Realtime Interrupt

by James P. Hogan

  Why hadn't he seen it sooner? Because he had been too busy proving to himself that if he didn't fit in with the world, then he didn't need the world anyway. Because he had been trying to pretend that he could bury the resentments that came with remembering a life of success and achievement all snatched away. Because he thought he deserved better. Yet the same could be said on every count about Lilly, but she had seen it. . . . And so had he, as soon as she started questioning things. It had been staring him in the face all the time, but she'd had to spell it out. That was what had galled him.

  Presumably, then, Lilly must have been right in her guess as to why they had no clear recollections of what had taken place after commencement of the preliminary tests, when the project had supposedly run into problems and been canceled. Their memories had been suppressed and a cover story manufactured to camouflage the cruder, early phases of the simulation, when the system was in its infancy of learning. The disruption had been progressively reduced as the simulation got better, and the corresponding improvement in perceptions and thought coherence offered as evidence of "recovery." The possibility of suppressing the memories of the real-world surrogates in this way was something that had been talked about often enough, but in all of Corrigan's experience the decision had been not to use it. That was why his first reaction to Lilly had been to reject the suggestion as impossible. Evidently he had been wrong.

  So exactly what was going on and why? He didn't know. He would need to start practicing some real philosophy for once, and get in touch with Lilly again. But that was going to have to wait for a while, he decided. Virtual or not, there were some aspects of this reality that were simply just too "real"—and which, for the moment at least, there was nothing he could do to change. Before any more consideration of what it all meant and what he was going to do next, he would have to get some sleep. He got up, shrugged at the mess of the broken spice rack and scattered containers, and made his way blearily through to the bedroom.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Corrigan stood with Mat Hamils, the New York City-area sales manager, outside the main entrance to the Executive Building of CLC's Blawnox R & D facility. With them were Victor Borth, Nigel Korven, and Amanda Ramussienne from Feller & Faber. Five months had passed since Corrigan's visit to New York. Pinder had decided to hold things until the first implementation of EVIE was operating, and then there had been a further delay while the PAF system was expanded to handle several operators simultaneously; but finally, the long-promised F & F trip to Pittsburgh for a demonstration had been arranged.

  Borth raised a hand in front of his face and wiggled his fingers. He turned his head to his two companions watching him, pursed his mouth approvingly, and nodded. He looked across the parking lot toward the main gate, and beyond at the tree-clad hills dotted with houses in the distance. The day was sunny and bright. Intermittent traffic sounds came from an unseen highway. To one side, a lawn edged by flower beds bordered the paved area where they were standing. A bee buzzed around the gladioli. Farther away, a crow landed on the lawn and cried raucously.

  "I'm impressed," Borth announced.

  "I certainly prefer this improvement in the weather," Korven agreed. The drive from the airport had been filthy, through heavy traffic with rain falling continually from a leaden sky. Hamils glanced at Corrigan and looked pleased.

  There were still some peculiarities about the scene, however. The flowers and the grass looked normal enough close up; but with increasing distance they lost detail too quickly and became smeary, as if viewed by somebody shortsighted. The distant scenery was too flat. And although there could be no denying that the colors were an improvement over even high-resolution conventional graphics, they lacked some subtle, indefinable quality of richness and depth out in the sunshine. In some areas of sharp contrast, such as shaded spots underneath trees, or the view back inside the lobby, which was illuminated by tinted light, they were simply . . . wrong. Some correction mechanism that the brain applied to create the hues that it "knew" to be true, regardless of the raw data that the optic nerves were reporting, was not being emulated.

  "Let's go for a walk," Corrigan suggested.

  They stepped off the paving in front of the entrance and began following the driveway in the direction of the gate. Although their movements seemed acceptably smooth and natural, they all felt a hint of a vaguely disconnected, floating sensation that Tom Hatcher had described as "walk by wire," which resulted from motor feedback not being perfectly synchronized with vision. Borth was relieved to note that a wrinkle in his sock that had been bothering him all morning was no longer there.

  A car entered the gateway and approached, slowing as it got nearer, and drew up in front of them. Driving it was Joan Sutton, one of the SDC technical people assigned to support Frank Tyron on what was now officially designated the CLC/SDC EVIE project. Tyron himself was in the passenger seat. They got out, grinning unabashedly at the amazed expressions on the faces of the three visitors.

  "Fantastic! I could almost believe you're really there," Borth exclaimed.

  Corrigan was especially pleased with the results of the improved Personal Attribute Files that Ivy Dupale's graphics section had been working on. Not only were individuals interacting within the simulation; they were doing it with accurate eye and facial movements superposed onto the figures being generated from the PAFs. The incorporation of regular skin-potential sensors into the VIV helmet gave face-muscle movements, and eye-tracking came as standard.

  Accepting the unvoiced invitation, Borth stepped forward to examine the car, a 2007 Dodge, which was obviously the star part of the demonstration. The detail was uncanny, with paint and chrome reflecting the surroundings convincingly. When he reached out and tested, the hood was warm to the touch. There was even some realistic ticking and creaking of metalwork cooling down.

