“Yes, the Kingston, on Adelaide Street. If that’s gone too, give me the number of the police station around the corner.”
He got the number, and after parting with a fistful of coins was through. “Is this the Kingston?” he inquired.
“Yes, it is,” a young woman’s voice replied.
“And are you at the reception desk there?”
“I am. Who’s this?”
“Just somebody who would appreciate it if you could help settle a small bet we’re having here. I wonder, would you mind stepping across the hall for a moment and looking out the front door to your right, and then describe to me what you can see?”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t be doing that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s, er . . . not company policy.”
Corrigan had to stifle a laugh. His eyes were watering. “Then tell me what the large picture is above the main bar in the lounge.”
“That was taken away, I’m afraid.”
“I’d like to have seen them do it. It’s painted on the ceiling.”
A sudden shrill tone announced a disconnection. “There seems to be a technical fault,” Corrigan was informed when he checked with the operator.
Still smiling, he went back to the bar with his drink. In a niche among the shelves of bottles, standing between a darts trophy and jar of ticket stubs, there was a figurine that he hadn’t noticed before. It was of an Irish leprechaun, complete with hat and pipe. “So, you’re still haunting me, eh, Mick?” he grunted as he sat down on the stool. It was uncannily like the one he had in his hallway at home.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The hills behind the Bay to the east looked invitingly sunbaked after the chill and wet of winter in Pennsylvania. Below, as the plane descended on its final approach into San Francisco International Airport, fingers of houses and marinas creeping outward along the water’s edge formed complex, convoluted patterns like frost on a windowpane.
Corrigan, looking casual in an open-neck shirt, light windbreaker, dove-gray jeans, and sneakers, slipped a hand over Evelyn’s and leaned closer. He had been more relaxed than she had ever known him, telling stories and cracking bad jokes all through the flight. “You know, Eric was right,” he said. “We’ve been cooped up inside CLC for too long, worrying about its politics. It’s not worth it. This is the kind of thing we should be making more time for. There might be something to be said for those old books of his after all. People need to get their values straight.”
She smiled and treated him to a look of mock superciliousness. “Why go back two thousand years to find that out? I’ve been telling you the same thing for ages.”
“Have you? I never noticed.”
“My point exactly.”
“Then you’re right too. Let the world be advised that Joseph M. Corrigan is switching to a lower-wattage lifestyle. The high-power stuff, I’ll leave to the Pinders and the Tyrons. And the blood pressure that goes with it.”
“Half your time would be empty,” Evelyn pointed out. “No. On second thought, most of it.”
“Great.”
“What would you do with it?”
He kissed her on the cheek and pretended to think about it. “Oh, I’d find something.”
They spent the next couple of days sight-seeing around the city. They went to the aquarium, planetarium, botanical gardens, and museums in Golden Gate Park, rode cable cars, and ate the best at Fisherman’s Wharf, Japantown, and Broadway. They rented a car and drove north across the Golden Gate to the wine country, around the Bay to visit some of the researchers at Berkeley, and back across the Bay Bridge in the evening to see the SF Symphony, playing the winter season.
When they got back to the hotel, Corrigan called Hans Groener, his onetime colleague from MIT days, to confirm their visit to Stanford for the next day.
“Yes, that will be fine, Joe,” Hans said over the phone. “Also, I have a surprise for you.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I talked to an old friend of yours who’s out here now, and who would like to say hello again. So I invited her to join us for dinner tomorrow night and make it a foursome—Ivy Dupale.”
“Hey, terrific!” Corrigan called across the room to Evelyn. “How about this. Hans knows Ivy. She’s joining us for dinner tomorrow night.”
“How wonderful!”
“Fine, Hans. That’ll be just great.”
The following morning they left San Francisco again and headed southward this time, to Stanford University. Hans was involved in sleep and dream research, which Corrigan looked on as something different and quite probably interesting, but not really relevant to his own line of work. It would be good to see Hans again anyway, even if the visit did turn out to be mainly social. But after he and Evelyn arrived at the sprawling campus with its Spanish-inspired facades of rounded arches and shady colonnades, and had talked with Hans in his laboratory for only half an hour, he realized that he had been mistaken. Hans’s work could turn out to be very relevant indeed.
The DINS technology used by Pinocchio and EVIE used a configuration of electrodes inside the collar to create a dynamic pattern of ultra-high-frequency electric fields that penetrated the lower brain regions and brain stem. The fields superposed and were precisely shaped to add or cancel in different spots that could be very finely localized, which was how desired neural centers were activated selectively. However, attenuation and dispersion increased with penetration depth, reducing selectivity and hence the effectiveness of the technique. This was the main factor drat had restricted direct coupling to the medulla.
For several years, papers had been appearing in the scientific literature, reporting on an alternative approach using intersecting photon beams tuned to several narrow-frequency windows at which body tissue was found to be surprisingly transparent. It was only in talking with Hans that Corrigan first came to realize how rapidly these investigations had consolidated and were advancing. The new, emerging field was known as “Deep Selective Activation.”
