“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,” reporting 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 m
oves 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.
Fractal algorithms provided a method for generating a lot of material from minimal information—the way Nature compresses its assembly directions in DNA. The principal drawback was that to produce a convincingly realistic output, some kind of randomizing capability needed to be introduced, which meant no two results of applying the same input formula would, in general, be alike. Hence, two separate runs to generate a tree, say (or leaf, or rock, or mountain, or snowflake), from the same set of starting parameters would both look like a tree, but they wouldn’t be the same tree. This would probably be all right for representing things like forests, skies, or general scenery where precise details didn’t matter too much; but other situations demanded a different approach.
So in these latter cases there seemed to be no alternative to having to store all the detail that might be required. Even with the kinds of faster processing methods and special-purpose hardware that Barry Neinst had been exploring, this imposed severe limitations on how large a world they could hope to simulate accurately. For the world to be sufficiently varied and interesting, not all of it could be represented everywhere, all the time. Nor, of course, did it need to be. So the system was organized to concentrate on the parts making up the immediate experiences of the individuals experiencing the simulation. Thus, indeed, in these worlds the Moon was not there when nobody was looking at it; and the question of trees falling in deserted forests didn’t arise, since with nobody around, forests ceased to exist.
For smoother continuity, and to reduce the occurrences of “black-hole glitches”—as when somebody opened a door to find themselves staring into a featureless void for a perplexing moment—various ways were tried for getting the system to anticipate and pre-access the branches that were most likely to be needed next. But none of them proved wholly satisfactory. Following chess-playing-machine parlance, this became known as the “look-ahead” problem. Solving it, along with “realscaping” more of the Pittsburgh area, was the main focus of the EVIE group’s work through the second half of the year.
During that period, Ivy Dupale resigned from the company and got a job on the West Coast.
With Christmas approaching, Corrigan and Evelyn drove out one evening to Eric Shipley’s house in Franklin, north of the city. Tom Hatcher and several others from the project were also due. It was a homey, unpretentious place, nestled in a fold of wooded hillside that provided seclusion, yet with the township center conveniently less than a mile away. It was the main house of what had once been a farm. The outbuildings were now converted or demolished, and most of the land sold off, except for a couple of acres forming a shady, somewhat overgrown garden bordered by a creek at the rear. Shipley lived there with his graying, genially disposed wife, Thelma. They had two sons and a daughter, all of them grown and gone in different directions. The children’s rooms were always kept the way they had been for their frequent visits home.
Hatcher was already there when Corrigan and Evelyn arrived. With him were two of his programmers, Charlie Wade and Sue Lepez, and also Bryan Reed, one of the electronics technicians working on EVIE. There were sodas, coffee, and beer. Later on, a couple of pizzas arrived. By the middle of the evening the talk had ranged over shop topics and settled on the do’s and don’ts for surviving in a popular VR game called “Sniper.” Shipley drew Corrigan away to go and see an old nautical chronometer of polished teak and gleaming brass that Shipley had in his study. It was not long, however, before they were back to the subject of developments within CLC. Corrigan sensed that this was the real reason why Shipley had taken him aside.
Most people—including Corrigan himself—had seen the consolidation of EVIE under his direction as an effective promotion, and an indicator that he was solidly on his way upward to better things. Shipley, however, wasn’t so sure.
“You said yourself, once, that in the long term EVIE doesn’t lead anywhere,” he reminded Corrigan. “You called it a short-term stunt, a hybrid mishmash. So what does that say about anyone doing you a favor by putting you in charge of it?”
But Corrigan was still riding the wave. “Ah, come on, Eric,” he said lightly. “You wouldn’t want me think that you’re having an attack of sour grapes, now, would you? Don’t you remember, too, that EVIE was to be the main-thrust program for two years? Whoever runs it now will automatically pick up whatever comes next.”
“That could be changing, Joe. There’s been a lot going on involving Tyron and Pinder at the division level that we’re only getting parts of. My guess is that corporate thinking has been turning away from EVIE ever since that business with Feller and Faber. In other words, they’re saddling you with a lame duck.”
“What else would they have in its place, then?” Corrigan challenged, his voice a touch sharper. They were still a year or more away from shifting up to the thalamus—and there was no guarantee that it would work even then.
Shipley shrugged and showed his hands. “You tell me.”
“Why assume that they’ve got anything else at all?”
“Then look at it this way. If EVIE really is a sinking ship, whose name is being quietly dissociated from it and who’ll be the skipper who goes down?” Shipley paused to let Corrigan think about that. “Then ask yourself what Tyron and his people were really brought in for. It certainly wasn’t just to take over Ivy’s section. That’s a holding operation.”
This time Corrigan said nothing but stared hard at him for several seconds. Shipley waited, holding his eye questioningly. Before they could resume, however, the long, loose-limbed figure of Tom Hatcher sauntered in from the living room, holding a can of beer in one hand and licking pizza grease off the fingers of the other. Evelyn was behind him, looking fresh and casually appealing with her long, fair hair, white top, and red, clinging slacks.
“Not interrupting anything, are we?” Hatcher drawled. “ ’Cause if we are it’s too bad. This is a party.”
Corrigan hesitated, then grinned. “No, it’s okay, Tom. Just shop as always.” It was a good time to ease things up a little anyway. Evelyn squeezed past Hatcher to hand Corrigan a sausage on a cocktail stick, then snuggled close while he slipped an arm around her. Hatcher went over to look at the chronometer that Corrigan had been examining earlier.
“Say, that’s some piece. They don’t make ’em like that these days.”
“Not a shred of plastic in it, and the knobs don’t come off in your hand,” Corrigan agreed.
“Can’t say I’d want to carry it around on my wrist, though.”
“You didn’t have to. You had a ship to carry these around.”
“Where do the b
atteries go?” Hatcher moved to admire a highly polished period revolver, mounted as a display on a board fixed to the wall nearby. “Looks like a .44 Dragoon Colt,” he commented. “Probably from the Civil War.”
“Right on,” Shipley said, nodding.
“I didn’t know you were into that kinda thing.”
“I’m not. Thelma picked it up at a yard sale for five dollars.”
“Does it work?”
“No—just an ornament.”
“Too bad.” Hatcher’s interest in guns was well known.
Shipley nodded in the direction that Hatcher and Evelyn had come from. “What’s going on back there?” he inquired.
“Shop,” Evelyn said. “Is it ever different with this bunch?”
“Charlie’s talking about his accelerator for the new look-ahead tree,” Hatcher explained. “I had enough of it all day. I came here to get away.”
They still hadn’t found a reliable way of paralleling the human intuition for knowing what people were apt to do next. In a test the previous day, the system had properly anticipated all the things that one of the experimenters could reasonably have been expected to do with a magazine when he picked it up and rolled it—except use it to swat a simulated fly. Hence there was a hangup upon impact, in which time the velocity of the magazine fell to zero, and the fly was able to walk with impunity onto the object that was supposed to have flattened it.
Machines were good at organizing the world into neat hierarchies of computed probability. The real world, however—essentially because of the way that the people in it behaved—didn’t work that way.
“Charlie’s still an idealist,” Hatcher said. “He just won’t accept that the world isn’t logical.”
“Well, it doesn’t work by formal, Aristotelian logic,” Shipley agreed. “You see, that’s purely deductive: you start with what’s true, and from that the way the world has to be follows. That’s what machines are good at. But in real life you start with experience of the way the world is, and then infer the reasons why and hope they come close to being true. Inductive: that’s what people do—and even they aren’t sure how. That’s why textbook science and real science aren’t the same thing.”
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