Cyber Rogues (81 page)

“Goodbye, Joe.”

“Thanks. You’re a pal,” Corrigan said to Hatcher as he put the phone down. “Borth’s coming with some people from Chase. I’m tied up to do lunch there.”

Hatcher shook his head in a way that said he didn’t buy that. “So? You could have taken Evelyn there too. You’re a head honcho and she’s staff. Hell, this outfit can afford it.”

Corrigan winked. “But the delectable Amanda will be there too. There are times and places for wives.”

Hatcher couldn’t contain his disapproval. “I’m sorry, Joe. Maybe I’m sticking my nose in, but I just don’t like to see it. Everything used to be fine with you two. You’ve changed a lot, you know—especially since we moved to this place.”

“Hey, give me a break, Tom. What’s the harm in a change of pleasant company once in a while? I do plenty of good-husbanding out of hours, when it’s the time for it.”

“Ain’t the way I’ve been hearing it.”

“Look, I’m not asking you to get involved or make it your business, Tom. Just a small favor to cover when I’m double committed. I happen to think that taking wives along just for the ride isn’t the proper thing to do. Whether the firm can afford it or not isn’t the point. I also think that honchos should set examples, don’t you?”

Hatcher turned back to his terminal. “This time, Joe,” he growled. “Just don’t do it to me again, that’s all.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Today was the beginning of National Color Week, and Carson Street was filled with radiantly decked people marching to express themselves through visual combinations: yellow for happy, blue for somber, red for lively, green for simple, and other mixes and hues for other natures and dispositions—real, imagined, or self-fulfilling—in between. Self-playing instruments driven by microchips were all the rage, so nobody needed to be a musician to join in the festivities with a guitar, trumpet, accordion, or trombone, and “belong.” The TV shows and movie ad inserts had been plugging fiber-optic augmentations to hairstyles and clothes, and half the costumes glittered and glowed like slow-motion Christmas trees.

Corrigan stood with Lilly on a rise above the main body of the crowd, staring at the site that had once held a modern, eight-story commercial structure of shiny white tiling and green-tinted glass, with separate buildings for offices and administration. All that was left now was one of them turned into an apartment block that looked like a psychedelic gift-wrap pack, another adopted as a “temple” by a cult who believed themselves to be reincarnated aliens from Sirius, and the main building demolished to make room for a hotel that never happened, now a campground for vagrants.

Even now, Corrigan found that it needed an effort to tell himself that what he was looking at had never happened. The conditioning processes of twelve years, everything he had seen, read, and been told through all that time added up to a powerful weight of persuasion that his instincts fought against simply dismissing. This had been Xylog. He could remember how it looked in those final weeks, the hectic days and bleary-eyed, all-night sessions to complete the preparations on time and straighten out the inevitable last-minute hitches. He had made some initial sorties into the final test simulations to check details from the inside . . . And after that his recollections became confused and indistinct.

It was only long afterward, when he was well on the road to recovery, that he had learned how those final tests had damaged him, along with many others, with mental disruptions, hallucinations, breakdowns, periods of total blankness. The government intervened to halt the project. There had been hearings and investigations, and finally the project was abandoned and the site sold off. He had read the reports, watched the tapes. And here, in front of him, was what was supposed to be the incontrovertible evidence.

Except that none of that could have happened, for the simulation was still running.

“You weren’t a permanent inhabitant like most of the other surrogates,” Lilly said. “You were supposed to be one of the controllers—entering and leaving whenever you wanted.”

“That’s right.” Corrigan had no explanation. He could only agree.

Lilly turned to him with an air of finality, as if that summed up everything that she had been saying since their first meeting in the Camelot. “So something that you weren’t expecting must have happened during the last week or so.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Corrigan groaned wearily. “It’s all so confused from around that time. I can’t remember.”

“What happened, obviously, was that your memory was wiped too,” Lilly said. “But according to you, it shouldn’t have been. Which can only mean that somebody else set it up.”

