Cyber Rogues (89 page)

“Ah, don’t start giving me any of that old bilge,” he warned. “It’s been hectic at Xylog. And since I woke up yesterday I’ve had other things on my mind than housekeeping.”

Lilly opened the dishwasher and shook her head despairingly at the pile of crockery and kitchenware inside. “Where’s the detergent?” she sighed.

“I can’t remember. It’s been twelve years since I saw it. Try the cupboard under the sink.”

Lilly opened the door and squatted down to look. “The stupid thing is that there’s really no need for any of this. Why go to the trouble of creating a simulated world and build in all the limitations of the real one? You could just have a code word or something that gets this done in an instant.” She found the detergent, stood up, and poured detergent into the dishwasher while Corrigan loaded items from the sink. “You could make life really comfortable, when you think about it.”

“Magic words, eh? You’re right. That’s exactly the kind of world we could create. We haven’t scratched the surface of this business yet, Lilly.”

She switched on the machine and began collecting assorted jars and dishes together to either throw out or put in the refrigerator. “You see what I mean,” she said. “Look at all this. Why is it necessary to have stuff dry up and go bad? Couldn’t we have a simulation without mimicking the effects of microbes?”

“Why stop at that?” he asked her. “Maybe you’d never get too hot or too cold, cut your finger, get a bruise, or catch flu, either. Talk to anyone anytime, and be anywhere in an instant.”

“Well, why not?”

“People might never want to come out of it.” Corrigan shook his head and set down two mugs that he had found for the coffees. “There’s all kinds of things to find out. The whole thing’s being rushed too fast, and for all the wrong reasons. That’s how we come to be stuck in here.” Which brought them back to the immediate issue at hand.

“You said we were here to look for the clue to a way out that Tom says you planted somewhere,” she said.

“Mmm.”

“What kind of thing are we looking for?”

“I don’t know.”

“That helps.”

“The clue to the magic word.” Corrigan poured the coffees and handed her one. “It was twelve years ago, Lilly. I hadn’t planned on it happening this way. It was supposed to have been just a few days.”

“What did you mean in the car when you talked about us seeing different things when we got here?” Lilly swept her free hand in a circle. “I see a sink, refrigerator, table with things on, a window over there, and the door we came in there. Isn’t that what you see?”

“Oh, sure. But you’d expect that. Everything superficial would have been captured when the guys were here realscaping the house. Possibly Tyron’s people came to get additional detail, too, at the same time that they did the car—after I was inside the simulation. So for stuff like that, the system has objective data that it can feed in the data streams to both of us. But at a more subtle level there are things that exist in my memories that it doesn’t know about. Will my mind fill in the details subconsciously so that I see them and you don’t? Or will I not see them, although I know I ought to? How will the system handle it when it’s driven to the limit?” He sipped from his mug and looked around the kitchen casually.

“For instance . . .” Corrigan moved over to the microwave and took down one of the recipe books from the shelf just above. It was called
Cooking the Good Old American Way
, and showed big, elegant houses and a riverboat scene. “They did a thorough job,” he commented. “This book of Evelyn’s did have that picture on the front. But they had to stop somewhere. He opened the cover and showed Lilly the endpaper and flyleaf inside. “What do you see there?” he asked her curiously.

She looked, then raised her eyes to meet his uncertainly as if suspecting a trick and shrugged. “Nothing. It’s blank.”

He nodded. “That’s what I see too. But what I know, and what you and the system don’t, is that it was a gift from an aunt of Evelyn’s, and it had an inscription inside. . . . You see—we’ve carried out one experiment already.”

Lilly gaped. In two days, nothing had brought home to her the reality of the situation that they were in more effectively than that one, simple demonstration. Corrigan was straining the system’s rules, watching for where the cracks would appear. Lilly realized then that he had a twofold strategy: either he would find the “magic word” and get them out; or failing that, he would find a way to crash everything from the inside.

