarm—curious and expressing a natural interest with dark, alert eyes that missed nothing; but at the same time she was clearly maintaining a measured reserve until she got to know this new addition to the family better. But the news that Evelyn, like Joseph, was a Ph.D impressed her. "Don't let him forget it," she advised Evelyn when they got a moment to talk between themselves. "He needs someone who's a match for him. These young flibbertigibbets that you see everywhere let the men turn them into replacements for their mothers, and it's the end of them."

  Kevin, Corrigan's father, looked fit and hearty, with a square-jawed, pink-hued face, and wiry gray hair clipped straight and short. He was wearing a dark suit with vest, tie loosened and collar in disarray, liberally sated and jovial. "Well, he's taken his own sweet time about it, but he hasn't done badly," he pronounced, clamping an arm around Evelyn's waist. "What he did to deserve you is beyond me power to imagine, but there must be some sense left in him somewhere. Welcome to Ireland. And welcome to our house."

  After that, Evelyn lost track of the introductions as they were shouted over the din or acknowledged with a wave from a table, over a frothing pint. There were Corrigan's two brothers and a sister, dozens—it seemed—of his old pals, friends of the family with names no sooner announced than forgotten, and innumerable cousins, uncles, in-laws, and aunts. And, of course, everyone was dying to meet the American wife.

  "Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh? Was Joe there? I didn't know that," a tall man in a tweed jacket said. "Did you know that Andrew Mellon was Irish-American?" Evelyn hadn't. "And so was William Penn, who founded Pennsylvania. In fact, he was native Irish—from Cork."

  "The Irish seem very proud of their nationality," Evelyn remarked.

  "Other people have nationalities," someone else chimed in. "The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis."

  "The only thing you have to know about Irishmen is not to let them mix alcohol and politics," a chubby woman in a floral dress told Evelyn. "It's like driving. They can't handle both at the same time, you see."

  "Where did ye say they're living now, over there? Pittsburgh, is it?"

  "I thought a Pittsburgher was something you ate with chips at McDonald's."

  Behind, Corrigan was unable to resist a little posturing as the worldly finder-of-fortune returned from afar. "Of course, I moved out of academics a while ago, now," he told a couple of men about his own age, both nursing pints of Guinness. "I'm managing a big AI project for one of the larger corporations—Pittsburgh based."

  "That's nice," one of them said, staring woodenly.

  "In fact, we're in the process of reorganizing for what everyone thinks will be a major breakthrough. Might well mean another promotion."

  "That's nice."

  Another woman said to Evelyn, "You should make money while you're young, and babies when you're older. People get themselves into such a mess trying to do it the other way round."

  "I have relatives in Boston," her companion said. "We always try and get over there for Saint Patrick's Day. Americans do a much better job of organizing it. I think they understand it better than we do."

  The drink and the talk flowed freely. As the mood grew mellower, Kevin Corrigan rose to propose the traditional Irish wedding toast: "May you have many children, and may they grow as mature in taste, and healthy in color, and as sought after . . ." he swayed unsteadily, almost spilling his drink, and Helen nudged him sternly, "as the contents of this glass."

  "Slainte!" everyone chorused, and drank.

  Then it was the turn of an uncle, also called Joe: "May the road rise to meet you, the wind be always at your back, the sun shine warm upon your face . . . Hell, there's more, but I forget what it is. Anyway, good luck to the pair of you. And let's be seeing more of you over here in future than you've managed so far. Slainte."

  "And may you be half an hour in heaven before the Devil knows you're dead," someone else threw in.

  "Slainte!"

  "May you live as long as you want," a woman sitting by Mrs. Corrigan followed, "and never want as long as you live."

  And naturally, Mick couldn't be left out. "May you die in bed at the ripe old age of ninety-five," he said, raising his glass to Corrigan.

  "Why, thank you, Mick."

  ". . . shot by a jealous husband."

  By the middle of the afternoon, Evelyn could feel travel fatigue and jet lag catching up with her, on top of everything else. The room seemed to be rocking, and the faces and conversation were all smearing into a meaningless blur of sound and color. "I have to go up to the room and rest," she told Corrigan. "Can we make some excuse and get away?"

  "Good idea," Corrigan mumbled—he wasn't looking especially bright-eyed and spiffy, just at that moment, himself. "There's going to be a party later, up at the house."

  Evelyn shook her head dismally. "I'm not going to survive this."

  "We're away," Corrigan announced to everyone. "Got to get a few hours' sleep. Have fun. We'll catch you later, okay?"

  "Would you get that? He can't wait."

  Ribald jeers and catcalls, mainly from the male company present.

  "Tch, tch. What's the world coming to, at all?"

  "Not an ounce of decency in the man."

  "Will you give over?" Corrigan protested. "We've not even unpacked yet."

