Cyber Rogues (94 page)

Tyron ignored her. Corrigan, however, was a person whose habits died hard. “Let’s do this somewhere less public,” he said. He looked back at the open door of his office, but Pinder was still talking at the screen in there. There was still the room where Lilly was ensconced. “Come on. This way.” And before anyone could object, he began herding them away. “Don’t worry about it, Judy,” he threw back as they disappeared around the corner. “I’ll explain it all later.”

Lilly was sitting in a chair to one side of the room, apparently thinking to herself, when Corrigan came in followed by the others. Tyron halted when he saw her, a frown of puzzled recognition on his face. She seemed unsure of whether she had met him before or not.

“Yes, you know her, Frank,” Corrigan said, reading the situation as Morgen came in last of all, closing the door. “This is Lillian Essell, one of the Air Force volunteers that you interviewed in California a month ago. Except for her it’s been twelve years. I’m not sure if they’ve made that clear to you yet, out there—the memory suppression of the first run didn’t work. It was a neat idea, but you messed up. We still remember everything.”

But Tyron was already waving a hand impatiently and grimacing. “You don’t understand. The rerun is showing some amazing things already. Just stay with it for a few more days. There’s—”

Corrigan slammed a hand down on the table in the center of the room. “
Days for you!”
he stormed. “That’s the whole point I’m trying to tell you, but you don’t seem able to space for get it into your head. It’s going to be years all over again for us!”

“Not years,” Tyron argued. “The contradictions are beginning to show now. It can’t go much farther. You’ve got to push it to its limits. That’s the only way we’ll learn what we need to know to make it better.”

“So that
you
can deliver what they want, while I’m the schmuck locked up inside it? What do you take me for? I might be Irish, but I’m not all Kerry green. The answer’s no—no way. Forget it. It’s over. We’re getting out.”

Tyron’s expression changed to something approaching a leer. “Well, it’s a pity you feel that way, Joey boy, because when the chips are down you don’t really have that much of a choice. We can exit at any time. . . .” To prove it, Tyron vanished before their eyes and reappeared a moment later ten feet away, on the opposite side of the table. He pointed a finger at Corrigan. “But you depend on an external disconnect.” He shrugged with a grin of emphasized unapology. “And we’ve got the switch out there. You don’t.”

Lilly stood up and broke in, “That’s not true. What about Tom Hatcher? We can get out anytime.”

Tyron shrugged again, evidently having already considered the point. “So go ahead and opt out,” he told them. “That won’t score very high with the people who own the show, will it? So the simulation loses a couple of surrogates. So what? There are still four dozen others. The show goes on, with you or without you.”

“You talk as if you think it’s yours,” Corrigan said.

Tyron leered again, more broadly this time. “You quit now, and it will be,” he answered.

Corrigan shook his head, bunching his mouth grimly, and threw out an arm. “Oh no, it isn’t as simple as that; at all. Haven’t you heard? You’ve created another crazy world out there. Ever since Hatcher showed them how, they’ve been wiping each other and themselves out all over Pittsburgh. What use do you think a simulation like that is going to be to anyone?”

Tyron made a show of being unperturbed. “We overcompensated on the assimilation parameters. So we set them back a little. It’s no problem.”

Corrigan’s neck reddened. He was about to reply, when the door opened again and Pinder appeared. Pinder moved a pace into the room and stood, looking around at the company perplexedly. “Will somebody tell me what the hell’s going on around here?” he demanded. His eyes singled out Corrigan, and he was about to say something further, when he noticed Lilly beside him, and her visitor’s badge. “Who are you?” he asked her.

Pinder was an animation. He would know nothing of what was being discussed in the room. Corrigan knew more about what Lilly was doing there than any of the others. He gave the only answer that he could: “Her name’s Lillian Essell. She’s a journalist from California, doing a piece on the project. I told her she could use this room for the morning.”

Pinder waited a couple of seconds to see how that explained anything, and when nothing more was forthcoming, shook his head, refusing to add another layer of complication to what there already was. “I’m sorry, Ms. Essell, but this is strictly an internal company matter. I must ask you to leave us, please.”

