“When you woke up yesterday, you were back in a hotel, right?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Not at Xylog. But if we were back in 2010 after coming out of the simulation, why didn’t you find yourself in a lab somewhere, where you must have been to take part in Oz in the first place? And how was it that I found myself back at home in Fox Chapel?”
Lilly shook her head. She had been going through the same convolutions as he in her own head, and had tied herself in similar knots. “Everything was so confused from around this time. I’ve just about given up trying to make sense of it,” she replied.
Corrigan began moving again, leading them over to an open-fronted store with counters displaying ladies’ jewelry, perfumes, and cosmetics. “It needed to be confusing,” he said, not looking at her but studying the items arrayed on the shelves. “To disguise the crossover while the system was still learning. We thought we were recovering from perceptual dislocations. But all the time it was the world that was getting better, not us.” He smiled in a peculiar, crooked kind of way. “It’s got a lot better since then, hasn’t it, don’t you think?”
“What are you talking about?”
“It needed those cover stories so that the surrogates wouldn’t cotton on—the first time around.”
Lilly caught the emphasis. “I’m not sure I follow. . . .” But her voice was little more than a whisper, her eyes suddenly fearful. A part of her, at least, followed him, all right.
Corrigan picked up one of the sample bottles of perfume from the counter and dabbed it on the back of his hand. He sniffed, then extended his arm toward Lilly. “Like it?” he asked her.
She started to shake her head and say something, then checked herself and lowered her face. There was no smell at all. Nothing. She straightened up slowly, shaking her head, refusing for a moment longer to face what it meant.
Corrigan nodded. “I can’t smell it either. The first cranial nerve, the olfactory, synapses directly in the cerebrum. We never could get the sense of smell right, could we?”
For what it meant was, they had never come out of the simulation at all. It was still running.
And not only that. Somebody on the outside was rerunning it from the beginning.
* * *
In a small room off the Monitor & Control Center on the third floor of the main Xylog building, a small group of people listened tensely to Tyron’s aide, Harry Morgen, just up from the gallery of interface cubicles on the level below. Tyron was there, so was Borth, John Velucci from CLC Legal, and also Joan Sutton, the other technical specialist who had first followed Tyron from SDC. A technician standing beside Morgen had brought a hardcopy of the trace report that he had asked for on returning from the simulation. Things were not going according to plan.
“She tried to contact him in Xylog,” Morgen informed the others. “Now she’s due to see him, posing as a journalist.”
Tyron was peering at a screen showing a status update on Corrigan, revised in the last few seconds. “His behavior is way outside his computed assigned norms. The system can’t make sense out of it. His SDV index is down to fifteen percent.”
“What does all that mean?” Borth asked.
“That something unexpected is motivating them,” Tyron said.
Joan Sutton was shaking her head in a way that said this confirmed all she had been fearing. She was the one who had urged more caution all along, and opposed the latest extension of the original plan, which had thrown everything into a new dimension of risk and uncertainty.
“The forced reset was too soon,” she told the others. “It should never have been attempted at this stage. The erasure function was too much of an improvisation, to say the least. With the time-rate differential there was no chance for a rational evaluation.”
“The opportunity was too much to let slip by,” Tyron insisted, defending the decision that had been at his urging, and also for Borth’s benefit. “We had to go with it.”