Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  “Okay.” Corrigan pulled another chair close and sat down where Evelyn could see him. “MIMIC reads muscle-control information directly from the brain,” he said. “DINS transmits information into the brain, bypassing the normal sensory apparatus. This is what happens when we combine the two together.”

  A solid figure appeared in the holo-space, again female, wearing a simple red, loose-fitting dress. Once again, Evelyn could feel herself standing—in the same attitude as the figure, she realized after a second or two. She moved her eyes to look at Corrigan inquiringly. He nodded. She looked back at the holo-figure and made to move her arms. From the corner of her eye she could see that they remained motionless on the armrests of the chair. Instead, the hologram figure moved its arms. But unlike the case with MIMIC, this time Evelyn could actually feel it: the weight shifting and pressures in her joints altering as the shoulder and elbow angles changed, the tensions in her muscles—even the light rubbing of the dress material against her skin. Yet she knew that all the time she was sitting unmoving in a chair. It was unbelievable.

  “Still feel like a dance?” Corrigan asked, his eyes twinkling. “There’s no cable to worry about this time. The motor outputs from your brain are being read as before with MIMIC, but a DINS signal is suppressing the onward transmission of them into the spine—like an externally induced anesthetic. At the same time, the computer is synthesizing the feedback signals that you ought to be experiencing, and injecting them back the other way.”

  She walked the figure forward, then back, sideways and in circles, finally pirouetting and launching it into a series of twirls and minor acrobatics. At first it was odd to feel the figure’s internal dynamics, yet at the same time to be observing it from a viewpoint outside. Corrigan watched, letting her get the hang of it. And then something changed suddenly, like the image of a wire cube reversing: the two bodies of sensation fused, and she was able to project herself inside, compensating unconsciously for the discrepancy in visual space.

  Corrigan sensed it. “Managed to make the flip?” he asked. She blinked at him once and forced a parody of a grin.

  “Try these,” Hatcher’s voice said. A flight of steps appeared in the display. Evelyn walked the figure over to them and began climbing. The sensations of her legs lifting and pushing, foot tilting and shifting the weight onto the ball, felt completely real.

  “The illusion is totally compelling if you close your eyes,” Corrigan said.

  She did, and there was no longer any doubt: she was climbing a staircase. Already her thighs were starting to ache; and ache; and—surely not—she could feel her heartbeat accelerate from the effort, even slight perspiration. She opened her eyes again. They must have looked alarmed.

  “Don’t worry,” Corrigan said. “It’s all simulated. You’re bone dry and as relaxed as a sleeping baby. . . . So now you can see why MIMIC is in the museum already. This is its successor. We call it ‘Pinocchio.’ What do you think?”

  The three of them got down to specifics over lunch in the staff dining room at the top of the Executive Building, back at the front of the complex.

  “We’re looking for more help on the neurophysiology side to go into the next step,” Shipley said to Evelyn. He had said little since his few words about his SDI background, over in the IE Block, which Evelyn now knew was dedicated to various aspects of Interactive Environments. Now that they were into Shipley’s territory, Corrigan no longer played the lead but was happy to sit back and let him get on with it. Evelyn sensed an easy, informal working relationship between them. She was finding the prospect of becoming a part of it increasingly appealing.

  “What is the next step?” she asked.

  “Pinocchio Two,” Shipley replied. “As things stand, we’re limited to the medulla. The system can’t handle the Trigeminal and the Abducens. To go further, we want to bring somebody into the team with the kind of background you’ve had at Harvard—experience of connecting at the pons.”

  Evelyn thought for a second. “That’s why the face and eye movements didn’t look right, isn’t it?” she said. “I noticed when Tom went to close-up. I pulled a face deliberately, but the holo was still smiling.”

  Shipley raised an eyebrow at Corrigan. Corrigan nodded that he liked what he was hearing. “You’re right,” Shipley told Evelyn. “The face is dubbed, purely for effect. The computer fills in what it thinks is appropriate.”

