Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  His memory refreshed, Corrigan asked Judy to get ahold of Meechum and went into his office. Inside, he stopped and looked around at the walnut-topped desk with its onyx penholders, shelves of reference books and reports that he liked to keep handy, diplomas and pictures framed on the wall. . . . Already, the sights of familiar things were triggering more memories and associations. The dream was beginning to fade at last; he could get back to being himself, and on with the important business at hand. There was a memo board with some cartoons and other clippings that, on the whole as he looked at them, struck him as somewhat immature and slightly silly for the office of a prospective technical director in this kind of operation. He made a mental note to get rid of them that morning. Also, on a shelf of a wall unit close by, was the figurine of an Irish leprechaun that cousin Jeff had given to Corrigan and Evelyn as a wedding gift during their honeymoon visit to Ireland. He frowned at it, puzzled. He was certain that Evelyn had put it on the window ledge in the den back at the house. What was it doing here?

  Then the call tone sounded from the comm unit on one side of the desk. “I’ve got Ed Meechum,” Judy’s voice called through the open doorway.

  “Okay.” Corrigan activated the screen, then hesitated, confused by the display of icons and options that it presented. After a few seconds Judy turned and leaned across to peer in at him.

  “Aren’t you going to take it?”

  “Er . . . I’m having a block today. What do I do?”

  “Just hit Enter. It’s on Auto Accept.” She said it in the same tone that she might have used to tell him that turning the wheel steered the car.

  “Oh, right. . . . Ed, hi.”

  Meechum’s features appeared on the screen: lean, toothy, and with thinning hair, but at the same time healthy and vigorous, with a pink-skinned, open-air complexion. “How’s it going, Joe? Got some news for me?”

  “Yes. We’ve got the figures. Want me to copy them through?” The eerie thing was that he remembered saying something like this before. How could the “dream” explain that? . . . Unless he had somehow projected it into the dream in anticipation, because he knew he was due to call Meechum. How could one stupid dream have gotten him feeling as rattled and confused as this?

  “Great,” Meechum said. “How do they look?”

  “Oh . . . I haven’t really had a chance to go through them closely, Ed. But from what Borth says, they look like what you wanted.”

  “Me? Hell, it’s you who’s been pushing them on me, Joe.”

  “Oh, yes. Right.”

  “I’ve had Frank Tyron on me as well this morning, wanting to get a plug in about the new version of the interface hardware,” Meechum went on. He winked conspiratorially. “But I remembered what we agreed yesterday.” Corrigan had no idea who agreed what yesterday. “You’re all set for filming at four o’clock. Is that okay?”

  “How long are we talking about?” Corrigan asked.

  “For the interview?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I already told you: forty-five minutes, probably cut to around ten minutes’ air time.” Meechum looked pleased with himself, as if he were waiting for congratulations. He was saying that he was on Corrigan’s side, and they both understood how everything stacked up.

  Corrigan sighed inwardly. There was serious work to do and a major project with all kinds of unknowns confronting them. Getting the job done was going to need all the talent they could muster. Suddenly, the whole business with Tyron that had been dragging on and interfering with everything forever seemed so unimportant and idiotic. Why exacerbate it any further?

  “Hell, there’s time enough in that for both of us. Why don’t we simply get Frank in on it too?” Corrigan said.

  Meechum stared out of the screen incredulously. “Tyron? You mean you want to let him on the show? You don’t mind? You’re saying you’ll hand him half the action?”

  “Why not? He’s done a good job on the COSMOS interface. It’ll give you some good stuff.”

  “Well, sure . . . if you say so.” Meechum shook his head as if this was all too much for him. “You want me to just go ahead and fix it with him, then?”

  “Yes, do that.”

  Meechum nodded, shook his head again, then decided to drop it. “I was thinking, Joe, afterward, we could get a cocktail someplace and have dinner. Maybe that place in the mall along by the river, the Gaucho, was it?”

  That was where they had gone in the dream, Corrigan remembered. Had it been somehow prophetic, in the paranormal kind of way that he’d heard tell about but never had any time for? Could there be something to it after all? He wondered if he was tied in some inexplicable way to acting out those things that he remembered, or was he free to alter them if he chose? Try it, he told himself.

  “I’ve had enough of the Gaucho, Ed,” he replied. “Let’s make it somewhere different this time. How about the Sheraton? It’s practically next door.”

  “Suits me.”

  Which seemed to answer that question.

  “I’ll get Judy to fix it,” Corrigan said. “So we’ll see you here later.”

  “Four o’clock.”

  The screen cleared, and Corrigan looked up to see that Judy was waiting just inside the doorway, holding a folder and some papers. He motioned her in. She approached and placed the wad on the desk. “Gary called through while you were on the line. He’s on his way.”

  “Gary?”

  “Gary Quinn.”

  Oh, yes. He had been one of Tom Hatcher’s software engineers, Corrigan recalled. “What for?” he asked.

