Cyber Rogues (72 page)

“I wasn’t sure.”

“How could you not?” She drew back, shaking her head, laughing out loud, unable to contain herself. “So when? . . . Where? How are we going to do it?”

Corrigan shrugged, able to feign nonchalance again, now that he had gotten it out. “Whatever you like. Do you want to hire a cathedral, and maybe a symphony orchestra to go with it?”

She shook her head. “Nothing like that. Something small and informal.”

“Short and quick?”

“Just that. I want it just to be us. It doesn’t have anything to do with anybody else.”

“I was hoping you’d say that,” Corrigan said. “We can go straight on into Nevada and do it while we’re here. How’s that?”

Evelyn gaped at him. “While we’re here? You mean now?”

“Why not? If you’re going to live with Irish impulsiveness, you might as well get used to it. We could make Carson City or Reno tomorrow. A couple of days there. Then a flight to San Francisco or L.A., connecting to Dublin via London. You’re always saying how much you like to support wild life. Okay, then, how about Christmas and New Year’s in Ireland? Your life will never be the same again.”

She shook her head disbelievingly. “But . . . what about work? We’re expected back there. We can’t just . . .” She left it unfinished, not quite sure what she had been about to say.

Corrigan made a dismissive wave in the air. “Ah, to hell with the lot of them. They can manage on their own for a while, this once. We’ve both got enough leave due to us. We’ve been saying ever since we got on the plane: it’s about time we started living a little more for ourselves for a change. Well, I’m thinking, the time to begin that is right now.”

“But shouldn’t we at least call them and let them know what’s happening?” Evelyn asked.

“Oh, not at all. We’ll make it a surprise for them when we get back,” Corrigan said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so happy.”

They went back to the car. As they got in, Corrigan pressed the button to disable the phone from accepting incoming calls. “There,” he said. “Peace guaranteed. Come on and get in. I wouldn’t want you catching a cold. You’re mine now, exclusively, for the rest of this year. CLC can start taking its share again when we’re into the new one.”

Eric Shipley had a feeling that something unusual was in the air when Pinder appeared in the DINS laboratory, being genial and showing an uncharacteristic concern about how things in general were going. As a rule he spent most of his time holed up in the Executive Building with the others of the managerial elite who had transcended the mortal plane of solder guns, screwdrivers, and rolled-up shirtsleeves. Shipley believed that a chief’s place was where the troops were—in the trenches. When managers collected together in comfortable surroundings remote from where things were happening, it usually wasn’t long before they started inventing realities of their own that were far more virtual than anything going on in the labs.

“It’s come a long way since the days when it was you, some programmers, and a couple of techs,” Pinder said, casting his gaze around. He was referring to the group that had first experimented with adding DINS feedback to the MIMIC prototype that Carnegie Mellon and MIT had developed jointly—the combination that became Pinocchio.

“It’s going to go a lot farther, too, and get a lot bigger,” Shipley replied, sensing the way the conversation was headed. He might as well give Pinder his opening now, he decided, and find out what this was about.

Pinder obliged. “And the organization has to adapt to anticipate that. It was fine for handling things the way they used to be. But that has all changed. We see things going toward a more comprehensive organizational structure that will combine all the interactive environment work under one reporting function. Bring all the decision-making together, eliminate the duplications.”

By “we,” Shipley presumed he meant the Olympians across the parking lot. Pinder refocused away from the distance, where he stared when he was being evasive, and back on Shipley, which meant that he was getting to the point. “Don’t you think that the DINS group would function more smoothly all around as part of an integrated system like that?”

In other words, apart from possible semantic jugglings with job titles, Shipley couldn’t expect any promotional prospects. Pinder was sounding out his reactions to merging DINS under a larger structure that would be headed by someone else. “Integrated” was always the managerese code word for “more controllable.”

