Realtime Interrupt

by James P. Hogan

  Hatcher's concessions to the new order of things amounted to switching to regular pants in place of jeans, acquiring a jacket, and, on special occasions, adding a necktie. But underneath, the old, easygoing casualness remained unaffected, and he was still more at home sprawled in front of a terminal with his coffee in a Styrofoam cup than listening to investment plans being expounded over pâté de foie gras. When Corrigan arrived, he was waiting with Charlie Wade, one of the old crew from Blawnox, and Des Jorrecks, the head of Xylog's applied psychology department. There were two broad areas to discuss:

  First, results of tests to evaluate different strategies for creating animations that would best emulate people. Like people, the animations would shape their lives and personalities by pursuing goals. The intention was that these goals would arise internally, according to the animations' individual natures and experiences, rather than be imposed from without. But real people rarely formed distinct goals that they pursued consciously and deliberately all the time, such as to become a doctor, lawyer, physicist, or actor, or to head a country or win an Olympic gold medal; for the most part, they simply lived their day-to-day existences following unconscious drives and desires, and the bigger things just "happened." How, then, should such a nature best be simulated? What mix of drives, fears, ambitions, aversions was needed, with what kinds of relative weightings? How should such factors be represented as a statistical distribution across a whole population? Opinions on these questions changed constantly, and the short answer was that nobody really knew. A lot would be learned when the first runs were done in full-system mode, with the animation and environmental modules finally on-line and interacting together.

  The other thing on the agenda was a subject that it seemed could never be laid to rest: the question of suppressing the surrogates' memories when they began the full-system tests. Those in favor argued that it would ensure greater authenticity of behavior. Those against, who included Corrigan, maintained that they were scientists running an experiment, and scientists needed to know what was going on. "All we have to do is play role models to a bunch of dumb machines. We're not trying to impress a panel of Shakespearean critics," Corrigan said after they had been through the technical arguments yet again. "And on top of all that, it will make it a more exciting experience for everyone: the thought of launching off into the unknown—a bit like going up on a space flight to another planet, or something."

  "Aw, I don't know that it would get anybody that excited when you get down to it," Hatcher said. Hatcher was for suppression but resigned to a lost cause. Corrigan had vetoed the idea, there was not enough time left now to change the decision, and that seemed to be that. "These things tend to creep up on you so gradually, day by day, that you get used to it. I asked an astronaut the same question once. He said that they trained so hard for a mission that by the time it actually happened they couldn't tell the difference anymore. But then, that was the whole idea, I guess. Pretty much the same as what we're doing."

  It wasn't just a matter of authenticity. There was the question of being better able to cope in an emergency, too. "What if something did screw up in there, Tom?" Corrigan said. "We're going straight into people's heads, interacting at deep perceptual levels that wire into emotional centers. And with the speedup, if anything unexpected did start happening, it would be hours out here before anyone knew about it.

  Hatcher knew all that. He thought over it briefly, failed to come up with anything that hadn't been said a hundred times already, and shrugged. "Well, that's what the surrogates are being paid all that money for. We know there's a lot we don't know, and so do the volunteers who are coming in from outside. What else can anyone say, Joe?"

  "I think Joe's got a point, all the same," Jorrecks put in. "Whoever's in there needs to be able to abort the run from the inside if it really goes off the rails somehow. But how could they do that if they didn't even know they were inside a simulation? I don't think I'd want to go in there under those conditions."

  "You want an ejector seat," Charlie Wade said.

  Jorrecks nodded. "Yes. But of course you couldn't have one if the memory was suppressed, since there would be no knowledge of the mechanism for using it. There's no way you could get around it. Any knowledge that an escape mechanism existed would also be knowledge that there was a simulation to be escaped from, which would defeat the whole purpose." Jorrecks looked at Corrigan for support. Corrigan nodded.

  Charlie Wade looked at Hatcher questioningly. "Shall we tell them?" he asked.

  "Why not?" Hatcher said.

