“There’s a visitor down here for you,” Peggy told her. “Quite a hunk, too . . .” She moved her eyes to smile at somebody offscreen. “A Captain Solinsky from the Army.”
“Mat? . . . He’s here?” Kim at once flew into a tizzy. “Hey, did you hear that? Mat’s here . . . I didn’t even know he was in New York. Captain, no less. Linsay sure doesn’t waste any time. It’s marvelous.”
“You’d better get down there and fetch him up,” Dyer suggested. Kim told Peggy she was on her way down, cut the screen and rushed out straightening her jacket and fussing with her hair. Betty nodded slowly to herself as she took it all in.
“Very strange,” she declared. “There have definitely been some strange goings-on going on since you all took off. Tell me. I’m interested.”
“I told you—some other time,” Dyer insisted. “I haven’t even said hello to Al and Judy yet. I’ll tell you all about it some other time.” With that he walked away toward the lab bay where Ray and Chris were standing with Judy Farlin around the holo-tank.
“He can’t,” Laura whispered to Betty. “I think they’ve been involved with some project involving the government. Security and all that stuff. I’ve got a feeling it’ll all be made public pretty soon.”
“Oh, I see.” Betty nodded her head knowingly as if that had told her everything and began cutting more cake, apparently having dismissed the whole matter from her mind. Laura went through to join Ray and the others.
Judy was at the console in front of the tank tapping in commands at the touchboard to activate the image. After a few seconds she got up and moved around to stand next to Dyer.
“You’re up to something, Miss Farlin,” he told her. “What?”
“Doctor Farlin, if you don’t mind,” she informed him. Dyer’s face split into a wide grin. “You made it! Hey, that’s fantastic! Congratulations! Did you all hear that? Judy made it.” While Chris, Ron and Laura were adding their congratulations, Hector materialized inside the tank, surrounded by his kitchen. His head was turned to look, had he been a real being and not a composite pattern of optical wavefronts, straight out at them.
“What’s this?” Dyer inquired suspiciously.
“You haven’t said hello to Hector yet either,” Judy explained.
“Oh, is that it?” Dyer grinned and played along with the game. “Hi Hector. How’ve you been?”
To his astonishment Hector brought up a hand in salutation and his mouth began opening and closing. At the same time the familiar baritone voice issued from the audio grille on the console.
“It’s about time too! I’m glad to see you’re all back. I’ve been getting fed up not having anybody to talk to.” At that moment the door burst open and Brutus bounded through and began bouncing and jumping up at the side of the tank. A sound of excited yapping came as a background to Hector’s voice. “Brutus is glad to see you all back again too. Brutus has been getting fed up like me. Leaving things like me and Brutus to get fed up is not okay.”
Laura, speechless, stared into the tank while Ron and Chris exchanged disbelieving looks.
“This isn’t possible, surely,” Laura gasped. “FISE is only electronics in one of those boxes, isn’t it? What’s going on?”
“Of course it is,” Dyer told her. “Judy must have preprogrammed it, that’s all. Nice thought, Judy.” Judy smiled but said nothing. A few seconds later Hector spoke again:
“I am not preprogrammed. I am now a very smart machine. Brutus is also very smart like me. Saying that things like me and Brutus being smart is impossible is not okay.”
Chris’s jaw dropped. Ron’s eyes bulged and his face reddened as he gaped into the tank, where Hector was standing indignantly with his hands planted on his hips.
Dyer shook his head as if refusing to believe his eyes and ears and looked around helplessly. And as he did so, he caught a glimpse of Al Morrow sitting at a terminal inside a half-open door at the far end of the short passage leading from the lab area between the partitions that formed Kim’s office and a storeroom. Al looked away nonchalantly as his eyes met Dyer’s . . . too nonchalantly. Dyer laughed inwardly but kept a straight face in order not to spoil the fun. He caught Judy’s eye, nodded almost imperceptibly and winked. After a few seconds Chris looked up and jerked his head from side to side.
“Where’s Al?” he demanded.
“In his office, I think,” Judy answered innocently.
“It has to be Al,” Chris declared. “Come on, Ron. Let’s go find the bugger and sort him out.” The two of them strode away into the office area. Moments later a bellow from Ron signaled that they had solved the problem. Judy at last released the laughter that she had been holding back inside and went after them to enjoy their reactions firsthand.
Laura remained staring thoughtfully down at the two comic figures in the tank, which by now had become frozen. After a while she looked up and across at Dyer.
“You know, I’ve just remembered something,” she said. “It wasn’t all that long ago that you told me this machine was as advanced as anything that existed anywhere. But it’s prehistoric already, isn’t it? There’s something already here that’s a million years ahead of it.”
“You used to have nightmares about it too, remember?” Dyer replied. “All about some alien intelligence taking over. How do you feel about it now that it looks as if it’s going to happen?”
