Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  However, as if to compensate for the loss of detail from his immediate past, he seemed to have retained the maturity that had developed in the course of living through years that were still ahead of him. This expressed itself as a charisma that affected everyone present at the table in the same way that it had enabled him to dominate—without domineering—the TV interview earlier.

  Among those present was a Graham Sylvine, from a department in Washington that prepared appraisals for scientific-policy reviews. He had been following the Oz project for some time, and appeared in Pittsburgh without warning late that afternoon. He reminded Corrigan of somebody, but Corrigan was unable for the moment to put his finger on just who. “The next phase will be the first full-system run, is that correct?” he asked Corrigan.

  “That’s right,” Corrigan confirmed.

  “What does that imply, exactly?”

  “So far we’ve only been testing parts of the simulation as separate pieces. Next we bring them all together as a full system. Also, we’ll be introducing the first real-world surrogates: operators coupled into the simulation to act as models for the animations to learn to emulate.”

  “Did you hire actors?” a woman across the table asked.

  Corrigan smiled. There had in fact been some talk about doing just that. “We wondered about it,” he replied. “The problem was that it might all work too well and we’d end up with a world full of actors. So we decided to stick with ordinary people just being themselves.”

  “I take it that you won’t be one of these surrogates,” Sylvine said.

  Corrigan shook his head. “They’re on a full-time commitment. I’ll be going in and out of the simulation to keep an eye on how it’s going, sure—but my place is really on the outside, watching the whole thing.”

  “What kind of risk is there in all this connecting into people’s heads?” another woman asked. “It sounds horribly spooky to me.”

  “Naturally we wouldn’t be proceeding without testing as thorough as it’s possible to make it,” Corrigan replied. “But I’d be less than frank if I told you that we know everything. Of course there are uncertainties. That’s how you learn. Life and progress toward better things couldn’t exist otherwise.”

  “Well, what we’ve been hearing today sure makes a change from all the PR bull,” Meechum said. “Now I’ll be frank with you, Joe. Listening to you talking today has been the first stuff about this whole project that I’ve really believed for months.”

  “It’s about time, then,” Corrigan said.

  Sylvine was vague about when he would be returning to Washington. He asked Corrigan a series of technical questions about the basis of Oz and what it might lead to. The surrogates seemed of particular interest to him. He wanted to know what kind of world they would perceive from the inside. Also, he raised the possibility of memory suppression and was intrigued by Corrigan’s account of how the possibility had been considered and rejected by the Oz designers. It occurred to Corrigan that perhaps this constantly recurring issue was of more concern to him unconsciously than he realized, and maybe that was what had caused him to cast himself as a subject of it in the dream.

  The person that Sylvine reminded him of, Corrigan realized as he watched him, was Dr. Zehl—Sarah Bewley’s supervisor in the dreamed simworld. He wasn’t quite sure why, although it certainly had nothing to do with physical similarity. Perhaps it was that Zehl, too, had been from Washington; or maybe his tendency to appear suddenly, without warning.

  The woman who had inquired about risk was still watching Corrigan and thinking to herself. When a lull presented itself, she asked him, “Do you really think that we do progress toward better things, Mr. Corrigan?”

  Corrigan wiped his mouth with a napkin. “Certainly we do,” he answered. “Evolution is a self-improving process. Hence change is for the better, by definition.”

  “I’d have to think about that,” the woman said dubiously.

  “I never realized before that you were so much of a philosopher,” Pinder said to Corrigan. He had been watching Corrigan and saying little throughout, still showing much of the interest and curiosity that had been evident earlier.

  “That was one of the things I learned as a bartender,” Corrigan replied unthinkingly.

  Pinder looked surprised. “Really? I never knew you had been a bartender. When was that?”

  For a second or two Corrigan was flummoxed. “Oh . . . that was way back, when I was earning my way as a student in Ireland,” he said finally.

  He looked around, grinning. Everyone smiled back. He could become anything he wanted, he realized. He was a young man again, free to relive a crucial part of his life—and as far as he could see, with the benefit of all the accumulated experience of having lived the next twelve years before.

  Maybe this was a dream, and maybe it wasn’t; he had all but given up trying to tell. But either way, it seemed he had no way of breaking out of it if it was, or of changing the situation if it wasn’t. So he might as well make the best of it. This time around, then, he decided, it would be a great ride.

  He tried calling around to locate Evelyn when he got back later that night, but nobody he talked to could give him a lead. It seemed that everybody he’d known in Boston had either moved or was out of town. None of the few that he did manage to get through to had heard from her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “I just thought you’d like to know, Borth called Ken Endelmyer at home last night,” Pinder said from the screen of the comm unit on Corrigan’s desk. The NBC interview had been aired as part of a current-affairs documentary following the six-o’clock news the previous evening. “I’m assuming that he wasn’t very happy.”

  “Which was pretty much to be expected,” Corrigan answered. His tone was matter-of-fact, with no second thoughts or regrets. “I still think it will do more good this way in the long run, after the dust settles.”

