“Who’s Eric?” Maguire asked.
“A scientist that we know back at CLC,” Corrigan said.
“He’d fit in here,” Evelyn said. “You’re his kind of people. You talk his values. Corporate politics isn’t his scene.”
Maguire nodded and pulled a face. “Well, if he ever decides he’s had enough, tell him to get in touch. We’ll talk to him, sure enough. We’ve got some good people here, including some from Europe, but we could always use more. . . . And that applies to you, too, Joe, don’t forget. If you get tired of being among those neurotics over there, we’ll find room for you.”
Corrigan laughed and raised his pint. “I think I can handle whatever comes up, Brendan. But thanks anyway.”
The next day, Dermot drove Corrigan and Evelyn south to Shannon, where they boarded an Aer Lingus jet for New York. It had been fun, and it had been interesting—the kind of break they had intended. And in another way, a lot that they had not intended. But now it was time to get back to the real world. They had a big surprise to tell everybody.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jonathan Wilbur was in the Galahad Lounge again, sitting at the bar. It was early yet, with a few people at the other barstools and a group from a company marketing conference that was being held at the Camelot that week occupying some tables on the far side.
“How are things working out with Oliver?” Corrigan inquired casually.
“Oh, okay,” Wilbur replied neutrally, and returned to playing with his portable electronic office. Corrigan sauntered back to the other end of the bar and checked the pressure in the dispenser. Wilbur looked up at him oddly from time to time but said nothing. Corrigan got the feeling that his behavior of late had been puzzling the system.
In the commercial showing on the TV, the couple who had arrived for dinner were healthily image-conscious, he in a satin-edged cloak and wearing a wig of constantly color-changing optical fibers, she in a Psi-Woman meditation jumpsuit, complete with requisite combination shoulder-purse and music/mantra player.
“Wasn’t she the clairvoyant in that movie about the surgeon who put his wife’s lover’s brain inside the gorilla after they had the car crash?” a fat woman in a pink sombrero, sitting on another stool, asked the man with her while she stared absently at the screen and pushed pretzels into her mouth.
“Yeah. She showed the detective where the body was.” The man was wearing a short, embroidered cloak and matador’s black hat. It was South of the Border week. Anyone in Mexican garb got a ten-percent discount in most places.
On the screen, the two guests were sipping before-dinner cocktails. Suddenly the woman nudged her husband and pointed to a faint finger-smudge on her glass. “Body grease!” she whispered behind her hand. The husband hurriedly put down his own glass, at the same time glancing apprehensively from side to side at the cutlery and the china. Moments later, the scene ended with a shot of the couple departing on a pretext, and then the embarrassed host consoling his distraught wife.
“She can really do it,” the woman in the sombrero said.
“Huh?” her companion said.
“In real life—she’s really psychic.”
“Oh.”
“The police use her. A documentary last week had her in it, so it must be true.” The woman looked at Corrigan for support. “She can find missing stuff by looking at pictures that they take from choppers over the city.”
“That’s nice,” Corrigan said.
While on the TV, the hostess’s wise and worldly mother was educating her daughter in the use of “Bodysafe.” After spraying fingertips and palms, they embarked on a tour of the house together, rapturously drenching drawer handles, doorknobs, light switches, phone buttons, toilet seats, and anything else carrying the risk of indirect contact with another human being. The ad ended with the husband and wife again, this time waving goodbye to their guests after a brilliantly successful dinner party, and then flinging their arms around each other ecstatically—presumably after taking appropriate precautions with Bodysafe.
“You know, Joe, I think you’ve been holding out on me,” Wilbur said at last.
Corrigan ambled back to that end of the bar. “Oh? Why would that be, now?”
“I think you saw some things coming that I didn’t see, and you didn’t tell me.”
“Is that a fact?”
“About Oliver,” Wilbur said. So, apparently, things weren’t going so well. “What makes people so greedy? I mean, not only in business, but all these people that we read about. How do they get like it?”
“People will continue trying to get better at whatever others continue to admire,” Corrigan answered.
“Aren’t there any people of principle out there anymore?” Wilbur grumbled.
“Probably. But who’s interested in principles? What gets you elected is where you stand on issues. And that’s a shame, because issues change but principles don’t. When you know a man’s character, you know where he’ll stand on any issue.”
Already, as a now-cognizant observer inside the experiment, Corrigan was gaining some invaluable insights on how the system was evolving. This was the way they should have done it from the beginning—with the surrogates fully aware of what was going on. It was what he himself had always advocated in the endless debates on the subject. He didn’t know how the decision had come about to go ahead with it—once it was decided upon, keeping the fact secret from the surrogates would be essential. The idea of it had been to guarantee that the surrogates’ behavior would be as authentic as possible. But now he was surer than ever that it had been the wrong way to go. Knowing what was going on, he could steer the system into grappling with concepts of real substance for a change, and hence into showing the beginnings of emulating real, thinking beings—which had been the whole idea. Left to freewheel in its own direction for years, it had been industriously populating its world with morons.
Wilbur propped his chin on a hand and stared across the bar exasperatedly. “Joe, why are you a bartender?”