Laura smiled and moved closer to him. “I don’t have nightmares anymore,” she said. “Anyhow, it isn’t alien. It’s ours. We’ve got a new partner, that’s all.”
“That’s a good way of putting it,” Dyer agreed. “From here on in, it’s a partnership—the whole human race and Spartacus stringing along together. Should be a pretty powerful team.”
“You mean like us?” Laura asked softly.
Dyer shook his head.
“Oh, not nearly as powerful as that,” he said. “But you’ve got the general idea. It’ll last for a long time too, if my reckoning’s anything to go by.”
“Which one do you mean?” Laura asked.
Dyer thought for a moment. “Both of them of course,” he told her, and grinned.
REALTIME
INTERRUPT
To Maurine Dorris
Acknowledgments
The help and advice of the following is
greatly appreciated:
Joseph Bates and Mark Kantrowitz, School of Computer Science,
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
Liam Cullinane, First National Building Society, Ireland
Beverly Freed, for background on real reality
Brenda Laurel, for background on virtual reality
Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT,
and Thinking Machines Corporation
John Moody and the staff of Holland’s Lounge, Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland
Brent Warner, NASA, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Maryland
Patricia Warwick, University of Wisconsin
PROLOGUE
Faces, places, formless spaces. Blurred thoughts, smeared thoughts. Images dissolving away under swirling water. Words tumbling in dislocated time. Then, clearness emerging suddenly, like a momentary calming of the wind in a storm.
There was a small, plain room with a bed, a closet, and a window with closed slats. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a heavy plaid robe. Where this was or how he came to be there, he didn’t know. It could have been a hospital. He had a strange feeling of unreality about everything, as if the walls around him were all there was: stage props brought together in a void, with nothing behind.
He rose and moved to the window. The motion felt remote and disconnected, as if he were watching it from a vantage point that was distant yet still strangely within. Beyond the glass was a city with tall buildings and a river spanned by steel bridges. It felt familiar, but he was unable to name it. He searched his memories but found only faded and scattered fragments from long ago. Of his recent past—anything that might have s
ome connection with where he was and why—there was nothing.
He turned as he heard the door behind him open. A man entered, dressed in a physician’s smock. “Good morning, Joe. How are you feeling today?” the man said.
So his name was Joe? He made no answer.
The physician closed the door behind him and crossed the room. He had a square jaw and brow, smooth, pink features, wavy blond hair, and heavy-rimmed spectacles: a physician caricature, the generic of a type, giving the fleeting feeling of possessing no more substance than the room.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked. Joe shook his head. “I’m Dr. Arnold. We’ve known each other for quite some time now.”
“Oh,” Joe said.
Arnold peered at him closely. “Do you know who you are?”
“I’m Joe,” Joe told him.
The physician frowned and seemed momentarily perplexed. “Well, of course you’d know that. I just told you,” he said.
“It was a joke,” Joe explained.
“That was funny?”
Joe shrugged. “Not in a way that you’d split your sides over. But kind of, I guess.”
“Why was it funny?”
Joe was beginning to find this a strange conversation. “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know how to tell you,” he replied.
“Then tell me why you think it’s funny,” Arnold said.
“Look, you don’t need to lose any sleep over it. It’s not that big a thing. Why are we making such a deal out of this?”
Arnold stared at him intently. “But I need to know. It’s important that I know everything that goes on inside your head. It’s been pretty messed up, I’m afraid. You’ve been a very sick man, Joe.”
Joe didn’t feel as if he had been sick. Not just at that moment, anyway. He did feel that Arnold was a strange kind of person to be telling him that he had been. But then the coherence that had momentarily given clarity to his thoughts fell apart again, and what happened next dissolved back into confusion.
“It’s great that you’re up and about, Joe. We can show you the place, and you can start meeting some of the other patients. That will do you a lot of good.”
The nurse’s name was Katie. They walked slowly along a wide corridor with windows on one side, looking out at the river and the bridges. Moving felt more natural, but he still had occasional attacks of giddiness—especially when he changed his direction of vision too suddenly. Sometimes everything would go completely blank for a moment. Arnold said it was because different parts of his nervous system were out of synchronization and needed time to accommodate to sudden changes of input.
“What city is this?” Joe asked.
“That’s good: you’re getting curious about things. This is Pittsburgh,” Katie said.
Somehow it did not come as a complete surprise. He had a vague recollection of coming to work here. But the clearer details of his still-blurred memories were from another city of high buildings with a river.
“How long ago did I come to Pittsburgh?” he asked.
“The second-largest city in Pennsylvania, with a population of over two million, once known as the Gateway to the West,” Katie recited, ignoring his question. She went on, sounding like a talking commentary at a museum exhibit whose button had been pushed. “In the eighteenth century it was a scene of intense rivalry between the British and the French, which caused five forts to be built here. It was a major producer of armaments for the Union during the Civil War, and subsequently grew to become the center of the steel industry through the 1960s.”
