Cyber Rogues (60 page)

“Yes.” Lilly nodded.

Corrigan sighed. “But we didn’t know as much as we thought we did, Lilly. We were going straight into people’s heads—nothing like it had been tried before. And there was too much haste and competitive pressure. We didn’t spend the time that we should have to get it right. People started coming unglued with mental disorientation and perceptual disturbances. I was one of them. I’ve been slowly getting my act back together ever since.”

“So was that what ended your first marriage?” Lilly asked.

Corrigan nodded. “Evelyn was a neurophysiologist from Boston who joined the project back in the early days—what you’d call my kind, I suppose. But I was young and brash, too obsessed with my career. Things soured, and when I turned into a vegetable, she opted out. I don’t blame her, really. She did well to put up with it as long as she did.”

“And the second one—the one who left last night; it wasn’t the same with her?” Lilly said.

Corrigan leaned forward to top up their glasses. “Oh, that was a joke from the beginning—not done for what you’d call exactly the most romantic of reasons. My rehabilitation counselor suggested it. She thought it would help to bring a better focus and some stability into my life.” He drank from his glass and looked across at her. “Okay, enough of that. Now suppose you tell me how what you seem to know fits with working in a shoe-finishing shop.”

Lilly shrugged lightly, as if to say it was all very simple, really. “I used to be with the Space Defense Command up to twelve years ago—OTSC at Inglewood. I was a scientific evaluator involved in the development of DIVAC.”

“My God,” Corrigan murmured.

SDC’s Operational Training & Simulator Center in California was where the final component had come from to make a full-sensory direct-neural interface possible. Up until then, direct-neural I/O coupling had been at the lowermost level of the brain, and research had been confined to the body’s motor system. DIVAC, standing for
D
irect
I
nput
V
ision &
AC
oustics, besides adding speech and auditory capability, succeeded in entering at a higher level to achieve the long-awaited goal of integrating vision as well.

Some of the surrogates who were to have been projected into the simulation from the real world outside had been supplied by the military. “Were you one of the Air Force volunteers who were brought in?” Corrigan asked. He had met some of them then, but not all.

“Yes,” she replied. “I was part of a group from California. A guy called Tyron came out from Pittsburgh and interviewed the candidates. I was one of the ones selected. Later, we were flown to Pittsburgh, checked into a hotel there, and the next morning we were driven to Xylog to begin preliminary tests.”

It didn’t take too much guesswork to see what was coming. “And? . . .” Corrigan prompted.

“I’m not sure. That’s where it all gets vague. The next recollections I have are of being in a world of jigsaw pieces in Mercy Hospital. The shrinks told me that there had been problems that nobody anticipated, and the project was shut down. I was a mental basket case for a long time afterward. . . . And I’ve just been muddling along and trying to get something of a life back together ever since.” Lilly exhaled abruptly and looked at him in a way that asked what was the point of this. “But I don’t have to tell you any of this,” she said. “That’s what happened to you too, isn’t it?”

Suddenly, Corrigan sensed what had drawn somebody like this to a bartender. She had known this about him, somehow. That was why she had come back to the Camelot tonight. It was what this whole meeting had been leading up to.

“Can I ask you something?” Lilly said.

“Sure. I’m not promising to answer.”

“What do you remember people being like before?”

“Before when?”

“Before Oz. Before you had the breakdown.”

“Why?”

“I’d just like to know. It has to do with something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.”

Corrigan considered the question. “It feels like a long time ago,” he replied finally. “Like trying to think back over the top to the other side of a hill. . . . But what I
remember
is being more like most other people. You know . . .” he waved his hand to and fro over the tabletop between them, “the way it is with you and me now: being understood without having to spell everything out.”

“You could talk about the things you think inside?” Lilly said.

“Exactly.”

“Like you and I seem to be able to do. Why should that be so strange, Joe? Are you saying you don’t feel that way with people anymore?”