  Pinder rubbed his chin as if still pondering something that he had spent a lot of time on, and nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday, and I have to agree. The air needed clearing. Things have been getting out of control for a long time. So the other thing I wanted you to know is that if things do get rough, you can count on my support. As you say, it will do everyone more good in the long run.”

  “Well, thanks: I appreciate it.” Corrigan said.

  “I’ll keep you posted if I hear anything more,” Pinder promised, and hung up.

  Like the others at the TV interview the day before, and at dinner in the evening, Pinder too had succumbed to following Corrigan’s lead, almost as if their roles of senior and junior in the line of command had been reversed. And it had happened so naturally and easily, Corrigan realized, that he didn’t even think about it.

  There had still been no sign or word of Tom Hatcher since yesterday, which was odd, considering that they were in the last days of preparation before Oz. Already some critical decisions had had to be delayed, and the software section-heads were getting anxious. Corrigan was wondering whether he ought to have somebody check with the police, when his desk unit buzzed again and Judy came through on voice.

  “Ken Endelmyer’s secretary at Head Office is holding. Also, I’ve got another reporter on the line, wanting to talk to you: a Lola Ellis from Futures magazine in L.A., but she’s here in Pittsburgh right now.”

  Corrigan sighed. “Let’s see what himself wants and get it over with. Slot the reporter in when you can for later.” The Meechum interview had apparently made an impression—this was the third journalist this morning asking for more information.

  “She’s being very insistent,” Judy said. “She seemed to think you’d recognize the name.”

  Corrigan grinned as he signed some letters that he had been checking when Pinder called. “A good try, but I’ve never heard of her. Fix an appointment, will you, and put Celia through. Oh, and could you try calling Tom’s place one more time, Judy?”

  “Will do. You’re through,” Judy’s voice sai
d. At the same time Corrigan’s schedule for the day appeared on the screen, with Celia’s face framed in a window in one corner.

  “Top o’ the mornin’,” Corrigan said, accentuating his brogue.

  “Hello, Mr. Corrigan. I’m sorry to drop this on you at such short notice, but Mr. Endelmyer would like to meet with you rather urgently. Could you get over here for, say, eleven o’clock this morning?” Coming from such heights, it was an order couched as a request merely for form. God, Corrigan thought to himself, he must really have stirred things up. He saw on his schedule that he had a couple of things fixed for around then, but they would just have to be shifted.

  “Yes, that will be fine,” he replied.

  “We’ll see you at eleven, then.”

  The window with the face vanished, and Corrigan called up a color bar to indicate to Judy the appointments that would have to be changed. Her voice came through again a moment later.

  “Still nothing from Tom. I’ve put Lola Ellis in to see you here at four-thirty this afternoon. Uh-oh . . .” Judy had just seen Corrigan’s changes flagged on her monitor outside. “What’s this? Has something come up for this morning?”

  “I have to report to the general,” Corrigan said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Celia didn’t say. Firing squad, probably.”

  Judy paused just long enough to be discreet. “I thought you were very good. But you did rock the party boat a bit.”

  Corrigan snorted. “Well, maybe this is where I get told that I’m not going to get my captain’s hat.”

  “That would be a shame,” Judy said.

  “Ah, not a bit of it,” Corrigan told her. “We can always go and work in a bar.”

  But to Corrigan’s surprise, the summons was not for him to be shot. He arrived to find that Victor Borth had come down unexpectedly that morning from New York. Pinder was there also, along with a couple of the other CLC vice presidents. It turned out that Borth had not contacted Endelmyer the night before to vent fury about Corrigan’s performance, but to commend it.

  “I was gonna get him fired,” Borth admitted candidly. “I was as mad as hell.” He made a short, stabbing gesture toward where Corrigan was sitting. “This turkey had loused everything up. It was going to be panic out there—backers running in a stampede to get out after some of the things he said.” Corrigan caught Pinder’s eye across the table. They shrugged at each other, both equally at a loss as to guess what might have changed things. Borth went on. “Then I get a call from Milton Perl.” Perl was Chief Executive Officer of Berrenhauser Trusts, one of the major backers, who had marshaled a consortium of commercial banks and investment houses behind the project. “And what do you know—Milt loved it! You see, they had been getting bad vibes for some time over the whole project, and they were talking about pulling out—the whole shooting match, the consortium, the works. Those guys aren’t so stupid. . . . I mean, you don’t get to be worth that much if you don’t know your head from your ass, right? They knew it wasn’t going to happen the way they’d been hearing it. ‘Vic,’ Milt says to me, ‘I’ve been worried.’ See, his people knew that nothing even close to this has ever been tried before in history, and that there are all kinds of questions nobody has answers to. But they also know that you never get anywhere if you won’t take risks. ‘We were willing to take a risk, Vic,’ he says to me. ‘But in return we expected honesty. All we wanted to hear was somebody tell us to our faces that there could be no guarantees. Then we’d know we were all on the same side and working to solve the same problem, right? But that wasn’t what we got. Instead, all we got was bullshit.’”

  Borth pointed at Corrigan again. “Until he said it! And now Milt and his friends are happy people.” Borth spread his hands and treated everyone to an uncharacteristically appeasing smile. “Okay, I admit that I laid it on a bit, too, at times. But I’m not one of these tech-whiz geniuses. I guess a lot of people got carried away in the excitement, eh? But now everybody’s feet are on the ground again, and this is a good time to reappraise things.”

