Realtime Interrupt

by James P. Hogan

  Then the sound of new voices came from outside the office door, which Corrigan had left open. He looked away from the desk and saw that Harry Morgen and Joan Sutton had arrived. Morgen was talking to Judy and pointing at a configuration on her screen that looked from a distance like Corrigan's call-log format. Sutton was standing behind him, gazing about at the surroundings as if she had never seen them before. Then Morgen, in the process of uttering something, brought his right hand up to touch his temple with a finger in an odd, flicking motion, vaguely suggestive of a lazy salute. Corrigan had seen that mannerism before somewhere.

  Corrigan walked slowly across the office and stopped in the doorway, studying them. Neither they nor Judy had noticed him yet.

  Then he remembered where he had seen that temple-touching mannerism before: Zehl! Dr. Zehl had had the same unconscious habit. And, therefore, Graham Sylvine—since Corrigan had already concluded that they were the same person. So Morgen had been the outside controller who had masqueraded as Zehl and Sylvine. That much made sense—Morgen was a firm Tyron follower. The only thing that didn't answer was if this Morgen was another animation re-created from system profiles, like Pinder and Barry Neinst, or a projection of the real person, coupled in. If he was real, then maybe Corrigan had his channel to the outside standing here, right in front of him.

  Chapter Forty

  Judy stopped what she had been saying as she saw Corrigan moving out from the doorway of his office. "Oh, here he is now." Morgen and Sutton turned toward him and exchanged perfunctory greetings. Corrigan watched their faces as they spoke. As with Barry Neinst, there was no way of telling from outward appearances.

  "People over at Head Office are trying to get hold of you, Joe, but you haven't been getting back to them," Morgen said. "With the project about to go live, that seems strange. Is everything okay over here?"

  Corrigan was conscious of their eyes searching his face like mapping radars, almost as if they were trying to divine the true person behind the surface imagery as much as he was of them. Considering the events since the previous evening, Morgen's remark seemed curiously insensitive. And Corrigan thought he knew why. Here was his opportunity.

  "He was one of our key people,'' Corrigan said. "And now the city's making a fad out of it. It does alter the perspective of things a bit."

  His vagueness was deliberate. Involuntarily, Joan Sutton glanced at Morgen with a bemused look, and he returned one that was just as mystified. They didn't know! And in that instant Corrigan knew that they were real-person surrogates. The way that Sutton had seemed awed by the surroundings should have told him sooner.

  For had they been Morgen and Sutton animations—permanent denizens of the simulated world—they would have been present since yesterday, and hence aware of what had been dominating the news. But Morgen, as Sylvine, had left only twelve minutes ago, outside-time, which would have given him barely enough time to report from his last visit, agree on the next objectives, and reenter. The fact that he had reappeared so soon, as himself, and bringing Joan Sutton with him, suggested that something irregular had been detected by the controllers on the outside. That would fit with why they were checking on Corrigan's behavior.

  He looked at them coldly, making no attempt to hide the rancor that he felt. "You don't know what's been going on, do you?"

  Morgen tried to feign a puzzled look. "How—"

  Corrigan cut him off with a disdainful wave. "Don't try any acting, Harry—it'll save us all a lot of breath." He nodded back toward the doorway of his office. "Let's go inside." He extended an arm. Morgen's face was apprehensive. Sutton shot him what looked to Corrigan like an accusing look, and he sensed that all was not smooth between them. They went through. "Hold all calls, Judy," Corrigan said, and followed.

  Inside, he closed the door behind him and turned on them. "Now let me guess what's been happening outside. The trait-assimilation parameter settings in the first run were wrong—yes?—which caused the animations to go off on self-reinforcing patterns and create a screwed-up world in which the surrogates—" Corrigan indicated himself with a finger and interjected in a scathing voice, "such as me! . . . instead of providing the models, became misfits. Yes, Doctor Zehl?" He glared at them and found that his breathing was heavy. Morgen had paled. His skin looked clammy in the pale light of the office. The system was picking up his physiological responses and projecting them perfectly. Even Corrigan marveled.