Shipley thought it was plain to everyone that his interests lay in science, not in whatever satisfaction came from exercising authority over people. He was not surprised, for he had never entertained the illusion that, by the generally accepted criteria, he was particularly promotable material. Neither was he concerned. The decision was one that he had made consciously, a long time ago. He replied, “I don’t think that the neural work on P-Two and EVIE would be affected much, either way. If it fits in better with other plans, then fine.”

“Such an arrangement would be acceptable?”

“I’m assuming that my present group remains intact.”

“Oh, no question. You and your people simply transfer under the new system as is. It’s really the other sections that get reorganized more, around you. You carry on as normal.”

“Okay.”

“We’re responding to new opportunities in a changing world,” Pinder said. “Naturally, the new organization that we’re talking about would benefit from the direction of somebody whose background best qualifies them to exploit those opportunities. I’m sure you see my point—the contacts and resources that Tyron’s government and industrial experience give him access to are something that the corporation can’t afford to ignore.”

“I see,” Shipley said.

What he saw was Corrigan being shoved into a subordinate position incommensurate with his ambitions, tied to a project that Shipley was becoming increasingly certain was not going to be the corporation’s mainline development thrust. But he had seen that much coming for some time anyway. More disturbing now was to see these overtures being made in this fashion, while Corrigan was away. It invited suspicions of more devious motives behind them. Shipley had no idea what these might be, but his instincts detected something underhanded.

Back in his office, he brooded for a while over the situation. Then he asked his secretary, Kathy Rentz, to find out Corrigan and Evelyn’s planned schedule in California, and to try to get ahold of them. Kathy checked with Judy Klein in Corrigan’s office and got back to Shipley half an hour later.

“They were due back in San Francisco today, but the hotel there says they called last night and canceled the reservation. Judy hasn’t heard anything.”

“Dammit. . . . What about their mobile number. Did you get that from the car-hire company?”

“Yes I did. I’ve tried it half a dozen times at least, but it’s not accepting. Sorry, Eric. That’s all I can tell you.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Corrigan didn’t know Lilly well enough to have any real idea what she might do. She seemed sane and stable enough on the surface, but he had been confounded by human nature often enough to know not to trust first impressions. For his part, he had no difficulty accepting and adjusting to the situation—he knew the background to Oz and was committed to its success. But how might somebody else react in a world where no action could have “real” consequences, and who really believed that twelve years of a life had been stolen?

The trouble was, he still hadn’t been able to trace her. He had gone to the North Side again, with no result, and got Horace to call companies listed under “Shoe Manufacture” in the city directory, to find out if any of them employed somebody called Lilly. This had produced four Lillys, none of them the right one. Either her firm was listed as something else, or she had told him a wrong story for some reason, or given him a false name for some reason, or she went by a different name at work for some reason . . . or any one of a thousand other possibilities that knowledge of human nature said happened every day. If this was the kind of thing that the machines were supposed to figure out, then good luck to them, Corrigan thought. Ten thousand years hadn’t been enough for humans to even begin figuring out each other. Whether those twelve years had been real or not, he had to admit that they had certainly changed some of his attitudes.

What he needed to do, then, was talk to Dr. Zehl. It was obvious now, of course, why Zehl seemed so different from most of the people that Corrigan met: he
was
different—not an internal animation created and manipulated by the system, but, like Lilly and himself, a real-person surrogate projected in from the outside. Corrigan realized now that he had met others, too, in the course of those years. If the original plan had been adhered to, there should be fifty or so of them mixed in among the regular population.

But Zehl was not one of the ordinary surrogates. Supposedly, he was Washington based, appearing and disappearing spasmodically, and often not seen again for long stretches of time. This, along with his position as Sarah’s “supervisor,” told Corrigan that he was really one of the controllers, entering the simulation from time to time in an effort to keep track of how things were going. In all likelihood he was somebody that Corrigan knew, but the physical appearance of injected surrogates could be changed at will. But whoever he really was, Zehl was Corrigan’s only ready channel of communication to the powers outside who had the ability to determine Lilly’s whereabouts, given the nature of the situation.