  Endelmyer looked startled. “Reappraise things? What are you saying, exactly?”

  Borth raised a restraining hand. “Oh, it’s okay, Ken. Don’t get me wrong. I used the wrong word. ‘Consolidate’ might be better. The project stays, no question. But Milt does want to go over the goals and purpose again, now that people are making sense, so we’re probably talking about putting back the start date.”

  “I hope he’s not asking for a redesign,” Pinder said apprehensively.

  “Nothing like that,” Borth assured everyone. “Like I said, Milt is a happy man today. But he does want to be clear on what the limits are and what can realistically be expected. As far as Oz goes, the technical design, organization, and operations stays with CLC, the way we’ve always agreed. The only thing that Milt did insist on in that area . . .” Borth leveled a finger at Corrigan again, “is that he wants him in charge of it.”

  They stayed for the remainder of the morning discussing details, and then went to lunch, which Borth insisted on standing. And so there it was. After months of rivalry, backbiting, and infighting that had produced nothing but tension and bad feelings all around, Corrigan accepted, as the talk flowed around him, that in under a day he had attained everything he’d wanted. And it had not had to be fought for or conceded grudgingly, at that, but was being thrust upon him eagerly. Just a little integrity had worked wonders when the compounded results of suspicion and fear of failure had been about to bring disaster.

  And it was all due to this extraordinary situation that he found himself in, whereby he was able to apply an older man’s experience to a young man’s circumstances. If it had proved this effective in the course of one day, he wondered if there was any end to where it might lead in the years still ahead of him.

  Back in his own office that afternoon, he found himself wondering if this might explain the phenomenon of genius, that the world had been baffled by for as long as people had been around to think about it. He had convinced himself by this time that his experiences of the day before had been nothing more than a peculiar form of déjà vu, brought on by the sudden activation of a heightened level of consciousness at which he was now functioning. Events since yesterday were diverging so rapidly from anything in the “dream” that any feeling of having lived this time before had for the most part already left him.

  But the altered perspective and perspicacity of vision that had accompanied that strange sensation of regression—the calm, inner confidence that he knew where he wanted to go and why, knew how to get there, and that it would not be the end of everything if he messed it up anyway—remained. He felt like a mouse that had been raised to some privileged vantage point from where he could watch the others still scurrying about in the maze. He could see where all the courses led, what lay at the end of every decision path, and in which direction changes would alter them.

  Perhaps, far from being unique, this altered state of perception that seemed, as yet, beyond the ability of physics and psychology to explain, was something that had happened to many individuals of exceptional achievement and ability throughout the past. If so, it was little wonder why so few of those affected had cared to speak out. Far better to be an Einstein or a Da Vinci without the complications of trying to explain what would probably never be believed anyway, than risk being locked up as insane. And then again, maybe many of those who did try to convey their experiences had been put away, excommunicated, burned, banished, or whatever for just that. It was often said that the borderline between genius and madness was very thin. And as he got to thinking more, it struck him as significant how much of the world’s religious teachings could be interpreted as coded references to undergoing a mystical rebeginning of life: “born again;” “life after life;” “inner enlightenments” that can only be experienced, not described. Suddenly, it all took on a new meaning.

  Through the afternoon, he went mechanically through the routine of taking calls, seeing visitors,
checking on the project, and dealing with queries from Judy. There was still no word from Hatcher, and he told Judy to check with the police to see if there was any record of an accident. Pinder called to let him know that the rumor was already going around the top floor of Corporate HQ that Corrigan was tipped to be the technical director of Xylog. The news must have got back to New York ahead of Borth, too, for Amanda Ramussienne was on the line a half hour later.

  “I see Pittsburgh is in the news,” she crooned from the screen, giving him one of her special sultry looks through half-closed lids.

  “Why? What’s happened?” Corrigan asked.

  “You don’t watch it?”

  “No time for trivia. Anyhow, I only believe the advertising. What’s happened?”

  “Oh, I assumed you’d know about it. There was a shootout at the airport there—less than an hour ago. A maniac went wild and shot some police officers. Anyhow . . .” She smiled a seduction. “But, as a matter of fact, if the rumors I hear are anything to go by, you are getting famous down there too. There’s a whisper that you’re going to get the tech-chief slot at Xylog.”

  “Who whispered that, now?”

  “Oh, a little bird.”

  Corrigan shook his head despairingly. “Nothing’s confirmed. We’ll see how it goes.”

  Amanda became more serious. “So there is something to it, then?”

  “It’s looking promising,” was all Corrigan would say.

  She brightened up. “So when are you coming up to New York again? We need to celebrate.”

  “I told you, nothing’s definite.”

  She pouted. “Well, what’s wrong with practicing celebrating? I need your kind of company.”

  An icon indicated another call waiting, with a message caption superposed from Judy that read: MILTON PERL, BERRENHAUSER. “Amanda, sorry, but I have to go,” Corrigan said. “Something’s waiting.”

  “Let me know soon, then?”