The expressions on the two faces in front of him were completely stunned, causing Corrigan’s smile to widen derisively. “You see what it means?” he said to them. “Now the parameters are overcompensated. The animations are slavishly copying whatever the surrogates do—if you’d looked hard enough around the dinner table, you might have seen it yourself when you were here a little while ago as Graham Sylvine. With surrogates acting rationally in the way everyone assumed they would, that might have been okay. Oz could have worked. But what the experiment never bargained for was any of them going off the rails the way Tom did. Now you’re about to create another world full of lunatics, only this time psychopaths and suicides.” Corrigan tossed out a hand in a dismissive gesture, and the smile vanished from his face. “So it’s over, and lot of heads are going to roll out there. Get it terminated.”
“I did try and tell you,” Sutton began, looking at Morgen. “I said that the—”
Morgen waved her aside in a way that said all that could wait until later. “It was the pressure from the F and F consortium,” he told Corrigan. “They insisted on going straight to a full-world implementation, and they funded additional outside programming to do it. That was what they’d always wanted—a virtual world. They weren’t interested in developing AI. We had to go along to get the backing.”
Corrigan looked at him disdainfully. “What do you take me for? I’ve grown twelve years in the last three weeks. Come on—I want out!”
But Morgen persisted in the line that had been agreed upon in his excursion outside. “Look, Joe . . . I know that the way it’s been done has been a bit underhanded. . . .”
“Underhanded! By Christ, I—”
“Hear me out, please. Look, I know you’ve had a raw deal. But that can all be straightened out. As you just said, this whole project, this process of yours, has worked out way, way better than anything anyone ever dreamed of. If—”
“Right! You just said it: this process of mine!”
“I understand what you’re saying, Joe. But let’s not allow the project to suffer just because you’re feeling sore in the short term, right now.” Morgen showed both palms hastily. “Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying you don’t have good reason. Rerunning and knowing what we know now, it might actually get so close to reality that you can’t tell the difference. That was the original success criterion, remember? And we’re almost there already. After this we can do more realscaping and expand the territory. Maybe tie in a whole list of remote places.” Morgen forced a jocular tone. “Hey, remember that time you wanted to visit Ireland, and Zehl had to pull rank?”
“Somebody seems to have it all figured out,” Corrigan remarked sarcastically.
“See it through,” Morgen urged. “You’ll be more than compensated. It’s already been agreed. We’re only talking about another few days.”
That was too much. “For you!” Corrigan exploded. “A few days for you! Don’t you understand what I said a minute ago? Suppression of the first-run memories didn’t work. For us, you’re talking about years. I want this thing stopped now, and I want out. So get on with it.”
Morgen shook his head, still unwilling to give up but at a loss for a continuation. “Is there a choice?” Sutton asked him. “From the sound of it, it’s all about to go off into a different brand of craziness in the other direction anyway. It’s time to hold, analyze the data we’ve got, and reevaluate.”
Still, Morgen wavered. After a few seconds of waiting, unyielding, Corrigan pointed out, “You might as well. It can’t work now, whatever you do. I’ll just start tossing people out of the windows, and by lunchtime everyone’ll be doing it. What use is that going to be to your precious backers? It’s over. Accept it. Get us out.”
Finally Morgen capitulated. “I can’t make the decision. It has to go back to the people outside.”
“Okay, but you don’t have to decouple. Use one of the direct gate codes,” Corrigan said. As a transient observer, Morgen would be able to signal the outside via a special calling number like the one that Corrigan had used to leave messages for “Sylvine.” Probably he had recourse to other means, too.