She watched, still struggling to overcome the eerie feeling of it all as Corrigan replaced the cookbook. He opened one of the kitchen drawers and rummaged idly among the contents, but nothing caught his eye as the kind of thing that he had vaguely in mind. It was the usual assortment of utensils and implements that could have been imaged and recorded straightforwardly. He needed something that would let his mind work spontaneously, without prior expectations. He wandered around, taking pictures off the walls, lifting ornaments from their niches, trying to create opportunities for stumbling on details that a realscaping crew with finite time to contend with would have missed. The watercolor of a schooner that he took down from above the breakfast bar was just blank pasteboard on the reverse side. Was anything supposed to be written there—a date, a caption, an inscription? He couldn’t remember. Was the maker’s mark that he found on the underside of the vase from the ledge by the pantry the authentic one that had always been there, or had the system improvised it? He had no idea. He lifted a wooden-handled carving knife from its fixture on the wall—a relic from his student days that had followed him over the years through all his digs and apartments from Dublin to Pittsburgh. The handle had a deep, L-shaped gouge in it, dating from a time long forgotten, which had been hidden facing the wall. He held it out to let Lilly look at it.

“Tell me what you see,” he said.

“An old knife. It’s got a worn blade, a polished wooden handle held by brass rivets.”

Corrigan turned the knife over in his hands. “Anything different this way?” He turned it again, showing her the first side once more, then the other.

“No. Should there be?”

“To me, there’s a deep gouge in the handle. You don’t see one at all?” He had found something.

“No. Nothing.” Lilly looked up at him disbelievingly. “My God!” she whispered.

Corrigan had forgotten that gouge. But his subconscious hadn’t, and it was filling the detail in, inside his head. The system had known nothing about the gouge, since it had faced the wall and not been captured in the imaging; therefore, the data to define it were absent from the optical input being generated for Lilly.

“Now it’s caught in a direct conflict,” Corrigan said. “It knows that you and I are seeing different things, violating its primary reality criterion. It can’t resolve the issue by deleting what I see, and it can’t correct what you see because it doesn’t have the information to draw it. And either way, even if it could, that would violate its consistency rules.”

Lilly shook her head helplessly, as if it were her problem. “So how will it handle it?” she asked.

Corrigan shrugged. “I have no idea. The system has been evolving its own associative structures. That’s what it was designed to do. Its internal complexity will be so great by now that neither I nor anyone else could tell you what it’ll do. It’s going to be interesting finding out.” Lilly looked around uneasily, as if half expecting the house to cave in. Corrigan grinned cheerfully and took her arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a stroll around the house and see what else we can find.”

They went out through the living room and into the den. It was getting dark. Corrigan switched on the light and gazed around at the desk, the terminal, shelves of books, ornaments, pictures and other hangings on the walls. Finally he went over to the bookshelves and began peering more closely at the titles. “Now, I can’t remember exactly everything that was here,” he said. “But it seems the kind of place that I might have stuck a reminder to myself. . . . Ah! Now, see this one, for example.” He took down a thin, green-covered volume with the title
The Stories Behind the Flags
. “You see, I can’t remember where this book came from at all. It could be something that Evelyn put there and didn’t tell me about, or I forgot.” He glanced at Lilly pointedly. “Or maybe I put it there for a reason, just before Oz went live, and the memory got suppressed along with everything else from those last few days. See my point?” He rippled through the pages idly with a thumb.

Lilly caught glimpses of the pages, replete with text and illustrations. “The pages are all there,” she said, indicating with a hand. “Surely the people who scanned the house couldn’t have gone through every one.”

“No need,” Corrigan said. “You just get the titles from a high-resolution scan of the room, and the system obtains the contents electronically from a library.” He nodded toward the file cabinet in a corner. “I bet you’d find a lot wrong in there, though. Nobody’s going to wade through that lot.”

“Are you going to look?”

“Oh, we’ll get to it. Meanwhile, what about this book? Is it the clue to the magic word?”

Lilly turned up her hands. “I don’t know. How do we find out?”

“We experiment. . . . Maybe all you have to do is say the right words in the right place, like in a D and D game. Maybe it’s the title.” He raised his voice and recited, “‘The Stories Behind the Flags.’” He waited a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe the name of a flag. How about, The Stars and Stripes? . . . Old Glory? . . . Irish Tricolor? Union Jack?” He looked back at Lilly. “You see. Nothing happens.”

