Cyber Rogues (86 page)

And then she found herself suddenly about to relive that day again. As before, she had come to Xylog yesterday—and might even have bumped into him if he had happened to go across to the DNC Training Lab in one of the other buildings, where the new arrivals were being briefed and introduced to Oz. Like him, as she grappled with the weirdness of the situation and began experimenting, she discovered that she was not bound to relive what she remembered but could change things. Unlike him, she had thought to seek him out as part of what she, too, had been tempted to rationalize as a “dreamworld,” and find out if he existed in this one. In a group from outside the company confined to a different building, she hadn’t been able to get near him in the day yesterday, and he disappeared for the evening after the TV interview. So this morning she invented Lola Ellis.

There was no question that they had met in the simworld. When they compared experiences, they found that they remembered the same places, the same people, the same events, the same conversations together. The simulation had happened. There could be no doubt about that. But if that was the case, how could the simulation have not yet started?

One explanation, of course, was that the whole thing
had
been an internal creation in Corrigan’s mind, and still was: that what he thought he was hearing and thinking now was just as much a part of it as everything else. In that case he was totally insane, there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it, and the only choice open was to go with the ride and wait to see where it took him. But he had been around that same weary, frustrating loop enough times, and since no logical process could help if he accepted that as the answer, he rejected it through pure Irish obstinacy if nothing else. In any case, he told himself, if he were going to go to the trouble of going insane to invent an alternate reality to escape into, surely he would have made it a more entertaining and hedonistic affair than this.

A chill breeze was starting to lift off the water, the kind that nipped the ears and found chinks in clothes. Corrigan directed their steps across the court by the riverside parking lot, toward the Freight House—a onetime railroad terminal building, now converted into a complex of shops and restaurants. “Let’s head inside and get a coffee or something,” he muttered. “Maybe a bite to eat.”

“Did you have lunch?” Lilly asked.

“No chance of missing it in this job.”

He went over the facts in his head one more time. The simulation had been real—the way they both remembered. It had been taken to a degree of realism that went beyond anything he had known was planned. Their memories of going into it had been suppressed and a cover story manufactured to disguise the cruder early phases, which again, as far as he had ever been aware, had not been the intention. He was supposed to have been one of the controllers, able to enter and leave intermittently at will, fully aware of what was going on. The only explanation there could be to that much was that another design group that he didn’t know about had been organized somewhere, who had vastly extended the scale and concept of the operation, added the memory-suppression option that he had declined, and then sprung it on the surrogates unannounced—as they would have to if the memory suppression was going to serve any purpose.

Fine, so far. That much was what Lilly had already tried to tell him. But it still failed to explain how he and Lilly could be carrying recollections of their experiences inside a simulation that had not yet begun. The only answer to that was, they could not.

They came to the entrance into the mall. Corrigan stopped to gaze at the gaily stocked shops and booths, the decorations and colored lights, the crowds of evening shoppers; he went back in his mind over the events of the last two days. It was uncanny, but there was only one explanation left.

“When you woke up yesterday, you were back in a hotel, right?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Not at Xylog. But if we were back in 2010 after coming out of the simulation, why didn’t you find yourself in a lab somewhere, where you must have been to take part in Oz in the first place? And how was it that I found myself back at home in Fox Chapel?”

Lilly shook her head. She had been going through the same convolutions as he in her own head, and had tied herself in similar knots. “Everything was so confused from around this time. I’ve just about given up trying to make sense of it,” she replied.

Corrigan began moving again, leading them over to an open-fronted store with counters displaying ladies’ jewelry, perfumes, and cosmetics. “It needed to be confusing,” he said, not looking at her but studying the items arrayed on the shelves. “To disguise the crossover while the system was still learning. We thought we were recovering from perceptual dislocations. But all the time it was the world that was getting better, not us.” He smiled in a peculiar, crooked kind of way. “It’s got a lot better since then, hasn’t it, don’t you think?”

“What are you talking about?”

“It needed those cover stories so that the surrogates wouldn’t cotton on—the
first
time around.”

