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?”
Pinder 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.
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.”