  They were saying that Pinocchio’s combined motor-intercept and DINS interface coupled in at the lowest region of the brain stem, the medulla oblongata, the main railroad of the nervous system, where the seventh through twelfth of the body’s twelve cranial nerves terminated. These were the nerves serving the body’s voluntary and involuntary motor systems, along with the sense of balance, which was what enabled body movements and sensations to be reproduced in the ways that Evelyn had experienced. (These nerves also handled speech, taste, and hearing, but those faculties were not subjects of the current research.) The remaining functions—jaw and upper-face movements, ocular motion, vision, and smell—were handled by the first to sixth cranial nerves, which synapsed in higher regions of the brain.

  In particular, the fifth and sixth cranial nerves, known as the Trigeminal and the Abducens, both synapsed in the next region above the medulla oblongata: the pons. Shipley was saying that they now wanted to extend the coupling level up to the pons. Such a step could be in preparation for only one thing.

  “So the eventual intention must be to add vision,” Evelyn concluded. That would require going further, to the thalamus, the next region above the pons. “You’ve already got hearing and speech, potentially, at the medulla—via the Acoustic, Glossopharyngeal, and Vagus. Extend from the pons to the thalamus, and you’ll have it all: full-sensory direct-neural.”

  “Except for olfactory,” Shipley said, smiling faintly.

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Evelyn checked herself. Smell was handled by the first cranial nerve. The most primitive of the senses, it was the only one to enter the brain above the thalamus and go directly into the cerebrum.

  “Well, now you know what we’re up to here,” Corrigan said, sitting back in his chair. He turned an inquiring eye to Shipley. Shipley returned a nod that he was satisfied. Corrigan looked back at Evelyn. “I think we’ve heard all we want to. To hell with the bureaucratic nonsense—that can catch up later. There’s a place here for you if you want it. What do you say?”

  After what she had seen, there wasn’t a lot for her to think about. But she didn’t want to appear too eager.

  “What sort of longer-term prospects would we be talking about?” she asked.

  Corrigan threw out a hand carelessly. “Unlimited. It could be the beginnings of a whole new research section dedicated to higher-level coupling. You could end up running it.”

  That seemed good enough. “Confirm the figures in writing,” she said. “If there are no surprises . . . Well, yes. . . . I’ll take it.”

  “Splendid.” Corrigan looked at Shipley for an endorsement. “Come on, Eric. Congratulate the lady, at least.”

  “Pinder hasn’t confirmed the appointment yet,” Shipley reminded him.

  “He’s the VP of R and D,” Corrigan explained to Evelyn. “He’s away today. Don’t worry about it. It’s just a rubberstamping thing.”

  Shipley gave her a reassuring nod. “Joe’s right. You’re just the person we need. I don’t think there’ll be any problem.”

  Over the remainder of lunch they talked about lighter things, asking Evelyn about her other interests and swapping personal anecdotes. Then they took her to meet Peter Quell, Pinder’s deputy. Apparently, Pinder was with a group visiting the Air Force Space Defense Command in California. Quell stood in for him by delivering some routine corporate messages about CLC being a caring company, and the career opportunities being unlimited for somebody who could fit in, after which they went to Shipley’s office and spent a half hour clearing up miscellaneous questions that Evelyn raised. That concluded the business for
the moment. While Shipley stayed behind to catch up on what was happening in the lab, Corrigan had a cab called to take Evelyn back to her hotel and walked her back to main reception in the Executive Building. While they were waiting, he talked her into having dinner together that night, before she caught her flight back to Boston the next morning.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Corrigan and Evelyn met for dinner in the downtown Vista Hotel, where she was staying. The interview had told him much about her. Now the informal setting gave her an opportunity to satisfy more of her curiosity about him.

  “Oh, I’m from a place that I’d be surprised if you’ve heard of,” he told her as they sat in the lounge over drinks, waiting for a table. “On the coast a few miles south of Dublin.” He wrote the words “Dun Laoghaire” on a coaster and asked her how she’d pronounce it.

  Evelyn shrugged. “Dun Layo-ghe-air?” she tried, sounding it out phonetically.

