Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  “This is your car,” she said after a period of silence that had lasted since the Fort Duquesne Bridge. “I mean, not just the same model and color and everything that you drove now”—she was still seeing events from a viewpoint projected twelve years forward—”but your car, the one that you’d owned and gotten to know.”

  “Yes,” Corrigan said. He could see where her thinking was heading, but it was easiest to just let her follow it through.

  She motioned with a hand. “So what should there be inside that glove compartment in front of me?”

  “I honestly can’t remember. Have a look and see.”

  Lilly reached out and opened the compartment door. “Map of the city, another of Pennsylvania, black flashlight, insurance certificate, pen, wiping cloth . . . another pen, empty envelope, and an owner’s manual,” she recited, taking out the items and showing them briefly.

  “Sounds about right,” Corrigan said, glancing at her and nodding.

  Lilly shook her head. “But this is what I don’t get. How does the machine that’s managing this simulation know what was in your car? When we were at my place, you talked about how a lot of detail can get filled in by a person’s subconscious—like in a dream. But that isn’t happening here. I’m seeing the same things as you, but the information can’t be coming from my subconscious, can it? I never knew what was in your glove compartment.”

  Corrigan shrugged. “No big deal, really. Think about it. I’m comatose inside a COSMOS cubicle at Xylog, and my car is right outside in the parking lot. It wouldn’t take somebody very long to inventory everything with a camera and input the images to the system.” He paused to let her take that in, then added casually, “When you woke up this morning, where was it, exactly? Tell me again.”

  “A hotel that the Air Force put us in.”

  “After you arrived from California to take part in the project.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I assume that you put on some regular clothes out of your wardrobe, and picked up the purse and that blue coat when you were leaving. Right?”

  Lilly glanced down at herself. “Well, sure. Of course I did. What else?”

  Corrigan gave her a sideways grin. “Then how come I see a blue coat and all the right things? I don’t know what was in your closet, do I?”

  It took Lilly a few seconds to see what he was driving at. “The bags, all my things? . . . You’re kidding!” she said disbelievingly.

  Corrigan nodded. “Same thing. A crew goes out to the hotel, scans the rooms and itemizes the contents. Do the lot in under an hour. If the truth were known, that’s probably why they put you in a hotel in the first place. Don’t make any mistake, Lilly. There’s heaps of money riding on this. These people are doing it right.”

  Lilly still couldn’t buy it completely. “But you didn’t wake up in a hotel room with just a few things,” she said. “You were at home. There’s no way they could have captured the whole of something like that. Every piece of junk in a desk drawer? The contents of a file cabinet? It’s simply not feasible.”

  “It wouldn’t be as hard as you think. Practically all of us who were on the project got our homes realscaped just for the hell of it, to make realistic test environments. So a lot of what would be needed is in the databank already. But you’re right—it couldn’t be perfect. I want to find out what differences you and I see when we get there. There could be something in that house that can get us out of this, regardless of what anyone outside decides. That’s what Tom Hatcher was telling me back at the office.”

  “Okay. Then now suppose you tell me what that was all about,” Lilly suggested. “Hatcher was the one who ran a lot of the software development at Xylog, right?”

  “That’s him. Well, there was something that he and me and a couple of others talked about once when we were arguing about memory suppression.” Corrigan grunted as he braked to avoid a Buick making a sudden lane-switch without signaling—probably under the influence of a random number.

  “Okay. And? . . .”

  “One of the things that came up was how to get yourself out of the simulation—say, in some kind of emergency—if we had gone with suppression; in other words, if you didn’t even know you were in a simulation. We called it the ejector seat. But can you see the problem? If your knowledge that it exists gets erased as part of the suppression, it’s no use to you. But if you know about it from before the period that was suppressed, then you must know also that you’re in a simulation, which defeats the whole object of having any suppression in the first place.”

  “How do you use a button that you know you’re going to forget about?” Lilly summarized.

  “Exactly.”

  She sat back in her seat, thought about it, and then looked across at him. “There’s no way you can do it.”

  “Tom came up with a way whereby maybe you can. His idea was to plant something of personal significance in the simworld environment that would take on a new meaning when you know that you’re looking for it. In other words you know the way you think, and when the need became strong enough, you’d realize that you would have put something close by somewhere—something that you’d recognize when the time came. So for as long as the simulation was running normally, it would effectively be invisible. Get the idea?”

  Lilly did, but its relevance was less clear. From what Corrigan had just said, the notion had been purely hypothetical—something to think about if the decision had been to use suppression in the project. But—as far as Corrigan had been aware, anyway—the decision had been not to use suppression. So why would he have implemented an ejection button? She tried to think back to what she had overheard Hatcher say from the screen.

  “Back in your office just now, he said something about you and he talking late into the project. You went into the simulation a day before he did.”

  Corrigan nodded that she had got it. “So my memory erasure went back a day earlier than his did. Something was going on that aroused our suspicions enough for us to decide that maybe an ‘out’ button would be a good insurance. And what he’s telling me is that we went ahead and put them in somewhere. It means that there is a way out, Lilly, whether Sylvine and the rest of them out there feel like cooperating or not. All we have to do is find it.”