“The window allows photons to penetrate coherently and maintain a tight focus, below disruptive ionization energies,” Hans explained. “On top of that, frequency tuning to specific neural states provides an additional dimension for fine probing. There’s no need for flooding the cells with huge numbers of photons.” He was lean and narrow-framed, with straight blond hair and a pale, thin-lipped countenance. The movies would have cast him as an SS officer whose sadism was a compensation for a physique that fell short of the Wagnerian Nordic ideal. In reality, Hans played American folk guitar and bred parakeets. Most of his equipment was being rebuilt currently, and his staff hidden away in offices or at computer terminals: there wasn’t a lot, really, to show that day.
“I knew you were dabbling in this, but I never realized it had come so far,” Corrigan confessed.
“DSA has had a boost from a lot of government work that was declassified,” Hans told him. “We’ve got quite a club springing up here on the West Coast. SRI are putting a team together. Todd’s group up at Berkeley.”
“We hoped to see him yesterday, but he’s away this week.”
“Hughes and Lockheed are in on it. Some department in the Air Force has been very active.”
The significance of the remark didn’t hit Corrigan just then. He was still telling himself inwardly that he would have to make a point of keeping more up to date with the literature in future. Get back to being a scientist again, and forget trying to turn into a corporate politician. Being back in academic surroundings was reawakening his appetite for intellectual excitement.
Evelyn was studying some charts of neural organization fixed to one of the walls. Corrigan’s background was software rather than interfacing, and his personal expertise at the working level lay in the area of self-modifying associative nets. What Hans was describing came closer to the kind of work that Evelyn had had experience of at Harvard and was now doing with Shipley.
“Hans, what are these references to ‘resona
nce modes’ here?” she asked curiously. “I use this mapping system practically every day, but I’ve never come across those before.”
Hans stepped across and looked pleased, rubbing the palms of his hands together and showing teeth with lots of metal. “Ah, yes, very good. You spotted it.” He nodded approvingly at Corrigan. “You’ve found a smart lady here, Joe.”
“And what else would you expect?”
Hans looked back and forth, taking in both of them. “This is something fairly recent that we’ve discovered through DSA. It’s quite exciting—something that I think you will find particularly interesting, Joe. We call it associative neural resonances.”
Corrigan’s eyebrows rose. “Which are? . . .”
“Shortcuts to generating complex pictures inside the brain. We’ve found that triggering just a few, precisely selected, neuronal groups can activate entire chains of connected imagery.”
“Wilder Penfield’s experiments, back in the forties,” Evelyn tossed in.
“Yes,” Hans agreed. “Except we can do it from the outside.” He glanced back at Corrigan. “You know how extraordinarily lucid dreams can be, yes? The images can be so rich in detail that it’s often impossible to tell whether one is asleep or not.”
“Sometimes I’ve been awake for five minutes before I realized I wasn’t awake yet,” Corrigan said.
“Exactly.” Hans nodded and went on. “Obviously that information isn’t coming from anywhere outside. It was already present there, in the mind. Random firings can set off whole trains of them that are linked together, which we experience as dreams—or it may be firings that are predisposed by recent repeated activity due to worry, intense emotional contexts, and that kind of thing.”
“Like the way a bell rings,” Evelyn said. “The complexity of the sound has nothing to do with how you hit it, or what with. It was already there implicitly, in the bell’s structure.”
“And with language,” Hans said. “Words are just a code system to trigger associations already established in the listener’s neural system from the experience of living. The information is in the listener, not the speaker. It seems to be a general characteristic of the neural system. And that is what we are learning to control. Activating just the right set of primitives can cause amazingly detail-rich images to be generated in the visual system. By ‘playing’ the input combinations like a keyboard, we can induce complete event-sequences to order, inside the subject’s mind, without having to inject huge data streams to specify every detail. We simply reactivate what’s already there. Much faster than conventional brute-force graphics. Much more efficient.”
The significance was apparent immediately. Here, possibly, was a totally new way of approaching the problem that Corrigan’s group had been grappling with of representing major portions of the real world. Instead of trying to supply every detail of an image, feed in just the right cues and let the subjects fill in the details themselves, from the inside.
But surely it couldn’t be that simple. Hans watched the frown forming on Corrigan’s face, knowing the objection that was coming.
Finally, Corrigan said, “These resonances. Are they unique—different for each individual? Or does everyone share the same ones? . . . I mean, if they’re unique, they can’t produce the same world for different people.”
“Yes, I know what you’re saying, Joe. But the fact is, there does seem to be a surprising degree of commonality. We are still very much in the fact-gathering stage, but the way it looks is that similar input code patterns do result in similar things being perceived by different people.”
Corrigan was looking undisguisedly skeptical. “How could that be, now?” he demanded.
