“What do you think you’ll achieve by this?” Tyron snarled. “You’ll pay—you realize that, don’t you?”
“Just having a little fun, Frankie boy. What you don’t realize yet is that it doesn’t matter anymore—any of it,” Corrigan said. He looked back at the screen. “Let’s see, now . . . Roger, reset all mu-f to zero.”
“Done.” Which reduced to nothing all the coefficients of mechanical friction.
Velucci, who had been hauling himself back up with the help of a bookcase, went down again as his feet shot from under him, tilting the bookcase and burying himself under a torrent of volumes coming off the shelves. Sutton sprawled flat on her back as the floor she had been pushing herself up from turned into ice. Morgen felt the treacherousness beneath his feet and reached out instinctively to steady himself against the wall, but his hand skidded away and he fell over into Endelmyer, taking them both down in a heap on top of Sutton. Tyron managed to stay upright, but his spectacles slid off. Pictures fell from the walls as their fastenings came out. The drawers of a file cabinet standing in the corner slid slowly out and tipped the whole unit over on its front with a crash. More crashings and breaking sounds poured in through the doorway from all over the building. In her chair across the room, Lilly had started to laugh uncontrollably.
Tyron, unable to contain himself, his face contorted with rage, swung a fist at Corrigan’s head. Corrigan laughed derisively as it passed harmlessly through; at the same time, the opposite reaction sent Tyron’s legs off in the other direction, and he fell through Corrigan, over the chair, and became entangled with Velucci, who was floundering like a beached whale.
“Roger, rotate k-sub-g vector field ten degrees northward.”
“Done.”
So now gravity was no longer vertical, and all the surfaces that had been horizontal were, in effect, sloping. Everything on the desk slid to the edge and then over in a slow cataract to join the collection of anything loose—books, pens, folders, furnishings, wildly flailing and protesting CLC executives—accumulating against the far wall. The desk slid across behind them, followed by the chairs that Corrigan and Lilly had been sitting in. They could stand and watch from where they were, their bodies had no effective mass for gravity to operate on—vertical or otherwise.
“Continue rotating at ten degrees per minute, Roger,” Corrigan said.
Tyron tried pulling himself up the tilted floor, but his hands slid futilely. “You’ll regret it, Corrigan,” he screeched as a tide of oddments from the room swept him back down again.
Corrigan shook his head. At last he grasped the meaning of the words that he had borrowed from Eric Shipley long ago but never really understood. “No,” he said. “None of you control anything that’s important to me anymore. I’m free. You’ll get out of this, Frank, but you’ll be trapped in your own slow-motion tumble dryer all your life. Have fun.” Corrigan looked away. The desk unit and screen had gone with the desk, but it didn’t matter. “Roger, operand class by name: surrogates Corrigan, Essell,” he directed.
“Specify operation?”
“Out-out. It’s time to go home.”
And Corrigan was instantly in a reclining position, feeling stiff and cold, his head and neck restrained. He opened his eyes sluggishly and saw cables and pickup assemblies connected to banks of apparatus indistinct in the reduced lighting. Already his senses were overwhelmed by a level of clarity and detail that he had long forgotten was normal.
“Done,” a synthetic voice from a speaker somewhere announced matter-of-factly.
Epilogue
The irony of it all was that in those first two days, it was the animations that had behaved rationally and commendably. In his TV interview, Corrigan had set the precedent that personal integrity was more important than dishonest gain, and in succession the system-generated analogs of Pinder, the CLC Board, then F & F and its clients, had followed him. It was only when the real people got involved that the old, familiar human formula had reasserted itself of rivalry, hostility, aggression, and mistrust. That was when Corrigan knew he could no longer be a part of it, and whatever happened from there on didn’t matter.