“You could talk about the things you think inside?” Lilly said.
“Exactly.”
“Like you and I seem to be able to do. Why should that be so strange, Joe? Are you saying you don’t feel that way with people anymore?”
Corrigan was unable to stifle a guffaw. “You’ve got to be joking! Come on, you’ve been telling me yourself how it is. You saw that bunch we were among all evening. What is this?”
Lilly didn’t react to the frivolity but continued looking at him steadily. “The strange thing is, I remember it all the same way,” she said. “Why should that be? How did you explain it to yourself?”
Corrigan did his best to draw together his scattered musings of many years into something coherent. “I suppose, as a process of projection: projecting back out of my head a picture of how I wanted things to be . . . probably subconsciously.” That was how the specialists explained it. “By being projected into a past that was no longer accessible, what I wanted became unchallengeable. Hence the fragments of my identity that were coming back together had a basis that was secure. Psychological foundation-building. Does that make sense?”
“It makes too much sense, Joe. Way too much.”
Corrigan frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Lilly’s face softened into a thin, vaguely despairing smile. It caught Corrigan the wrong way, striking him as condescending and mildly mocking. “Doesn’t what you just said strike you—just a little bit, maybe—as incredibly insightful for someone who’s supposed to be crazy?” she said.
Supposed to be? What was she saying? Well, true, he didn’t believe himself to be crazy, exactly—not anymore; but for the disorientations that he had experienced in the not-so-distant past, it was probably as good a description as any. All the experts that he’d talked to had confirmed that he was a casualty of a massive assault on the neural system. Who was this person to be questioning it now?—even if she had been an Air Force computer scientist once.
“I don’t relate to people anymore,” he said. “My mind works along different paths, with a lot of short circuits. It makes connections that mean things to me, but which other people don’t follow. My own internal virtual reality. That could be getting pretty close to most people’s idea of crazy.”
Lilly shook her head. “That won’t wash, Joe. If those connections were the result of disruptions that you experienced, they’d be private and unique—purely subjective. But even if I had been affected similarly, how could it result in the same connections?” She gave him a few seconds to object. But he couldn’t. What irked him was that she was right. She must have felt this affinity the first time they talked in the Camelot. While he had been camouflaging his abdication from life, she had remained the scientist.
She went on. “You want to know what I think? You’ve got it the wrong way around. The `virtual’ isn’t any aberration that you and I have manufactured inside our heads.” She waved an arm in a circular movement to indicate the room, the building outside of it, and everything beyond. “It’s all of this.” She waited, but Corrigan was still too preoccupied with his internal self-admonishments to register what she was saying. Finally she commented dryly, “You guys did a hell of a job.”
Corrigan shook himself out of his fuming and downed a half-glass of wine in a gulp. “What are you talking about?”
“Oz was never abandoned,” Lilly said. “It went ahead as scheduled. We’re still in it. This whole world full of lunatics that we’re in is the simulation! It has been for the last twelve years.”
Corrigan stared at her with a mixture of dismay and annoyance. Just when he had started to believe that she really was different, and had confided in her things that he’d mentioned to nobody, not Muriel, nor Sarah Bewley . . . now this. It was like hearing a physics Nobel Laureate suddenly start prattling about ESP. He groaned and shook his head.
“Oh, for God’s sake. . . . You’re being ridiculous.”
Lilly was unfazed. “Think about it,” she urged. “A lot of things add up. Do you remember Oz actually being canceled?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Neither do I. You were told that it had been—just like I was. The memories from that period were suppressed and confused by some kind of electronic drugging, and those stories about being incapacitated were fabrications to paper over the join. You were never crazy, and neither was I. It was the world that was learning to get better, not us.”