Lilly looked questioningly at Corrigan. “My office is empty,” he said. “Use that for now. You know where it is.” He moved with her to see her to the door. She nodded, happy to let them get on with it. Pinder stood aside and held the door for her to leave. But just as he was about to close it behind her, he saw Ken Endelmyer and John Velucci approaching along the corridor. They halted just outside the room. Endelmyer looked at Pinder strangely. Pinder looked strangely at him.

“What are you doing here?” Endelmyer asked, looking puzzled. “I thought we left you outside. How did you get inside?”

“Inside what?” Pinder replied, just as puzzled. “I’ve just come across.”

“Across what?”

“Across from HQ. You asked me to.”

“1 did? When?”

Pinder tried desperately not to look like a subordinate suddenly confronted by a superior who has taken leave of his senses. “Ten minutes ago. You wanted me to get over here and see what the problem was with Joe.”

“No, you were already here,” Endelmyer said, looking equally suspicious. “
We’ve
just come over from HQ—to join Frank and the others here. But we left you outside in the Monitoring Center.”

“Outside?” Pinder queried.

“Outside Oz—outside the simulation,” Endelmyer replied.

Pinder looked uneasily around the room in a silent plea for somebody to tell him that he wasn’t the only one for whom this was getting insane. The others returned looks as devoid of expression as a fog bank.

Then Corrigan realized what had happened. Pinder, the animation, had just left an Endelmyer animation in HQ, across the river, and now had run into the real Endelmyer, who had entered the simulation as a surrogate; and since Pinder knew only the animation Endelmyer, he was presuming this one to be he. The real Endelmyer, on the other hand, had come over from HQ in the real world, and by the sound of things had talked to the real Pinder before being coupled in. Corrigan groaned inwardly. It could only get worse. Nothing was going to sort this out now.

Pinder looked back at Endelmyer. “Outside the simulation,” he repeated. “That’s very interesting. I’m not quite sure I follow, though, since the simulation isn’t due to begin until tomorrow.” His voice was polite and inoffensive, like a student not wanting to say that the professor was wrong when it was obvious. “Perhaps you could explain?”

“Tomorrow?” Endelmyer blinked, nonplussed. “It’s been running for three weeks, Jason. What in God’s name are you talking about?” He sent an uncertain look around the room in his turn, then moved in through the doorway to appeal to them all directly. “Is Jason not making sense, or is it me?”

Tyron hadn’t quite seen it yet either. “I understand you, but not him,” he said, but sounding distant as if fearing that he might be missing something. “Of course, it’s been running for three weeks. We just came into it.”

“You’re all mad,” Pinder declared flatly.

“What kind of talk is this?” Endelmyer demanded. “First Hatcher flips. Then Corrigan won’t talk to anybody. Is there something we don’t know about this process that affects . . .” His voice trailed away when he saw that Corrigan was staring past him, out into the corridor, with a look of open disbelief. Endelmyer turned to follow his gaze, and his jaw fell. Another Endelmyer and another Velucci were coming along the corridor from the elevators.

“Ah, there you are, Joe,” Endelmyer called ahead, seeing him. “I figured that maybe you were having bigger problems over this Hatcher business than I realized, so John and I decided to follow Jas—” He stopped in midword and came to a dead halt as he saw who was with Corrigan, just inside the doorway of the conference room. The Endelmyer and the Velucci inside stared at the Endelmyer and the Velucci outside. The ones outside stared back. All of them seized up.

Joan Sutton came out of her stupor first. “Frank, freeze the animations,” she said sharply.

At the far end of the room, Tyron fished out a communicator and hammered in an emergency code. “Control? Do we have synchronization yet? Hello? Does anyone out there read? This is critical. . . .” All attention in the room focused upon him. Perspiration showed on his forehead. His eyes were wide with alarm behind his spectacles.

“Will somebody tell me what in Christ is going on here?” Borth demanded darkly.

“Oh shit,” Harry Morgen groaned as the truth slowly dawned.

“Who are you talking to?” the animation Endelmyer asked, moving in through the door and pointing at Tyron. “I
demand
an explanation!”

That was enough to shock the other Endelmyer into life. “
You
don’t demand anything around here.
I
run this company.”

“Come in, control. Does anyone read? . . .”

