They came out onto the street, with its usual assortment of caricatures, crazies, and zombies. “I’ve been looking for you all over,” Corrigan muttered as soon as they were away from the doors. “You’ve had me worried, I can tell you.”
“You know where I am. What was so difficult?” Lilly’s voice was clipped and bitter. Clearly, she was not over her indignation—at the deception, and him as the only accessible target representing those responsible. The latter was compounded by his defending the situation, which she interpreted as bland acceptance. He got the feeling that she had come to him only as a last resort.
“I tried to, a few times. But I couldn’t find the place again. They’ve changed parts of the city that weren’t scaped. I tried to get you at work, but I couldn’t find it listed.”
“Why all the trouble? What worried you so much?”
“I didn’t know what might come into your head to try next.”
“Did you think I might try suicide or something as a way out?”
As a matter of fact, Corrigan had. After all, no physical harm could come to an external operator from causing an internal surrogate to permanently deactivate itself. But for all anyone knew, the knowledge and the trauma of the event might leave some adverse psychological imprint. It was something that the system designers had talked about, but in the end been forced to leave as one of the many unknowns that the experiment would entail.
“Somehow it didn’t seem like you,” Corrigan replied. Lilly didn’t respond. He went on. “I was concerned that you might try to disrupt the experiment. Oh, I don’t know how, exactly. . . . Set fire to the city, start a riot, preach revolution from street corners—mess the whole thing up somehow. And that would have been a shame, because it’s all doing so incredibly well—despite the flaws.”
Lilly stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at him incredulously. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” She shook her head. “I’ve heard of loyal servants of the System, but this is unreal. I mean, they’ve stolen twelve years of your life, and all you can do is stand there defending them like Horatius on his bridge and say—”
Corrigan raised his hands protestingly. “No. Look, it’s not the way you think. We haven’t really lost twelve years.”
“Not lost? What would you call it, then?”
“I didn’t mean like that. It hasn’t—”
“Do you call being surrounded by this lunacy every day living a life?”
“Let me finish. . . .” Corrigan looked around. There was a small coffee shop, not too crowded, a short distance from where they were standing. He took Lilly’s elbow and began steering her in that direction. “We can’t talk like this. Come on, let’s take the weight off our feet in there. A cup of something might calm you down before you break a spring or something, too.”
“. . . and we finally settled on a factor of 200. A day to us is only seven minutes outside. A whole week is less than an hour. So the twelve years that you’re so hyped up about works out at about three weeks. . . . Hell, Lilly, you’re a scientist. What we’re going through is a unique experience. Three weeks isn’t a lot to exchange for it.”
Lilly, hunched over the opposite side of the small corner-table, sipped her coffee and sighed. Corrigan’s words had had some effect. At least she was listening. She indicated their surroundings with a glance and a motion of her head. “So this is all an accelerated dream. We can afford to sit here and talk about it. It isn’t losing us much.”
“If we sat here for the next hour, it would be a whole eighteen seconds out of your life,” Corrigan said.
Lilly fell quiet for a moment, reflecting on that. “You people might have told us,” she said.
“Tyron didn’t mention it when you were interviewed in California?”
Lilly shook her head. “They didn’t tell us a great deal about it at all.”
“Maybe they did tell you after you got to Pittsburgh,” Corrigan said. “But then somebody sprung this memory suppression, and it got lost with the rest.”
Corrigan felt more at ease for the first time in days. It seemed that he had saved the project and would have good news to report the next time Zehl contacted him. The thing now was to get Lilly back into playing her role normally. He made a conscious effort to discharge the atmosphere by being casual, resting an elbow on the edge of the table and draping his other arm along the back of an empty chair next to him.
“Out of curiosity, what gave it away?” he asked her.
“You mean how did I see through the simulation?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, not because of any one thing that you could put a finger on. Lots of little things.”
“But there must have been something that clinched it.”
Lilly stared into the distance and tried to think back. “I think it was cracks in a sidewalk,” she replied at last.
“You’re joking.”
“No. . . . I do remember a couple of days in Pittsburgh before it all goes blank—when the group from California that I was with first arrived. There was a briefing and some preliminary tests.”
“Okay.”
“Well, I spent some of my free time wandering around, taking in the sights. I like the older, East Coast cities—they’re all so much alike in California. Anyway, I was standing watching something in one particular small street—it’s not all that far from here—that had lots of old, cracked paving stones in the sidewalk, and I noticed that the pattern of the cracks near the base of a lamp outside an antiques store looked like the coastline of Labrador.”
Corrigan shrugged. “What about it?”
Lilly drank from her mug, frowning with the effort of trying to keep clear what had happened around that time. “Soon after that it all gets lost. That was when the intensive tests began, and we were supposed to have had the breakdown and the rest of it. . . .”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Much later, after all the therapy and rehabilitation, when I was out and about again, I ended up one day in that same street. The stones were still old and cracked, so they hadn’t been replaced—but the pattern wasn’t there.” She raised her eyes and looked across at Corrigan. “And that was when a lot of other strange things that I’d been noticing started making more sense. It was a simulation. The system had the data to create realistic views of that street; it knew that the street had old paving stones, and that old paving stones would have cracks. So it put cracks in them. But it didn’t put in the right cracks.”
