Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  He pointed to a figure of an Irish leprechaun, identical, as far as he could judge, to the one in his hallway back at the flat. “That’s Mick. He keeps popping up wherever I go. Do you know, I’ve one the same as that at home. It was a wedding present.”

  “Was that to the wife who left yesterday?”

  “No, there was one other before—a while back, now.”

  “Maybe he’s haunting you,” Lilly said. “Can you have leprechaun ghosts?”

  “Well, if it’s a crock of gold that he’s after, he’s wasting his time haunting me,” Corrigan said.

  They resumed walking. “So, when you see into people, what things do you see?” Lilly asked, getting serious again and picking up their earlier subject.

  Corrigan thought back to Wilbur, Oliver, and Delia. “Oh, the strange ways they go about trying to get what they want,” he replied.

  “Such as?”

  “Well, if you asked them, I suppose most of them would say that what they want is to be happy, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “A young fella was in earlier. He’s pinned everything on a job that he’s after, and if you want my opinion it’s a scoundrel he’ll be working for.” Corrigan made a brief, empty-handed gesture. “You see these people chasing after money and success and the like, because those are the things that they think will make them happy. But they’re making their happiness depend on what others have the power to give or take away. So don’t they become slaves to the people who control those things? And can people who are not free be happy? They cannot. So have such people obtained what they set out for? They have not. They’re looking in the wrong places.”

  They found a pay booth. Corrigan called a local cab company, giving his name and their location. “I see you’re not listed with us,” the synthesized voice commented. “We have an introductory discount for opening an account tonight.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Can I register you for our bonus-mileage club?”

  “No.”

  “How about the all-in-the-family group scheme? Brand new.”

  “We’d just like to go home. Is that all right?”

  A baffled pause, then, “A cab will be there in five minutes.” Corrigan shook his head as the call cleared.

  “Are you free, then, Joe?” Lilly asked.

  “I’d say so, yes,” he replied.

  “And why’s that?”

  He shrugged and gave her a quick, easy grin. “I’m what you might call a self-unmade man. I didn’t always do what I do now, you know. It took a lot of effort to work my way down to it. But now I’m free to live according to the things I believe in, and nobody can compel me to think or believe anything I choose not to. So the things I do value, nobody can take away.”

  “Are all the Irish like that?” Lilly asked. She sounded fascinated.

  “Oh, God, not at all. You’ve never met such a crowd of rogues and villains in your life.”

  “So how come you’re different?”

  “Ah, well, I went through some bad experiences a few years back. Maybe that changed some things, if you know what I mean.”

  Lilly hesitated, obviously wanting to be tactful. But for some reason it seemed important to her. “Things?” she repeated. “What kind of things? Do you mean psychologically?”

  Corrigan spotted the cab approaching and stepped forward, raising an arm. “Exactly,” he said over his shoulder. “The pieces are coming back together again, but they don’t seem to function the way that most people’s do.”

  They climbed in, and Lilly gave the address on North Side. As soon as the door closed, a screen in the rear compartment began running commercials. Corrigan paid an extra dollar to shut it off.

  “Being different might not be such a bad thing,” Lilly said. “You said you used to work in computers, but you sound more like a philosopher. What kind of a society lets its philosophers end up working in bars?”

  “Believe me, there’s no better place to learn the subject,” Corrigan assured her as the cab pulled away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lilly lived in a two-bedroom unit in a complex north of the Allegheny Center. It was clean and comfortable, feminine but not cute and lacy, casual without being a mess: all about what Corrigan would have expected. She produced a liter of Californian Chablis to go with the steak sandwiches that they had stopped for on the way.

  Now Corrigan was able to give her his full attention for the first time. She was attractive not just physically but in the rarer, more appealing way that comes with the feeling of two minds being in tune. He hoped that his coming back here with her wasn’t going to be interpreted as going along with anything more intimate that she might have in mind. The day had been emotionally fatiguing, and he had worked a hectic shift through to the early hours. Enough was enough. If ever there had been a time when a rain check was in order, this was it.

  But such fears proved groundless. Lilly was more interested in hearing about his years in computing and the “bad experiences” that he had mentioned which put an end to them. For anyone to ask was a novel experience in itself. So, although the hour had surpassed ungodliness, he refilled the glasses and settled himself back to regard her across the empty plates on the table.

  “Is it stuffy in here after the food?” Lilly asked suddenly. “I can’t tell. I’ve got a sinus problem that stops me smelling things.”

  “It’s okay,” Corrigan said. “I used to be with one of the big companies here: Cybernetic Logic Corporation—I worked at their corporate research center out at Blawnox. They were big in Artificial Intelligence-based systems. Still are, for that matter. The aim of the AI field had always been true, human-level intelligence, one day. But around the turn of the century, the technology was plateauing out. After some progress and mixed results, there didn’t seem to be any obvious way to advance things further.”

  “Yes, I know CLC,” Lilly said. “They’ve got a building downtown, near Westinghouse.”