Hans refused to be put on the defensive. “How do we know that we all see the same world anyway?” he challenged. “Oh, sure, we agree on the same broad descriptions—I’m not disputing that. But how do we know . . .” he paused, looking first at one, then the other, to emphasize his point, “that what we’re seeing is identical? We don’t. You’d be surprised how much in ordinary day-to-day living, people habitually see what they expect to see, not what’s there. Our tests show measures of agreement that are comparable. So the differences that we get are no worse than happen every day in the real world anyway.” He shrugged and turned up his hands to make one final point. “And in any case, we all tend to dream about similar things. That says there’s common circuitry at work somewhere.”
“But surely the degree by which different people disagree can’t be the same for all of them,” Evelyn said.
“That’s right—it varies as a Gaussian spectrum,” Hans said. “Ninety percent more-or-less agree what it’s like out there, and they define the ‘norm.’ But the fringe groups differ increasingly, until in the extreme cases they live in a different world entirely.”
“And we call them insane,” Corrigan said, getting the point.
Hans grinned at him jestingly. “Maybe you’re tackling VR the wrong way, Joe. Instead of trying to shovel a whole world into people’s heads, perhaps you should try inducing the right dreams, and let the machinery that’s already there inside do the work. That is what it evolved for, after all. Just as the best cures use the body’s own defenses.”
* * *
Ivy arrived late in the afternoon. She was looking good, had found herself a place in San Jose, and was heading up a space-imaging program at NASA, Ames. She asked about Tom Hatcher, Eric, and the others back at CLC, but—not so surprisingly, Corrigan supposed—did not show a great deal of curiosity about the progress of the project itself. Corrigan took the hint and didn’t push it on her. Evelyn got the same message.
From the university they went to eat at a place in Palo Alto that was a popular nightspot as well as a restaurant. Afterward, they stayed for a couple more drinks, and to dance. Late into the evening, while Evelyn was on the floor with Hans and the other two were taking a break, Ivy looked across at Corrigan over the rim of her glass and asked, “Are you going to marry her?”
Corrigan was used to Ivy’s direct way of saying exactly what was on her mind. He had found it disconcerting at first; later it became refreshing. He grinned forbearingly. “Now, why would I want to go and be doing a thing like that?”
“You two go so well together.”
“Exactly. Why go and spoil a good relationship?”
Ivy sipped her drink unblinkingly. “I think you should risk it. She wants to, you know. Women have this kind of radar. We can tell.”
“There’s an old Irish saying,” Corrigan told her. “If you want praise, die; if you want blame, marry. People change when they feel owned. They start blaming each other for not coming up to expectations that were never realistic in the first place.”
“If you’re smart enough to think that, you can’t be dumb enough to believe it, Joe,” Ivy said.
Corrigan took a mouthful of drink, thought for a moment, and set his glass down. “Ah, enough of this heavy stuff,” he said. “Have you got your breath back? This is a great one that they’re starting now. Let’s go back and show Hans and Evelyn a thing or two.”
But Ivy’s comment about he and Evelyn going so well together had struck a sympathetic chord in him somewhere. Some of the women back at CLC had said the same. For some reason, it was always the women who noticed such things—or at least, who mentioned them. And socially, it was one area where his life felt incomplete.
He was unusually quiet and thoughtful all the way through the drive back up to San Francisco.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was too late in the season to visit Yosemite as Evelyn had wanted—reports were that the approaches were already treacherous due to snow. So, following a suggestion of some people that they talked to at breakfast the next morning, they postponed that for another occasion, and instead drove across the San Joaquin Valley and up into the Sierra foothills to the Mother Lode country of 1849 gold-rush fame.
They toured the old mining town of Columbia, preserved as a state monument, where the build
ings remained inside and out just as they had been a century and a half before, and residents wearing traditional dress still worked the old crafts. The Wells Fargo Company office was still there, whose scales had weighed over one and a half billion dollars’ worth of precious metals during the gold era.
Eight miles away they found California’s largest public cave, Moaning Cavern, estimated to be a million years old and large enough to hold the Statue of Liberty upright and still leave room to spare. The bones of approximately a hundred people dating back to prehistoric times had been found at the bottom, 180 feet below the surface—probably the results of unfortunates accidentally falling into the cavern, since until its opening up in recent times the entrance had been just a small, vegetation-covered hole in the surface. The guide, who was also the owner, told them that from the positions that the bones were found in, some of the victims had apparently survived the fall and tried to climb out—a tough proposition, considering the overhangs. Traces of carbonized wood suggested that perhaps others at the surface had thrown down torches in an effort to help. “Of course, it’s impossible to be sure,” he told them, pinching his mustache and chuckling. “But we like to think that some of ’em made it.”
They drove higher into the Sierra, the wild range separating California from Nevada. In every direction they looked they saw tree-covered hills, sweeping expanses of canyon and rock, unfolding vistas of lakes and mountains. Corrigan found himself intoxicated by the feelings of freedom and openness. They gazed down at foaming creeks far below them in sheer ravines, stared up in awe at sequoias with trunks more than twenty feet in diameter. From a crag high in the Sonora pass they clung close as they stared out over the vastness, and it seemed that all of it belonged just to them.
“This time you’ve got to admit it, Joe,” Evelyn said. “Come on. There are some things that even Ireland doesn’t have.”
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