Corrigan looked at her, astonished. “And that was it?”
“That was it.”
He sat back, nodding. All for the want of a nail . . . “I noticed similar things from time to time, too. I put it down to my own faulty memories.” He shrugged, as if accepting the need for some kind of explanation. “That was what all the authority figures in my life had been telling me for years.”
Lilly looked at him doubtfully over her mug. “You know, for someone who was involved from the start, there seems to be a hell of a lot that you don’t know,” she remarked.
“I’m not really in any better situation than you,” Corrigan said. “We talked a lot about the pros and cons of suppressing the surrogates’ memories, but as far as I was always aware, the decision was not to go with it. So what must have happened is that top management of the project set up another group to implement it secretly. . . .”
“But I thought you were project top management,” Lilly interrupted.
Corrigan waved a hand. “Okay, maybe I should have said company top management. There were all kinds of people involved in Oz, both inside CLC and out—it was a hugely complicated undertaking. . . . Anyway, the idea was to make reactions to the simulation valid. But I always thought it was the wrong decision. Things work better if you know what’s going on.”
Lilly stopped him again. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that you didn’t know about it—that there was going to be any memory suppression?”
Corrigan shook his head and showed his hands app
ealingly. “I couldn’t be allowed to, could I? Think about it. If a surrogate knew in advance what the intention was, he’d see straight through any attempt at a cover story. If it was going to be done, that part had to be done by other people—without my knowing. Sneaky, yes. But what other way was there?”
Lilly tapped her spoon absently against the side of the mug, frowning to herself and watching it in a distracted kind of way. Corrigan realized that she was far from appeased. She had let herself be led into a diversion about the project’s early days and cracks in paving stones to give herself time to mull over the things he had said earlier.
Finally she shook her head and said, “It still doesn’t add up, Joe. You said you were one of the principal architects of this experiment, right? It practically grew from a proposal of yours in the first place.”
Corrigan had a premonition then of where she was leading. Suddenly he felt less comfortable. “Right,” he agreed.
“And yet, twelve years into it, you could still be taken in?” Lilly stared at him disbelievingly. “If this was anything at all like the experiment you expected, you’d have to have recognized it. Even if your memories of actually commencing it were suppressed, you’d know enough to figure out what all that business early on had been about. The only explanation has to be that the possibility of a simulation that would keep running for years never entered your head. Therefore, it must have gone way past anything envisaged in the plans that you knew about. Maybe the reason I saw through it first was that I didn’t know what the simulation was supposed to be.”
Corrigan had to nod—he had said as much himself when they talked before at Lilly’s place. The first phase was supposed to have consisted just of progressively more elaborate tests. A comprehensive, extended simulation of the kind they were in wouldn’t follow until much later. “Nothing like this was even scheduled,” he admitted.
“Well, it seems somebody scheduled it,” Lilly said pointedly.
In short, had he ever been as in control of things as he imagined? And if he had not, then who had been in control?
And still was?
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The CLC Board decided to go with the proposal to attempt evolving an Artificial Intelligence by means of machine-directed animations learning to mimic human surrogates in a virtual world. The project was designated “Oz,” and to begin with, half a floor was allocated to accommodate it in the IE Block at Blawnox. This did not mean abandoning COSMOS, however, since an all-neural interface as envisaged from COSMOS would be essential for coupling in the human surrogates for Oz. Hence, COSMOS was recast as a subsidiary goal in the greater plan.
The COSMOS part of the program was left under Tyron’s management, as had been the original intention, and the overall direction of Oz entrusted to Pinder, with Corrigan heading up the groups responsible for developing the animation-driver software. Peter Quell, Pinder’s deputy, stood in as acting head of the rest of the R & D division. The most obvious aspect of this arrangement was the temporary nature of Pinder’s overseeing role in getting Oz off the ground. When he returned to his regular job as R & D chief, an opening would be left for a permanent technical director for the Oz project. And just as clearly, the only two real candidates for the position would be Corrigan and Tyron.
Corrigan remained undaunted and cockily confident. “He’s just an interface man,” he said to Evelyn on one of the evenings that were becoming rarer when they both got away early enough to have dinner in. “We’re into big systems now. Complex, adaptive systems. And that’s my territory.”
Evelyn was less sanguine. “Tyron’s got people behind him, here and outside CLC, who’ve staked a lot on seeing their man in control,” she reminded him. “They’re not going to go away, Joe. I mean, who are we talking about that we know? Velucci was there at the first meeting with SDC, wasn’t he?—he has to be involved. Probably others from corporate, above Pinder. Maybe even Endelmyer. Certainly Harry Morgen and the others who followed Tyron. And others outside CLC, who must have had a hand in keeping the work on DIVAC in the public domain and nonlicensable. They’re not just interface people. And they’re not people who are going to sit back and watch while somebody throws a wrench in.”
