Cyber Rogues

by James P. Hogan

  Joan Sutton came out of her stupor first. “Frank, freeze the animations,” she said sharply.

  At the far end of the room, Tyron fished out a communicator and hammered in an emergency code. “Control? Do we have synchronization yet? Hello? Does anyone out there read? This is critical. . . .” All attention in the room focused upon him. Perspiration showed on his forehead. His eyes were wide with alarm behind his spectacles.

  “Will somebody tell me what in Christ is going on here?” Borth demanded darkly.

  “Oh shit,” Harry Morgen groaned as the truth slowly dawned.

  “Who are you talking to?” the animation Endelmyer asked, moving in through the door and pointing at Tyron. “I demand an explanation!”

  That was enough to shock the other Endelmyer into life. “You don’t demand anything around here. I run this company.”

  “Come in, control. Does anyone read? . . .”

  In the middle of it all, Corrigan slipped out into the corridor. He walked quickly back to his own office, past Judy, who was talking with Betty, the sixth-floor receptionist, and straight in through his own door. Lilly was sitting in a chair to one side of the desk, contemplating a figurine of an Irish leprechaun that she had taken from the shelf above. She looked up before Corrigan could say anything and asked him, “Didn’t you tell me that somebody gave this to you and Evelyn as a wedding gift? But I saw it at the house, too, last night. How do you come to have two of them?”

  “Jesus, can you believe women? We’ve no time for things like that right now. The whole . . .” Corrigan stopped speaking abruptly and jerked his head around to look at her as he realized what she was saying. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It was on a ledge in the den.” That was right. On the morning of his mysterious awakening, when he came into work and looked around his office, Corrigan himself had thought that it ought to be at the house. But he hadn’t been sure because it had been twelve years ago. Then, with everything else going on, it had completely gone from his mind to check in the evening. He took the figurine from her and turned it over in his hands, staring at it.

  “You said, something that would be meaningful when you looked for it—something that would become significant when the time came,” Lilly said unnecessarily. “And it was there the last time, too. We saw it in the shop window. You told me you had one just like it at home. You said that it haunted you.” Yes. And he had seen one when he was out by himself, in the bar, Corrigan remembered. The system had been prodding him, reminding him all the time that the leprechaun was there. Because that was what, sometime in that lost day that he had forgotten, Corrigan had told it to do.

  “By God, Lilly, I think you might be a genius,” Corrigan whispered. He walked quickly around the desk and sat down, still holding the figurine. From outside, the sounds came of voices rising in an angry clamor. What would he have expected himself to do with it? he asked himself frantically. What associations did he have with leprechauns? A word? A phrase? A code that would have a special meaning only to him?

  And suddenly he smiled as he remembered his cousin Jeff giving it to him in the lounge of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dun Laoghaire, and himself and Evelyn talking to a somewhat cynical Marvin Minsky years ago. . . .

  “I wonder,” he muttered aloud. Working quickly, he activated his desk unit and keyed it into “System” mode. A command prompt appeared on the screen. Lilly came around to stand behind him and watch. He entered the word IRELAND.

  Nothing happened.

  He tried LEPRECHAUN.

  A cry of alarm came from Judy outside.

  “What are you doing?” Lilly murmured tensely by his ear.

  “Shhh.” He entered MICK.

  The system responded with: “WHEN IRISH EYES ARE SMILING . . .”

  Corrigan’s face broke into a wide, triumphant grin. He completed: YOU’VE PROBABLY JUST BEEN RIPPED OFF.

  There was an instant’s delay that seemed eternal. Corrigan stared at the screen, vaguely aware of Judy coming in through the doorway, waving her arms wildly at something behind her.

  And then the screen changed to:

  CONGRATULATIONS!!!