  Corrigan looked from one to the other. "Tell us what?"

  "As a matter of fact, we think it is possible," Hatcher said.

  Corrigan looked skeptical. "How?"

  "But everyone would have to do it for themselves."

  "What are you getting at, Tom?"

  "Well, if it was me—if I was going in as a surrogate, and let's say that shortly before the full-system phase I was suddenly told that all memories of, say, the last couple of days were going to be suppressed."

  Corrigan nodded. "Okay."

  "What I'd do is this. I'd plant something inside the simworld that would be significant to me in some way, something that nobody else would know about. Later, after the run was started and I was in it, I wouldn't know I'd done it, because that memory would have been killed. But I'd still know the way I think, and I'd wonder what in hell this something—this whatever—was doing there. But if some kind of crisis developed to raise the stress level to the point where I had to get out, then I'd recognize it as a signal to myself. And from there it wouldn't take much fooling around with it to figure out what I'd set it up to do."

  Jorrecks looked at Corrigan inquiringly. Corrigan thought about it for a few moments, and nodded. "That's clever."

  "You think it could work?" Jorrecks said.

  Corrigan smiled and had to nod. "It just might, at that, Des. It just might."

  Hatcher clasped his hands behind his head and stretched his length out over the chair. "Does that mean you've changed your mind, Joe? Suppression's in, after all? We can go with it?"

  "Not at all," Corrigan said, waving a hand dismissively. "It's dead and buried. Forget it. We've enough else to do as things are." Hatcher knew that and hadn't really been serious anyway. Just then, the phone on Hatcher's desk rang.

  "I think we're done," Jorrecks said, seizing the opportunity and rising while Hatcher picked up the receiver. "We'll leave you to it, guys." Charlie Wade got up from his chair also and collected his notes together.

  "Tom here. . . . Say, hi! Yes, he sure is." He held the phone out to Corrigan. "It's Eve, for you." Jorrecks and Wade left the room with a wave and a nod each.

  "Hello?" Corrigan said.

  "Joe, Judy said you were probably with Tom. Just checking to see if we're still having lunch."

  Corrigan frowned. Oh, yes, that was right—she had suggested it that morning. He had mumbled that it would probably be okay, and then forgotten to get back to her when Borth's visit was confirmed. "Er, look, something's come up and I'm not going to be able to make it," he replied. "I should have got Judy to call you. I'm sorry about that."

  Evelyn sighed. "Oh dear. And you were so late that I never got to see you last night."

  "Everything's insane. It's all hectic now we're getting close."

  "I know. Maybe dinner for a change?"

  "I'll try." Corrigan looked across and caught Hatcher's eye. "Tell you what, why not have lunch with Tom instead? He's up to his neck too, but I'm sure he'd like the company." He held a hand over the mouthpiece. "Like to have lunch with Eve? I was supposed to, but I'm grabbed. I know you two always find plenty to talk about." Hatcher didn't seem overly happy, but nodded. Corrigan spoke back into the phone. "He says that's fine."

  "Okay. Tell him I'll stop by there at, say, twelve. Okay?"

  "She says how about twelve? She'll stop by here." Another nod. "That's fine. Look, I've got a ten-thirty, so I have to go. Talk to you later, then. 'By
e now."

  "Goodbye, Joe."

  "Thanks. You're a pal," Corrigan said to Hatcher as he put the phone down. "Borth's coming with some people from Chase. I'm tied up to do lunch there."

  Hatcher shook his head in a way that said he didn't buy that. "So? You could have taken Evelyn there too. You're a head honcho and she's staff. Hell, this outfit can afford it."

  Corrigan winked. "But the delectable Amanda will be there too. There are times and places for wives."

  Hatcher couldn't contain his disapproval. "I'm sorry, Joe. Maybe I'm sticking my nose in, but I just don't like to see it. Everything used to be fine with you two. You've changed a lot, you know—especially since we moved to this place."

