“Yes.” Lilly nodded.
Corrigan sighed. “But we didn’t know as much as we thought we did, Lilly. We were going straight into people’s heads—nothing like it had been tried before. And there was too much haste and competitive pressure. We didn’t spend the time that we should have to get it right. People started coming unglued with mental disorientation and perceptual disturbances. I was one of them. I’ve been slowly getting my act back together ever since.”
“So was that what ended your first marriage?” Lilly asked.
Corrigan nodded. “Evelyn was a neurophysiologist from Boston who joined the project back in the early days—what you’d call my kind, I suppose. But I was young and brash, too obsessed with my career. Things soured, and when I turned into a vegetable, she opted out. I don’t blame her, really. She did well to put up with it as long as she did.”
“And the second one—the one who left last night; it wasn’t the same with her?” Lilly said.
Corrigan leaned forward to top up their glasses. “Oh, that was a joke from the beginning—not done for what you’d call exactly the most romantic of reasons. My rehabilitation counselor suggested it. She thought it would help to bring a better focus and some stability into my life.” He drank from his glass and looked across at her. “Okay, enough of that. Now suppose you tell me how what you seem to know fits with working in a shoe-finishing shop.”
Lilly shrugged lightly, as if to say it was all very simple, really. “I used to be with the Space Defense Command up to twelve years ago—OTSC at Inglewood. I was a scientific evaluator involved in the development of DIVAC.”
“My God,” Corrigan murmured.
SDC’s Operational Training & Simulator Center in California was where the final component had come from to make a full-sensory direct-neural interface possible. Up until then, direct-neural I/O coupling had been at the lowermost level of the brain, and research had been confined to the body’s motor system. DIVAC, standing for Direct Input Vision & ACoustics, besides adding speech and auditory capability, succeeded in entering at a higher level to achieve the long-awaited goal of integrating vision as well.
Some of the surrogates who were to have been projected into the simulation from the real world outside had been supplied by the military. “Were you one of the Air Force volunteers who were brought in?” Corrigan asked. He had met some of them then, but not all.
“Yes,” she replied. “I was part of a group from California. A guy called Tyron came out from Pittsburgh and interviewed the candidates. I was one of the ones selected. Later, we were flown to Pittsburgh, checked into a hotel there, and the next morning we were driven to Xylog to begin preliminary tests.”
It didn’t take too much guesswork to see what was coming. “And? . . .” Corrigan prompted.
“I’m not sure. That’s where it all gets vague. The next recollections I have are of being in a world of jigsaw pieces in Mercy Hospital. The shrinks told me that there had been problems that nobody anticipated, and the project was shut down. I was a mental basket case for a long time afterward. . . . And I’ve just been muddling along and trying to get something of a life back together ever since.” Lilly exhaled abruptly and looked at him in a way that asked what was the point of this. “But I don’t have to tell you any of this,” she said. “That’s what happened to you too, isn’t it?”
Suddenly, Corrigan sensed what had drawn somebody like this to a bartender. She had known this about him, somehow. That was why she had come back to the Camelot tonight. It was what this whole meeting had been leading up to.
“Can I ask you something?” Lilly said.
“Sure. I’m not promising to answer.”
“What do you remember people being like before?”
“Before when?”
“Before Oz. Before you had the breakdown.”
“Why?”
“I’d just like to know. It has to do with something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.”
Corrigan considered the question. “It feels like a long time ago,” he replied finally. “Like trying to think back over the top to the other side of a hill. . . . But what I remember is being more like most other people. You know . . .” he waved his hand to and fro over the tabletop between them, “the way it is with you and me now: being understood without having to spell everything out.”