Corrigan was unable to stifle a guffaw. “You’ve got to be joking! Come on, you’ve been telling me yourself how it is. You saw that bunch we were among all evening. What is this?”

Lilly didn’t react to the frivolity but continued looking at him steadily. “The strange thing is, I remember it all the same way,” she said. “Why should that be? How did you explain it to yourself?”

Corrigan did his best to draw together his scattered musings of many years into something coherent. “I suppose, as a process of projection: projecting back out of my head a picture of how I wanted things to be . . . probably subconsciously.” That was how the specialists explained it. “By being projected into a past that was no longer accessible, what I wanted became unchallengeable. Hence the fragments of my identity that were coming back together had a basis that was secure. Psychological foundation-building. Does that make sense?”

“It makes too much sense, Joe. Way too much.”

Corrigan frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lilly’s face softened into a thin, vaguely despairing smile. It caught Corrigan the wrong way, striking him as condescending and mildly mocking. “Doesn’t what you just said strike you—just a little bit, maybe—as incredibly insightful for someone who’s supposed to be crazy?” she said.

Supposed to be? What was she saying? Well, true, he didn’t believe himself to be crazy, exactly—not anymore; but for the disorientations that he had experienced in the not-so-distant past, it was probably as good a description as any. All the experts that he’d talked to had confirmed that he was a casualty of a massive assault on the neural system. Who was this person to be questioning it now?—even if she had been an Air Force computer scientist once.

“I don’t relate to people anymore,” he said. “My mind works along different paths, with a lot of short circuits. It makes connections that mean things to me, but which other people don’t follow. My own internal virtual reality. That could be getting pretty close to most people’s idea of crazy.”

Lilly shook her head. “That won’t wash, Joe. If those connections were the result of disruptions that
you
experienced, they’d be private and unique—purely subjective. But even if I had been affected similarly, how could it result in the
same
connections?” She gave him a few seconds to object. But he couldn’t. What irked him was that she was right. She must have felt this affinity the first time they talked in the Camelot. While he had been camouflaging his abdication from life, she had remained the scientist.

She went on. “You want to know what I think? You’ve got it the wrong way around. The ‘virtual’ isn’t any aberration that you and I have manufactured inside our heads.” She waved an arm in a circular movement to indicate the room, the building outside of it, and everything beyond. “It’s all of this.” She waited, but Corrigan was still too preoccupied with his internal self-admonishments to register what she was saying. Finally she commented dryly, “You guys did a hell of a job.”

Corrigan shook himself out of his fuming and downed a half-glass of wine in a gulp. “What are you talking about?”

“Oz was never abandoned,” Lilly said. “It went ahead as scheduled. We’re still in it. This whole world full of lunatics that we’re in
is
the simulation
!
It has been for the last twelve years.”

Corrigan stared at her with a mixture of dismay and annoyance. Just when he had started to believe that she really was different, and had confided in her things that he’d mentioned to nobody, not Muriel, nor Sarah Bewley . . . now this. It was like hearing a physics Nobel Laureate suddenly start prattling about ESP. He groaned and shook his head.

“Oh, for God’s sake. . . . You’re being ridiculous.”

Lilly was unfazed. “Think about it,” she urged. “A lot of things add up. Do you
remember
Oz actually being canceled?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Neither do I. You were
told
that it had been—just like I was. The memories from that period were suppressed and confused by some kind of electronic drugging, and those stories about being incapacitated were fabrications to paper over the join. You were never crazy, and neither was I. It was the
world
that was learning to get better, not us.”

Corrigan was already shaking his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffed. “Memories of what? Oz never reached the full-system phase. All that ever happened was a series of preliminary tests that got abandoned.”

Lilly stopped short of looking openly derisive. “How do you
know
?”
she pressed.

“How do I know? Because
I
practically conceived the project, that’s how.” Corrigan pointed a finger. “Who were
you
? A volunteer helper. One of the techs.” He knew the gibe was uncalled for, even as he said it. What she was saying ought to have been preposterous; not wanting to face the nagging thought—even now—that it might not be, was making him react unreasonably. “Do you really think that if we’d been in Oz all this time,
I
wouldn’t have seen it?”

