“Isn’t that just—”
He slammed the door before she finished, and went out the front of the house. His car screeched out of the driveway moments later.
But he did not get all that drunk. After he’d had a couple in one of the bars downtown and calmed down a little, he went to the phone and called the Vista Hotel. A minute later he was through to Amanda Ramussienne.
“Why, Joe, how nice to hear from you,” she purred. “I enjoyed talking to you at lunch so much. Where are you?”
“Just a few blocks away. It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be very gentlemanly to let you go back tomorrow without so much as a goodbye. Have you eaten?”
“Not yet, after this afternoon.”
“I haven’t yet either. I thought you might like to join me. What do you think?”
“What a nice idea.”
“How are you fixed?”
“Sure, I can make it. Give me forty minutes to spruce up.”
“I’ll be there at eight,” Corrigan said.
“I look forward to it,” she murmured. There was just the right hint of a double entendre in the way she said it.
Nothing had changed when Corrigan got back to the house in the early hours. Evelyn had gone. It gave him a feeling of unencumbrance and freedom, of decks cleared for what had become the only important thing in life. Oz was his. He had wrested it out of what had seemed a lost cause, when every sign had pointed to Tyron taking control via COSMOS. He felt like a grimly confident general on the eve of battle. Even if his closest ally had deserted him in the final hour, nothing could take away victory now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was one of those awakenings that come suddenly, like a light being switched on, unlike other mornings when Corrigan could spend ages tugging himself free from the clutches of sleep. He felt unusually light and sprightly—more charged up than he could remember feeling in a long time. Maybe he would call Lilly and see about meeting somewhere for lunch.
After leaving the former Xylog site they had come back to Oakland, bought some wine and cooked themselves a dinner at his place, then talked on until the early hours. The suggestion of her staying over had permeated the mood of the evening unspoken. But few turnoffs could be more effective than an awareness of being in a simulation subject to monitoring and recording, and the understanding to wait for more conducive circumstances had been just as mutual, again with no need for anything to be said. The rapport they seemed to have was uncanny, he reflected as he stared up into the darkness. Or was that simply how any two real people would affect each other after twelve subjective years among animations?
Something was odd.
It could have been a difference in temperature or humidity, or perhaps a subtle change in the odor or acoustic properties. But something felt wrong about the room. And the pillow was silky. They didn’t have silky pillows—Muriel thought they were too clinging.
“Lights, Horace,” he called. Nothing happened.
He reached out and groped for the switch on the wall-mounted lamp above the bed. But his fingers found nothing, just a blank wall. And instead of the padded headboard below the lamp, he found what felt like a polished brass rail connected to a bedpost.
Bewildered, he pushed back the covers and sat up. The face of a clock was glowing at him from the bedside unit that the time was 6:30 A.M. There shouldn’t have been a clock on the bedside unit, nor the lamp whose outline he could now make out in the light from the clock. He felt for the base of the lamp, found the switch, and turned it . . . to find that he was not in his apartment in Oakland at all.
But at the same time, the surroundings were familiar: the vanity with its mirror and lights, walk-in closet with louvered doors, satin drapes and shag carpet. . . . He was back in the house that he and Evelyn had lived in at Fox Chapel twelve years ago. The room was untidy, with the pants from one of his suits thrown over a chair along with a crumpled shirt and some socks, shoes tossed haphazardly by the closet, and clothes overflowing around the laundry basket.
He blinked, swung his legs out, and sat in confusion on the edge of the bed, trying to make sense of it. It made no sense. He got up, crossed over to the window, and peered through the drapes. The cluttered housefronts and cramped urban streets of Oakland were gone; instead, roomy, upmarket homes with wide driveways, standing comfortably secluded in wooded suburban surroundings. There was no doubt about it: this was Fox Chapel.
Numbly, he fumbled his way into a robe and went out into the hall and along to the living area. His briefcase was on the long coffee table in front of the couch, with papers and a notepad scattered in front of it, and pushed to one end were an empty coffee mug and a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. The side table with the computer monitor had been pulled forward for easy viewing from the couch, and the still-connected keyboard was resting on one of the arms. It looked as if he had been working late last night. He went over and shuffled through the papers. They were all to do with preliminary test schedules for the Oz project. He activated the terminal and checked the current date. It read Tuesday, October 12, 2010. Oz had been due to go on-line at around that time, late in 2010.
Still baffled, he went through to the kitchen. As he did so, he became aware of a different feeling in the way his body moved. He felt lighter on his feet, more lithe and supple than he was used to. The kitchen was messy, like the bedroom—dishes in the sink, more papers on the table, the things for preparing the sandwich in the other room not put away. He went over to the mirror by the shelf above the microwave and looked at himself. His jaw fell in astonishment. He was looking at himself twelve years younger and a good fifteen pounds leaner. He felt his face, ran the fingers of a hand through his hair. This was insane.
So what about the whole business of being a bartender and meeting Lilly? Had it all been a dream? No, he couldn’t accept it. Dreams could be uncannily lucid, it was true, but never as real as those recollections—all the way through to seeing Lilly out to her cab and going to bed last night.