“You don’t
know
that,” Corrigan protested. “I could have agreed to something they sprung on me in the last few days. If that’s the case, then of course I don’t remember anything about it. That would have been the whole idea.”

“You were one of the main designers,” Lily pointed out. “Your place would have been supervising from the outside.” She raised an arm to take in the locality of Southside around them, the river off to one side, and beyond it in the visible part of downtown Pittsburgh. “We’re
twelve years
into this, and it’s still running,” she said. “Didn’t you tell me before that this goes way past anything that had been planned? All that had been scheduled was a series of more extended testing. Nothing like this.” She waited for a moment, saw that he had no immediate answer, and went on. “It’s clear what must have happened. Somebody else had arranged a far more elaborate simulation than you were told about.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Which meant that you weren’t. as in control as you thought. Your position wasn’t so unassailable—that’s what you won’t admit. Sometime during the early phases you entered the simulation on a routine visit, and while you were inside they switched over to the extended version and wiped your memory to keep you here for the duration. Meanwhile, they’re running things on the outside. . . . And you’re telling me not to worry, everything’s going just fine? That I should trust them?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, you’ve been watching too many movies,” Corrigan retorted irritably. He had a more than gnawing suspicion that she was right, but he needed time to think. “You don’t have any evidence for all this. It’s pure fabrication. These weren’t the sinister people that you’re trying to paint—just ordinarily ambitious people in a competitive environment. You’re making it sound like intrigue inside the Kremlin.”

“Oh, yes? Look what they did to you. You’d already stabbed your best friend in the back. And things with Evelyn were heading for the rocks. How soon afterward did that come apart? In circumstances like that, it would have been easy for them to convince anyone who asked that you’d elected to go in as a surrogate on your own initiative—to get away from it all for a while to wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe I did,” Corrigan retorted. “And that would put a hole through your whole paranoia theory right there, wouldn’t it?”

And he had a point. Now it was Lilly’s turn to feel less sure of herself. “Why? . . . When did it finish with Evelyn?” she asked.

“Oh, it all came to a head about three weeks before Oz was due to go live. She split.” Corrigan sighed. “She left me for being too pushy and ambitious. Muriel left me for being the opposite. It’s true what they say about women, you know: there’s no pleasing them.”

“Tell me what happened,” Lilly said.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Evelyn stared across the living room at Corrigan, shaking her head disbelievingly. Her eyes were wide, her body taut like a threatened animal, her face a mask of someone he didn’t know. All of the resentment and anger that had been pent up for months was pouring out with the adrenaline flush.

“How
could
you?” she shouted. “A man that you’d worked with for years . . . after the friend he’s been to both of us. How could you let them just walk all over him like that? What did you do—just stand there? Didn’t you say
anything
to stand up for him?”

Tom Hatcher had told her over lunch about Corrigan’s part in the Shipley affair—but in a distorted way that made it sound as if Corrigan had asked Pinder to dump him. Apparently that was the version that Tyron had been spreading around the company. But Corrigan was in no mood to quibble over details or have to justify himself.

“What did you expect me to do?” he snapped back. “Their minds were already made up. . . . And anyway, they might have had a point. Eric would never have fitted in at Xylog. If the truth were known, he wanted out of it anyway.” Shipley had been offered a mundane position in the general CLC research facility, but turned it down and quit the company.

Evelyn looked at Corrigan contemptuously. “Who are you to say what Eric wanted? At least he could have been given a chance to say so himself, instead of being discarded like worn-out shoes. Don’t things like people’s pride and dignity mean anything to you anymore? It’s a shame, because they used to.”

“Yes, they do,” Corrigan answered, marching in front of her. He jabbed at his chest with a thumb. “And so do my own, for that matter. All I’d have succeeded in doing would be to make a sacrificial lamb of myself. And wouldn’t Tyron have just loved that! Can’t you see? It’s exactly what he was hoping I’d do.”

Evelyn hooked a wisp of her hair with her finger and whirled away savagely. “God, if you only knew how sick I am of hearing about Tyron, Tyron, Tyron . . . the whole pack of them.”

