Counterfeit World

by Daniel F. Galouye

  I spun around as the door from the staff section opened.

  Collingsworth stood staring at me. “I watched you earlier this afternoon when they were rescuing Chuck from Simulacron-3.”

  Earlier this afternoon? I looked outside. It was getting dark. I had spent hours wrestling with my foundering thoughts.

  He crossed the room and drew up solicitously before me. “Doug, you’ve been having more trouble, haven’t you?”

  Unconsciously, I nodded. Perhaps I was reaching out for whatever slim reassurance he might offer, as he had done once before. But then I caught myself. God, I couldn’t tell him! If I did, he might be the next candidate for a disappearance act or an accident.

  “No!” I almost shouted. “Everything’s fine! Leave me alone.”

  “All right, we’ll do it my way.” He pulled up a chair. “When we spoke in my study that night I took off on the assumption you were suffering from a guilt complex-compunction over manipulating reactional units who imagine they are real. Since then I’ve done some thinking on how that complex might further express itself.”

  The light played upon his thick, white hair, giving him a benign appearance. “I deduced what sort of obsession would result—has probably already resulted—from those circumstances.”

  “Yes?” I looked up, only remotely interested.

  “The next development would be for you to start believing that, just as you are manipulating your ID units, there is a greater simulectronicist in a greater world manipulating you —all of us.”

  I leaped up. “You know! How did you find out?”

  But he only smiled complacently. “The point, Doug, is—how did you find out?”

  Even though I realized the knowledge would endanger Avery too, I told him exactly what Ashton had said on bursting into my office in the person of Chuck Whitney. I had to tell someone.

  When I had finished, he squinted. “Most ingenious. I couldn’t have conceived of a better device for self-deception.”

  “You mean Ashton didn’t say this world is an illusion?”

  “Do you have any witness to prove he did!” He paused. “Isn’t it odd that the one common denominator in all your experiences is that none of them can be substantiated?”

  Why was he trying to knock down every structure of reason I had erected? Had he, too, had access to Fuller’s “basic discovery”? Was he steering me back to safety in ignorance?

  More important, if both he and Jinx had somehow come into possession of the fatal information, why had she been purged of it while he had been allowed to remain unreprogrammed?

  Then I saw through the woods: Collingsworth was merely aware of my suspicions about the true nature of our world. He did not believe them. And therein lay his apparent immunity to being yanked.

  Still, I hadn’t rejected that lethal knowledge. Yet here I sat—unyanked, unreoriented, unreprogrammed. Why?

  Collingsworth placed one splayed set of fingers thoughtfully against the other. “Your rationalization processes are slow, Doug. Right now I’m even going to add another building block to your structure of pseudoparanoid obsession.”

  I glanced up. “What’s that?”

  “You overlooked rationalizing your blackouts into the pattern.”

  I thought of the several times I had fought off sudden seizures of near unconsciousness. “What about them?”

  He shrugged. “If I were trying to weave your web of fantasy, I would say that the blackouts were the side effects of an upper world simulectronic operator establishing empathic coupling with me. A faulty coupling. You’ve seen it happen in your own simulator. The ID unit becomes aware something is going on.”

  I gaped. “That’s it, Avery! That’s exactly it! That’s the one thing that explains why I haven’t been yanked yet!”

  He grinned, a superior there-didn’t-I-tell-you-so expression. Patiently, he said, “Yes, Doug? Go on.”

  “It makes everything simple! The last time I had a near blackout was just last night. Do you know what I was thinking then? I was utterly convinced that everything that had happened to me had been a hallucination, just as you suggested!”

  Collingsworth nodded, but not without conveying his sarcasm. “The Great Simulectronicist realized then that He didn’t have to worry about reprogramming you any longer?”

  “Exactly! I had reprogrammed myself with my own skepticism.”

  “And what’s the next reasonable deduction in that chain of spurious logic, Doug?”

  I thought a moment, then said grimly, “That I’ll be safe until He decides to make another spot check and see whether I’ve gone back to my former convictions!”

  He slapped his thigh triumphantly. “There. And you should suspect by now that that’s just the still-rational part of Douglas Hall admitting he’d better get a grip on himself before those obsessions become uncontrollable.”

  “I know what I saw!” I protested. “I know what I heard!”

  He didn’t try to hide his pity. “Have it your own way. This is something I can’t do for you.”

  I walked to the window and stared out into the night sky, ablaze with summer’s canopy of familiar stars arrayed in their eons-old constellations.

  Even now I was glancing hundreds of light years into space, billions upon billions of miles. Yet suppose I could pace off the absolute dimensions of my universe, as it actually existed within the bounds of the simulectronic apparatus that supported it. Would I find that all creation was compressed into an Upper Reality building that was only, say, two hundred feet long by a hundred feet in depth, as measured by the yardstick of that Higher World?

  There—Ursa Major. If I could see through the illusion, would I be staring instead at nothing more than a function generator? And over there—Cassiopeia? Or actually a bulky data processor, standing next to its allocator, Andromeda?

  Collingsworth’s hand descended gently on my shoulder. “You can still fight it, Doug. All you have to do is make yourself see how impossible your obsessions are.”