  YOU ARE NOW IN CONTROL OF THE

  SYSTEM PRIMARY COMMAND EXECUTIVE. ENTER:

  “OUT/OUT” FOR IMMEDIATE DECOUPLING (EJECT)

  “AB” FOR GENERAL SYSTEM ABORT

  “OV” OVERRIDES ALL EXTERNAL COMMAND

  FUNCTIONS UNTIL UNLOCKED

  “DF” LISTS OTHER DIRECTIVE FUNCTIONS

  “VM” SWITCHES TO VOICE MODE

  (COMMAND EXEC ANSWERS TO “ROGER”)

  Lilly gasped, awed. “Joe, is this what I think it is?”

  “Joe,” Judy’s voice came, strangled, fearful. “Out there—Betty. Something’s happened to her.” Corrigan looked past the doorway and saw that Betty was standing by Judy’s desk, inanimate like a mannequin, her mouth open and arm raised in the middle of a gesture. Tyron had gotten through: the controllers outside had deactivated the animations. From outside the building there came the distant, muted sounds of multiple vehicles crashing. Corrigan looked back at Judy suddenly as the further implication registered.

  “You’re real!” he said in astonishment.

  “What are you talking about? Of course I am,” Judy said. “Do something about Betty.” She must have volunteered for the rerun and had her memory suppressed, just like the others the first time. She didn’t know anything about the first run.

  Farther back, Tyron, Endelmyer, Velucci, and Borth were coming across the area of open floor beyond Judy’s desk, looking grim and purposeful, with Morgen and Sutton following. Behind them, just before the corner to the corridor, another Endelmyer, another Velucci, and Pinder were standing immobilized.

  Corrigan hurriedly tapped OV into the pad, followed by VM, and then said aloud, experimentally, “Roger, do you read?”

  “Loud and clear,” a voice answered. It was in his head, but he heard it in his ear.

  “I’m in full exec access now?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Oh, boy. He was going to enjoy this. “Define operand class: all current surrogates,” he instructed. “Exceptions by name: Corrigan, Essell, Tyron, Morgen, Sutton, Endelmyer, Velucci, Borth.”

  “Specify operation?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about, Judy,” Corrigan muttered. “I’ll explain later.” Then, louder; “Disconnect them, Roger.”

  And Judy vanished—as, in that same instant, did all the other bewildered surrogates all over Pittsburgh who had just seen the world around them turn into statues.

  Tyron strode into the room ahead of the others. “What do you think you’re doing?” he barked at Corrigan.

  Corrigan ignored him. “Roger, put SPD generic on my screen.” A format appeared specifying the set of Surrogate Physical Descriptors that the system used to manage the interactions of each projected persona with its environment. Speaking quickly, Corrigan directed, “Operand class by name: Corrigan, Essell. Zero reaction coefficients of M-sub-M, M-sub-P, and delete spatial conflict restrictions.”

  “Get away from that. . . . What the? . . .” Tyron came around the desk and grabbed at Corrigan’s shoulder to pull him away from the screen, but his hand met no resistance and went straight through. Corrigan had in effect turned himself and Lilly into ghosts.

  Tyron brought the communicator up to his mouth and snapped, “Control, do you read?”

  A harassed voice answered, “We seem to have problems. Nothing’s responding out here. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “You don’t have control anymore,” Corrigan said. “I do.”

  “That’s impossible,” Tyron declared. He stepped forward, moving through Corrigan’s body, but struck his knee on the edge of the chair, causing him to curse. Corrigan smirked and waved a hand invitingly toward the touchpad. Tyron stabbed savagely at several keys and saw that it was ineffective. The others closed around the desk, all seemingly talking at once so that Corrigan was unable to understand wh
at they were saying—not that he cared a great deal anyway.

  “Roger, display Global Dynamics. Reset k-sub-g to twenty percent.”

  “Done.”

  The plant out on Judy’s desk straightened itself up visibly. Papers that had been lying on the desk and in other places around the office and outside suddenly lifted and began blowing about in currents from the air-conditioner vents. Velucci, who had been walking around the edge of the room behind the others, seemed to unglue from the floor in midstep, went into a strange, floating leap that carried him toward the wall.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelled, losing his balance and falling in slow motion over a chair. The others felt giddy and strangely light on their feet. Sutton tried to sit down on the nearest chair, but everything about the movement felt wrong; she misjudged the distance, succeeding only in tipping the chair over, and she and it went down together. Corrigan had reduced the gravitational constant to a fifth of normal.

