Cyber Rogues (80 page)

Pinder waited a few seconds longer, then sighed. “All right, I’ll come out with it straight. Borth has seen it too, and he isn’t happy. He’s told Ken Endelmyer that he doesn’t want Shipley in the venture. Management’s view is that his former DINS work is part of the past now, and largely irrelevant, and they have concurred.”

So there never had been anything for Corrigan to give an opinion on. Pinder had simply been casting for a way to make him feel implicated. But if Corrigan had any protest to make, this was the moment to do it.

He turned and looked around the place where they had worked together, remembering feet propped on untidy desks; solder guns and birds’-nest tangles of makeshift racking; grubby diagrams tacked to pressboard; scratched keyboards and gray metal shelving. He thought of the future and Xylog: of glass-paneled corridors, deep-pile executive suites, and gleaming machine-halls. And he said nothing.

Pinder heard the silence and went on. “There is a core group from the DINS section that I’d like us to retain. Frank Tyron agrees that they’re good and wants them transferred to COSMOS, but I think there’s an equal case for integrating them into your side of the operation. I’m giving you first choice. What do you say?”

An offer of alliance, wrapped around the handle of the knife. He couldn’t do anything to change the verdict now, Corrigan told himself. Only Tyron would benefit if he refused. It was a time for realism.

“Sure, I’ll take them,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The sign in gold indented lettering on a polished wood ground facing the elevators read:

Floor Six

OZ PROJECT SOFTWARE SYSTEMS DIVISION

ANIMATIONS ENGINEERING

ADAPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS GROUP

DATABASE MANAGEMENT

SUPPORT SERVICES

“Good morning, Mr. Corrigan,” one of the two clerks waiting with bundles of files greeted as Corrigan emerged carrying a black Samsonite.

“Hello, girls,” he returned, nodding, and headed toward the double doors leading through a glass divider to the sixth-floor reception foyer.

“Good morning, Mr. Corrigan,” the receptionist said from her desk as he passed.

“ ’Morning, Betty. You’re looking very smart today.”

“Why, thank you.”

“We’ve got some important people coming today. Keep it up.”

“Good morning, Mr. Corrigan,” the young man in a charcoal suit going the other way said, halfway across the open-plan floor of work spaces and conference areas leading to Corrigan’s office.

“Hello, Chris. Did we get those specs integrated for Bolger?”

“Completed yesterday. Run and checked out last night.”

“Good lad.”

Judy Klein was already at her desk in the partitioned outer area in front of his office. It looked like part of a set for the flight deck in a space-fiction movie, with its curvy furnishings and multiscreened computer side-table.

“Hi, Judy. ’Tis a grand day for living, to be sure, to be sure. What have we got?”

“Hello, Joe. Let’s see. The arrangements for those people from Chase that Borth is bringing are confirmed. And there’s a message from Amanda Ramussienne at F and F saying that she’ll be coming too.”

“Fine. And where have we fixed for lunch?”

“Delio’s for twelve-thirty.”

“That’s great.”

“Roger said to let you know we’ve signed off on the two new TMCs. There’s a list of calls to be returned on your desk. And Pinder has put the meeting with Quell back to ten-thirty instead of ten. I said it would be fine. It doesn’t clash with anything.”

“Okay. Anything from Tom Hatcher yet on those referent transfer patches?”

“Yes. You’re due to see him in half an hour with Charlie Wade and Jorrecks. He said he’ll have the information then.”

“Fine. I’ll clear the calls first. If anything comes up while I’m down there, just put it through.”

“Will do.”

Corrigan went through to his own office and set the briefcase down on one corner of the broad sweep of curved, walnut-topped desk with its terminal, onyx pen-holders and neatly arranged piles of papers and reminders. The floor-to-ceiling windows formed a corner of the building, presenting fine views of the downtown Pittsburgh vista along the opposite shore on one side, and the meeting of the three rivers with the Ohio Valley beyond on the other.