  Corrigan nodded. “Well, about twelve years ago, CLC set up a big research project to try a new way of achieving AI. It might come as a surprise, but I practically invented it.” He paused, but Lilly merely returned a stare that could have meant anything. Corrigan went on: “You see, traditionally there had been two approaches to AI: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down meant trying to understand all the complexity of this thing we call ‘mind’ in sufficient detail to code it into programs.” He waved a hand in front of his face. “Forget it. The immensity of the task would make it intractable, even if we knew what to code.”

  A strange half-smile was playing on Lilly’s lips, but in his soliloquizing Corrigan failed to notice. He continued: “The other way, bottom-up, meant trying to create simple neuronlike configurations that could be made to evolve, the same as we did. The problem you run into there is that you don’t realize how efficient animal nervous systems are until you try imitating them. You can spend ten years, fifty million dollars, and the best brains in the business putting TV cameras and legs on a computer to make it walk, and the average twelve-month-old will run rings around it—literally. The simple fact is, computers don’t interact very well with the real world outside. They haven’t had a billion years of evolution optimizing them for it. They operate better on their own, internal worlds.”

  Lilly nodded, finally, and raised a hand. “It’s okay, Joe. You don’t have to go on. The project was called Oz—set up under a new CLC division called Xylog, across the river, along Carson Street—yes? The idea was to let an AI evolve by interacting with a virtual world.”

  Corrigan stared at her in astonishment. “Xylog! That’s right. Some of the buildings are still there . . . I don’t know what they’re used for today. How in heaven would you know about that?”

  Instead of answering immediately, Lilly continued, “But Oz was shut down in the preliminary test phase. Before that, were you working on the program that led up to it: a project called EVIE?”

  Corrigan shook his head bemuse
dly. “How in God’s name—”

  “I’ve got one more,” Lilly said. “Then you’ll get your answers. What happened? Why was the Oz project abandoned, and what did it have to do with your winding up in a place like the Camelot?”

  It wasn’t something that Corrigan normally talked about, especially to people he hardly knew. But these were hardly normal circumstances. “How much do you know about how the interaction was going to be implemented?” he asked, to avoid launching off into needless explanation.

  “Enough,” Lilly answered. “The idea was that the system would learn by manipulating humanoid animations to emulate real-person surrogates projected in from the outside.”

  The AI would evolve by controlling artificial characters in a virtual world. As a substitute for the directional thrust of biological evolution, the system would endeavor to shape the behavior of its creations closer to that of surrogate representations of volunteer participants coupled in from the outside. Thus, the virtual world would contain two kinds of inhabitants: humanoid “animations,” manipulated by the computer; and “surrogates,” controlled by real people, represented as themselves. The test would be to see if the machine could make the behavior of the animations indistinguishable. From her reply, Lilly was aware of all this.

  “And am I right in supposing that you know how the surrogates were coupled in?” Corrigan said. “VIV? DIVAC? You’ve heard of them?” He meant the latest developments at that time in direct-coupled neural I/O, which had appeared on the scene after the earlier VR paraphernalia of head-mounted displays, bodysuits, and so forth. It had come out of work going on at places like Carnegie Mellon and MIT, certain government departments, and Advanced Telecomms at Kyoto, that involved interaction directly with the neural structures of the brain.

  “Yes.” Lilly nodded.

  Corrigan sighed. “But we didn’t know as much as we thought we did, Lilly. We were going straight into people’s heads—nothing like it had been tried before. And there was too much haste and competitive pressure. We didn’t spend the time that we should have to get it right. People started coming unglued with mental disorientation and perceptual disturbances. I was one of them. I’ve been slowly getting my act back together ever since.”

  “So was that what ended your first marriage?” Lilly asked.

  Corrigan nodded. “Evelyn was a neurophysiologist from Boston who joined the project back in the early days—what you’d call my kind, I suppose. But I was young and brash, too obsessed with my career. Things soured, and when I turned into a vegetable, she opted out. I don’t blame her, really. She did well to put up with it as long as she did.”

  “And the second one—the one who left last night; it wasn’t the same with her?” Lilly said.

  Corrigan leaned forward to top up their glasses. “Oh, that was a joke from the beginning—not done for what you’d call exactly the most romantic of reasons. My rehabilitation counselor suggested it. She thought it would help to bring a better focus and some stability into my life.” He drank from his glass and looked across at her. “Okay, enough of that. Now suppose you tell me how what you seem to know fits with working in a shoe-finishing shop.”

  Lilly shrugged lightly, as if to say it was all very simple, really. “I used to be with the Space Defense Command up to twelve years ago—OTSC at Inglewood. I was a scientific evaluator involved in the development of DIVAC.”

  “My God,” Corrigan murmured.

  SDC’s Operational Training & Simulator Center in California was where the final component had come from to make a full-sensory direct-neural interface possible. Up until then, direct-neural I/O coupling had been at the lowermost level of the brain, and research had been confined to the body’s motor system. DIVAC, standing for Direct Input Vision & ACoustics, besides adding speech and auditory capability, succeeded in entering at a higher level to achieve the long-awaited goal of integrating vision as well.