Lilly caught the emphasis. “I’m not sure I follow. . . .” But her voice was little more than a whisper, her eyes suddenly fearful. A part of her, at least, followed him, all right.

Corrigan picked up one of the sample bottles of perfume from the counter and dabbed it on the back of his hand. He sniffed, then extended his arm toward Lilly. “Like it?” he asked her.

She started to shake her head and say something, then checked herself and lowered her face. There was no smell at all. Nothing. She straightened up slowly, shaking her head, refusing for a moment longer to face what it meant.

Corrigan nodded. “I can’t smell it either. The first cranial nerve, the olfactory, synapses directly in the cerebrum. We never could get the sense of smell right, could we?”

For what it meant was, they had never come out of the simulation at all. It was still running.

And not only that. Somebody on the outside was
rerunning
it from the beginning.

In a small room off the Monitor & Control Center on the third floor of the main Xylog building, a small group of people listened tensely to Tyron’s aide, Harry Morgen, just up from the gallery of interface cubicles on the level below. Tyron was there, so was Borth, John Velucci from CLC Legal, and also Joan Sutton, the other technical specialist who had first followed Tyron from SDC. A technician standing beside Morgen had brought a hardcopy of the trace report that he had asked for on returning from the simulation. Things were not going according to plan.

“She tried to contact him in Xylog,” Morgen informed the others. “Now she’s due to see him, posing as a journalist.”

Tyron was peering at a screen showing a status update on Corrigan, revised in the last few seconds. “His behavior is way outside his computed assigned norms. The system can’t make sense out of it. His SDV index is down to fifteen percent.”

“What does all that mean?” Borth asked.

“That something unexpected is motivating them,” Tyron said.

Joan Sutton was shaking her head in a way that said this confirmed all she had been fearing. She was the one who had urged more caution all along, and opposed the latest extension of the original plan, which had thrown everything into a new dimension of risk and uncertainty.

“The forced reset was too soon,” she told the others. “It should never have been attempted at this stage. The erasure function was too much of an improvisation, to say the least. With the time-rate differential there was no chance for a rational evaluation.”

“The opportunity was too much to let slip by,” Tyron insisted, defending the decision that had been at his urging, and also for Borth’s benefit. “We had to go with it.”

As the representative from the top floor of Corporate HQ, Velucci was the de facto chairman of the proceedings. “That’s all history now. Time’s running. What’s the recommendation?” he asked them. This kind of briskness had become routine. In the five minutes that they had been debating, the simulation had already moved into a new day.

“Too many uncertainties. Shut it down now,” Joan Sutton said without hesitation.

“I disagree,” Tyron said. “I say, send Harry back inside, maybe with you, Joan, to give a second opinion. We can still get a lot of mileage out of this.”

Morgen nodded. “I support Frank.”

“We can’t quit now,” Borth pleaded. “This is where all the backers get their payoff. It’s worth hundreds of millions.”

“What about the people in there who are being rerun?” Sutton demanded. “They’ll sue for every cent in the company.”

“We’ve got enough money to keep them sweet. We’ve got lawyers. We can handle that when the time comes,” Borth said.

Impasse. Everyone looked toward Velucci. He got a connection to Endelmyer at CLC’s Head Office on one of the conference screens, summarized the situation, and requested a ruling.

“Are they in any immediate risk?” Endelmyer queried.

“No,” Tyron answered firmly.

“We don’t know,” Sutton said.

“That’s pure speculation,” Morgen said.

“Any risk that we can positively identify,” Endelmyer corrected.

“No,” Tyron said again. This time Sutton remained silent.

“Is there evidence that they suspect?” Endelmyer asked.

“Nothing that Harry actually saw—only the SDV index,” Tyron replied. “But that was yesterday their time. That’s why I want to send him back in. Joan can go with him.”

“As ourselves,” Morgen interjected. “There isn’t time for messing around through personas.” Tyron nodded that he agreed. All heads turned back toward the screen.