  “What for? To talk about the spec you wanted to change. There’s the file, with a fax that came through from Cindi in Blawnox.” Judy watched uneasily as Corrigan sat down and turned the sheets. From his actions it was clear that he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for. “Joe, you’d been here talking about it for an hour when I left last night. It’s the spec for the second-level attribute cross-linkages. It has to be approved and sent through to Keith before lunch today.”

  “Oh, yes. . . . Right. I just need a minute to recap. It’s okay, Judy. You can carry on.”

  But Judy stayed where she was, looking worried. “I have to ask, are you feeling all right today, Joe? You’ve been burning it at both ends for months. . . . And now this thing with Evelyn on top of it all. Let me slot you in sometime today for a check.”

  “No, it’s all right. I guess I hit the bars a bit last night. Probably a reaction, eh? Everything’s still hazy.”

  Judy shook her head. “What’s happening to everybody this morning? Tom Hatcher was supposed to be here too, but his secretary says he hasn’t showed up—not even a word. And the full simulation is scheduled to go live in three days’ time. It’s crazy.”

  “Maybe Tom’s been feeling the strain and doing some unwinding too,” Corrigan said, forcing a grin. “Be an angel for me, would you? Fetch me a strong, hot coffee, black with nothing, and I’ll be fine.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Somehow he muddled his way through until the late morning, when Amanda Ramussienne called. She was still in New York.

  “Joe, hi darling,” she crooned. “Look, I hate to do this, but I’m gonna have to break your heart. Something’s come up that I can’t do anything about, which means I’m stuck in town and can’t make it down there today. Promise you won’t hold it against me for the rest of time.”

  So it appeared that lots of things were free to change: Here was one less complication to deal with. Corrigan decided he could live with that. He forced a resigned grin. “Well, too bad. Life happens, I guess.”

  “And I was so looking forward to it! You still have that promise to keep.”

  “We’ll get by.” Corrigan had no idea what she meant. “I appreciate your letting me know.”

  “You’re so understanding. I’ll make it up with interest.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “Well, it’s all a panic here. Have to go. You’ll do great on the intervi
ew with Ed. I wanted to be there. So sorry again, Joe.” She winked a promise; blew him a kiss, and vanished.

  Corrigan sat, staring at the blank screen, wondering what had possessed him. Looking back from where he saw things now, the whole business with Amanda felt grubby and sordid. Had the phoniness and gaudiness always been that transparent? And then the full realization dawned on him that it hadn’t all happened then; it was now. It was possible that he could straighten things out with Evelyn.

  Then Judy came through to remind him that he was due to have lunch with somebody from another F & F client. The name meant nothing. “What’s it about?” Corrigan asked.

  “He’s the one who thinks Oz could be used to try out an idea he’s had for using media superheroes to promote products to adults the way they do already with juveniles,” Judy said.

  Corrigan remembered him. A complete flake. He had talked without stopping all through lunch, without telling Corrigan anything he didn’t already know. Corrigan couldn’t face the prospect of repeating it. “You know, maybe you’re right,” he told Judy. “Maybe I’m not feeling myself today. Can you fob him off for me? Tell him something vital has come up on the project—anything.”

  “Leave it to me,” Judy said.

  Corrigan went off to a coffee shop in Station Square to think and be alone.

  For he was unable to avoid a conviction that had been steadily growing inside him all morning that the impressions that he had woken up with that morning of having lived years past today were not the result of some extraordinarily vivid dream or fabrication, but that it had happened, somehow, and now he was back at the age of thirty-two again and had lived this day before. But how could that be? Things like that simply didn’t happen.

  All he could think of was that the life he remembered living after having the breakdown and Oz being canceled had, in fact, been real, but distorted in the process of his gradual recovery—in other words, exactly what he had been told it was. In that case, everything he was experiencing now was an illusion, perhaps taking place in the course of some kind of catastrophic relapse manufactured out of his stored experiences from long ago. So was he really back in Mercy Hospital or somewhere in 2022, thinking that he was back in 2010, before he had the breakdown? But if everything he was experiencing was the product of a deranged mind, then anything was possible and his situation was a total solipsism, with no possibility of his being able to prove or disprove anything by any form of investigation or experiment, one way or the other.

  But then, on the other hand, would a deranged mind be capable of thinking it through this logically? In which case it was real. But since time travel didn’t happen, if it was true, it followed logically that it had to be a delusion. Unless, of course, he was only thinking that he was being logical. . . .

  At that point he gave it up as hopeless and went back to the office.

  One corner of the main reception lobby had been turned into a mini TV studio. Meechum was on a couch in the center behind a low, glass-topped table, with Corrigan sitting in an armchair on one side and Tyron on the other. The crew had set up lights and improvised a background from drapes, potted plants, and a sign bearing Xylog’s corporate logo.

  After a short introduction, Meechum turned to Corrigan and picked up his main theme. “Tell us, Joe, isn’t it like being God, in a way? I’m told that Oz will be a world in itself, inhabited by computer creations that behave exactly as real people do. As the manager of Xylog’s software division, you’re the person largely responsible for those creations. How does it feel?”