“Just like D and D games,” she remarked.

“Maybe we have to type it into the system.” He went over to the terminal, sat down and switched it on, and began entering any phrases and references to flags that came to mind.

“This could take until the next ice age,” Lilly said bleakly as she began to get the idea.

“I told you, having to try and hit on the right thing from twelve years back doesn’t help. If it was a connection that meant something a couple of days ago, the way it was supposed to, it would probably be obvious already.”

He carried on resolutely. Lilly looked around the room, searching for anything that might suggest itself. She was about to say something when the headlights from a car turning into the driveway outside came in through the window.

Corrigan stopped what he was doing and got up to cross the room and peer out. A familiar tall, loose-limbed figure, yellow-haired in the glow from a nearby streetlamp, straightened up from behind a Ford parked next to Corrigan’s Mercedes and headed with tense, agitated footsteps toward the front door of the house.

“Well, there’s one lot of questions we won’t have to worry about for very much longer,” Corrigan said, letting the drape fall back. “Tom’s here.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The bell started ringing when Corrigan was halfway to the door and carried on ringing until he opened it. Hatcher looked as if he had been in a private war. His hair was tousled, his face showing two days of yellow stubble, and his eyes, which in all the years they had worked together Corrigan had never seen other than mild and mockingly easy-lazy, mirroring the way Tom ambled through life, were red-rimmed and glazed. He was wearing a gray, hooded zipper jacket, torn on one side, over a stained khaki shirt and blue jeans.

He gestured back toward the driveway and said without preamble, “Can I move the car into the garage? I need to get it out of sight, off the street.”

“Well . . . sure, Tom.” Corrigan went past him to open the garage door, while Lilly watched from the doorway. Corrigan heard the door of Hatcher’s car slam behind him, and the engine start. He fumbled with the keys and had to try several before he found the right one to open the door. Hatcher drove in past him and got out; Corrigan closed the garage door from the inside and led the way through a side door into the kitchen. Lilly joined them from the hallway a few seconds later.

“I was right, wasn’t I? It happened to you too,” Hatcher said, again wasting no words on preliminaries. “You couldn’t remember which key opened the garage. It’s been twelve years since you did it last, right?”

Corrigan waved a hand to indicate one of the chairs by the kitchen table. “Why don’t you take a load off your feet before we get into this, Tom? You look beat. We’ve just made some fresh coffee.”

“What does it matter—any of it? We’re not really here. None of it’s really here. Coffee? You act like . . .” Hatcher checked himself, then indicated the surroundings with a wave of his arm. “Just to be sure that we’re talking the same language—we
do
both know what all this is, right?”

Corrigan nodded. “It’s the simulation. We know that. And to save any more comparing of notes, yes, we both went through twelve years of it. And yesterday we woke up back at the beginning, all set to start over.”

“Her too? You mean she’s not a . . .” Hatcher threw up a hand in a way that said call them anything you want.

“This is Lilly Essell,” Corrigan said, his tone making the point that bizarre circumstances didn’t excuse bad manners. “Space Defense Command, Inglewood. Lilly’s a scientist with OTSC—one of the surrogates recruited from outside. She was involved with DIVAC development. We met in the simworld the first time around.”

Hatcher sighed, sank down onto the chair, and nodded wearily. “Excuse me, Lilly. . . . Yeah, man, could I use some coffee.”

Lilly had already taken down an extra mug and was filling the three of them from the pot. “Thanks,” Hatcher acknowledged as she set one of them down in front of him. Some of the fury that Corrigan had sensed when Tom came into the house was abating, but his movements were still tense. He picked up his mug and sipped from it, clasping it in both hands. “Having those freaks around for too long,” he said by way of explanation. “That’s what it does to you.”

“It’s been tough all around,” Lilly said.

“This is the Tom Hatcher that we talked about,” Corrigan told her. “Worked with me on software for years. Now he runs a big slice of the development work at Xylog.”