Borth sat down finally, indicating that he was through. He continued looking expectantly at Corrigan. Corrigan, however, having had his orders, left it to someone else to respond. Hamils launched off into a fairly standard line about Virtual Reality technologies offering new ways for users to interact with data: Through suitable presentation to the user’s senses, information normally handled as abstract symbols could be transformed into the furnishings of a directly perceivable “world.” Processing would then take the form of manipulating those objects via intuitively meaningful actions as used in the everyday world. Glinberg gave the commonly cited example of a bicycle. “To compute the correct angle to lean at for taking a corner at a particular speed requires solving a complicated equation of physics. But the five-year-old kid just feels the right thing to do, and does it. Well, the way you do forecasting at present is tackling the problem as numbers; what Joe’s people are working on will give you a bike.”
“So it’s not one of these systems that thinks it knows my job better than I do,” Borth said, assuming the position of one of his clients. “I’m still the best judge of my own business. It simply gives me a better way of seeing the angles.”
“Exactly,” Hamils said.
Which gave a clear and concise picture, certainly. And it was obviously the kind of thing that the customer wanted to hear. The only problem was that it bore no resemblance to what was actually envisaged at CLC. Pinocchio Two was aimed at shifting the coupling level of the existing motor interface to a higher region of the brain stem and adding speech; EVIE was a short-term kluge to gain experience with vision before the whole thing was redesigned to DNC. The kind of thing that Hamils was talking about, if it ever materialized at all, was years away in the future, at least.
Corrigan tried to inject some measure of perspective but received a firm “not now” signal from Hamils. Borth gave no indication of wanting a detailed technical explanation of either project. It made Corrigan wonder what he was doing here at all. He suspected that the reason was primarily for effect: to maintain an image of CLC’s corporate responsiveness. Therese Loel knew of the huge potential market within F & F’s client base, and had mentioned the DNC program simply to be sure that nothing of possible relevance was missed. Borth had asked for a specialist; the company had obliged. Now everyone was reading too much into it.
“Have you seen our research organization down at Pittsburgh?” Hamils asked Borth.
“I’ve been to the head office in the city a couple of times, but never out at the labs, no,” Borth replied.
Hamils inclined his head for a moment. “Maybe we could offer you a trip down there to see what goes on?” he suggested. “Then Joe’s people could show you the whole state of the art. What do you think?”
“Sounds good,” Borth replied. “I’d like that.” He glanced at his colleagues. They seemed interested. “We’ll all come,” he announced.
Hamils looked pleased with the morning’s work. “Joe will set it up when he gets back,” he said. “Okay, Joe? Can you fix that for us?”
There it was at last: a direct question. What else was Corrigan supposed to say? “Sure, I’d be happy to.” He forced his expression to remain calm and composed. “That would be no problem at all. But we are in changeover mode to the new project just at this moment. . . . Could we schedule it for a little later in time?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“You come home at some unearthly hour, and all you’ve done since is drink coffee. No sleep, nothing to eat. Why can’t you admit that it’s a textbook case of delayed shock response, following your recent emotional trauma?”
“Horace, shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. In fact, you don’t know anything about what’s going on at all.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Joe. It’s perfectly normal. The symptoms were described exactly by Fenwick Zellor in—”
Corrigan flipped the manual override on the kitchen monitor panel to “off.” Then he returned to his chair at the table, topped up his mug, and resumed contemplating the design of floral bunches and foliations on the wallpaper opposite.
Although he was looking away from it, he knew that above the work surface behind him was a spice rack fixed to the side of a cabinet—a flimsy, wooden affair of two shelves and supporting ends, holding an assortment of small glass jars. It was outside the range of his immediate attention—as far as could be ascertained from outward appearances, anyway—and the likelihood of anything else in the room affecting it in some way in the next few seconds was vanishingly small. That meant that it would rank low in the probability tables constantly being updated by the program that tried to guess which features of the surroundings were likely to be objects of action or change in the immediate future.