Corrigan called Sarah Bewley and told her it was important that he get in touch personally with Zehl immediately. Sarah, naturally, wanted to know what he proposed telling Zehl that he didn’t feel he could tell her, his counselor, and the whole thing bogged down in a mire of pique and offended feelings that got him nowhere. In any case, Zehl was out of town and not contactable right now. Corrigan called Zehl’s department in Washington direct, and after some bouncing around obtained a number that had Zehl’s name listed. The voice that eventually answered, however, confirmed that Zehl was currently away and couldn’t be easily reached. In fact, it would be the system covering for the fact that Zehl, or whoever, was not currently coupled into the system. The number Corrigan had called was a code to activate an external flag alerting an operator, to page Zehl.

“This is the twenty-first century, isn’t it?” Corrigan objected. “Are you telling me you can’t get a message to him?”

“Well, maybe . . . if you leave it with me,” the voice replied.

“Tell him it’s from Joe Corrigan of Xylog. I want to talk urgently about Oz. That should get him back to you minutes after he reads it.”

But even a minute outside would still be something like four hours inside. The same speeding up of time that made more than a week of simulation time fly by while Zehl was absent for an hour also meant that Corrigan was going to have to wait for a response. A day for him equated to a little over seven minutes for Zehl, which meant there wasn’t much time out there for anyone to hold lengthy conferences on what they were going to do. It also meant that Lilly would have free rein for a couple of days at least. But, unless he happened to run into her by chance or she decided to find him, there was nothing that Corrigan could do about that.

In the meantime, the best way to avoid having the time drag was to carry on as normal. But now that he knew the situation, he found himself in something of a quandary. Part of his nature—probably to do with his Irishness—rebelled from the prospect of obligingly continuing to act out his role as if nothing had happened, like a rat in a laboratory cage. The system had fooled him, and it couldn’t be allowed to get away with it. On the other hand, he was a scientist involved with an experiment that was to a large degree of his own making, and his new awareness gave him a unique opportunity to function as a privileged observer on the inside. So he satisfied his instincts by teasing the system gently to its limits. This not only provided valuable practical data on where the limits were; but also, like playing word games with Horace and Sarah, he found it perversely and gratifyingly amusing.

“I’ve got a joke for you,” he told Sherri. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the Galahad Lounge was quiet. “What do you call an insomniac, agnostic, dyslexic?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“Somebody who lies awake all night, wondering ‘Is there a dog?’”

She laughed obligingly, stared through him at the tariff list on the wall, and went away to clear some tables while she thought it over.

It was all so obvious, now that Lilly had forced him to recognize it. Strange, how the obvious was always the last thing you thought of. Or maybe not so strange, Corrigan reflected as he replaced glasses on the shelf below the bar. When you finally see the obvious, then obviously you stop wondering. It was the same as when people were always asking why everything they lost was always in the last place they looked: who was going to carry on looking after they’d found it?

Sherri came back to the bar and looked at him curiously. “So could an anemic, myopic, skeptic be somebody with a pale face who doesn’t believe he’s shortsighted?” she asked.

“Could be,” Corrigan agreed nonchalantly.

“So is that funny too?”

“I’m supposed to be odd,” he reminded her. “Why would you care how it strikes me?”

She corrected herself. “Would they have thought it was funny back in Ireland years ago? I’m just curious.”

Corrigan made a show of subjecting the proposition to profound analysis. “Ingenious, yes. Funny, not really,” he told her.

“Okay,” she invited. “Now tell me why not.”

Normally, Corrigan would have known better than to try, and hence wouldn’t have raised the subject in the first place. This time, however, he was aware that he was really talking to a trio of TMC 11s and a SuperCray in Xylog’s basement. It was about time, he decided, that they began really exercising their circuits to earn their keep.

“Imagine an insomniac, and imagine an anemic,” he replied. “How do you picture them?”

Sherri frowned. “I guess one of them looks whiter.”