  "Hey, give me a break, Tom. What's the harm in a change of pleasant company once in a while? I do plenty of good-husbanding out of hours, when it's the time for it."

  "Ain't the way I've been hearing it."

  "Look, I'm not asking you to get involved or make it your business, Tom. Just a small favor to cover when I'm double committed. I happen to think that taking wives along just for the ride isn't the proper thing to do. Whether the firm can afford it or not isn't the point. I also think that honchos should set examples, don't you?"

  Hatcher turned back to his terminal. "This time, Joe," he growled. "Just don't do it to me again, that's all."

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Today was the beginning of National Color Week, and Carson Street was filled with radiantly decked people marching to express themselves through visual combinations: yellow for happy, blue for somber, red for lively, green for simple, and other mixes and hues for other natures and dispositions—real, imagined, or self-fulfilling—in between. Self-playing instruments driven by microchips were all the rage, so nobody needed to be a musician to join in the festivities with a guitar, trumpet, accordion, or trombone, and "belong." The TV shows and movie ad inserts had been plugging fiber-optic augmentations to hairstyles and clothes, and half the costumes glittered and glowed like slow-motion Christmas trees.

  Corrigan stood with Lilly on a rise above the main body of the crowd, staring at the site that had once held a modern, eight-story commercial structure of shiny white tiling and green-tinted glass, with separate buildings for offices and administration. All that was left now was one of them turned into an apartment block that looked like a psychedelic gift-wrap pack, another adopted as a "temple" by a cult who believed themselves to be reincarnated aliens from Sirius, and the main building demolished to make room for a hotel that never happened, now a campground for vagrants.

  Even now, Corrigan found that it needed an effort to tell himself that what he was looking at had never happened. The conditioning processes of twelve years, everything he had seen, read, and been told through all that time added up to a powerful weight of persuasion that his instincts fought against simply dismissing. This had been Xylog. He could remember how it looked in those final weeks, the hectic days and bleary-eyed, all-night sessions to complete the preparations on time and straighten out the inevitable last-minute hitches. He had made some initial sorties into the final test simulations to check details from the inside. . . . And after that his recollections became confused and indistinct.

  It was only long afterward, when he was well on the road to recovery, that he had learned how those final tests had damaged him, along with many others, with mental disruptions, hallucinations, breakdowns, periods of total blankness. The government intervened to halt the project. There had been hearings and investigations, and finally the project was abandoned and the site sold off. He had read the reports, watched the tapes. And here, in front of him, was what was supposed to be the incontrovertible evidence.

  Except that none of that could have happened, for the simulation was still running.

  "You weren't a permanent inhabitant like most of the other surrogates," Lilly said. "You were supposed to be one of the controllers—entering and leaving whenever you wanted."

  "That's right." Corrigan had no explanation. He could only agree.

  Lilly turned to him with an air of finality, as if that summed up everything that she had been saying since their first meeting in the Camelot. "So something that you weren't expecting must have happened during the last week or so."

  "I don't know, I don't know," Corrigan groaned wearily. "It's all so confused from around that time. I can't remember."

  "What happened, obviously, was that your memory was wiped too," Lilly said. "But according to you, it shouldn't have been. Which can only mean that somebody else set it up."

  "You don't know that," Corrigan protested. "I could have agreed to something they sprung on me in the last few days. If that's the case, then of course I don't remember anything about it. That would have been the whole idea."

  "You were one of the main designers," Lily pointed out. "Your place would have been supervising from the outside." She raised an arm to take in the locality of Southside around them, the river off to one side, and beyond it in the visible part of downtown Pittsburgh. "We're twelve years into this, and it's still running," she said. "Didn't you tell me before that this goes way past anything that had been planned? All that had been scheduled was a series of more extended testing. Nothing like this." She waited for a moment, saw that he had no immediate answer, and went on. "It's clear what must have happened. Somebody else had arranged a far more elaborate simulation than you were told about."

  "That's impossible."