  Borth grunted and moved to the driver's-side door, which Joan Sutton had left open. She moved aside. Borth peered in, then began poking around curiously. He moved the panel, column, and foot controls with a hand, feeling them resisting and responding. "This is good," he told his colleagues. Amanda came to the other door and ran a hand over the upholstery and trim.

  "Better than what I can afford to drive, Victor," she declared pointedly.

  Borth sniffed. Then he frowned, turned and moved his head over the back of the seat, then sniffed again. "It's got no smell," he called to those outside. "This looks like a new car. It ought to have the new-car smell that you always get. It doesn't."

  "We can't give you a sense of smell," Corrigan said. "It's handled at a different level of the brain."

  "Oh, is that so?"

  "It was described in the information that was sent," Amanda reminded him.

  "Was it? Okay."

  Amanda turned on the radio, and it played a local Pittsburgh channel—injected through the VIV audio system.

  "What about the parts that you don't see?" Korven queried. It was the obvious next thing. Corrigan caught Hamils's eye and winked confidently.

  Borth pulled the hood release and walked around to the front. Korven raised the hood. Engine, battery, generator, hydraulics, air conditioning—everything was there, with all the hoses and accessories. If they looked, they would find water in the radiator, fluids in the reservoirs, oil in the sump. The glove compartment had maps in it, and there was an inside to the trunk, complete with spare wheel and a jack. Within reasonable limits, the team had covered every base.

  And then Joan Sutton inadvertently dropped the keys, which she had been toying with. They struck her thigh and glanced off to fall under the car, just behind the front wheel-arch.

  "It's okay. I'll get 'em," Korven said, and squatted down to reach. Then he stopped, looked in farther, then pulled his head back and grinned up at Corrigan. "Gotcha!"

  "What?" Borth inquired, coming around.

  "This car doesn't have an underneath," Korven said, gesturing. "It's all just blank."

  Corrigan sighed and showed his palms to acknow
ledge defeat. There was no way to anticipate everything.

  To finish the demonstration they entered the Executive Building and went through the reception area, past CLC's "museum" and the visitors' dining room to a rear exit. From there they crossed a parking lot to the IE Building and went upstairs to the lab area that had been allocated to EVIE. Here they found seven chairs fitted with Pinocchio collars and VIV helmets, arranged in the same positions as the real chairs that they had sat down in at the commencement. Tyron ushered them in and invited them to take their places.

  "I hope you're sure that we'll end up coming back out," Korven teased as he settled back. "I mean, I wouldn't want somebody to hit a switch the wrong way, or something, and send us into another simulation inside a simulation."

  "What a fascinating thought," Amanda said. "Is it possible?"

  Borth and Hamils were fiddling uncertainly with the collar attachments. There were no technicians to help this time. Since only seven working EVIE interfaces had so far been built, nobody else could be projected in from the outside.

  "It's okay. You don't have to worry," Tyron said. "We cheat a little." As he spoke, the devices positioned of their own accord, and the participants found themselves in blackness, suddenly conscious once again of the helmets confining them.

  Tyron's voice came again, now sounding muffled and remote from the outside. "You can take them off. That's it."

  Borth and Hamils had a moment of confusion in unraveling what was real and what wasn't. One by one they all removed their headgear to find themselves in the same place, only this time there "really." The approximation had been good, but this had an entirely different feel about it. Jason Pinder was present also, along with Therese Loel from ESG, Tom Hatcher, Ivy Dupale, and a number of technicians who had been operating the equipment.

  Borth was grinning like a kid stepping down from a funfair ride. A good sign. "This is it?" he quipped. "We're back now? You guys are sure?"

  "You'd better be," Therese said. "It's almost time for lunch. The virtual variety isn't all that nutritious."

  "Incredible!" Hamils declared. "Absolutely incredible." He directed the words at Pinder, but they were for the F & F people's benefit. "You know, you're really onto something here, Jason. There's no end to what can be done with this."

  "I wonder how authentic it's possible to get?" Amanda Ramussienne said, staring thoughtfully back at the connecting gear as she stood up.

  "My dear, what do you have in mind?" Korven asked her in a tone that required no answering.

  * * *

  The visitors were clearly impressed, and it seemed that the way was open for getting down to some solid business talk on the market area that all were agreed still held enormous potential. But things turned out to be less straightforward in the world of not-so-virtual reality. Borth put it bluntly from the end of the lunch table, back in the Executive Building a little under an hour later.

  "It's nice," he told them. "And clever. Very clever. Don't get me wrong—I can see that some very smart people have put a lot of effort into this. I don't want to knock that. But when you get down to it, it's still a toy—the kind of thing that kids might get a kick out of playing more realistic games on. You guys get my meaning?" He looked around. Beside him, Pinder stared woodenly at the table. Korven continued to look smooth and imperturbable, as always. Amanda's face had taken on harder lines than her normal sultry image. Corrigan had noticed that she tended to mirror whatever mood of the moment she sensed in Borth. Conversely, she seemed the only one at F & F who could handle him. Korven and the others always went to Amanda first when there was a delicate issue to raise with him, or when he was having one of his grouchy days.

