“Mmm.”
“What kind of thing are we looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
“That helps.”
“The clue to the magic word.” Corrigan poured the coffees and handed her one. “It was twelve years ago, Lilly. I hadn’t planned on it happening this way. It was supposed to have been just a few days.”
“What did you mean in the car when you talked about us seeing different things when we got here?” Lilly swept her free hand in a circle. “I see a sink, refrigerator, table with things on, a window over there, and the door we came in there. Isn’t that what you see?”
“Oh, sure. But you’d expect that. Everything superficial would have been captured when the guys were here realscaping the house. Possibly Tyron’s people came to get additional detail, too, at the same time that they did the car—after I was inside the simulation. So for stuff like that, the system has objective data that it can feed in the data streams to both of us. But at a more subtle level there are things that exist in my memories that it doesn’t know about. Will my mind fill in the details subconsciously so that I see them and you don’t? Or will I not see them, although I know I ought to? How will the system handle it when it’s driven to the limit?” He sipped from his mug and looked around the kitchen casually.
“For instance . . .” Corrigan moved over to the microwave and took down one of the recipe books from the shelf just above. It was called Cooking the Good Old American Way, and showed big, elegant houses and a riverboat scene. “They did a thorough job,” he commented. “This book of Evelyn’s did have that picture on the front. But they had to stop somewhere. He opened the cover and showed Lilly the endpaper and flyleaf inside. “What do you see there?” he asked her curiously.
She looked, then raised her eyes to meet his uncertainly as if suspecting a trick and shrugged. “Nothing. It’s blank.”
He nodded. “That’s what I see too. But what I know, and what you and the system don’t, is that it was a gift from an aunt of Evelyn’s, and it had an inscription inside. . . . You see—we’ve carried out one experiment already.”
Lilly gaped. In two days, nothing had brought home to her the reality of the situation that they were in more effectively than that one, simple demonstration. Corrigan was straining the system’s rules, watching for where the cracks would appear. Lilly realized then that he had a twofold strategy: either he would find the “magic word” and get them out; or failing that, he would find a way to crash everything from the inside.
She watched, still struggling to overcome the eerie feeling of it all as Corrigan replaced the cookbook. He opened one of the kitchen drawers and rummaged idly among the contents, but nothing caught his eye as the kind of thing that he had vaguely in mind. It was the usual assortment of utensils and implements that could have been imaged and recorded straightforwardly. He needed something that would let his mind work spontaneously, without prior expectations. He wandered around, taking pictures off the walls, lifting ornaments from their niches, trying to create opportunities for stumbling on details that a realscaping crew with finite time to contend with would have missed. The watercolor of a schooner that he took down from above the breakfast bar was just blank pasteboard on the reverse side. Was anything supposed to be written there—a date, a caption, an inscription? He couldn’t remember. Was the maker’s mark that he found on the underside of the vase from the ledge by the pantry the authentic one that had always been there, or had the system improvised it? He had no idea. He lifted a wooden-handled carving knife from its fixture on the wall—a relic from his student days that had followed him over the years through all his digs and apartments from Dublin to Pittsburgh. The handle had a deep, L-shaped gouge in it, dating from a time long forgotten, which had been hidden facing the wall. He held it out to let Lilly look at it.