“Tell me what you see,” he said.
“An old knife. It’s got a worn blade, a polished wooden handle held by brass rivets.”
Corrigan turned the knife over in his hands. “Anything different this way?” He turned it again, showing her the first side once more, then the other.
“No. Should there be?”
“To me, there’s a deep gouge in the handle. You don’t see one at all?” He had found something.
“No. Nothing.” Lilly looked up at him disbelievingly. “My God!” she whispered.
Corrigan had forgotten that gouge. But his subconscious hadn’t, and it was filling the detail in, inside his head. The system had known nothing about the gouge, since it had faced the wall and not been captured in the imaging; therefore, the data to define it were absent from the optical input being generated for Lilly.
“Now it’s caught in a direct conflict,” Corrigan said. “It knows that you and I are seeing different things, violating its primary reality criterion. It can’t resolve the issue by deleting what I see, and it can’t correct what you see because it doesn’t have the information to draw it. And either way, even if it could, that would violate its consistency rules.”
Lilly shook her head helplessly, as if it were her problem. “So how will it handle it?” she asked.
Corrigan shrugged. “I have no idea. The system has been evolving its own associative structures. That’s what it was designed to do. Its internal complexity will be so great by now that neither I nor anyone else could tell you what it’ll do. It’s going to be interesting finding out.” Lilly looked around uneasily, as if half expecting the house to cave in. Corrigan grinned cheerfully and took her arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a stroll around the house and see what else we can find.”
They went out through the living room and into the den. It was getting dark. Corrigan switched on the light and gazed around at the desk, the terminal, shelves of books, ornaments, pictures and other hangings on the walls. Finally he went over to the bookshelves and began peering more closely at the titles. “Now, I can’t remember exactly everything that was here,” he said. “But it seems the kind of place that I might have stuck a reminder to myself. . . . Ah! Now, see this one, for example.” He took down a thin, green-covered volume with the title The Stories Behind the Flags. “You see, I can’t remember where this book came from at all. It could be something that Evelyn put there and didn’t tell me about, or I forgot.” He glanced at Lilly pointedly. “Or maybe I put it there for a reason, just before Oz went live, and the memory got suppressed along with everything else from those last few days. See my point?” He rippled through the pages idly with a thumb.
Lilly caught glimpses of the pages, replete with text and illustrations. “The pages are all there,” she said, indicating with a hand. “Surely the people who scanned the house couldn’t have gone through every one.”
“No need,” Corrigan said. “You just get the titles from a high-resolution scan of the room, and the system obtains the contents electronically from a library.” He nodded toward the file cabinet in a corner. “I bet you’d find a lot wrong in there, though. Nobody’s going to wade through that lot.”
“Are you going to look?”
“Oh, we’ll get to it. Meanwhile, what about this book? Is it the clue to the magic word?”
Lilly turned up her hands. “I don’t know. How do we find out?”
“We experiment. . . . Maybe all you have to do is say the right words in the right place, like in a D and D game. Maybe it’s the title.” He raised his voice and recited, ” `The Stories Behind the Flags.’ ” He waited a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe the name of a flag. How about, The Stars and Stripes? . . . Old Glory? . . . Irish Tricolor? Union Jack?” He looked back at Lilly. “You see. Nothing happens.”
“Just like D and D games,” she remarked.