The last few months had seen an intensification of the realscaping program for capturing every facet of visual imagery over the entire Pittsburgh area. Camera teams had been out every day, touring and recording all the streets, expressways, parks, and trails; from vehicles and on foot, from helicopters overflying the city, from boats out on the rivers. Back in Xylog the machines were running day and night, reducing and compiling the encoded scenes into crosslinked hierarchies of field definitions in the huge database that took up half a floor of high-density crystal-array recirculator memory cubicles. Hatcher had told Corrigan that they could reproduce any aspect of any scene out there, from any viewpoint, in any direction. Corrigan had studied the figures and experimented with some samples, and he believed it. The results of the similar but smaller-scale program that Himomatsu had carried out in Tokyo were now incorporated into the main Oz database, as was a part of the Inglewood area of California and a few other places, following experiments by SDC.

Having reviewed his priorities for the day and disposed of the calls, Corrigan went through the mail with Judy and gave her a list of follow-up actions for the morning. Then he went back out to the elevators and down past the Primary Operations Level, where the main banks of massively parallel processing lattices took up almost the entire floor, past the Interface Level with galleries of COSMOS coupling hardware for up to fifty real-world surrogates, past the Monitoring & Control Center, from where the whole operation was directed, and came out on the second floor. Finally he came to a door marked FINAL EVALUATION & TEST, which was where Tom Hatcher’s group ran newly completed system modules prior to operational integration.

Hatcher’s concessions to the new order of things amounted to switching to regular pants in place of jeans, acquiring a jacket, and, on special occasions, adding a necktie. But underneath, the old, easygoing casualness remained unaffected, and he was still more at home sprawled in front of a terminal with his coffee in a Styrofoam cup than listening to investment plans being expounded over pâté de foie gras. When Corrigan arrived, he was waiting with Charlie Wade, one of the old crew from Blawnox, and Des Jorrecks, the head of Xylog’s applied psychology department. There were two broad areas to discuss:

First, results of tests to evaluate different strategies for creating animations that would best emulate people. Like people, the animations would shape their lives and personalities by pursuing goals. The intention was that these goals would arise internally, according to the animations’ individual natures and experiences, rather than be imposed from without. But real people rarely formed distinct goals that they pursued consciously and deliberately all the time, such as to become a doctor, lawyer, physicist, or actor, or to head a country or win an Olympic gold medal; for the most part, they simply lived their day-to-day existences following unconscious drives and desires, and the bigger things just “happened.” How, then, should such a nature best be simulated? What mix of drives, fears, ambitions, aversions was needed, with what kinds of relative weightings? How should such factors be represented as a statistical distribution across a whole population? Opinions on these questions changed constantly, and the short answer was that nobody really knew. A lot would be learned when the first runs were done in full-system mode, with the animation and environmental modules finally on-line and interacting together.

The other thing on the agenda was a subject that it seemed could never be laid to rest: the question of suppressing the surrogates’ memories when they began the full-system tests. Those in favor argued that it would ensure greater authenticity of behavior. Those against, who included Corrigan, maintained that they were scientists running an experiment, and scientists needed to know what was going on. “All we have to do is play role models to a bunch of dumb machines. We’re not trying to impress a panel of Shakespearean critics,” Corrigan said after they had been through the technical arguments yet again. “And on top of all that, it will make it a more exciting experience for everyone: the thought of launching off into the unknown—a bit like going up on a space flight to another planet, or something.”

“Aw, I don’t know that it would get anybody that excited when you get down to it,” Hatcher said. Hatcher was for suppression but resigned to a lost cause. Corrigan had vetoed the idea, there was not enough time left now to change the decision, and that seemed to be that. “These things tend to creep up on you so gradually, day by day, that you get used to it. I asked an astronaut the same question once. He said that they trained so hard for a mission that by the time it actually happened they couldn’t tell the difference anymore. But then, that was the whole idea, I guess. Pretty much the same as what we’re doing.”

It wasn’t just a matter of authenticity. There was the question of being better able to cope in an emergency, too. “What if something did screw up in there, Tom?” Corrigan said. “We’re going straight into people’s heads, interacting at deep perceptual levels that wire into emotional centers. And with the speedup, if anything unexpected did start happening, it would be hours out here before anyone knew about it.

Hatcher knew all that. He thought over it briefly, failed to come up with anything that hadn’t been said a hundred times already, and shrugged. “Well, that’s what the surrogates are being paid all that money for. We know there’s a lot we don’t know, and so do the volunteers who are coming in from outside. What else can anyone say, Joe?”