“They knew what they were getting into. As Victor says, any objections can be straightened out afterward,” was Endelmyer’s decision. “Send Morgen and Sutton in. We keep it going.”

Corrigan and Lilly came out of the west end of the commercial court on Station Square and began walking quickly back along Carson Street toward Xylog. All thoughts of coffee and sandwiches were forgotten. Of course Sylvine reminded him of Zehl, Corrigan told himself. It was more than simply that they were both from Washington, appeared at short notice, and asked lots of questions. Corrigan had already tagged Zehl as an external controller coming into the simulation, and something in Corrigan’s subconscious had identified the same habits of speech, posture, and mannerisms in Sylvine. Sylvine was Zehl! It was the same person from outside, cloaked in two different identities. The difference was that this time, Sylvine hadn’t instantly come across as being somehow more “real” than the others around him. The animations were getting good. Stunningly good!

There was an anger in the forced pace of Corrigan’s tread on the sidewalk stones and the taut set of his face that Lilly had not seen before. It was an anger of the worst kind—the kind directed at one’s own foolishness. While he had been fondly living fantasies of glory and success, believing himself to be in control of his imaginary project in its imaginary world, somebody else, outside, was very much in control of the real one.

“They must have been setting it up since before Xylog was formed,” Corrigan muttered darkly. “Nothing like the scale of this was expected until way in the future. That was why I had such a hard time accepting it. Now I can see what’s been going on.”

“What? Tell me how you read it,” Lilly said.

“This is what Borth’s clients wanted all along—a simulated world that they could test marketing ideas in. And somebody told them they could have it. That was why the backers poured all that money in.”

“You mean Tyron and company?”

“It has to be. Borth’s no doubt in on it, Velucci certainly, maybe Endelmyer himself. I don’t know. . . . But they’ve got friends in SDC. There could have been a whole department working on this behind a security screen. They must have done it the way you said once: waited until I went into the simulation on a routine inspection, then invoked the memory suppression to make it permanent and concocted some story to say it was my own decision. That gave them total control. And they’ve been in control of everything out there for the last three weeks.”

They crossed the exit from a parking lot without slowing down, forcing a car that had just begun moving out to stop abruptly with a squeal of tires.

“
Hey, asshole! You try’na get yusself killed or sump’n?”
Nothing abstract or unreal about this world. It was eerie.

“That much I follow,” Lilly said. “But how do we suddenly find ourselves back here again—before the project has even started?”

“The backers didn’t get what they had been expecting,” Corrigan replied. “They got the crazy place that you and I remember.” He tossed a hand up as they walked. “No good for their purpose at all, not even close—
to begin with
.”

Lilly walked a couple more paces, then came to a dead halt when what he was saying finally hit her.

“Ohmygod!” she gasped. Corrigan stopped and looked back. “But it was getting better, wasn’t it,” she said.

He nodded. “Faster than anybody ever dreamed it could—certainly much faster than anything I’d ever have dared bet was possible. We did a better job than we realized. Finally, after about three weeks of run time—twelve years in the simulation—it had got itself almost right. Not completely. There were still some flaws. In particular, the animations weren’t copying the surrogates but had gone off on a zany tangent of their own instead; but for the most part, the realism that it achieved was incredible. And then somebody out there said, if it can get this close in three weeks, starting from scratch . . .”

Corrigan saw from the look on Lilly’s face that she had already completed the rest for herself. What somebody had said was that they could do so much better still if they could start all over again, only this time with the benefit of everything that the system had learned the first time.

“They’ve reset everything back to the beginning,” Lilly said. Corrigan nodded. But it still didn’t add up. Lilly’s face creased in puzzlement. “But how could they hope to run it again with us knowing what we know now?” she said.

Corrigan shook his head. “We weren’t supposed to. They’ve got memory suppression. All that was supposed to have been erased, so that we’d start out again yesterday with clean slates, really believing that it was the real world, just before Oz was due to start. But they screwed up somewhere. That suppression didn’t work. And now they’re all set to run the whole thing through again—only this time from more realistic beginnings.”