  He went on. "But even so, the results were so far beyond anything we'd ever imagined that somebody out there decided to run the whole thing again from the beginning with the parameters reset. But that's where you messed up. You see, the erasure of the first run didn't work the way it was supposed to. We still remember it—all twelve years of it."

  They stared at him numbly. He continued. "But yesterday, Tom Hatcher decided he'd had enough and wasn't about to go around again. And do you know what he did? He got a gun and blew away a heap of computer-code cops and security guards out at the airport. By nighttime, it had become the rage all over the city. Later, Tom ran his car up to eighty and pointed it head-on into a truck, so he's out of it already, and probably giving everyone out there hell." Corrigan's face creased into a mocking smile. "And guess what—this morning there's screwballs doing the same thing all over Pittsburgh."

  The expressions on the two faces in front of him were completely stunned, causing Corrigan's smile to widen derisively. "You see what it means?" he said to them. "Now the parameters are overcompensated. The animations are slavishly copying whatever the surrogates do—if you'd looked hard enough around the dinner table, you might have seen it yourself when you were here a little while ago as Graham Sylvine. With surrogates acting rationally in the way everyone assumed they would, that might have been okay. Oz could have worked. But what the experiment never bargained for was any of them going off the rails the way Tom did. Now you're about to create another world full of lunatics, only this time psychopaths and suicides." Corrigan tossed out a hand in a dismissive gesture, and the smile vanished from his face. "So it's over, and lot of heads are going to roll out there. Get it terminated."

  "I did try and tell you," Sutton began, looking at Morgen. "I said that the—"

  Morgen waved her aside in a way that said all that could wait until later. "It was the pressure from the F and F consortium," he told Corrigan. "They insisted on going straight to a full-world implementation, and they funded additional outside programming to do it. That was what they'd always wanted—a virtual world. They weren't interested in developing AI. We had to go along to get the backing."

  Corrigan looked at him disdainfully. "What do you take me for? I've grown twelve years in the last three weeks. Come on—I want out!"

  But Morgen persisted in the line that had been agreed upon in his excursion outside. "Look, Joe . . . I know that the way it's been done has been a bit underhanded. . . ."

  "Underhanded! By Christ, I—"

  "Hear me out, please. Look, I know you've had a raw deal. But that can all be straightened out. As you just said, this whole project, this process of yours, has worked out way, way better than anything anyone ever dreamed of. If—"

  "Right! You just said it: this process of mine!"

  "I understand what you're saying, Joe. But let's not allow the project to suffer just because you're feeling sore in the short term, right now." Morgen showed both palms hastily. "Don't get me wrong—I'm not saying you don't have good reason. Rerunning and knowing what we know now, it might actually get so close to reality that you can't tell the difference. That was the original success criterion, remember? And we're almost there already. After this we can do more realscaping and expand the territory. Maybe tie in a whole list of remote places." Morgen forced a jocular tone. "Hey, remember that time you wanted to visit Ireland, and Zehl had to pull rank?"

  "Somebody seems to have it all figured out," Corrigan remarked sarcastically.

  "See it through," Morgen urged. "You'll be more than compensated. It's already been a
greed. We're only talking about another few days."

  That was too much. "For you!" Corrigan exploded. "A few days for you! Don't you understand what I said a minute ago? Suppression of the first-run memories didn't work. For us, you're talking about years. I want this thing stopped now, and I want out. So get on with it."

  Morgen shook his head, still unwilling to give up but at a loss for a continuation. "Is there a choice?" Sutton asked him. "From the sound of it, it's all about to go off into a different brand of craziness in the other direction anyway. It's time to hold, analyze the data we've got, and reevaluate."

  Still, Morgen wavered. After a few seconds of waiting, unyielding, Corrigan pointed out, "You might as well. It can't work now, whatever you do. I'll just start tossing people out of the windows, and by lunchtime everyone'll be doing it. What use is that going to be to your precious backers? It's over. Accept it. Get us out."