  Borth went on. "What we're looking for is real artificial intelligence. We've explained it all before. Our clients want to predict the outcomes of complex situations. What you've shown us here is neat, but it only anticipates what the people who programmed it were able to tell it to anticipate. So it's no better than the people, and we can hire them already. See what I mean?"

  It was exactly what Corrigan had tried to point out after his first meeting at F & F many months ago. But sales and management had been interested only in not cutting off options. If this was going to be a debacle, it wasn't of his making. He maintained a detached, inwardly self-vindicating silence.

  Tyron shook his head. This was the first time that he had heard straight from the customer what was wanted, and it was nothing like what CLC or anyone else was in a position to supply. He was too astute a politician to get into an argument over it, but this thing had to be put to rest. "What you're asking is virtually impossible," he said, glancing from side to side for support from the CLC people. "The world of human affairs is an extreme example of complex, chaotic dynamics that are unpredictable by definition—far more so than the weather system, economy, or other things that you hear about. Even in simple models, the tiniest changes in starting conditions can produce wildly differing outcomes. Nothing known to science can make predictions about systems like that. One chance-in-a-million accident can ruin a company. A singer with a cute face can start a craze that alters the world. For most things that happen, nobody will ever know what the causes were. . . ." He looked at Pinder. Pinder nodded his endorsement. Tyron came back to Borth. "That's simply the way it is. We're up against laws of nature here. Nothing is going to change it."

  Corrigan was intrigued to note that Borth didn't seem to be hearing anything especially unexpected, but doodled on a pad and nodded idly until Tyron had had his say. It was Amanda who came to the point of what this was all really about. And she did so with surprising candor.

  "You're all thinking like scientists," she said, smiling in the manner of someone ending the joke they had all been playing, of pretending that they hadn't known all along. "Most of the people that we deal with are frauds, flakes, and phonies. I mean, who are we talking about? PR departments that think reality is what they say it is. Madison Avenue and political hygiene experts who make their own reality. Media crazies who never knew the difference in the first place. They all operate in worlds of manufactured images—images built on the public's credulity and wish-fulfillment fantasies, sustained by illusion and delusion. What matters is not what happens to be true, but what people believe is true, and what they want to be true."

  She held up a hand to acknowledge what Tyron had just said. "Yes, sure, we know that most of what happens in the world happens for reasons that nobody understands. But there will always be somebody who gets the credit for having called it: the leader of whatever the current in-fad is; today's guru-of-the-moment . . . Anyone with the right reputation. Whether the reputation is based on fact or fantasy doesn't matter.

  "Well, right now the trendy word in cocktail-party science is AI. If somebody like us can make it believable that they can bring real AI to bear on the complexity-prediction problem, it'll have the clients lining up all down the block."

  "Even if it has known . . . limitations?" Therese Loel still hadn't fully gotten the message. She couldn't bring herself to say, "won't work."

  "It doesn't matter," Korven interjected softly. "In this world, what you believe to be real is real. Amanda said it: Reputation."

  "The Rainmaker Syndrome," Amanda said. "If you dance long enough, eventually it'll rain. If lots of people make predictions, some will hit lucky, and that will be good enough for the rest. When enough people try a cure for something, some percentage of them is going to get better anyway. And there's your reputation. When it happens in the market we're talking about, somebody's going to collect a bonanza."

  Borth closed his pad and looked up. "But EVIE and Pinocchio aren't it. They play at being what the world is right now. What I want to see is how the world is gonna be, say, five years from now. Show me that, and we can start talking deals."

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the middle of 2008, Frank Tyron left the Space Defense Command to take up a position with CLC's R & D division as "Development Manager, Simulation Graphics," r
eporting to Pinder. In this, he took charge of a new group that combined the people still on assignment from SDC, plus the loosely structured graphics and holo-imagery section that Ivy Dupale had been heading informally. The remaining parts of the DNC department outside Shipley's DINS lab were consolidated as EVIE and placed under Corrigan. The corporation assured all concerned that these moves represented an overdue streamlining and rationalization, needed to better serve a "fast-growing and exciting new area faced with increasingly severe competitive pressures from abroad."

  There was disgruntlement within the DNC group over Ivy's being passed over in this way by an outsider. Evelyn was one of the most indignant, but being a comparative newcomer to the scene, she was hesitant about how much of a fuss it was her place to make over it. Privately, she made representations to Corrigan.

  "I think it's scandalous, Joe—especially after the job she did getting the synchronization bugs out of the EVIE imaging system. Can't you talk to Pinder about it, or something?"

  "My line is research," Corrigan told her. "Corporate politics isn't what I do." He also wondered if the change was entirely bad; it could represent a step toward the more cosmopolitan flavor that he felt the project could do with.

  "So you won't do anything?"

  "Eve, I can't do anything."

  Corrigan was also preoccupied at this time with the problem of efficiently representing and storing the enormous amount of detail implicit in any realistic depiction of the world—which the F & F demonstration had highlighted. To represent everything absolutely faithfully was impracticable but also unnecessary, since a reality was real enough if it looked real enough. The problem, then, was to find good ways of being able to cheat and get away with it.