  He was right, of course. I had simply to convince myself that I had only imagined Phil Ashton’s mocking recital, his scornful insistence that my own world was but a simulectronic counterfeit.

  “I can’t do it, Avery,” I said finally. “It all fits together too neatly. Ashton did tell me that. And it was the information Fuller had hidden deep in his own simulator.”

  “Very well, son.” His shoulders fell. “If I can’t stop you, then I’m going to help you put yourself through the complete works as quickly as possible.”

  When I only stared back nonplussed, he continued, “It’s not difficult to reason what you’re going to do now. But, since it’ll take you three or four days to conceive of that next step, I’m going to save you the time. Eventually you’ll push the analogy another notch. If this is a simulectronic creation, you’ll tell yourself, then there must be someone with total knowledge of the setup working on the inside.”

  “The same way we have Ashton serving as a Contact Unit!”

  “Right. And you’ll realize sooner or later that flushing out this world’s Phil Ashton will be the final measure of the validity of your suspicions.”

  I immediately saw what he was suggesting. The Upper Reality would have to have a special ID unit down here to keep an eye on developments that might not otherwise come to Their attention until some output collator was periodically checked. If I could find the Contact Unit, I might get a final, positive admission from him.

  But then what? Was I to leave him to his devices afterward? Let him go free to report, on his next contact with the Upper World Operator, what I knew? I saw instantly that tracking him down was only half the job. The moment I identified him, I would have to kill him in order to protect myself.

  “So,” Collingsworth said soberly, “go on off in search of your Contact Unit. And good hunting, son.”

  “But it could be anybody!”

  “Of course. However, if there is such a person, he would have to be close to you, wouldn’t
he? Why? Because all the effects you claim to have experienced apply exclusively to you.”

  It could be one of many persons. Siskin? Dorothy Ford? She had been right there when Lynch had vanished! And she had moved in to post close watch over me just as matters had become critical! Chuck Whitney? Why not? Hadn’t he admittedly been the only one around when the thermite charge had gone off in the modulator? Or Marcus Heath, who was to supplant me in REIN? Or even Wayne Hartson? They had both shown up at a convenient time, during a period when the Upper Reality would have found it necessary to keep me under closer surveillance.

  Jinx? Of course not. It was clear she had gone through the same routine They were putting me through.

  But what about Avery Collingsworth? As I glanced suspiciously at him, he must have surmised my thoughts.

  “Yes, Doug,” he said. “Even me. By all means, you must include me, if your research is going to be thorough.”

  Was he sincere? Had he actually foreseen my paranoid reactions? Or was he merely being cunning for some undecipherable purpose? Was he steering me into a certain channel of action?

  “Even you,” I repeated profoundly.

  He turned to leave but paused in the doorway. “Of course, it’ll occur to you that your search will have to be made under a guise of total normalcy. You can’t go about accusing people of being a Contact Unit. Because if you are right, it won’t be long before you will be yanked. Correct?”

  I only stared back as he closed the door behind him. But he was right. I could expect immunity at least until the next time the Operator decided to run another empathy-coupling check on me—but only if I didn’t attract His attention before then.

  Outside, I was oblivious to the slight chill of night as I made my way past the late-shift reaction monitor pickets and headed for the parking lot. There was little within me that was either calm or rational. These buildings, the stars above. Just the flick of a switch would cancel them all out in an abrupt neutralization of electrical charges. And myself along with everything else.

  As I continued on toward the nearest company car I thought contemptuously of all the petty human values and intricacies, ambitions, hopes, devices. Of Siskin reaching for the world and not knowing it was as tenuous as the air around him. Of the Association of Reaction Monitors, fighting Siskin’s simulator to the death, not even aware that they enjoyed no greater degree of physical being than the reactional units in that machine.

  But I thought mainly of the Master Simulectronicist, that metempirical Omnipotent Being who sat arrogant and secure in the immense data-processing department of His Super Simulator, allocating and integrating stimuli and putting His analog creatures through their paces.

  Deus ex machina.

  All was sham. All was utterly hopeless and inconsequential against the backdrop of unsuspected illusion.

  “Doug!”

  I drew back cautiously, squinting at the air car from which the voice had come.

  “Doug, it’s Jinx.”

  Then I remembered she had insisted upon meeting me here. Uncertainly, I went over. She reached across the seat and opened the door and the interior lights flashed on.

  “You really look as if you’ve had it,” she said, laughing.

  Which reminded me it had been two days since I’d had any sleep. And I could feel a numbing fatigue undermining even the horrifying comprehensions of that impossible day.

  “Rough afternoon,” I said, climbing in beside her.

  I glanced into her face and was instantly impressed with the change that had come over her. During the past few days I had only imagined she was attractive. I saw now that she was. For all that while her elegant features had been laden with the effects of terrifying knowledge. Now it was clear that she had been relieved of that burden. In place of her troubled expression was a winsome cast of loveliness.

  “In that case,” she said with a spritelike smile that was reminiscent of the fifteen-year-old Jinx’s effervescence, “we’ll cancel plan number one and settle for the alternative.”

  The car rose skyward in a swift, swaying motion that almost put me to sleep as the brilliance of the city fanned out all around us.