The only other explanation, then, was that he was in the middle of a lucid dream right now—dreaming that he was back in the days of the project. But surely no dream could be as real as this either. Or could it? The disconcerting realization came over him that he had no idea if he was asleep or awake, and he was far from sure how to find out.
Pain. The pain response didn’t function in the dreaming state. That was why people always pinched themselves. He pinched the back of his hand. It hurt. He bit his tongue. It hurt more. He picked a pin out of an oddments bowl on a shelf by the refrigerator and jabbed his thumb with it, and it hurt like hell. Yet somehow he was still unconvinced. Perhaps it was possible to dream that you were feeling pain when you really weren’t.
If he was not dreaming, and this was in fact 2010 with Oz about to go fully on-line, why was he unable to recollect anything that had happened at Xylog yesterday, or what he was supposed to be doing there today? His memories of such things were blurred and distant, as would be expected after the passage of twelve years. On the other hand, he could vividly remember going to the Southside with Lilly yesterday and seeing the site where Xylog used to be, going back to Oakland, and their cooking dinner together. If that had been a dream, why was yesterday so vague, now that he was awake again? If this was a dream, it was so real as to be scary—there didn’t seem to be a way out of it.
He went into the den to check on the terminal there for any received E-mail that might give him a better perspective on what was going on. But when he activated the terminal he stopped, confused. He couldn’t remember the procedure. This was silly. He stared at the screen, feeling stupid, but it was no good. He found the mnemonic for “Help,” scrolled to the directions for accessing personal mail . . . and all of a sudden it came easily.
There were several items from various people, but they were too long-forgotten to mean anything. Nothing triggered any immediate associations. And then he came across a note from Judy Klein that read:
Monday, October
11, 9:35 P.M.
Joe:
Just a reminder to call Ed Meechum first thing regarding the interview scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday). I do have the figures from F & F that Ed said he was interested in, so we should get you the slot.
Judy
He remembered reading that message before—years ago. It had been in the last few days before Oz went on-line, a few weeks after Evelyn walked out. That explained the state of the house. The project had been getting good media coverage, and Ed Meechum was the producer for an interview that NBC was due to shoot, describing the last-minute action. Exactly who would be interviewed had not been decided yet, and Corrigan and Tyron were both vying for the visibility. The figures mentioned in Judy’s message were statistics from the tests run so far—hopelessly skewed, if the truth were known, but since when had the media worried unduly about minor things like that?—that F & F were banding around to impress their clients on the predictive power that would come out of Oz. In other words, pure hokum to reassure the investors.
But the point was, he did get the slot. He remembered being interviewed at Xylog late in the afternoon. It had been a circus of hyperbole and misrepresented facts, and thinking back to it now didn’t make him feel especially proud of his performance at all; although F & F had been delighted. Afterward, he had gone out for dinner with Meechum and some other NBC people. Amanda Ramussienne had been there too, having come down that day from New York. They went to the Gaucho Restaurant in Station Square. Corrigan could remember it all. He stared at the words on the screen perplexedly. But how could he? How could he be remembering details—even if a bit vague—of events that weren’t due to happen until later in the day? The whole situation was crazy.
He left the den in a daze and went to get a better look at himself in the bathroom mirror. Yesterday, there had been a nick on his thumb, where he had cut it cleaning up the pieces of a broken glass at the Camelot. It was quite pronounced, with a week or more of healing to go before the mark would fade. Yet today there was not a trace of it.
Something very strange had happened to him. He had definite recollections of having woken up like this, on this very day, but long ago. The recollections were indistinct and incomplete, as if being retrieved from long ago. What had happened after the dinner with the NBC people? He seemed to remember they had gone on to a club, and afterward he went back to the Vista with Amanda. And then, the next day, what? . . . He wasn’t sure.
The first thing he could recall anything of after that was being in Mercy Hospital, slowly piecing himself together again. Dr. Arnold and the nurse . . . Katie, her name was; a strange Saturday-night dance, populated by caricatures representing the system’s early attempts at constructing people; Simon, the counselor, and the time when Corrigan had dug a hole in the hospital lawn. . . . And after that a succession of memories over the years, becoming progressively clearer until the last few days, when he was forty-four, working as a bartender in the Camelot, and met Lilly.
But the person looking back at him out of the mirror was a young man of thirty-two. The computer said the date was Tuesday, October 12, 2010. There was a message in the system from Judy, put there last night, that corroborated it. Had that whole sequence of the last twelve years that he thought he remembered been nothing more than a creation of his mind? Was it possible for a mere dream to be so compelling?
He went back to the den and used the phone to call Lilly’s number. The call failed to connect, and he got a message asking if he needed information. That was right—the codes used in 2022 had embodied a new system of multifunction options that confused everybody. He was unable to recall any of the numbers that he had used in 2010, not even his own or Xylog’s. Neither could he remember how to get a directory on the phone’s miniscreen, so he had to go through the Operator.
“Information. What city, please?”
“Pittsburgh. Do you have a listing for Essell, please? Lillian Essell. The address is 7H Beech Ridge, on Boer Way.”
“One moment. . . . I’m sorry sir, I don’t have that name listed.”