  They drove along a road of comfortably aloof homes lying in upper-middle-class seclusion among shrubbery and pines, and turned off into the driveway of a low-set, contemporary composition of lacquered timbers and stone chimney breasts, with brown shingles, a screened porch, and large expanses of glass.

  Corrigan parked without saying anything, got out, and walked around to open the passenger door. Outside a house a short distance farther along, a man who looked like the occupant was standing with a woman by the mailbox at the end of a driveway. They looked across while pretending not to as Lilly climbed out of the car—unwilling to permit anything approaching eye contact, even at that distance, but too intrigued to miss anything. Then the gazes averted, and the chins began to wag.

  “I think I’m the sensation of the street already,” Lilly said as they began walking up toward the house. “How long is it since Evelyn left?”

  Corrigan snorted. “Three weeks. You know, it’s funny. I can remember how smug and self-satisfied I felt when we picked this place. Now I think I’d prefer that flat in Oakland. Better neighborhood. Less insufferable people.”

  “Drunks, deadbeats, students, dancers? Even bartenders.”

  “Exactly.”

  The dog from next door was out front, secured by a sliding chain to a line that gave it the run of the lawn on the far side of the scattering bay laurel and flowering dogwoods separating the two properties. It was a shaggy gray mass of indeterminate origins, and had paused to watch them hesitantly, as if unsure what it was supposed to do. Corrigan stopped and looked at it strangely for a couple of seconds. Then he held out a hand and called jovially, “Hey, Bruce, old fella. How’s it going today, eh?” The dog scampered as close as its chain would permit, t
ongue lolling from jaws panting wide in delight and tail wagging. Corrigan grunted to himself, followed Lilly up to the door, and let them in.

  “I never knew you were a dog person,” she said as he closed the door.

  “I’m not. That was an experiment. Checking out the system.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Corrigan cocked his head and pointed back over his shoulder with a thumb. “Its name isn’t Bruce—I don’t know what its name is. And it never acts like that. It hates me.” Lilly frowned uncomprehendingly. Corrigan moved to the hallway window beside the door and looked out. The dog had gone back to investigate something under a shrub by the lawns; the two people across the street were still talking.

  “The system is operating right on its edge,” Corrigan murmured. “You see, it didn’t know what to make the dog do. Somebody must have got a shot of the next-door dog when they were here realscaping the house, but they didn’t know what name it answered to, or how it behaves. So the system took its cue from me. That’s what it was designed to do.” He inclined his head, still gazing out across the road. “Are those animations of real neighbors that somebody got views of, or are they characters that the system invented? I don’t know, because I’ve never talked to anyone around here. But the system couldn’t be aware of that. If I did know what the guy who lives there looks like, I’d be in a position to catch it out. If I walked across and went into his house, do I know what I ought to find there, or could the system get away with making up an interior of its own? It can’t tell. You see, again, we’ve got it right on the edge.”

  Lilly looked out of the window, and then uncomfortably back at Corrigan. “This is getting weird.”

  “Hell, it’s been weird for a long time, Lilly.”

  He helped Lilly out of her coat and hung it, along with his own, on the rack by the door. “That’s interesting, Joe,” she agreed after she had absorbed what he was getting at. “But how is it supposed to help?”

  “I’m not exactly sure yet. But when something’s stretched to its limits, that’s when you find where its weaknesses are.” He led the way into the kitchen and tipped the old filter and grounds from the coffeemaker into the trash bin. “Anyhow, simulation or not, it activates the same taste centers. Let’s get the pot on.”

  “I could use one.” Lilly looked around at the mess he had left that morning—the sinkful of dishes; papers from work spread over the table; bread, cheese, pickles, and mayonnaise for his sandwich still not put away. “Boy, you sure have been on your own for three weeks,” she commented.

  “Ah, don’t start giving me any of that old bilge,” he warned. “It’s been hectic at Xylog. And since I woke up yesterday I’ve had other things on my mind than housekeeping.”

  Lilly opened the dishwasher and shook her head despairingly at the pile of crockery and kitchenware inside. “Where’s the detergent?” she sighed.

  “I can’t remember. It’s been twelve years since I saw it. Try the cupboard under the sink.”

  Lilly opened the door and squatted down to look. “The stupid thing is that there’s really no need for any of this. Why go to the trouble of creating a simulated world and build in all the limitations of the real one? You could just have a code word or something that gets this done in an instant.” She found the detergent, stood up, and poured detergent into the dishwasher while Corrigan loaded items from the sink. “You could make life really comfortable, when you think about it.”

  “Magic words, eh? You’re right. That’s exactly the kind of world we could create. We haven’t scratched the surface of this business yet, Lilly.”

  She switched on the machine and began collecting assorted jars and dishes together to either throw out or put in the refrigerator. “You see what I mean,” she said. “Look at all this. Why is it necessary to have stuff dry up and go bad? Couldn’t we have a simulation without mimicking the effects of microbes?”