Corrigan speared a piece of steak with his fork and held it in a so-what pose. “They need what I’ve got,” he said. “I’m the only one who can deliver Oz in the time they’re committed to, and they know it. So what can they do?”
“I don’t know, Joe. But be careful,” Evelyn said.
The months that followed saw a lot of activity to extend the funding and support for Oz onto a wider base beyond CLC. Corrigan was too preoccupied with technical issues to pay much attention to background politics, but one day the company announced that Feller & Faber were coming in as cosponsors of Oz, which would be set up and run under a new, jointly owned corporation, “Xylog,” dedicated to the project. F & F in turn were able to channel further funding from their lucrative client base, and very soon the original scheme that was to have been housed on a half-floor at the existing Blawnox facility gave way to a greatly expanded vision using more, bigger, and better machines, many more people, and occupying a site of its own elsewhere. F & F and its associates would manage the financial side of the joint venture, with somebody from CLC—yet to be designated—directing the technical operations. So in essence nothing changed as far as Corrigan and Tyron were concerned; it had all just shifted to a higher level.
All kinds of visitors began appearing at Blawnox, eager to see the work. Some of them were very strange, but all commanded influence or were in positions to direct significant flows of money. Another thing they had in common was the perception that they brought of Oz. They did not seem to have been made to understand it merely as a means to achieving AI. Rather, they took the AI for granted and saw it in turn as the engine that would power a revolutionary method for testing new design concepts, product models and styles, marketing methods, political campaign strategies—anything at all—in an artificial world running hundreds of times faster than the real thing: a Reality Simulator.
The character that Pinder and Tyron had brought over from the Executive Building was as zany as any that Corrigan had met in the last few months. His name was Roderick Esmelius, and he was from Market Resource Researches Inc., one of Feller & Faber’s clients. He was tall, lean, and eccentrically theatrical, with flowing, silver hair, a suit of maroon trimmed with pink, and sporting a cane. The assistant with him, whose name was Godfrey, had dark curls, heavy, black-rimmed spectacles, and a mauve suit. He referred to the project as the “Crystal Ball,” and seemed to think that it could predict election results. MRR were contemplating buying into Oz to the tune of two million dollars to try out a brainchild of Esmelius’s that he was sure would revolutionize advertising. He explained to Corrigan and Shipley, punctuating his words with flourishes and pauses for effect:
“It will have the greatest impact of anything since the advent of television. The problem is getting to people, you see. There are too many distractions and alternatives to pull audiences away.” In other words, the program offerings were garbage. “People are busy and more mobile these days than they used to be. They don’t have enough opportunity to be near their TV.” Esmelius wagged a finger and swept his gaze over the whole group as he came to the crux. “So why not let it accompany them permanently, everywhere? We hear about putting chips in people’s heads to link them to computers. So why not a TV in the head?” He paused expectantly. Pinder nodded an amen. Tyron smirked at Corrigan. Shipley, from his chair at a terminal where he had been working, tried to catch Corrigan’s eye with a look that asked if they were hearing things right; but Corrigan was too busy keeping up an appearance of relaxed, can-do suavity. He had been getting more conscious about dress lately, and was turned out in a stylish jacket of gray and black fleck, with a pink shirt and red silk tie with matching handkerchief folded in his breast pocket. Gold had appeared on his fingers, cuffs, and in his tie clip, and he had upgraded his w
atch.
Esmelius went on. “Just imagine, watch anything you like, any time, anywhere you like. And what a medium for advertisers: a direct line straight into everyone’s head! You can’t beat it.”
Godfrey carried on, pitching with the same enthusiasm. “We have a number of potential investors. But public acceptance would be the key factor in a venture like this. Now, if we could show them what the public’s reaction would be, before anyone puts up the money to actually develop the technology . . .”
“You want to know if the Oz simulation could tell you,” Shipley completed. Having listened to a dozen similar lines in the last two weeks, he knew what was coming.
“Yes, precisely,” Godfrey said. “Can the Crystal Ball do it? It would pay for itself ten times over, just on that.”
“You’d only need to give the inhabitants the effect of having such technology,” Pinder put in.
“Quite so,” Esmelius confirmed. “All we’d want to know is their reactions.”
Shipley was looking dubious and about to say something, but before he could do so, Tyron came in, looking at Pinder. “The potential for this kind of thing must be enormous. Just think of all the applications that could be emulated in advance, without the need for detailed designs or even a working prototype. All you need is the concept.”
Pinder was nodding like a pigeon pecking up seed. “I agree, Frank, I agree. It could begin a whole new science for allocating development funding and priorities.”
Tyron answered Esmelius, but with his eyes on Corrigan. “Oh, I’m sure that our programming specialists won’t find it a problem.”
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