  Corrigan stared down at his hands for a moment, reflecting on all the hype and exaggeration and wishful thinking masquerading as fact that had been dispensed on the subject. A public circus was not the place where science should be conducted. It was time to make a start on setting the record straight right now.

  He looked up. “Let’s clear up a lot of wrong information that has been put out about this, that shouldn’t have been,” he said. “We are not about to create an artificial world that’s going to model how people in the real world think and behave—the products they’d buy, how they’d vote on this issue or that issue, what they like, what they don’t like, or anything else like that. Human behavior is one of the most complex phenomena ever studied. For forty years now, some of the most intensive research going on in the world has been aimed at trying to emulate the full versatility of what we call ‘intelligence,’ and for the most part it’s got nowhere. All we’re doing at Oz is exploring an alternative approach to achieving that: an Artificial Intelligence—a process that functions something like the way we do. That’s all. Whether such an AI—assuming that we’re successful—could form the basis of a lifelike simulation of the real world is a question that lies way in the future and is one that we’re not even considering yet.”

  Meechum was looking a bit taken aback. He accepted as a matter of course that part of his job was to be a paid hack, and he had been ready to help plug the product in whatever direction his guests chose to steer things. But this sudden shrinking of a current sensation down to lifelike proportions was something that he had not been prepared for. “That’s, er, something of a more cautious assessment than a lot of the things we’ve been hearing,” he commented.

  “My first role is as a scientist,” Corrigan said. “I’m simply reporting the facts as to what the goals of the Oz project are, as currently formulated. I can also speculate on what it might lead to in times to come, if you like. But that wasn’t your question.”

  On Meechum’s other side, Tyron was following with a mixture four parts bewilderment to one of confusion. His first reaction on hearing of Corrigan’s offer to share the show had been one of suspicion, and he had arrived ready to outdo anything Corrigan might try adding to what had already been said to please the ears of the project’s financial backers. It did cross his mind as he heard this that Corrigan’s intention might be to throw him off stride and steal all the thunder, but the fact remained that in the meantime, right off the top of his head, he didn’t have a lot to say that was wildly inspirational to counter it. So when his turn came, he took up the theme that Corrigan had set and concentrated on the new interfaces and associated hardware that formed his main contribution to the project, the principles underlying its operation—which were fascinating—and what it could reasonably be expected to accomplish.

  Meechum grew more relaxed as it became evident that the animosity that he had been waiting to see surfacing between them was not going to happen, and the rest of the interview went well. But it was Corrigan who set the tone, while the other two responded. Although he was physically the youngest, his unswerving dedication to principle and insistence on frankness inspired everyone watching. When they were getting up after the cameras stopped rolling, Meechum said, “Joe, that makes more sense than anything I’ve heard in ages. You carry a wise head on young shoulders.”

  Pinder, who had come down from the top floor to watch, walked over to Corrigan while the NBC people were packing away their equipment. He seemed intrigued in a guarded kind of way.

  “You handled that . . . interestingly, Joe,” he said. “Interestingly, but well. Very commanding and positive.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was more down to earth than I expected. You, ah, seem to be taking a more sober view of things all of a sudden.”

  “I try to be realistic,” Corrigan said. “Fooling yourself isn’t going to help anyone in the long run.”

  “There could be some flak from Borth’s people. It wasn’t the crystal ball that they’ve been painting to their clients. This could burst a few balloons.”

  “Probably better now than later, then,” Corrigan said. “Investors are the worst ones to fool.”

  Pinder looked at him curiously for a second. “Ed tells me that it was your suggestion to put Frank on the show as well.”

  “Sure, why not? Frank and his people have done some neat things. The idea was to make the show interesting, right?”

  Pi
nder cast an eye around and lowered his voice reflexively. “What I’m saying is, it isn’t exactly the best strategy for the longer term from your point of view—with things being the way they are.” In other words, as they both knew, Pinder’s term as acting technical chief of Xylog would end soon. Corrigan was not optimizing his chances of stepping into the slot by sharing the limelight.

  “Let’s get the ship launched first,” Corrigan replied. “When we know it floats, then we can worry about who’ll play captain.” Which was what Pinder thought he had been hearing, but he had wanted to be sure.

  “You’ve changed in a big way, Joe,” Pinder told him.

  Something about Pinder had changed too. He was too wary, feeling his way with probing questions that seemed somehow out of character. The assertiveness that Corrigan remembered was missing. It was almost as if Pinder hadn’t known Corrigan as long as Corrigan had known him, and was unsure what kind of reactions to expect. But then, from Corrigan’s distorted perspective of things, it had been a long time for him. Maybe he didn’t remember Pinder as well as he thought.

  And, indeed, Corrigan did seem to have undergone a change in his personality that appeared permanent. For by the time the party sat down to dinner in the Sheraton, the twelve years of pseudolife that he remembered himself as having lived were just as clear in his mind as when he had woken up that morning, while his recollections from yesterday and the days before, although jogged and reawakened to some degree by the events of the day, were for the most part just as remote.