And then she found herself suddenly about to relive that day again. As before, she had come to Xylog yesterday—and might even have bumped into him if he had happened to go across to the DNC Training Lab in one of the other buildings, where the new arrivals were being briefed and introduced to Oz. Like him, as she grappled with the weirdness of the situation and began experimenting, she discovered that she was not bound to relive what she remembered but could change things. Unlike him, she had thought to seek him out as part of what she, too, had been tempted to rationalize as a “dreamworld,” and find out if he existed in this one. In a group from outside the company confined to a different building, she hadn’t been able to get near him in the day yesterday, and he disappeared for the evening after the TV interview. So this morning she invented Lola Ellis.
There was no question that they had met in the simworld. When they compared experiences, they found that they remembered the same places, the same people, the same events, the same conversations together. The simulation had happened. There could be no doubt about that. But if that was the case, how could the simulation have not yet started?
One explanation, of course, was that the whole thing had been an internal creation in Corrigan’s mind, and still was: that what he thought he was hearing and thinking now was just as much a part of it as everything else. In that case he was totally insane, there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it, and the only choice open was to go with the ride and wait to see where it took him. But he had been around that same weary, frustrating loop enough times, and since no logical process could help if he accepted that as the answer, he rejected it through pure Irish obstinacy if nothing else. In any case, he told himself, if he were going to go to the trouble of going insane to invent an alternate reality to escape into, surely he would have made it a more entertaining and hedonistic affair than this.
A chill breeze was starting to lift off the water, the kind that nipped the ears and found chinks in clothes. Corrigan directed their steps across the court by the riverside parking lot, toward the Freight House—a onetime railroad terminal building, now converted into a complex of shops and restaurants. “Let’s head inside and get a coffee or something,” he muttered. “Maybe a bite to eat.”
“Did you have lunch?” Lilly asked.
“No chance of missing it in this job.”
He went over the facts in his head one more time. The simulation had been real—the way they both remembered. It had been taken to a degree of realism that went beyond anything he had known was planned. Their memories of going into it had been suppressed and a cover story manufactured to disguise the cruder early phases, which again, as far as he had ever been aware, had not been the intention. He was supposed to have been one of the controllers, able to enter and leave intermittently at will, fully aware of what was going on. The only explanation there could be to that much was that another design group that he didn’t know about had been organized somewhere, who had vastly extended the scale and concept of the operation, added the memory-suppression option that he had declined, and then sprung it on the surrogates unannounced—as they would have to if the memory suppression was going to serve any purpose.
Fine, so far. That much was what Lilly had already tried to tell him. But it still failed to explain how he and Lilly could be carrying recollections of their experiences inside a simulation that had not yet begun. The only answer to that was, they could not.
They came to the entrance into the mall. Corrigan stopped to gaze at the gaily stocked shops and booths, the decorations and colored lights, the crowds of evening shoppers; he went back in his mind over the events of the last two days. It was uncanny, but there was only one explanation left.