  "Which meant that you weren't. as in control as you thought. Your position wasn't so unassailable—that's what you won't admit. Sometime during the early phases you entered the simulation on a routine visit, and while you were inside they switched over to the extended version and wiped your memory to keep you here for the duration. Meanwhile, they're running things on the outside. . . . And you're telling me not to worry, everything's going just fine? That I should trust them?"

  "Oh, for God's sake, you've been watching too many movies," Corrigan retorted irritably. He had a more than gnawing suspicion that she was right, but he needed time to think. "You don't have any evidence for all this. It's pure fabrication. These weren't the sinister people that you're trying to paint—just ordinarily ambitious people in a competitive environment. You're making it sound like intrigue inside the Kremlin."

  "Oh, yes? Look what they did to you. You'd already stabbed your best friend in the back. And things with Evelyn were heading for the rocks. How soon afterward did that come apart? In circumstances like that, it would have been easy for them to convince anyone who asked that you'd elected to go in as a surrogate on your own initiative—to get away from it all for a while to wouldn't it?"

  "Maybe I did," Corrigan retorted. "And that would put a hole through your whole paranoia theory right there, wouldn't it?"

  And he had a point. Now it was Lilly's turn to feel less sure of herself. "Why? . . . When did it finish with Evelyn?" she asked.

  "Oh, it all came to a head about three weeks before Oz was due to go live. She split." Corrigan sighed. "She left me for being too pushy and ambitious. Muriel left me for being the opposite. It's true what they say about women, you know: there's no pleasing them."

  "Tell me what happened," Lilly said.

  Chapter Thirty

  Evelyn stared across the living room at Corrigan, shaking her head disbelievingly. Her eyes were wide, her body taut like a threatened animal, her face a mask of someone he didn't know. All of the resentment and anger that had been pent up for months was pouring out with the adrenaline flush.

  "How could you?" she shouted. "A man that you'd worked with for years . . . after the friend he's been to both of us. How could you let them just walk all over him like that? What did you do—just stand there? Didn't you say anything to stand up for him?"

  Tom Hatcher had told her over lunch about Corrigan's part in the Shipley affair—but in a distorted way that made it sound as if Corrigan had asked Pinder to dump him. Apparently that was the version that Tyron had been spreading around the
company. But Corrigan was in no mood to quibble over details or have to justify himself.

  "What did you expect me to do?" he snapped back. "Their minds were already made up. . . . And anyway, they might have had a point. Eric would never have fitted in at Xylog. If the truth were known, he wanted out of it anyway." Shipley had been offered a mundane position in the general CLC research facility, but turned it down and quit the company.

  Evelyn looked at Corrigan contemptuously. "Who are you to say what Eric wanted? At least he could have been given a chance to say so himself, instead of being discarded like worn-out shoes. Don't things like people's pride and dignity mean anything to you anymore? It's a shame, because they used to."

  "Yes, they do," Corrigan answered, marching in front of her. He jabbed at his chest with a thumb. "And so do my own, for that matter. All I'd have succeeded in doing would be to make a sacrificial lamb of myself. And wouldn't Tyron have just loved that! Can't you see? It's exactly what he was hoping I'd do."

  Evelyn hooked a wisp of her hair with her finger and whirled away savagely. "God, if you only knew how sick I am of hearing about Tyron, Tyron, Tyron . . . the whole pack of them."

  "One of us is going to end up as the technical head of Xylog," Corrigan said. "It's down to that: either him or me. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

  "No, it doesn't. I told you, I'm sick of all of it. Maybe Eric knew exactly what he was doing. Perhaps you should have walked out too. At least you'd have stayed the person you were."

  "And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?" Corrigan demanded darkly.

  Evelyn turned back with a pained, sarcastic face. "Oh, don't start acting as if you were stupid, Joe, on top of everything else," she implored. "When I fell in love with you, it was because I admired you for what you stood for: knowledge, honesty, the worth of people as people. But that's all changed. I loved you because you were what you seemed to be. You were genuine. Now you're turning into what I never thought you'd be: a phony."