  Finally Morgen capitulated. "I can't make the decision. It has to go back to the people outside."

  "Okay, but you don't have to decouple. Use one of the direct gate codes," Corrigan said. As a transient observer, Morgen would be able to signal the outside via a special calling number like the one that Corrigan had used to leave messages for "Sylvine." Probably he had recourse to other means, too.

  "Better do it, Harry," Sutton murmured in a tone that said he might as well get it over with. Morgen hesitated, then drew a pocket communicator from his jacket and tapped in a numeric sequence to flag a precoded message that would be transmitted practically instantaneously. Hence he was able to get information out straightaway, which was the option that Corrigan had not had access to.

  "You might as well tell them to reduce the time-acceleration down to unity, too, while you're at it," Corrigan suggested. "Communication would be a lot simpler. It won't make any difference now. This run isn't going anywhere."

  While the time-rate differential existed, however, and allowing for even a couple of minutes' deliberation on the outside, there would be a considerable delay before any response became known. Joan Sutton was at boiling point, tight-mouthed and sending Morgen daggers looks. Corrigan guessed that she had opposed the decision to reset the simulation and been overruled. Corrigan decided it would be easiest to leave them to it. He had said all he had to say for the time being.

  He moved back to the door and opened it to look out. Lilly was back sitting on her chair opposite Judy's desk. Yeen was standing nearby. He came across when Corrigan appeared.

  "Er, Mr. Corrigan," he said. "There are one or two inconsistencies between your account and Ms. Essell's—that we'll need to go over." Corrigan did his best to look surprised. "I must ask you to be available again later today."

  "Very well," Corrigan said.

  "If you do have reason to go elsewhere, you will leave details of how you can be reached?"

  "Of course."

  "Then that will be all for now. Thanks for your cooperation. I can find my own way out, if that's okay."

  Corrigan smiled apologetically. "Sorry—company rules. Judy, would you take Mr. Yeen back down to Reception, please?" Judy got up and walked away with Yeen in the direction of the elevators. Corrigan shrugged at Lilly in a way that said none of it mattered. The sound of Joan Sutton's voice rising came through the doorway behind him. Corrigan half closed the door behind him and went over to Lilly.

  "I think we might have cracked it," he said in reply to her inquiring look. His voice lowered. "Two of the outside crew showed up as observers while you were gone. I've told them the game's up. They're on the line back to base right now."

  She gaped at him. "Cracked it—already? You mean we're getting out?"

  "Right. There'll probably be a bit of a wait before anything happens, but they know it's blown. And thanks to Tom, we know how to wreck everything from the inside now, if they try to be obstinate. They don't have any choices."

  Lilly was about to reply, but then she looked away toward his office door with a puzzled expression. Corrigan realized that it had suddenly gone curiously quiet inside. He went back, pushed the door open, and looked in. Morgen and Sutton had vanished.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Harry Morgen stood facing Frank Tyron in the Monitor & Control Center on the third floor of the Xylog Building. Sutton was with him. They had just come up from the gallery of interface couplers on the level below after breaking one of the cardinal rules for transient observers visiting the simulation: effecting entry and exit in such a way as to risk confronting the inhabitants with abnormal phenomena. Endelmyer had heard the news about Hatcher and was on his way over from CLC headquarters across the river with John Velucci from Corporate Legal. Rumors were flying around the building that the whole Oz simulation was about to self-destruct.

  "It doesn't matter anymore," Morgen insisted. "Time is more important now. The longer Corrigan has to wait in there, the more likely it's going to get that he'll start doing something to sabotage the whole works. You have to believe me, Frank—he's mad as hell and he'll do it." Morgen pointed to the lanky, yellow-haired figure with a pallid, tired-looking face covered in unshaved growth, who was sitting by one of the consoles along the wall, a blanket drawn around his shoulders and clutching a mug of hot, black coffee. "He showed them how to do it. We overcompensated on the TAPS. Now half the animations are shooting each other and crossing over highways. It's an asylum in there."