The number of discrete objects needed to make up a simulated world that aspired to be in any way authentic was stupendous. Every one of those objects had, associated with it, a list of latent attributes that might require activating at any time, according to circumstances. A book taken randomly off a shelf and thumbed, for example; a rug kicked back across the floor; a candy bar broken—all would involve the sudden revealing of new information that had previously been hidden. The number of conceivable ways in which a given situation might develop in the next instant was so astronomic that no method of organizing the data could make all of the possible continuations equally available for processing in the time necessary to create smooth, realistic transitions: the computers couldn’t generate dirt and worms under every square foot of grass in Pennsylvania all the time, just in case somebody were to decide on a whim to pick up a shovel and dig a hole somewhere.
So what the system did was identify the most likely continuations, based on its accumulating experience of how people tended to behave, and make sure that the pertinent descriptors would always be the fastest accessible. Thus, there was a small but not insignificant possibility that the mug in Corrigan’s hand might slip and shatter—and the pointers to such details as the internal structure, texture, and fracture modes of the porcelain would therefore be high in the current access tree. There was a bowl containing two oranges an arm’s reach away from him on the table, and the distinct possibility presented itself that he might decide to peel one of them; subfiles defining the properties and behavior of the pulp, fruit, juice, and pips would all have been shuffled up to ready-access status when he arrived in the vicinity and sat down. Similarly for the pages of the magazine lying underneath the fruit bowl, the contents of the pockets of his jacket, slung over the back of another chair, and the details of the palm of his hand, resting on the tabletop—in case he chose to turn his hand over and look at it. But for the spice rack behind him—out of sight, and not something that a person would normally pay attention to. . . .
In a slow, natural movement, consciously suppressing muscle tension and keeping his gaze on the far wall to avoid signaling any intentions to the eye-tracking software, he set the mug down and leaned back in his chair. Then, abruptly, he leaped up and whirled around, in the same movement shooting out a hand to smash one of the spice rack’s ends outward.
If his attention hadn’t been totally focused, alert for every detail of what happened, he might well have missed it, even then. But for someone who knew what to look for, everything was wrong. For a brief instant—barely perceptible, but definite—there was a break in the movement of his hand just as it touched. The sting and the sound came a fraction too late. And there was a fleeting moment of blankness in the break before the detail of splintered wood and the exposed grain added itself. He stared, oblivious to the clattering of spice jars falling on the countertop and rolling off to the floor. When he pried off one of the shelves hanging by an end and snapped it experimentally, the effect was perfect. He dropped the pieces onto the counter and sat down again at the table.
So it was true.
He snorted humorlessly to himself as Lilly’s words came back: “It makes too much sense . . . Way too much.” Wasn’t he, she had said, being just a little to
o insightful for someone who was supposed to be crazy?
Of course, it was too much of a coincidence that both he and she, involved in the same project twelve years ago, should have undergone similar psychologically disrupting experiences, and afterward have perceived a world severely distorted to begin with but steadily improving with time.
And that both he and she should suffer from an impaired sense of smell. The first cranial nerve, the Olfactory, serving the most primitive of the senses, is the only one to synapse in the cerebrum. They had never been able to carry the DNC interfacing level beyond the thalamus.
And that in all this time their travel options should have been limited for “medical” reasons. The preparations for Oz had included a major program of systematically recording and encoding all the architectural, geographic, and other visual details of the city—a process known as “realscaping”—in order to re-create any scene realistically in a virtual presentation. But there had to be limits. The program had covered only Pittsburgh and the surrounding area—and the effort entailed by that had been massive enough. In addition, Xylog merged its database with others compiled by cooperating organizations that had carried out similar schemes elsewhere. One of those had been Himomatsu Inc. of Tokyo, which explained how Corrigan had been able to “visit” Japan four years previously.
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 brai
n.”
“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 acknowledge 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.
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