  "Well, while you're at it you can unpack this as well." Jeff, one of the cousins, handed Corrigan a gift-wrapped box. Corrigan tore off the paper and added it to the pile of gifts and wrappings that had accumulated on the table, and opened the box. Inside was a figurine of a grinning Irish leprechaun, sporting a high hat and puffing a pipe. "To take back with ye's and remind you of us," the cousin said.

  "It'll do that, all right, Jeff," Corrigan said. "Sure, it even looks like you."

 
"He needs a name," one of the women called out. "You have to give him a name, Joe."

  Corrigan looked around him. "Ah, what else is he but a Mick, of course? We'll call him Mick."

  Mick moved over and stared down approvingly at his namesake. "He looks happy enough to be a Mick," he agreed.

  One of the men across the table started to sing, "When Irish eyes are smiling . . ." He looked at Corrigan and raised a hand invitingly for him to take it from there.

  Corrigan couldn't. He was too exhausted, and the drink was hitting him the wrong way . . . and besides, he didn't remember the words. Then Marvin Minsky's line came to him, from the day when Corrigan and Evelyn had visited Boston. Grinning faces on every side waited for him to continue the song. He tossed up a hand, acknowledging defeat, and grinned.

  "You've probably just been ripped off. . . ."

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Corrigan sometimes said that Europeans had exported Puritanism and the work ethic to America in order to be rid of both, and then get back to the business of enjoying life. The Christmas week that followed became one long round of eating, drinking, dancing, and more drinking, that persisted through into the New Year. By custom, annual holidays east of the Atlantic tended to be generous, and most people saved a healthy portion of them for the year's end. It seemed that nobody was at work who didn't have to be, and Evelyn lost track of the homes that were visited, and the pubs and hotel lounges sampled in the annual tribal loyalty-reaffirmation rites. Like many visitors to Ireland, she had a feeling of rediscovering the basics of simple warmth and spontaneous familiarity that can be too easily forgotten when pursuit of wealth and what passes for success becomes obsessive. Even allowing that she was being a bit romantic and impractical for the modern world, she suspended her disbelief willingly and delighted in fond reconstructions of bygone times, doubtless illusory, sparkling with wisdom and elegance that had probably never existed; but, after all, wasn't this supposed to be the most romantic time of her life?

  What marred it a little was Corrigan saying scoffingly that she sounded like a tourist. For him this was just a break. He was becoming impatient to get back to the arena. Americans, it was often said—especially those with Irish roots that were imaginary—could be more Irish than the Irish. It was sometimes true the other way around, too. Mick was not a lot of help in sustaining her romantic images of unsullied Irish charm and simplicity, either.

  One evening in one of the seafront hotels, the customers sitting around the lounge began taking it in turns to sing solo. Every one of them seemed to have a party piece, which the rest would listen to appreciatively and applaud loudly—a far cry from dingy downtown bars where people went to get drunk, laid, or lost in anonymity. At one point, Evelyn felt her eyes misting as she listened to a wistful, soaring tenor voice evoking visions of homey farm cottages and green hillsides swept with rain.

  "Can everyone over here sing?" she whispered, leaning across to Corrigan and Mick.

  "Ah, it's the drink that does it. He'll be croaking like a rusty gate by morning," Mick told her, ruining the whole effect.

  "Most of those songs were written by people who'd been away from Ireland so long that they forgot what it was like," Corrigan said.

  "Or never been there, more like," Mick agreed.

  "Six months over here, and you'd be writing the same about Pittsburgh," Corrigan told Evelyn.

  They did visit Trinity College, finally, with its stiffly aristocratic frontages of gray, columned stone, staring down over an inner maze of interlocking lawns and cobbled courts. Evelyn was fascinated by the famous Long Room chamber of the Old Library, built in 1724, with its wood paneling, carvings, and gallery, containing hundreds of thousands of volumes going back to medieval times and before. Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, George Berkeley, and Oscar Wilde had been students here, and again, walking among the ceiling-high shelves of cracked leather bindings and yellowing folios, Evelyn found herself reliving images of a time of tastes and sensitivities that had passed—even with the brash intrusion of a gaudily modern gift-and-souvenir shop, underneath on the ground floor.

  They shopped in O'Connell Street, had lunch in the open, airy environment—with the sun actually putting in an appearance that day, reassuring the faithful of its existence—of the glass-enclosed mall by Stephen's Green. They saw Georgian squares and walked over the bridges along the Liffey, jostled through street markets, and took the tour of the Guinness brewery.

  And, partly as an aid to working off the effects of a week's overindulging, they joined the crowd of afternoon strollers walking the best part of a mile out to the lighthouse at the end of Dun Laoghaire pier. The weather that day—Mick said that four seasons a day was the norm in Ireland—was fine and dry, the wind brisk, the sea air bracing.

