They crossed the exit from a parking lot without slowing down, forcing a car that had just begun moving out to stop abruptly with a squeal of tires.
“Hey, asshole! You try’na get yusself killed or sump’n?” Nothing abstract or unreal about this world. It was eerie.
“That much I follow,” Lilly said. “But how do we suddenly find ourselves back here again—before the project has even started?”
“The backers didn’t get what they had been expecting,” Corrigan replied. “They got the crazy place that you and I remember.” He tossed a hand up as they walked. “No good for their purpose at all, not even close—to begin with.”
Lilly walked a couple more paces, then came to a dead halt when what he was saying finally hit her.
“Ohmygod!” she gasped. Corrigan stopped and looked back. “But it was getting better, wasn’t it,” she said.
He nodded. “Faster than anybody ever dreamed it could—certainly much faster than anything I’d ever have dared bet was possible. We did a better job than we realized. Finally, after about three weeks of run time—twelve years in the simulation—it had got itself almost right. Not completely. There were still some flaws. In particular, the animations weren’t copying the surrogates but had gone off on a zany tangent of their own instead; but for the most part, the realism that it achieved was incredible. And then somebody out there said, if it can get this close in three weeks, starting from scratch . . .”
Corrigan saw from the look on Lilly’s face that she had already completed the rest for herself. What somebody had said was that they could do so much better still if they could start all over again, only this time with the benefit of everything that the system had learned the first time.
“They’ve reset everything back to the beginning,” Lilly said. Corrigan nodded. But it still didn’t add up. Lilly’s face creased in puzzlement. “But how could they hope to run it again with us knowing what we know now?” she said.
Corrigan shook his head. “We weren’t supposed to. They’ve got memory suppression. All that was supposed to have been erased, so that we’d start out again yesterday with clean slates, really believing that it was the real world, just before Oz was due to start. But they screwed up somewhere. That suppression didn’t work. And now they’re all set to run the whole thing through again—only this time from more realistic beginnings.”
Lilly stared at him aghast. “The whole thing? You mean . . .”
“Sure. Why not? It’s only a few more weeks. But the returns they stand to collect are enormous.”
“That’s out there!” Lilly choked. “It might only be a few weeks to them. But in here . . .”
Corrigan nodded curtly and took her arm to resume walking. “Exactly. If we don’t find a way out of this, it’s going to be another twelve years!”
Chapter Thirty-six
Lilly was still struggling to come to grips with it when they arrived back at the main entrance to Xylog. “They can’t,” she protested as they ascended tie front steps. “No way. Not another twelve years. There’s got to be some way of telling the outside that they’ve screwed up.”
Corrigan nodded curtly. “Graham Sylvine.”
“Who’s he?”
They went through the glass double doors into Reception.
“One of the people that I had dinner with last night—supposedly an observer from Washington. But he’s really that Dr. Zehl from before that I told you about—the same person. One of the outside controllers.”
The receptionist at the desk smiled inquiringly. “Mr. Corrigan, right?”
For the first time in two days, Corrigan registered that her face was new. The plaque on her desk gave her name as Chris Iyles. “No Nancy?” Corrigan said.
“She left, I guess. I’m her new replacement.”
“Hi.” Newer than you know; Corrigan thought to himself. Every synthetic personality was one less real one to get right. The system didn’t have attribute files on everyone. He gestured at the screen to one side. “A Graham Sylvine from Washington was here yesterday. Can you find out if he’s still around?”
“Do you know who he’s with, Mr. Corrigan?” the receptionist asked, turning to call up a schedule of visitors.