“
One
of us is going to end up as the technical head of Xylog,” Corrigan said. “It’s down to that: either him or me. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“No, it doesn’t. I told you, I’m sick of all of it. Maybe Eric knew exactly what he was doing. Perhaps you should have walked out too. At least you’d have stayed the person you were.”

“And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?” Corrigan demanded darkly.

Evelyn turned back with a pained, sarcastic face. “Oh, don’t start acting as if you were stupid, Joe, on top of everything else,” she implored. “When I fell in love with you, it was because I admired you for what you stood for: knowledge, honesty, the worth of people as people. But that’s all changed. I loved you because you were what you seemed to be. You were genuine. Now you’re turning into what I never thought you’d be: a phony.”

“Grow up, little girlie,” Corrigan said. “It’s called getting on in the world. You don’t expect people to stay as techs in labs all their lives, do you? Anyone who called herself a wife would be appreciative. Will you listen to yourself and hear what I get?”

Evelyn shook her head. “Getting on in the world? Is that what you call it? Getting on would be doing better what you do. Becoming a better person. But you’re trying to ape these freaks that you idolize, who have taken over the project. You’re trying to be one of
them.
That’s what’s so sickening.”

It was her last plea for him to see things from where she stood, but Corrigan threw it back at her. “Well, at least they add a bit of fun to life for a change. Is that supposed to be bad or something? It might do you a bit of good to get out of that stuffy lab and away from your notes, and find out what life is all about for once.”

Evelyn rounded on him like a goaded cat. “Yes, of course, there are plenty of more
glamorous
women out there, aren’t there—with more tits than IQ points,” she spat. “And pricey dresses bought on someone else’s expense account. Is that the attraction in all these new playpens that you’ve been discovering?”

“Damn right!” Corrigan yelled.

Her eyes blazed at him for several seconds, inviting him to take it back. He glowered back defiantly. The hell he would. She turned away, tight-mouthed, and went over to the phone. “Well, enjoy,” she told him. “And when you come to your senses, or your ‘friends’ decide to ditch you the same way they did Eric, don’t bother looking. Have a nice life.”

“What are you doing?”

Evelyn didn’t answer him. “Hello? Yes, I’d like a cab, please. It’s two twenty-three Elm, Fox Chapel. . . . Right away. I’ll be waiting outside.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” Corrigan demanded.

“It’s none of your business. Probably back to Boston.” She disappeared along the hall leading to the bedroom, then came back a few moments later, clutching her purse and pulling on her coat.

“What about your things?” Corrigan said. “I hope you’re not expecting me to send them.”

“I wouldn’t want anything that reminds me of this place. I’d rather start from scratch again.”

“Well, isn’t that typical,” Corrigan sneered. “Have you ever seen anything through in your life? The project goes live in three weeks, and you won’t even stick around to see the end of what you’ve been working for.”

“I’m not interested in the stupid project. It’s changed you and it’s ruined us. You stay and watch your precious project. I wouldn’t want any part of a world that your kind of friends created.”

Anger surged up inside him suddenly then. His pride would not permit the affront of letting her walk out first to leave him standing there with the choice of either submitting passively or climbing down. He swept his jacket up from the chair where he had draped it and opened the door before she could reach it. “Suit yourself,” he threw back over his shoulder. “It won’t bother me. I’m going to get very, very drunk.”

“Isn’t that just—”

He slammed the door before she finished, and went out the front of the house. His car screeched out of the driveway moments later.

But he did not get all that drunk. After he’d had a couple in one of the bars downtown and calmed down a little, he went to the phone and called the Vista Hotel. A minute later he was through to Amanda Ramussienne.

“Why, Joe, how nice to hear from you,” she purred. “I enjoyed talking to you at lunch so much. Where are you?”

“Just a few blocks away. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be very gentlemanly to let you go back tomorrow without so much as a goodbye. Have you eaten?”

“Not yet, after this afternoon.”

“I haven’t yet either. I thought you might like to join me. What do you think?”

“What a nice idea.”