  “We were going to go back to that little restaurant,” she explained. “But not now. You need a quiet evening at home.”

  I had to act perfectly natural, Collingsworth had suggested. If, by chance, They brought me under surveillance I would have to convince Them I was still an unsuspecting part of the illusion. Even now that Real World Operator could be studying me through Jinx’s eyes, listening to me through her ears.

  “Sounds fine,” I agreed, with perhaps exaggerated enthusiasm. “In its domestic simplicity, the evening could be a taste of things to come.”

  “Why, Mr. Hall!” she said coyly. “That sounds like a left-handed proposal.”

  I moved closer, took her hand and caressed it. If that Operator were looking in now, I was determined, suspicion over my actions would be the last thing that would occur to Him.

  She put together a light supper—nothing elaborate, nothing conventional—and we ate in the kitchen as though we were old hands at domestic informality.

  Only once during the meal did I drift off into abstraction. That was to peck away stubbornly at the one remaining inconsistency: Why hadn’t They reoriented me at the moment They saw I might come into possession of Fuller’s “basic discovery”? They had meticulously reprogrammed Jinx, deleting from her retentive circuits all data that had any bearing on the forbidden knowledge. But They hadn’t stopped her from coming into contact with the one ID unit who might lead her back to awareness of the fatal information—me.

  “Doug, you are exhausted, aren’t you?”

  I sat up alertly. “I suppose I am.”

  She took my hand and led me into the study, over to the inviting leather couch. I lay with my head in her lap and she stroked my temple with a delicate, tender motion.

  “I could sing something gentle,” she proposed, joking.

  “You do,” I said for the benefit of Whoever might be watching and listening, “whenever you talk.”

  Then, unwittingly, I rang the curtain down on my special performance as I stared up into her vivid, intense eyes. I brought her head down and kissed her and, for a moment that was an eternity in itself, I forgot all about simulectronic mockeries, an Upper Reality, an Omnipotent Operator, a world of nothingness. Here was something tangible, a mooring buoy in a lashing sea.

  Eventually sleep came. But only under a pall of fear that the Operator would decide to run another spot check on my convictions before I could flush out His Contact Unit.

  11

  Halfway to Reactions the next morning I punched in a new destination on the air car’s control panel. The craft nosed around, then headed for the great, towering hulk of Babel Central, which rose haughtily above the layer of puffball clouds that it wore like a peplum.

  I felt a sort of trivial pride over the fact that I had not yet run amuck, as had Cau No in his own counterfeit world. Even as I had awakened in Jinx’s study, I had wondered whether I might manage to bury Fuller’s discovery deep in my mind—so deep that it wouldn’t be detectable during an empathic coupling.

  But could I settle back into a normal pattern, knowing what I knew? Could I bury my head in the sand and merely accept whatever fate the Higher Powers programmed into Their simulator for me? Of course not. I had to find the Contact Unit in this world, if there was one. And Siskin was as good a starting point as any.

  The car fell into a hovering pattern while waiting for two other vehicles to cushion off from Babel Central’s landing shelf.

  Absently, my gaze went out to the haze-shrouded countryside east of the city. And I recalled the night I had ridden with Jinx to the fringe of a terrifying, infinite nothingness—and witnessed the creation of half a universe. I realized now that here was another inconsistency which defied explanation. Unless—

  Of course! A simulectronic world depends upon the Gestalt principle for its veri
similitude—the presence of a sufficient number of items in a pattern to suggest the entire pattern. The cognitive whole is greater than the sum of its perceptible parts. The missing landscape had simply been one of the “gaps” in reality. Gaps that wouldn’t normally be encountered by reactional units.

  Even in Fuller’s simulator, the possibility existed that an ID unit might come upon an unfinished bit of “scenery.” Such a discovery, however, triggered automatic reprogramming circuits that not only immediately “created” the needed item, but also stripped from the reactional entity the memory of having encountered a missing prop.

  For my benefit, the road and countryside had been “filled in” on the spot. But why hadn’t I been reoriented to believe there had been nothing wrong in the first place?

  The car landed and I made my way along a hedge-lined flagstone lane that led directly to Siskin’s office. There his receptionist scanned me with the superior stare that personnel of the Inner Establishment reserved for those of the Outer and announced me.

  Siskin himself strode out and took me by the arm to lead me back inside. He was exuberant as he perched on the desk, legs dangling.

  “I was just going to call you,” he said. “You may not have to dress up the Siskin image too much, after all, when you program it into our machine. I’ve been accepted as a member of the party’s Central Committee!”

  He seemed only slightly disappointed that I didn’t gape over the development. But that didn’t discourage him.

  “And what’s more, Doug, there’s already speculation on my having a shot at the governor’s seat!”

  Thoughtfully, he added, “But, of course, I won’t be satisfied with anything like that. Sixty-four, you know. Can’t live forever. Got to move fast.”

  In a moment of precipitous decision, I stepped squarely in front of him. “All right, Siskin. You can put aside the mask. I know!”

  Starting, he drew back from the severity in my stare. He glanced frantically at the intercom, the ceiling, back into my eyes.