  Hatcher's chest heaved with laughter that was stifled by the thermometer in his mouth. The medic standing by him took it out and nodded that it was okay for him to drink the coffee now. He had flatly refused to be taken to the medical department for a rest and checkup as stipulated in the exiting procedure, and come straight up to the M & C floor instead. Nothing would make him miss what happened now, and that was final. Jason Pinder was hovering nearby, watching him anxiously, genuinely concerned.

  "We're initializing real-time resynch now," a supervisor called from where he was standing behind two of the console operators. "T-by-tau is dropping at one per second. Should have reintegration in about three minutes." It meant that the simulation's accelerated time was being slowed to bring it back into synchronization with the real world.

  Despite all these signs that it was over, Victor Borth was not ready to concede final defeat just yet. He turned from where he had been listening with his back toward Tyron and the others, and spread his hands appealingly. "This is crazy," he told them. "Somebody tell me I'm not hearing this. Are you people saying that two guys can screw up a whole project of this magnitude? I mean, what does it take to keep two guys sweet? All they've got to do is name it." He turned and walked toward the side of the room where Hatcher was sitting. "Hey, you. Tom, is it? What's the biggest thing you've ever dreamed of getting out of life? Cars? Boats? Broads? You could be a millionaire, know that? Everybody's got something. You could have some of the most powerful people anywhere on your side for the rest of your life—anything you wanna do. There has to be room for us to talk, right?" Hatcher shook his head, sighed, smiled wearily to himself, and looked away.

  Of more concern to Tyron than Hatcher's future right now was the matter of his own. He was the one who had convinced the consortium of F & F's client-backers that a functioning pseudoworld was feasible; he had coordinated outside development of the advanced system that went past the original specification drawn up inside CLC; and at his instigation, Borth had organized the flow of funds to support it. If he delivered as promised, the wherewithal to smooth over all these embarrassments would be forthcoming. He'd have the leverage; he'd have the friends. If he failed to . . . No, they were all in it too far. There could be no backing down now.

  He had authorized temporary resynchronization to permit direct communication with Corrigan from the outside. Now he decided that a more direct form of intervention was needed. He turned to the operators at the section monitoring operation of the COSMOS neural-coupling interfaces on the floor below. "Initialize another two units." Then, curtly, to Morgen, Sutton, and Borth, "We're going back in."


  Borth looked taken aback. "All of us? You mean . . ."

  Tyron smiled thinly at him. "Why not? You've been saying for a long time that you'll have to try this thing yourself someday. Well, now's your chance. Use your arguments on the guy who matters."

  "T-tau one seventy-five and falling," the supervisor reported.

  "Come on," Tyron said, striding across the floor in the direction of the way out to the main corridor. Borth followed, and after a moment of faltering Morgen and Sutton fell in behind. "And anyhow, we still have the final argument," Tyron tossed back at them over his shoulder as he reached the doors. "We've got the switch out here, and he doesn't."

  They disappeared, and the doors closed behind them. Some of the operators exchanged curious looks. Others shrugged. Pinder leaned closer to Hatcher with a worried expression. "How do you feel?" he asked.

  Hatcher stared dully across the room and considered the question. "I'm not sure," he said finally, looking up. "How is the victim of a successful suicide supposed to feel? . . . Not bad, considering, I guess."

  Chapter Forty-two

  For Corrigan this was the most unreal part since the beginning of the entire experience. The full-scale Oz project, culmination of everything he had been working toward for the past several years, was about to go live in the next couple of days. Technicians and managers assailed him constantly for decisions about last-minute details; Endelmyer, the president of the corporation, was demanding that his calls be returned. And none of it mattered. There was going to be some delay no matter how quickly events moved in the world outside. His only choice was to either make a dramatic exit as Hatcher had done, or wait it out.