“To get the money to pay the rent.”
“No, I mean why don’t you run for office or something?”
“I don’t have the necessary lack of qualifications.” Corrigan gestured to indicate the far side of the lounge. A manager from the Krunchy Kandy Corporation, which was the company staging its marketing conference at the hotel that week, was leading a mixed group of employees, all dressed similarly to himself in the pink-and-gold tunic and red frilled cap of the Krunchy Kitten, through a rendering in unison of the company’s new TV jingle. “Anyway, who on earth would vote for me?”
The phone behind the bar rang. Corrigan picked it up. “Hello, Galahad Lounge. This is Joe.”
“There’s an outside call for you,” the hotel operator’s voice said.
“Thanks.”
“Go ahead, caller.”
“Joe Corrigan here.”
“Ah, hello, Mr. Corrigan,” a firm, genial voice—but at the same time, one carrying an unmistakable undertone of curiosity—replied. “This is Dr. Zehl speaking. I got a message saying that you wanted to get in touch with me.”
The announcement came so unexpectedly that it took Corrigan several seconds to collect his thoughts. “Where are you calling from?” he asked.
“Does it make any difference?” Zehl—whoever he really was—had to be neurally coupled into the system again. If he were speaking via a direct channel from the outside, the mismatch in time rates would have made communication impossible.
The bar was an awkward place to have to take the call, but nobody was paying Corrigan any attention. He kept his voice low and faced away from the room, into a corner.
“Are we on monitor bypass?”
“Yes.” The question would have confirmed what Zehl suspected—that Corrigan knew the situation. Zehl’s reply meant that although the conversation was being handled by the system, its content was not being made available to the context analyzers. In other words, the line was not being tapped.
“I see.” Zehl’s tone was wary, waiting to see what line Corrigan would take.
“Has anyone else in here figured it?” Corrigan asked.
“You’re the first that we know of, so far.”
“It’s gone way past anything that was planned. I don’t know how it got to be taken this far, but the results are amazing.”
There was a pause, as if this was not the kind of reaction that Zehl had been expecting. “You’re . . . satisfied, then?” he said finally.
“Yes, for the most part,” Corrigan replied. “The memory-suppression took some figuring out at first, but I’m better off without it.”
“How do you mean?”
“It works better this way. I can do a lot more on the inside, now that I know what’s what. We should have set it up this way to begin with.”
“Okay.” There was an edge of relief in Zehl’s voice. “So it seems to be working out.”
“There might be a problem. One of the other surrogates has cottoned on to what’s happening too. The trouble is, she doesn’t know so much of the background, and she was pretty mad about the whole situation when I talked to her. I’m worried about what she might do.”
“Why not talk to her? Tell her whatever she needs to know. It can’t make a lot of difference now.”
“That’s what I want to do. The trouble is, I can’t locate her. What I need you people out there to do for me is . . .” Corrigan’s voice trailed off as he caught sight of the tall, dark-haired figure in a long coat, just coming into the lounge. He nodded a quick acknowledgment as he caught her eye, and turned his face back to the phone. “It’s okay. You don’t have to bother. I’ll call you back later. Guess what. She just walked in the door.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I understand that congratulations are in order,” Jason Pinder said from behind the desk in his office in the Executive Building. It was a meticulously neat office, with everything arranged logically and every need anticipated. “You never cease to surprise us, Joe. Well, give my best wishes to Ms. Vance. . . . No, that’s wrong, isn’t it. It’s Ms. Corrigan now. Anyway, I hope you’ll both have a fine future.”
“Thanks,” Corrigan said from the chair opposite. It was his first morning back. The summons to Pinder’s office had come minutes after he appeared in the lab. Corrigan didn’t believe it was just so that Pinder could be the first to offer his best wishes.
Pinder stroked his mustache with a knuckle and regarded Corrigan pensively for a moment before continuing. “I wouldn’t want to spoil the romance of a time like this, but your going off without a word like that made it impossible for us to let you know what was happening. Nobody knew where you were.”
Corrigan was far from sure that anyone from management had been trying to find out. Certainly, Corrigan’s secretary, Judy Klein, had said nothing about being asked in the few minutes that Corrigan had had to talk with her before being called over to see Pinder. He knew that Shipley had been trying to get in touch with him before he and Evelyn left California for Ireland, but that was a different matter. Since Shipley was not expected in until the afternoon, Corrigan still didn’t know what that had been about.
Pinder went on. “As you know, the whole DNC program has been the subject of top-level discussions in the company for some time now. While you were away, I was notified of certain decisions that have been made concerning revisions to our goals, and the organizational adjustments that will be needed to accomplish them.”
Only then did the premonition hit Corrigan that a pie was about to hit him in the face. In the same instant, the certainty crystallized that this wasn’t something that had suddenly happened in the last few weeks. He waited, saying nothing. Pinder continued:
“The change that will have the most impact as far as you’re concerned, Joe, has to do with our reviews of the state of the art and the future developments that now seem likely in various fields. To put it bluntly, VIV technology is obsolete—or at least, on its way toward very soon becoming so. EVIE really can’t be justified any longer as the company’s main VR line. Going through the primary sensory system for vision and acoustics is a dead end. All the market indicators are for taking everything over to direct neural sooner rather than later.” He showed his palms, then sat back, watching Corrigan with his marbly gray eyes to await his reaction.