“It’s on the North Side. I’ve been there.”
“Well, it’s not here. That’s all I can tell you.”
“How about the Camelot Hotel? Downtown on Fourth Avenue.”
“Camelot, with a C, as in King Arthur?”
“That’s it.”
“No, I don’t have that either. Downtown, you say? I’ve never heard of it.”
“One more, then. Do you have the Xylog Corporation?”
“Xylog? You mean the place with the big computer project that’s been in the news? I’m sure I have. Do you want the number?”
“Not right now. It’s okay. I was just checking something. Thanks for you help.”
“Thank you.”
Corrigan hung up and stared at the phone. So nothing of the world that he remembered as of yesterday existed out there. Lilly, the Camelot, everything else . . . it had all been a fabrication? He walked slowly back to the kitchen and put on some coffee, forcing himself to try to think.
A dream so vivid that even now it eclipsed his recollections of the world that he found himself back in? The only explanation he could conceive was that in his sleeping fantasies, he had acted out how, unconsciously, he would have wished the project to evolve over years; and—as happens with dreams—his mind had created some bizarre images and interpretations.
Had the project become such an obsession with him as that? If so, then perhaps this was a warning sign, and this time he should take heed. Maybe what some people had been telling him was true, and he was letting himself get unhinged over the business with Tyron. Evelyn might have had a point, he reflected uncomfortably.
But if the whole business of being in the simulation had been a dream, how could it have included a distant memory of reading a message from Judy Klein that he had seen for the first time only a few minutes ago, after he got up? Obviously, the only answer could be that it hadn’t been the first time. He must have got up sometime in the middle of the night, checked the mail at that time for whatever reason—and then gone back to bed and forgotten about it. Except that he hadn’t quite forgotten it, and his mind had woven it into the dream. That was it. That was how it must have happened. He nodded to himself as he took his first swig of coffee, feeling relieved and unburdened inside now that he had straightened it out.
He washed, shaved, and dressed, and in the process decided that he would eat breakfast out, on the way to Xylog somewhere. It was a pity about Lilly, though. He could have gotten along well with Lilly, he told himself. It seemed that in the process of creating her, his subconscious had fashioned an ideal woman. He was going to miss having her around, even if they did argue a lot. It was funny how somebody could feel that way about a creation in a dream.
And then, as he fastened his tie and put on his jacket, he thought about Evelyn. Again, as if he were really reaching back over years, he remembered distantly how he had acted, and all of a sudden it made him feel shabby. He no longer felt any of the anger or resentment that had raged so violently in him only a week or two before. He could understand how she felt, see the bitterness he had caused, feel her hurt. And God, she had tried. . . . Why had he been so incapable of seeing all this before? Could a dream bring about such changes?
Before leaving, he went back to the den and retrieved Judy’s message again in order to call Ed Meechum. But then he realized that he had no idea what the figures from F & F were all about. He would have to wait until he got to the office and reminded himself, he decided.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
For a dream, it was having the strangest effects. In it, he had not driven a car at all during his recovery and rehabilitation process, and later his therapists had discouraged him from acquiring one. By that time he had become used to not owning a vehicle, and living close to the city in Oakland had given no cause for change. But now, on the way in from Fox Chapel in his Mercedes, he felt as if he really hadn’t driven for years. He was clumsy on lane changes, getting
blared at a couple of times, and found himself uncertain about what should have been a familiar route that he had been taking every day since the move from Blawnox to Southside. Coming in on Route 28, he forgot that he had to exit onto East Ohio Street to get to 279 South, and instead carried on over the Veterans Bridge into the crosstown tangle, where he took a wrong ramp again and ended up in the early-morning downtown pileup, from which it took him fifteen minutes to extricate himself. The main problem was that the city he still remembered himself as living in for the past twelve years had changed more than he’d realized, and he had difficulty recalling the real one. However, he did remember his reserved parking slot at Xylog, found it, and after leaving his car, went up to the sixth floor.
“Good morning, Mr. Corrigan,” the receptionist greeted, smiling, as he came through the glass divider from the elevator hall on the sixth floor.
“Good morning . . .” He couldn’t remember her name. Nodding an awkward smile, he went on toward his office. Judy was at her post outside, looking relaxed but professional as usual.
“Good morning, Joe. I thought you said you’d be in first thing today. I was here extra early.”
“Oh, yes. . . . Sorry about that. I got stuck in traffic.”
“Did you get my message about the figures for Meechum?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Called him yet?”
“Not yet. I just wanted to check through them with you first. Remind me what they were about, would you?”
Judy looked at him strangely for an instant, but turned to her keyboard, tapped in a code, and brought a file up onto one of her screens. “It’s the statistical correlations that Borth had done for the tests that we ran last week,” she said.
Ah, yes, it came back to him now. To impress one of Feller & Faber’s moneyed clients, Borth had commissioned a marketing analyst to massage the data from some test runs of “proto-animations” (i.e., primitive creations that had not evolved inside a full simulation yet) in such a way as to suggest that the buying patterns of real supermarket customers were already discernible. It was mainly fiction and wishful thinking, but the client was happy. Also, it would be good publicity material to slip into the interview with Meechum.
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