In the middle of it all, Corrigan slipped out into the corridor. He walked quickly back to his own office, past Judy, who was talking with Betty, the sixth-floor receptionist, and straight in through his own door. Lilly was sitting in a chair to one side of the desk, contemplating a figurine of an Irish leprechaun that she had taken from the shelf above. She looked up before Corrigan could say anything and asked him, “Didn’t you tell me that somebody gave this to you and Evelyn as a wedding gift? But I saw it at the house, too, last night. How do you come to have two of them?”

“Jesus, can you believe women? We’ve no time for things like that right now. The whole . . .” Corrigan stopped speaking abruptly and jerked his head around to look at her as he realized what she was saying. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. It was on a ledge in the den.” That was right. On the morning of his mysterious awakening, when he came into work and looked around his office, Corrigan himself had thought that it ought to be at the house. But he hadn’t been sure because it had been twelve years ago. Then, with everything else going on, it had completely gone from his mind to check in the evening. He took the figurine from her and turned it over in his hands, staring at it.

“You said, something that would be meaningful when you looked for it—something that would become significant when the time came,” Lilly said unnecessarily. “And it was there the last time, too. We saw it in the shop window. You told me you had one just like it at home. You said that it haunted you.” Yes. And he had seen one when he was out by himself, in the bar, Corrigan remembered. The system had been prodding him, reminding him all the time that the leprechaun was there. Because that was what, sometime in that lost day that he had forgotten, Corrigan had told it to do.

“By God, Lilly, I think you might be a genius,” Corrigan whispered. He walked quickly around the desk and sat down, still holding the figurine. From outside, the sounds came of voices rising in an angry clamor. What would he have expected himself to do with it? he asked himself frantically. What associations did he have with leprechauns? A word? A phrase? A code that would have a special meaning only to him?

And suddenly he smiled as he remembered his cousin Jeff giving it to him in the lounge of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire, and himself and Evelyn talking to a somewhat cynical Marvin Minsky years ago. . . .

“I wonder,” he muttered aloud. Working quickly, he activated his desk unit and keyed it into “System” mode. A command prompt appeared on the screen. Lilly came around to stand behind him and watch. He entered the word IRELAND.

Nothing happened.

He tried LEPRECHAUN.

A cry of alarm came from Judy outside.

“What are you doing?” Lilly murmured tensely by his ear.

“Shhh.” He entered MICK.

The system responded with: “WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SMILING . . .”

Corrigan’s face broke into a wide, triumphant grin. He completed: YOU’VE PROBABLY JUST BEEN RIPPED OFF.

There was an instant’s delay that seemed eternal. Corrigan stared at the screen, vaguely aware of Judy coming in through the doorway, waving her arms wildly at something behind her.

And then the screen changed to:

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

YOU ARE NOW IN CONTROL OF THE

SYSTEM PRIMARY COMMAND EXECUTIVE. ENTER:

“OUT/OUT” FOR IMMEDIATE DECOUPLING (EJECT)

“AB” FOR GENERAL SYSTEM ABORT

“OV” OVERRIDES ALL EXTERNAL COMMAND

FUNCTIONS UNTIL UNLOCKED

“DF” LISTS OTHER DIRECTIVE FUNCTIONS

“VM” SWITCHES TO VOICE MODE

(COMMAND EXEC ANSWERS TO “ROGER”)

Lilly gasped, awed. “Joe, is this what I think it is?”

“Joe,” Judy’s voice came, strangled, fearful. “Out there—Betty. Something’s happened to her.” Corrigan looked past the doorway and saw that Betty was standing by Judy’s desk, inanimate like a mannequin, her mouth open and arm raised in the middle of a gesture. Tyron had gotten through: the controllers outside had deactivated the animations. From outside the building there came the distant, muted sounds of multiple vehicles crashing. Corrigan looked back at Judy suddenly as the further implication registered.

“You’re real!” he said in astonishment.

“What are you talking about? Of course I am,” Judy said. “Do something about Betty.” She must have volunteered for the rerun and had her memory suppressed, just like the others the first time. She didn’t know anything about the first run.

Farther back, Tyron, Endelmyer, Velucci, and Borth were coming across the area of open floor beyond Judy’s desk, looking grim and purposeful, with Morgen and Sutton following. Behind them, just before the corner to the corridor, another Endelmyer, another Velucci, and Pinder were standing immobilized.

Corrigan hurriedly tapped OV into the pad, followed by VM, and then said aloud, experimentally, “Roger, do you read?”