  “What do you think you’ll achieve by this?” Tyron snarled. “You’ll pay—you realize that, don’t you?”

  “Just having a little fun, Frankie boy. What you don’t realize yet is that it doesn’t matter anymore—any of it,” Corrigan said. He looked back at the screen. “Let’s see, now . . . Roger, reset all mu-f to zero.”

  “Done.” Which reduced to nothing all the coefficients of mechanical friction.

  Velucci, who had been hauling himself back up with the help of a bookcase, went down again as his feet shot from under him, tilting the bookcase and burying himself under a torrent of volumes coming off the shelves. Sutton sprawled flat on her back as the floor she had been pushing herself up from turned into ice. Morgen felt the treacherousness beneath his feet and reached out instinctively to steady himself against the wall, but his hand skidded away and he fell over into Endelmyer, taking them both down in a heap on top of Sutton. Tyron managed to stay upright, but his spectacles slid off. Pictures fell from the walls as their fastenings came out. The drawers of a file cabinet standing in the corner slid slowly out and tipped the whole unit over on its front with a crash. More crashings and breaking sounds poured in through the doorway from all over the building. In her chair across the room, Lilly had started to laugh uncontrollably.

  Tyron, unable to contain himself, his face contorted with rage, swung a fist at Corrigan’s head. Corrigan laughed derisively as it passed harmlessly through; at the same time, the opposite reaction sent Tyron’s legs off in the other direction, and he fell through Corrigan, over the chair, and became entangled with Velucci, who was floundering like a beached whale.

  “Roger, rotate k-sub-g vector field ten degrees northward.”

  “Done.”

  So now gravity was no longer vertical, and all the surfaces that had been horizontal were, in effect, sloping. Everything on the desk slid to the edge and then over in a slow cataract to join the collection of anything loose—books, pens, folders, furnishings, wildly flailing and protesting CLC executives—accumulating against the far wall. The desk slid across behind them, followed by the chairs that Corrigan and Lilly had been sitting in. They could stand and watch from where they were, their bodies had no effective mass for gravity to operate on—vertical or otherwise.

  “Continue rotating at ten degrees per minute, Roger,” Corrigan said.

  Tyron tried pulling himself up the tilted floor, but his hands slid futilely. “You’ll regret it, Corrigan,” he screeched as a tide of oddments from the room swept him back down again.

  Corrigan shook his head. At last he grasped the meaning of the words that he had borrowed from Eric Shipley long ago but never really understood. “No,” he said. “None of you control anything that’s important to me anymore. I’m free. You’ll get out of this, Frank, but you’ll be trapped in your own slow-motion tumble dryer all your life. Have fun.” Corrigan looked away. The desk unit and screen had gone with the desk, but it didn’t matter. “Roger, operand class by name: surrogates Corrigan, Essell,” he directed.

  “Specify operation?”

  “Out-out. It’s time to go home.”

  And Corrigan was instantly in a reclining position, feeling stiff and cold, his head and neck restrained. He opened his eyes sluggishly and saw cables and pickup assemblies connected to banks of apparatus indistinct in the reduced lighting. Already his senses were overwhelmed by a level of clarity and detail that he had long forgotten was normal.

  “Done,” a synthetic voice from a speaker somewhere announced matter-of-factly.

  EPILOGUE

  The irony of it all was that in those first two days, it was the animations that had behaved rationally and commendably. In his TV interview, Corrigan had set the precedent that personal integrity was more important than dishonest gain, and in succession the system-generated analogs of Pinder, the CLC Board, then F & F and its clients, had followed him. It was only when the real people got involved that the old, familiar human formula had reasserted itself of rivalry, hostility, aggression, and mistrust. That was when Corrigan knew he could no longer be a part of it, and whatever happened from there on didn’t matter.