“I think Joe’s got a point, all the same,” Jorrecks put in. “Whoever’s in there needs to be able to abort the run from the inside if it really goes off the rails somehow. But how could they do that if they didn’t even know they were inside a simulation? I don’t think I’d want to go in there under those conditions.”

“You want an ejector seat,” Charlie Wade said.

Jorrecks nodded. “Yes. But of course you couldn’t have one if the memory was suppressed, since there would be no knowledge of the mechanism for using it. There’s no way you could get around it. Any knowledge that an escape mechanism existed would also be knowledge that there was a simulation to be escaped from, which would defeat the whole purpose.” Jorrecks looked at Corrigan for support. Corrigan nodded.

Charlie Wade looked at Hatcher questioningly. “Shall we tell them?” he asked.

“Why not?” Hatcher said.

Corrigan looked from one to the other. “Tell us what?”

“As a matter of fact, we think it is possible,” Hatcher said.

Corrigan looked skeptical. “How?”

“But everyone would have to do it for themselves.”

“What are you getting at, Tom?”

“Well, if it was me—if I was going in as a surrogate, and let’s say that shortly before the full-system phase I was suddenly told that all memories of, say, the last couple of days were going to be suppressed.”

Corrigan nodded. “Okay.”

“What I’d do is this. I’d plant something inside the simworld that would be significant to me in some way, something that nobody else would know about. Later, after the run was started and I was in it, I wouldn’t know I’d done it, because that memory would have been killed. But I’d still know the way I think, and I’d wonder what in hell this something—this whatever—was doing there. But if some kind of crisis developed to raise the stress level to the point where I had to get out, then I’d recognize it as a signal to myself. And from there it wouldn’t take much fooling around with it to figure out what I’d set it up to do.”

Jorrecks looked at Corrigan inquiringly. Corrigan thought about it for a few moments, and nodded. “That’s clever.”

“You think it could work?” Jorrecks said.

Corrigan smiled and had to nod. “It just might, at that, Des. It just might.”

Hatcher clasped his hands behind his head and stretched his length out over the chair. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind, Joe? Suppression’s in, after all? We can go with it?”

“Not at all,” Corrigan said, waving a hand dismissively. “It’s dead and buried. Forget it. We’ve enough else to do as things are.” Hatcher knew that and hadn’t really been serious anyway. Just then, the phone on Hatcher’s desk rang.

“I think we’re done,” Jorrecks said, seizing the opportunity and rising while Hatcher picked up the receiver. “We’ll leave you to it, guys.” Charlie Wade got up from his chair also and collected his notes together.

“Tom here. . . . Say, hi! Yes, he sure is.” He held the phone out to Corrigan. “It’s Eve, for you.” Jorrecks and Wade left the room with a wave and a nod each.

“Hello?” Corrigan said.

“Joe, Judy said you were probably with Tom. Just checking to see if we’re still having lunch.”

Corrigan frowned. Oh, yes, that was right—she had suggested it that morning. He had mumbled that it would probably be okay, and then forgotten to get back to her when Borth’s visit was confirmed. “Er, look, something’s come up and I’m not going to be able to make it,” he replied. “I should have got Judy to call you. I’m sorry about that.”

Evelyn sighed. “Oh dear. And you were so late that I never got to see you last night.”

“Everything’s insane. It’s all hectic now we’re getting close.”

“I know. Maybe dinner for a change?”

“I’ll try.” Corrigan looked across and caught Hatcher’s eye. “Tell you what, why not have lunch with Tom instead? He’s up to his neck too, but I’m sure he’d like the company.” He held a hand over the mouthpiece. “Like to have lunch with Eve? I was supposed to, but I’m grabbed. I know you two always find plenty to talk about.” Hatcher didn’t seem overly happy, but nodded. Corrigan spoke back into the phone. “He says that’s fine.”

“Okay. Tell him I’ll stop by there at, say, twelve. Okay?”

“She says how about twelve? She’ll stop by here.” Another nod. “That’s fine. Look, I’ve got a ten-thirty, so I have to go. Talk to you later, then. ’Bye now.”