  "I think it's wonderful," Evelyn said to Corrigan and Mick. "All these people out walking just for the pleasure of it. It's more the way things should be. Back home legs are getting to be for emergencies only."

  "Have you seen what the price of gas is here?" Corrigan snorted.

  Back at the house, Helen Corrigan showed her the traditional way of making tea, in a pot. "I don't care what those two say," Evelyn declared as they set out cups, saucers, sugar, and milk on a tray in the kitchen. "I think they do it to twig me. It's a side of the humor that I haven't really figured out yet. But people here still have a charm that you don't find in many places around the world these days."

  "Ah yes, it's the charm of them that you have to watch," Helen replied, smiling faintly as she cut slices of still-unfinished Christmas cake.

  "How's that?"

  "People will behave as outrageously as the world will let them. And charm is how they extend the limits. Joe can be one of the worst. But it's not a lot of good telling you that now, I suppose."

  Finally, Corrigan and Evelyn said their goodbyes and au revoirs to a final gathering of relatives and friends, and loaded their bags into Dermot's eighties-vintage Rover. Then they left Dun Laoghaire to drive across to Galway on the west coast of Ireland, where, as hoped, Dermot had arranged for them to visit Corrigan's former professor, Brendan Maguire, at Ballygarven before their return to the States.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  More rooms with fluorescent lights and pastel walls, racks of electronics, glowing computer screens. Not rooms formed of movable partition-walls and ceiling tiles, but solidly built from stone, with mullioned bay windows, modernized to a laboratory environment. Maguire had installed his research outpost of Trinity in a large old house a little above the town itself, known locally as "The Rectory."

  Maguire himself was a short, rounding, Pickwickian figure with a crescent of ragged white hair fringing a balding head that had taken on the same, post-holidays, pinkish hue as his face. He had a pair of ferocious white eyebrows, and rimless spectacles that tended to sit halfway down a bulbous, purple-veined nose. He was wearing a crumpled tweed jacket of brown-and-tan check with a woven tie, plaid shirt, and baggy gray flannel trousers with turnups that hadn't been in style in fifteen years. From appearances, Evelyn would have dismissed him as a bumbling rural schoolteacher. Corrigan told her not to be deceived: it was Maguire's insistence on accurate thinking and old-fashioned rigor that Corrigan had to thank for his later successes in the States.

  There was little here in the way of visually entertaining demonstrations. Maguire showed them screens of symbolic diagrams representing abstract software relationships, and charts that tracked growth and decay trends in mixed populations of numerically defined entities that he referred to as "species." The term was no misnomer. The aim of the research that Maguire and his team were engaged in was, in effect, to induce the emergence of intelligent behavior from neural-system analogs.

  ". . . assuming that anything that has appeared in the natural world so far can be called intelligent," Maguire said. "The notion shouldn't be so strange to you, Joe. We talked about it often enough."

  "We did, that."

  Dermot elaborated for Evelyn's benefi
t. "The idea, essentially, is to let a computer-intelligence follow the same route as we did and evolve from simple beginnings—instead of trying to reproduce in one step all the complexity that resulted from a billion years of selection and improvement."

  "I've never believed that was practical, as I'm sure Joe will have told you," Maguire said to Evelyn.

  She smiled. "At least a thousand times, at the last count. Top-down won't work, right?"

  "That's right. We simply don't have the detailed knowledge to specify it," Maguire said. "Nobody has."

  "So how far back did you go to begin?" Corrigan asked him, intrigued.

  "The groupings that I showed you a few minutes ago approximate roughly to early molecular structures," Maguire replied. "We put a seed population into a simple world in large numbers and let them interact and compete. They've been running for the equivalent of several million years now, I'd say."

  "And the species you have now are performing at about the level of insects?"

  "Roughly, we think. The dynamics are completely different from biological competition. Making a direct comparison isn't easy."

  "Pretty impressive, all the same," Corrigan commented.

  "We do have the benefit of being able to guide things by conscious direction," Maguire pointed out. "We are able to introduce deliberately engineered genetic combinations when we see fit. That speeds up the process considerably. It's amazing the difference it makes when God goes into the stock-breeding business."

  "It's fascinating, all right," Corrigan agreed. There was an odd light in his eyes. Listening to Maguire and Dermot had rekindled all kinds of enthusiasms from years that he had almost forgotten. He could feel the excitement of real science stirring again: knowledge pursued purely for the sake of knowledge.

  "But we need a more realistic simulation of the physical environment if progress is to be sustained," Maguire went on. "One that will react back on the actions of the population more strongly and drive the selection mechanisms harder. It needs to close the overall organism-environment feedback loop more tightly."