  “It’s Dun Leery.” Corrigan grinned. “You can always win a dollar bet in a bar with that. The piers there are famous. They enclose what used to be the biggest artificial harbor in the world at one time.”

  “When was that?”

  “Back in the eighteen hundreds. The granite was brought down on a cable railway from a quarry a little farther down the coast. It was driven by gravity. The weight of the loaded cars going down hauled the empties back up.”

  “Neat.”

  Corrigan sipped his gin and tonic and nodded. “Great engineers; those Victorians. They made things to last. Big brass knobs on everything not plastic ones that come off in your hand all the time.”

  “So how did you end up in computing and things like that?” Evelyn asked.

  Corrigan pursed his lips and stroked the tip of his nose with a knuckle. “Well, now, I was more of a mathematician to begin with—you know, in college. Then I got this, kind of, scholarship thing . . .”

  “Never mind the false modesty.”

  “Good. It doesn’t come naturally to an Irishman anyway. I got to Trinity—that’s one of the Dublin universities. That got me in touch with the computer scene, and I came over to the States to do postgraduate work on AI.”

  “They do a lot of that at MIT, up in Boston,” Evelyn commented.

  “I was there for a while—at the AI lab that Minsky and John McCarthy started. Plus, I did a sabbatical with Thinking Machines there, too. You know them?”

  “TMC at Cambridge?” Evelyn nodded. “Sure.”

  “Then I was at Stanford for some time, and after that Carnegie Mellon, which brought me to Pittsburgh. That was up to a couple of years ago, and then I joined CLC.”

  Evelyn regarded him for a moment. “Okay, I know you must get asked this a hundred times a week, but when are we actually going to see it—the real thing? Does anyone know?”

  Corrigan snorted and made a face. “Ah, they’ve all got themselves bogged down on semantic issues, if you want my opinion—spending more time arguing over what intelligence is instead of actively doing anything to pursue it. We use the word to mean two different things: the ‘survival’ kind of intelligence that makes us different from animals, and the ‘intellectual’ kind that makes some people different from others—or think they are, anyway. The problem is that nobody can make their minds up which one they’re talking about.”

  “Which kind do you mean?” Evelyn asked.

  “Oh, I got out of the whole thing and left them to it.”

  “So is that why you’re into virtual sensory worlds now, instead?”

  “Exactly.” Corrigan showed his hands in a gesture of candor. “I’m in a hurry. I plan on going places in this world. There isn’t the time to wait for the likes of them to die off or get their act together.” It was a calculated brashness, playing off the light in Evelyn’s eye.

  “Something tells me you’ll get there, too,” she said. “Is this the male competitive urge that I sense surfacing now?”

  Corrigan smiled and shrugged in a way that said she could take it any way she liked. “Ah, well, now . . . Let’s just say that Eric can run the caution-and-conservatism department.”

  “Eric Shipley, you mean? I thought he was a nice guy.”

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. He’s a great guy to work with. Good scientist, knows his stuff. . . .” Corrigan sighed and showed a palm briefly. “But he has his own style, and it’s got him where he is.”

  “He seemed content enough to me,” Evelyn said, letting it sound as an objection. She still liked the thought of working with Shipley. Sharing a dig at his expense—even so slight a one as this—didn’t feel comfortable.

  “He is,” Corrigan replied.

  The hostess came over to tell them that their table was ready, and they went through into the restaurant. Corrigan had already ordered while they were in the lounge, and they began their soup course straight away. When the waiter had left, Evelyn returned to the subject of Shipley.

  “Why did it bother him that Jason Pinder wasn’t here himself today?” she asked.

  Corrigan shrugged unconcernedly. “That’s the way Eric is. He seems to think that if Pinder attached as much importance to this job as Eric thinks he should . . .”

  “Which job? You mean my job?”

  “Yes: the one we’re talking about . . . then he would have made sure that the interview was fixed for a day when he was here, instead of leaving it to Quell.”

  All of a sudden Evelyn felt uneasy. “What do you think?” she asked.