It was one of the occasions when the normally smooth-working pieces of Corrigan’s mind grated and jammed. First, after the success with Pinocchio One, Pinocchio Two had been enthusiastically pushed as the next logical step: extension of the existing system into the pons, in preparation for going further to the thalamus and hence being able to add DNC vision and acoustic. Then SDC had come along, offering a quicker fix through a hybrid approach using VIV technology, and that had become the mainline thrust in the form of EVIE, with P-Two relegated to longer-term, secondary status. But now, suddenly, EVIE was obsolete. What did it mean? Were the original priorities being reinstated?
“Everything, via direct neural?” Corrigan repeated. “That’s what Evelyn’s work is aimed at. So what are you saying? P-Two is on track again, after all?”
Pinder shook his head. “Fooling around at the pons—it’s still years away from going to vision.”
“What, then?”
“We can DNC to the thalamus right now. Scrub P-Two. Forget messing around with hybrids. Full DNC with vision in under a year.”
“How?” Corrigan asked, nonplussed. This was obviously the whole point that Pinder had been leading up to.
Pinder sat forward to rest his arms on the desk, fixing Corrigan with a direct stare. He held a breath for a second or two, then exhaled heavily. “Frank Tyron has drawn our attention to some recently declassified work that has been going on in SDC for some time, which changes the picture considerably. Basically, they already have a working method that couples to synapses in the thalamus. It’s called DIVAC: DIrect Vision and ACoustics. He’s put a proposal to the Board for going straight to a combined Pinocchio/DIVAC system now, rather than Pinocchio combined with VIV, and shooting for a full direct-neural system in half to a quarter of the time you’re talking about. The Board’s reaction is extremely favorable. Ken Endelmyer’s with it all the way.”
Pinder sighed and made an open-handed gesture that seemed meant to indicate that it was all as much a surprise to him as to Corrigan. But Corrigan didn’t believe it. This kind of thing was not hatched overnight, without the involvement of somebody in Pinder’s position. Shipley, he remembered, had seen something like this coming. At his house, Shipley had voiced his suspicion that EVIE was falling into disfavor, and putting Corrigan in charge of it was not necessarily to his advantage. Meanwhile, Tyron had been talking directly to the Board. The straws that Shipley had glimpsed had been in the wind for months.
Suddenly, a lot of things came back to Corrigan that he should have seen the significance of immediately, long ago. Hans Groener, in California, had talked about thalamus-level research going on there, and had mentioned the Air Force’s involvement. But Corrigan had been so immersed in his own, self-centered universe that it had barely registered.
“So . . .” Corrigan waved a hand meaninglessly while he struggled to collect his thoughts. “What about Evelyn and the pons interface that she’s working on? We brought her in with the aim of eventually setting up a neurophysiology group. What happens to that?”
Pinder nodded sympathetically. “I hear what you’re saying, Joe. But the corporation has to take account of developments in other parts of the world. Not all of anyone’s plans always work out as hoped. The decision is made: further major funding, either for EVIE or for further pons work, is out. But we would be prepared to keep it going in a low-key mode in case the DIVAC-based approach runs into snags—if that’s something you’d be interested in doing.” It didn’t need Pinder’s ton
e to convey that it equated to consignment to oblivion. Corrigan’s expression said that he would not be interested. “Alternatively,” Pinder said, coming to what was effectively the only option, “you could move into the mainline operation.”
Just for a second, Corrigan had thought Pinder was about to offer him the job of heading it, but his use of the word “into” promptly scotched that.
“Naturally, positions will be available for you—yourself and Evelyn,” Pinder said.
Corrigan swallowed dryly. His gut-feel already told him what the answer to the only outstanding question had to be, but there was no way around it.
“Who’ll be running this operation?” he asked.
At least Pinder had the decency not to try to pretend that he hadn’t been expecting it. It was, after all, as Corrigan could see by now, the whole point of the interview.
“Frank Tyron originated the proposal,” he reminded Corrigan. “His contacts and experience are right for this kind of work. And the Board were very insistent that a program that will involve a lot of coordination outside of CLC, and especially liaison with government departments, requires someone with his kind of background. I’m sorry, Joe. I know you’ve done some good work, but that’s the way it is.” He placed his hands palms-down on the desk and concluded briskly, before Corrigan could react, “The project will be designated COmbined Sensory and MOtor Stimulation: COSMOS. We’re at the beginning of a new year, and we want to get as much mileage out of that as possible. I’d like the current projects tidied up and loose ends cleared by the end of the week. There will be a meeting next Monday to brief everyone on the goals and tentative organizational structure for the new program.”
Even with it spelled out like that, Corrigan couldn’t bring himself to capitulating ignominiously to instant acceptance. “I’ll have to think it over,” he replied, too numbed for the moment to be capable of responding more effectively.
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