Chapter Forty
Judy stopped what she had been saying as she saw Corrigan moving out from the doorway of his office. “Oh, here he is now.” Morgen and Sutton turned toward him and exchanged perfunctory greetings. Corrigan watched their faces as they spoke. As with Barry Neinst, there was no way of telling from outward appearances.
“People over at Head Office are trying to get hold of you, Joe, but you haven’t been getting back to them,” Morgen said. “With the project about to go live, that seems strange. Is everything okay over here?”
Corrigan was conscious of their eyes searching his face like mapping radars, almost as if they were trying to divine the true person behind the surface imagery as much as he was of them. Considering the events since the previous evening, Morgen’s remark seemed curiously insensitive. And Corrigan thought he knew why. Here was his opportunity.
“He was one of our key people,” Corrigan said. “And now the city’s making a fad out of it. It does alter the perspective of things a bit.”
His vagueness was deliberate. Involuntarily, Joan Sutton glanced at Morgen with a bemused look, and he returned one that was just as mystified. They didn’t know! And in that instant Corrigan knew that they were real-person surrogates. The way that Sutton had seemed awed by the surroundings should have told him sooner.
For had they been Morgen and Sutton animations—permanent denizens of the simulated world—they would have been present since yesterday, and hence aware of what had been dominating the news. But Morgen, as Sylvine, had left only twelve minutes ago, outside-time, which would have given him barely enough time to report from his last visit, agree on the next objectives, and reenter. The fact that he had reappeared so soon, as himself, and bringing Joan Sutton with him, suggested that something irregular had been detected by the controllers on the outside. That would fit with why they were checking on Corrigan’s behavior.
He looked at them coldly, making no attempt to hide the rancor that he felt. “You don’t know what’s been going on, do you?”
Morgen tried to feign a puzzled look. “How—”
Corrigan cut him off with a disdainful wave. “Don’t try any acting, Harry—it’ll save us all a lot of breath.” He nodded back toward the doorway of his office. “Let’s go inside.” He extended an arm. Morgen’s face was apprehensive. Sutton shot him what looked to Corrigan like an accusing look, and he sensed that all was not smooth between them. They went through. “Hold all calls, Judy,” Corrigan said, and followed.
Inside, he closed the door behind him and turned on them. “Now let me guess what’s been happening outside. The trait-assimilation parameter settings in the first run were wrong—yes?—which caused the animations to go off on self-reinforcing patterns and create a screwed-up world in which the surrogates—” Corrigan indicated himself with a finger and interjected in a scathing voice, “such as me! . . . instead of providing the models, became misfits. Yes, Doctor Zehl?” He glared at them and found that his breathing was heavy. Morgen had paled. His skin looked clammy in the pale light of the office. The system was picking up his physiological responses and projecting them perfectly. Even Corrigan marveled.
He went on. “But even so, the results were so far beyond anything we’d ever imagined that somebody out there decided to run the whole thing again from the beginning with the parameters reset. But that’s where you messed up. You see, the erasure of the first run didn’t work the way it was supposed to. We still remember it—all twelve years of it.”
They stared at him numbly. He continued. “But yesterday, Tom Hatcher decided he’d had enough and wasn’t about to go around again. And do you know what he did? He got a gun and blew away a heap of computer-code cops and security guards out at the airport. By nighttime, it had become the rage all over the city. Later, Tom ran his car up to eighty and pointed it head-on into a truck, so he’s out of it already, and probably giving everyone out there hell.” Corrigan’s face creased into a mocking smile. “And guess what—this morning there’s screwballs doing the same thing all over Pittsburgh.”