Lilly shook her head. “But this is what I don’t get. How does the machine that’s managing this simulation know what was in your car? When we were at my place, you talked about how a lot of detail can get filled in by a person’s subconscious—like in a dream. But that isn’t happening here. I’m seeing the same things as you, but the information can’t be coming from my subconscious, can it? I never knew what was in your glove compartment.”
Corrigan shrugged. “No big deal, really. Think about it. I’m comatose inside a COSMOS cubicle at Xylog, and my car is right outside in the parking lot. It wouldn’t take somebody very long to inventory everything with a camera and input the images to the system.” He paused to let her take that in, then added casually, “When you woke up this morning, where was it, exactly? Tell me again.”
“A hotel that the Air Force put us in.”
“After you arrived from California to take part in the project.”
“Yes.”
“And I assume that you put on some regular clothes out of your wardrobe, and picked up the purse and that blue coat when you were leaving. Right?”
Lilly glanced down at herself. “Well, sure. Of course I did. What else?”
Corrigan gave her a sideways grin. “Then how come I see a blue coat and all the right things? I don’t know what was in your closet, do I?”
It took Lilly a few seconds to see what he was driving at. “The bags, all my things? . . . You’re kidding!” she said disbelievingly.
Corrigan nodded. “Same thing. A crew goes out to the hotel, scans the rooms and itemizes the contents. Do the lot in under an hour. If the truth were known, that’s probably why they put you in a hotel in the first place. Don’t make any mistake, Lilly. There’s heaps of money riding on this. These people are doing it right.”
Lilly still couldn’t buy it completely. “But you didn’t wake up in a hotel room with just a few things,” she said. “You were at home. There’s no way they could have captured the whole of something like that. Every piece of junk in a desk drawer? The contents of a file cabinet? It’s simply not feasible.”
“It wouldn’t be as hard as you think. Practically all of us who were on the project got our homes realscaped just for the hell of it, to make realistic test environments. So a lot of what would be needed is in the databank already. But you’re right—it couldn’t be perfect. I want to find out what differences you and I see when we get there. There could be something in that house that can get us out of this, regardless of what anyone outside decides. That’s what Tom Hatcher was telling me back at the office.”
“Okay. Then now suppose you tell me what that was all about,” Lilly suggested. “Hatcher was the one who ran a lot of the software development at Xylog, right?”
“That’s him. Well, there was something that he and me and a couple of others talked about once when we were arguing about memory suppression.” Corrigan grunted as he braked to avoid a Buick making a sudden lane-switch without signaling—probably under the influence of a random number.
“Okay. And? . . .”
“One of the things that came up was how to get yourself out of the simulation—say, in some kind of emergency—if we had gone with suppression; in other words, if you didn’t even know you were in a simulation. We called it the ejector seat. But can you see the problem? If your knowledge that it exists gets erased as part of the suppression, it’s no use to you. But if you know about it from before the period that was suppressed, then you must know also that you’re in a simulation, which defeats the whole object of having any suppression in the first place.”
“How do you use a button that you know you’re going to forget about?” Lilly summarized.
“Exactly.”
She sat back in her seat, thought about it, and then looked across at him. “There’s no way you can do it.”