  “Why stop at that?” he asked her. “Maybe you’d never get too hot or too cold, cut your finger, get a bruise, or catch flu, either. Talk to anyone anytime, and be anywhere in an instant.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “People might never want to come out of it.” Corrigan shook his head and set down two mugs that he had found for the coffees. “There’s all kinds of things to find out. The whole thing’s being rushed too fast, and for all the wrong reasons. That’s how we come to be stuck in here.” Which brought them back to the immediate issue at hand.

  “You said we were here to look for the clue to a way out that Tom says you planted somewhere,” she said.

  “Mmm.”

  “What kind of thing are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That helps.”

  “The clue to the magic word.” Corrigan poured the coffees and handed her one. “It was twelve years ago, Lilly. I hadn’t planned on it happening this way. It was supposed to have been just a few days.”

  “What did you mean in the car when you talked about us seeing different things when we got here?” Lilly swept her free hand in a circle. “I see a sink, refrigerator, table with things on, a window over there, and the door we came in there. Isn’t that what you see?”

  “Oh, sure. But you’d expect that. Everything superficial would have been captured when the guys were here realscaping the house. Possibly Tyron’s people came to get additional detail, too, at the same time that they did the car—after I was inside the simulation. So for stuff like that, the system has objective data that it can feed in the data streams to both of us. But at a more subtle level there are things that exist in my memories that it doesn’t know about. Will my mind fill in the details subconsciously so that I see them and you don’t? Or will I not see them, although I know I ought to? How will the system handle it when it’s driven to the limit?” He sipped from his mug and looked around the kitchen casually.

  “For instance . . .” Corrigan moved over to the microwave and took down one of the recipe books from the shelf just above. It was called Cooking the Good Old American Way, and showed big, elegant houses and a riverboat scene. “They did a thorough job,” he commented. “This book of Evelyn’s did have that picture on the front. But they had to stop somewhere. He opened the cover and showed Lilly the endpaper and flyleaf inside. “What do you see there?” he asked her curiously.

  She looked, then raised her eyes to meet his uncertainly as if suspecting a trick and shrugged. “Nothing. It’s blank.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I see too. But what I know, and what you and the system don’t, is that it was a gift from an aunt of Evelyn’s, and it had an inscription inside. . . . You see—we’ve carried out one experiment already.”

  Lilly gaped. In two days, nothing had brought home to her the reality of the situation that they were in more effectively than that one, simple demonstration. Corrigan was straining the system’s rules, watching for where the cracks would appear. Lilly realized then that he had a twofold strategy: either he would find the “magic word” and get them out; or failing that, he would find a way to crash everything from the inside.

  She watched, still struggling to overcome the eerie feeling of it all as Corrigan replaced the cookbook. He opened one of the kitchen drawers and rummaged idly among the contents, but nothing caught his eye as the kind of thing that he had vaguely in mind. It was the usual assortment of utensils and implements that could have been imaged and recorded straightforwardly. He needed something that would let his mind work spontaneously, without prior expectations. He wandered around, taking pictures off the walls, lifting ornaments from their niches, trying to create opportunities for stumbling on details that a realscaping crew with finite time to contend with would have missed. The watercolor of a schooner that he took down from above the breakfast bar was just blank pasteboard on the reverse side. Was anything supposed to be written there—a date, a caption, an inscription? He couldn’t remember. Was the maker’s mark that he found on the underside of the vase from the ledge by the pantry t
he authentic one that had always been there, or had the system improvised it? He had no idea. He lifted a wooden-handled carving knife from its fixture on the wall—a relic from his student days that had followed him over the years through all his digs and apartments from Dublin to Pittsburgh. The handle had a deep, L-shaped gouge in it, dating from a time long forgotten, which had been hidden facing the wall. He held it out to let Lilly look at it.

  “Tell me what you see,” he said.

  “An old knife. It’s got a worn blade, a polished wooden handle held by brass rivets.”

  Corrigan turned the knife over in his hands. “Anything different this way?” He turned it again, showing her the first side once more, then the other.

  “No. Should there be?”

  “To me, there’s a deep gouge in the handle. You don’t see one at all?” He had found something.

  “No. Nothing.” Lilly looked up at him disbelievingly. “My God!” she whispered.

  Corrigan had forgotten that gouge. But his subconscious hadn’t, and it was filling the detail in, inside his head. The system had known nothing about the gouge, since it had faced the wall and not been captured in the imaging; therefore, the data to define it were absent from the optical input being generated for Lilly.

  “Now it’s caught in a direct conflict,” Corrigan said. “It knows that you and I are seeing different things, violating its primary reality criterion. It can’t resolve the issue by deleting what I see, and it can’t correct what you see because it doesn’t have the information to draw it. And either way, even if it could, that would violate its consistency rules.”

  Lilly shook her head helplessly, as if it were her problem. “So how will it handle it?” she asked.

  Corrigan shrugged. “I have no idea. The system has been evolving its own associative structures. That’s what it was designed to do. Its internal complexity will be so great by now that neither I nor anyone else could tell you what it’ll do. It’s going to be interesting finding out.” Lilly looked around uneasily, as if half expecting the house to cave in. Corrigan grinned cheerfully and took her arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a stroll around the house and see what else we can find.”