  He still had his wife, of course—their supposed splitting up as told to him in the simworld had been contrived simply to account for Evelyn’s absence, since after her return to Boston nothing could have induced her to have anything further to do with the Oz project. But Corrigan could only think of her as a stranger from long ago.

  He did go up to Boston to see her. And she found great changes in the person who, just a matter of a few weeks before, she had come to despise. The self-assuredness that had turned into arrogance, and the pride that had soured into conceit were no more; but neither were the blithe youth and roguishness that had captured her, with which they might have grown together. At the same time, she, to him, had become childlike. For with Corrigan, it had not been a matter of space for a few weeks. A chasm existed that no amount of sacrificial forbearance could hope to bridge. They mended the space for wounded feelings, confessed to some regrets, and promised that they would remain friends. Three days later, Evelyn filed the papers finalizing the arrangement.

  By that time, the notices of impending lawsuits, corporate and private, were already flying between CLC, F & F, F & F’s clients, various members of the funding consortium, and dozens of involved individuals from all of them. Corrigan was advised that he had a solid case for millions. There was deceit with malicious intent, conspiracy to defraud, violation of patent rights, criminal abuse and neglect, willful and malicious misinformation and withholding of information, violation of just about every employment act, violation of contract, breach of rights, technical assault and abduction; in addition, a case charging the entirety of his collateral domestic and marital problems would be indefensible. Corrigan listened as the words echoed around him: force and counterforce; strengths and weaknesses; attack and defense; strategy and counterstrategy . . . And somehow, in spite of all his earlier passions, none of it seemed worth the real cost anymore. In the end, he just walked away.

  The green slopes rising up to the mountains behind Ballygarven were splashed with purple patches of heather. On the neck of water beyond the town, a fishing boat trailing a cloud of screeching gulls chugged its way out past the headland toward the open sea.

  Wearing jeans, sturdy boots, and an Aran sweater, Corrigan arrived on foot at the Cobh Hotel at a little after noon, having spent the morning on his own, walking on the cliffs, looking at the ocean, feeling the wind, and thinking. Brendan Maguire was already there at the bar with a pint of stout, talking to Rooney and a couple of the locals. Dermot Leavey was with him.

  “Ah, here’s the American himself now,” Rooney said as Corrigan joined them. “A pint, Joe, is it?”

  “A well-earned one, I’ll have you know. And enough of this ‘American,’ if you please. Can’t a man take a break to see somewhere else for a while without it following him around for the rest of his life?”

  “Here, this one’s mine,” Maguire said, producing a five-pound note as C
orrigan reached toward his pocket.

  “So did you have a good wander around this morning?” Dermot asked.

  “I saw a lot, anyway.”

  “You’ll be joining Brendan and his crowd up at the Rectory, I’m told,” Rooney observed, holding a foaming glass under the tap.

  “That’s the way it looks,” Corrigan said.

  “Aren’t we after telling you the last time you were here that you’d get tired of all that paranoia and dashing around soon enough?” Rooney said.

  Corrigan held up a hand in a what-can-I-say? gesture. “Well, here I am. I guess I’m learning how to be a self-unmade man.”

  Rooney grinned as he set down the glass. “Oh, you remembered that, did you? Ah well, working up there with them professors and all only gets you halfway there, you understand. Next you have to go all the way and try your hand at tending a bar. You’d be astounded at some of the people you meet. It’s the only form of true philosophy left.”

  “Is that a fact, now?” Corrigan smiled distantly to himself and left it at that.

  “Ah, yes, talking about philosophers . . .” Maguire felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out several folded sheets of paper. “This came through over the fax from your friend Shipley in Pittsburgh. It looks good. He’s interested, and his approach is just the kind of thing we could use. I’ve already got approval for another senior slot, so I can’t see there’ll be a problem.”

  “That’s great. Let’s hope it works out.” Corrigan picked up his beer and closed his eyes while he treated himself to a long, steady swig. It was cool and refreshingly tart after his exertions. Working with Eric again would be good. He was glad that he had been able to do something to make amends for the way things had ended last time. In a strange kind of way, he really was getting a chance to live a part of his life over again.