  Some of the surrogates who were to have been projected into the simulation from the real world outside had been supplied by the military. “Were you one of the Air Force volunteers who were brought in?” Corrigan asked. He had met some of them then, but not all.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I was part of a group from California. A guy called Tyron came out from Pittsburgh and interviewed the candidates. I was one of the ones selected. Later, we were flown to Pittsburgh, checked into a hotel there, and the next morning we were driven to Xylog to begin preliminary tests.”

  It didn’t take too much guesswork to see what was coming. “And? . . .” Corrigan prompted.

  “I’m not sure. That’s where it all gets vague. The next recollections I have are of being in a world of jigsaw pieces in Mercy Hospital. The shrinks told me that there had been problems that nobody anticipated, and the project was shut down. I was a mental basket case for a long time afterward. . . . And I’ve just been muddling along and trying to get something of a life back together ever since.” Lilly exhaled abruptly and looked at him in a way that asked what was the point of this. “But I don’t have to tell you any of this,” she said. “That’s what happened to you too, isn’t it?”

  Suddenly, Corrigan sensed what had drawn somebody like this to a bartender. She had known this about him, somehow. That was why she had come back to the Camelot tonight. It was what this whole meeting had been leading up to.

  “Can I ask you something?” Lilly said.

  “Sure. I’m not promising to answer.”

  “What do you remember people being like before?”

  “Before when?”

  “Before Oz. Before you had the breakdown.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d just like to know. It has to do with something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.”

  Corrigan considered the question. “It feels like a long time ago,” he replied finally. “Like trying to think back over the top to the other side of a hill. . . . But what I remember is being more like most other people. You know . . .” he waved his hand to and fro over the tabletop between them, “the way it is with you and me now: being understood without having to spell everything out.”

  “You could talk about the things you think inside?” Lilly said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Like you and I seem to be able to do. Why should that be so strange, Joe? Are you saying you don’t feel that way with people anymore?”

  Corrigan was unable to stifle a guffaw. “You’ve got to be joking! Come on, you’ve been telling me yourself how it is. You saw that bunch we were among all evening. What is this?”

  Lilly didn’t react to the frivolity but continued looking at him steadily. “The strange thing is, I remember it all the same way,” she said. “Why should that be? How did you explain it to yourself?”

  Corrigan did his best to draw together his scattered musings of many years into something coherent. “I suppose, as a process of projection: projecting back out of my head a picture of how I wanted things to be . . . probably subconsciously.” That was how the specialists explained it. “By being projected into a past that was no longer accessible, what I wanted became unchallengeable. Hence the fragments of my identity that were coming back together had a basis that was secure. Psychological foundation-building. Does that make sense?”

  “It makes too much sense, Joe. Way too much.”

  Corrigan frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Lilly’s face softened into a thin, vaguely despairing smile. It caught Corrigan the wrong way, striking him as condescending and mildly mocking. “Doesn’t what you just said strike you—just a little bit, maybe—as incredibly insightful for someone who’s supposed to be crazy?” she said.

  Supposed to be? What was she saying? Well, true, he didn’t believe himself to be crazy, exactly—not anymore; but for the disorientations that he had experienced in the not-so-distant past, it was probably as good a description as any. All the experts that he’d talked to had confirmed that he was a casualty of a massive assault on the neural system. Wh
o was this person to be questioning it now?—even if she had been an Air Force computer scientist once.

  “I don’t relate to people anymore,” he said. “My mind works along different paths, with a lot of short circuits. It makes connections that mean things to me, but which other people don’t follow. My own internal virtual reality. That could be getting pretty close to most people’s idea of crazy.”

  Lilly shook her head. “That won’t wash, Joe. If those connections were the result of disruptions that you experienced, they’d be private and unique—purely subjective. But even if I had been affected similarly, how could it result in the same connections?” She gave him a few seconds to object. But he couldn’t. What irked him was that she was right. She must have felt this affinity the first time they talked in the Camelot. While he had been camouflaging his abdication from life, she had remained the scientist.

  She went on. “You want to know what I think? You’ve got it the wrong way around. The ‘virtual’ isn’t any aberration that you and I have manufactured inside our heads.” She waved an arm in a circular movement to indicate the room, the building outside of it, and everything beyond. “It’s all of this.” She waited, but Corrigan was still too preoccupied with his internal self-admonishments to register what she was saying. Finally she commented dryly, “You guys did a hell of a job.”

  Corrigan shook himself out of his fuming and downed a half-glass of wine in a gulp. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oz was never abandoned,” Lilly said. “It went ahead as scheduled. We’re still in it. This whole world full of lunatics that we’re in is the simulation! It has been for the last twelve years.”

  Corrigan stared at her with a mixture of dismay and annoyance. Just when he had started to believe that she really was different, and had confided in her things that he’d mentioned to nobody, not Muriel, nor Sarah Bewley . . . now this. It was like hearing a physics Nobel Laureate suddenly start prattling about ESP. He groaned and shook his head.