Cyber Rogues (88 page)

“Oh? And what makes you say that?”

Lilly looked at the desk, then at the wall. Finally she brought her gaze back to meet Corrigan’s and shook her head as if it should have been obvious. “There isn’t any reason for them to be in a hurry, is there, Joe?” she said. “As far as they’re concerned, the longer we’re in here, the better. So why should they rush to shut everything down when the results are way past all expectations? Just because Sylvine comes out and tells them we’ve sussed it? Come on.”

Corrigan looked back at her long and hard. It was obvious. “No reason at all,” was all he could say.

He slumped back in his chair and spread his hands, indicating that he had nothing more to say. Then the desk unit buzzed. Corrigan accepted, and Judy’s voice came through. “It’s Tom.” At once, Hatcher’s face appeared on the screen. He was unshaven and looked haggard.

“Tom! Where are you?” Corrigan exclaimed.

“It doesn’t matter. Look, I’m gonna have to make this quick, Joe, but it’s important, so listen. First, let me see if I’m right about something. Did a very peculiar thing happen to you yesterday—yesterday in the morning? Like, I’ve seen all this before?”

Corrigan nodded curtly. “Yes. . . . Yes, it did.”

“Okay. We’re talking the same language.” Hatcher saw Corrigan’s mouth starting to open and cut him off with a wave of his hand. “Not now. I need to get together with you. I’ll see you at your house—say, half an hour from now. You know and I know that nothing else in this place we’re in matters, right? So is that okay?”

Corrigan nodded. “Half an hour.”

“I just want to tell you one more thing in case I don’t make it. Do you remember that talk we had, way back, with Charlie Wade and Des Jorrecks about ejector seats? Well, you went into the sim a day before I did, so you won’t remember. But I do. You and I talked about it again after the phase-two tests were started. There were some funny things going on then that you’ll have forgotten about, that we didn’t like. We agreed that some insurance would be good to have. Do you hear what I’m saying, Joe?
The ejector buttons exist.
We planted one each, the way we’d talked about before.”

Corrigan stared incredulously. “You mean—”

Hatcher looked around warily, as if worried about being watched. “Gotta go, Joe. Your place, half an hour. See ya.” The screen blanked.

Lilly looked at him, not bothering to ask the obvious. He rose and ushered her to the door. “I’ll tell you on the way,” he said.

Judy swiveled in her chair as they came out. “Do you want to see any of—” But Corrigan declined with a wave.

“Sorry, Judy. We have to leave right away. Thanks for holding the fort. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Judy eyed Lilly suspiciously. Corrigan paused, staring at her. Her eyes shifted from Lilly to him, her brows rising inquiringly. He peered, trying to pierce the veils to penetrate to the person inside. Was she? Wasn’t she? . . . But it was no good. For the life of him, he couldn’t tell.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

They drove northward in Corrigan’s simulated Mercedes, along simulated Route 28 by the simulated Allegheny River toward the simulation of Fox Chapel. Had the sign indicating the Blue Belt exit at Millvale really leaned over to one side as he was seeing it? Were the cracks and faces of the rock outcrop to their left exactly like that, or was the computer adding in its own details? Because his subjective recollections stretched back over twelve years, he couldn’t know from memory how much of what he was seeing was authentic. Lilly was evidently pondering the same issues.

“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, tongue 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.