  Corrigan waved a hand unconcernedly. “Ah, Eric worries too much about underhanded corporate politics—especially where influences are involved that he believes science could do without, such as SDC or anything else connected with the military. He should have lived in the nineteenth century and been one of those gifted, all-around amateurs that you read about.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?” Evelyn said.

  “The thought of getting mixed up with the Space Defense people?” Corrigan shook his head. “Not really. Why should it? That’s where the money is. It might add some excitement to life. It’s like everything else: you deal with the complications as they come.”

  He grinned. She smiled back. It was what she wanted to hear, and she thought no more about it. Over dinner, Corrigan brought up the possibility of his coming up to Boston to visit her. It was about time he looked up some of his friends there, he said. At the same time, he could show Evelyn some of his old haunts. Evelyn thought it would be a great idea.

  At the Space Defense Command’s Simulator Center at Inglewood, California, the time was three hours earlier. Jason Pinder and a party of technical and management executives that included the CLC president, Ken Endelmyer, were finishing the VIP tour. They had seen the motion platforms mounting cockpit mockups that even experienced Air Force space pilots reported as being “better than the real thing”; they had played with the telemanipulator helmets and arm-gloves used to remote-direct spaceborne repair and construction robots from ground and orbital stations thousands of miles away. Now they were in a section of the Visual Environments labs for a demonstration of a device that had been undergoing development and improvement for some time: the Vision & Voice head assembly, known as “VIV.” They had heard the presentations, watched the videos, and handled the equipment. Now it was time to lighten things up a little and conclude with some fun.

  Don Falker, chief engineer of CLC’s Artificial Vision division, stood a short distance apart from the group. He was wearing a lightweight plastic helmet fitting close, like a skullcap, that supported a set of miniaturized vision goggles in front of his eyes and padded earphones. A microchip package in the crown communicated via an IR frequency link to nearby processing equipment. In his hand, he was holding an imitation Ping-Pong paddle made of aluminum, covered front, back, and around the edge in tiny reflecting surfaces. Similarly equipped, standing a few feet away and smiling a little self-consciously, was Therese Loel, head of CLC’s Engineering Systems Group.

  The man in charge of the proceedings was around forty,
lean and tanned, with thinning hair, graying at the temples, and silver-rimmed spectacles. He had a presentation style that was smooth and polished, dynamic in content but coming relaxed and easy, developed over years of dealing with high-level individuals. His name was Frank Tyron, SDC’s civilian project manager of the VIV program.

  “Hold your other hand horizontal, as if you were about to serve a ball,” Tyron called to Falker.

  The stereo image being presented inside Falker’s goggles showed a nonexistent, computer-generated Ping-Pong table, with Therese Loel transposed so as to be facing him from the far end of it. To everyone watching, Falker simply extended an empty hand palm-up and looked at it. A program analyzing the output from a pair of cameras mounted on the walls tracked the movement, and another program added a Ping-Pong ball to the image that he could see of his hand. Therese Loel saw it appear too, but the view in her goggles showed Falker at the far end of the table.

  “Go ahead,” Tyron invited, speaking into a mike.

  The onlookers watched as Falker tossed the invisible ball up and hit at it with the metal paddle. Sensors around the room tracked the paddle’s motion from laser reflections, and the ball in the optical representation followed the computed path.

  “Hey!” Therese cried involuntarily, and jumped sideways to play a return stroke.

  “I can hear it hitting the bats and the table,” Falker said, playing a backhand. “The synchronization is perfect. This is good!” Therese returned, but the ball went high.

  As state of the art, simulating a Ping-Pong game wasn’t especially a revolutionary, or even a new, concept. What was different about this demonstration was the quality. There was nothing crude or cartoonlike about the images that the two players were seeing. The table in front of them and the room around it (actually a stored representation, encoded from videotape, of the games room in the OTSC Recreational Gym in another part of the establishment) were real. The figures at far ends were Therese Loel and Don Falker, superposed into the scene without the helmets—the missing facial details were added from TV images captured beforehand. Even with a fast forehand smash shot, the images of ball and paddle stayed clean and true: no flicker, no blurring. This hardware was fast.