“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” Corrigan mumbled. “It’s a misunderstanding on my part. I guess all this last-minute stress has been getting to me. I’ll explain tomorrow.”
Pinder’s face relaxed immediately. Unnaturally so. Real feelings didn’t just evaporate that quickly. Here was further proof if Corrigan needed any. He wondered how many other clues he’d been surrounded by for two days without noticing. “Very well, Joe,” Pinder said. “I’ll get back to my meeting. I hope you feel better tomorrow.” The screen blanked out.
Corrigan sat down shakily on one of the other chairs. “Jesus!” he breathed, shaking his head.
“What is it?” Lilly asked.
He waved vaguely at the screen. “That wasn’t Pinder. He isn’t coupled in as a surrogate at all. That was a system animation.”
“Never!”
Corrigan nodded. “He’s been acting out of character since yesterday—only marginally, but it’s there. You’d have to have worked with him to spot it. It even took me until just now.”
“But how? . . .” This time Lilly was incredulous. “How could the system possibly learn to mimic somebody that accurately who wasn’t in the first run? He wasn’t there. He was never a surrogate.”
“The system had a Personal Attribute File on him that it had been building up before then—from early experiments and calibration runs that he took part in. Practically everyone in the company tried it. It got to be a fad.” He shook his head again, still having trouble accepting it himself. “God, they’re getting close! . . . The whole idea of Oz was that the animations would improve by modeling their behavior on that of the surrogates. Something wasn’t right the first time around, and they went off in their own direction instead. But near the end, some of them were getting amazingly good—remember Sherri at the Camelot?” Corrigan stared at Lilly wonderingly.
“People like Zehl were reporting back, and it amazed everyone else too. Then somebody got the idea of rerunning the whole thing—going back and starting out with everything that the system had learned. Think what that could produce. They’d stand a strong chance of actually being able to deliver what the backers had been expecting—but which nobody who understood the technicalities had taken seriously. So they gain control and collect all the accolades from the people with the money, while I’m stuck here on the inside. Neat.”
“But you have to come out sometime,” Lilly pointed out.
Corrigan shrugged. “Then what? What do I do, cry foul? File a lawsuit? With the money they’ve got behind them now, they can ride all of it. . . . At least, that’s the way they’d figure it.”
Lilly looked at him for a few moments longer, as if waiting for something. “Well?” she said finally.
“Well what?”
Suddenly, everything that she had been fighting to control since waking up the previous morning came boiling out. She had sought out the one person she knew who offered a hope of making sense of anything, and he was acting as if the situation were no more serious than missing their stop on the subway and having to ride it out to the next. In reality, the sheer enormity of it had numbed him past the point of being able to react.
“For Christ’s sake, Joe!” she exploded, rising up from the chair and coming nearer. “These people have as good as abducted you and taken control of the project. We’re just about to start all over again from the beginning. And you’re just sitting there like . . .” She turned away to get a grip on herself. Corrigan heard her draw in a long breath. She turned back again, her hands turned upward and extended. “Surely you’re not saying that all we can do is wait like a pair of dummies until someone outside decides it’s gone far enough? There must be some way of getting out of here. There has to be a way we can do something!”
“Pinder can’t help us. All we can do is wait for Sylvine to get the message,” Corrigan said.
“Sylvine won’t do any good either,” Lilly answered.
“Oh? And what makes you say that?”
Lilly looked at the desk, then at the wall. Finally she brought her gaze back to meet Corrigan’s and shook her head as if it should have been obvious. “There isn’t any reason for them to be in a hurry, is there, Joe?” she said. “As far as they’re concerned, the longer we’re in here, the better. So why should they rush to shut everything down when the results are way past all expectations? Just because Sylvine comes out and tells them we’ve sussed it? Come on.”