Joe shook his head. “No, I was asking about me. How long have I been here? What did I come here for?”
“I think you’d better talk to Dr. Arnold about that,” Katie replied.
Joe sighed. In his scattered moments of clearer perception, he was getting used to this kind of thing. Arnold said it was because his mind wandered off into its own internalizations and lost logical continuity. “Are you a history major or something?” he asked as they resumed walking.
“No. I’m a nurse. Why?”
“Do all nurses talk like that?”
“Why shouldn’t they? Don’t most people take an interest in such things?”
“Hardly.”
“What kind of things would you expect me to be interested in?”
It was such a peculiar question that Joe didn’t know how to answer. When he looked at her, her eyes, although fixed on him, seemed to have an emptiness that gave him the feeling of talking to a shell.
“What do you think when you look at me like that?” she asked.
“That everyone I meet here is strange.”
But it could be because of the way he was seeing things, he told himself. Maybe people never had been the way he thought he remembered.
He remembered being with a group of young people, laughing and teasing each other as they walked along a road by a shore, where waves broke over rocks below. It was an old town somewhere, of imposing, high-fronted houses built in terraces around squares with green lawns. Ships sailed out of a harbor, past a lighthouse at the end of a long stone pier.
“You were involved in some unconventional experiments involving processes deep in the brain, which have affected your mind and altered the way you see the world,” Dr. Arnold told him.
“I seem to remember I worked with computers. I came to this country to work with them from somewhere else.”
“Ah, excellent! You’re getting better every day. Now I want you to meet Simon, who’s going to be your regular counselor. Simon, this is the man we want you to help. His name is Joe. Do you remember your full name, Joe?”
“Corrigan. . . . Joe Corrigan. Pleased to meet you, Simon.”
One Saturday night there was a dance for the patients to get to know each other and begin rediscovering long-unused social skills. Corrigan felt as if he had been caught up in a charade of walking character clichés.
“How are you finding it, Joe?” Dr. Arnold inquired, rubbing his hands together like an anxious headmaster showing his face at the annual high-school ball.
“Tell me these people aren’t real,” Corrigan answered.
Arnold seemed unsurprised but interested. “Why? What’s wrong with them?”
“I feel as if I’m in an old, corny movie.”
“The parts of your memory are starting to come together again. Not as much of what you think you see is really out there. Your mind is filling the gaps by projecting its own, stored stereotypes from long ago. Don’t worry. It’s a healthy sign.”
There came a day when Corrigan grew tired of being restricted. He wanted to get out in the air and work with his hands. In a shed in the rear grounds of the hospital he found some garden tools, and decided on impulse that he would plant a vegetable patch. There was no need to seek approval—one of the advantages of being deemed unstable was that nobody was surprised at anything one did. In any case, asking would simply be an invitation to be told no. A phrase came to mind from somewhere in his past and made him smile: “Contrition is easier than permission.”
The world was coming more together now, and although he hadn’t said so, inwardly he considered himself to be virtually back to normal. But when he turned over the first fork of soil, there was nothing underneath—just blackness. He stared, confused, then closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them again, nothing was amiss: he saw earth, roots, a shard of pottery, and a few rocks.
“You see, you’re not as well as you imagine yet,” Arnold told him when Corrigan described the experience. “Your perceptions can still be disrupted by sudden changes of mood or intent. That is why it is important for you to get into the habit of thinking smoothly. Avoid discontinuities. . . . But wanting to get out and about again, I can understand. It’s perfectly natural.”
“Maybe I could visit my old company?” Corrigan suggested. He could remember a little now about the organization that he used to be with, and his work there. It had involved supercomputers and other advanced hardware.
<
br /> “That project was abandoned a long time ago now, Joe,” Arnold replied. “And I’m not sure that digging up those ghosts would really be for the best. But I agree that we should begin broadening your experiences as a start to getting you on the road back to a normal life.”
“How long have I been here?” Corrigan asked.
“It’s getting close to three years now,” Arnold said.
“Don’t I have any family? Why does nobody come and visit?”
“They did, in the early days. Don’t you remember?”
“No.”
“You didn’t respond well. It set off a regression that threw us back months.”
“I’m better now. Can’t we try again?”
“Sure. But it would be best if not for a while just yet. All in good time, Joe. All in good time. . . .”
He remembered courts of cobblestones and lawns, closed in by tall buildings with frontages of old stone. An archway led through to a busy street with green, double-decked buses. There was a pub by a river, filled with talkative youths in heavy-knit sweaters and pretty girls who wore black stockings. They danced and sang to music in the back room.
“You have to get rid of Simon,” Corrigan said. “I can’t get along with him. It’s not working.”
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