“Then I’ll ask you something else: out of curiosity, how much traveling have you been able to do in the last twelve years? Let me guess: you’ve been confined to Pittsburgh and maybe one or two other places, right? And another thing: I’ll bet that you have problems with smelling things, too. Am I right? The DIVAC interface couldn’t handle the first cranial nerve. So couldn’t it just—”

Corrigan rose to his feet unconsciously and cut her off with an impatient wave. He was tired and fatigued, and the alcohol wasn’t helping. “I don’t want to hear this,” he groaned. “Will you stop trying to tell me what my own job was about? You don’t know anything about it. All we’d designed was a series of tests. The full, integrated-system phase wasn’t going to be until much later—if we ever got to it at all. I hadn’t put specifications together for a full-world scenario.”

“Well, maybe somebody else did,” Lilly retorted.

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“Why? How did the world turn so weird suddenly? What happened to families, people we knew? If this is real, why isn’t CLC papered with billion-dollar lawsuits?”

Corrigan scowled and shook his head. “I don’t want to listen to any more of this. I think it’s time to go.”

Lilly sighed and conceded. “Perhaps it is,” she agreed coldly. “We can talk about it another time.”

“Good night, then.”

“Right.”

Lilly sat, staring ahead impassively while Corrigan showed himself to the door. He collected his coat and let himself out. The morning air outside was cold. He called a cab and departed back for Oakland without noting the address or the street he was on.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The employees at Cybernetic Logic Corporation called it their “museum.” Officially it was known as the Interactive Technologies Collection. Housed on the ground floor of the Executive Building of the company’s R & D facility at Blawnox, behind the reception area and conveniently close to the visitors’ dining room, it formed a fossil record of the evolution of experimental people-to-computer communication’ through the second half of the twentieth century.

There was a working TX-2, the first transistor-based computer, used by Ivan Sutherland’s group at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the early sixties to pioneer interactive graphics; “Alto,” the first personal computer, which emerged from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the seventies; head-mounted displays, from the early Air Force program at Wright-Patterson, to the flight simulators of the eighties and NASA’s experiments at Ames into telerobotics; and a whole range of eye-tracking devices, gloves, bodysuits, and force-feedback hardware from university projects, industrial labs, and government research institutes. Prized most of all was SNARC, Marvin Minsky’s original neural network machine from 1951. The “Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator” consisted of three antiquated nineteen-inch cabinets containing over 400 vacuum tubes, with learning capability instilled by means of forty industrial potentiometers driven by magnetic clutches via a pair of bicycle chains. The assembly was lost in the late fifties, only to reappear half a century later in a government surplus supply store in New Orleans. The proprietor said he had thought it was a gunlaying predictor from a World War II battleship.

The young woman standing in an open area of floor in front of a graphics screen was in her late twenties, with fine-boned features, silky, shoulder-length fair hair bordering on platinum, and clear blue eyes. She was a postgraduate in neurodynamic physiology from Harvard and had come to Pittsburgh for a job interview. Her name was Evelyn. Evelyn Vance.

Corrigan made some final adjustments to the collar that she was wearing above the neck of her blouse. It consisted of a lightweight aluminum frame entwined with electrical windings and pickup heads, rising high under the chin like a surgical brace and close-fitting at the base of the skull. The whole assembly rested on padded shoulder supports, and a cable connected it to an electronics cabinet alongside the display unit, where another man was watching the screen as he entered setup commands from a keyboard. He was older than Corrigan, graying, with a ragged mustache, and looking more Evelyn’s idea of the old-time engineer, in a tweed jacket with open-neck plaid shirt, and cords. Corrigan had introduced him earlier as Eric Shipley, a senior scientist on the project.

“Did you ever hear of Tempest technology?” Corrigan asked Evelyn. “From the late seventies.”

“I was just being born then,” she replied.