Corrigan was already shaking his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffed. “Memories of what? Oz never reached the full-system phase. All that ever happened was a series of preliminary tests that got abandoned.”
Lilly stopped short of looking openly derisive. “How do you know?” she pressed.
“How do I know? Because I practically conceived the project, that’s how.” Corrigan pointed a finger. “Who were you? A volunteer helper. One of the techs.” He knew the gibe was uncalled for, even as he said it. What she was saying ought to have been preposterous; not wanting to face the nagging thought—even now—that it might not be, was making him react unreasonably. “Do you really think that if we’d been in Oz all this time, I wouldn’t have seen it?”
“Then I’ll ask you something else: out of curiosity, how much traveling have you been able to do in the last twelve years? Let me guess: you’ve been confined to Pittsburgh and maybe one or two other places, right? And another thing: I’ll bet that you have problems with smelling things, too. Am I right? The DIVAC interface couldn’t handle the first cranial nerve. So couldn’t it just—”
Corrigan rose to his feet unconsciously and cut her off with an impatient wave. He was tired and fatigued, and the alcohol wasn’t helping. “I don’t want to hear this,” he groaned. “Will you stop trying to tell me what my own job was about? You don’t know anything about it. All we’d designed was a series of tests. The full, integrated-system phase wasn’t going to be until much later—if we ever got to it at all. I hadn’t put specifications together for a full-world scenario.”
“Well, maybe somebody else did,” Lilly retorted.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Why? How did the world turn so weird suddenly? What happened to families, people we knew? If this is real, why isn’t CLC papered with billion-dollar lawsuits?”
Corrigan scowled and shook his head. “I don’t want to listen to any more of this. I think it’s time to go.”
Lilly sighed and conceded. “Perhaps it is,” she agreed coldly. “We can talk about it another time.”
“Good night, then.”
“Right.”
Lilly sat, staring ahead impassively while Corrigan showed himself to the door. He collected his coat and let himself out. The morning air outside was cold. He called a cab and departed back for Oakland without noting the address or the street he was on.
Chapter Eight
The employees at Cybernetic Logic Corporation called it their “museum.” Officially it was known as the Interactive Technologies Collection. Housed on the ground floor of the Executive Building of the company’s R & D facility at Blawnox, behind the reception area and conveniently close to the visitors’ dining room, it formed a fossil record of the evolution of experimental people-to-computer communication’ through the second half of the twentieth century.
There was a working TX-2, the first transistor-based computer, used by Ivan Sutherland’s group at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the early sixties to pioneer interactive graphics; “Alto,” the first personal computer, which emerged from Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the seventies; head-mounted displays, from the early Air Force program at Wright-Patterson, to the flight simulators of the eighties and NASA’s experiments at Ames into telerobotics; and a whole range of eye-tracking devices, gloves, bodysuits, and force-feedback hardware from university projects, industrial labs, and government research institutes. Prized most of all was SNARC, Marvin Minsky’s original neural network machine from 1951. The “Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator” consisted of three antiquated nineteen-inch cabinets containing over 400 vacuum tubes, with learning capability instilled by means of forty industrial potentiometers driven by magnetic clutches via a pair of bicycle chains. The assembly was lost in the late fifties, only to reappear half a century later in a government surplus supply store in New Orleans. The proprietor said he had thought it was a gunlaying predictor from a World War II battleship.
The young woman standing in an open area of floor in front of a graphics screen was in her late twenties, with fine-boned features, silky, shoulder-length fair hair bordering on platinum, and clear blue eyes. She was a postgraduate in neurodynamic physiology from Harvard and had come to Pittsburgh for a job interview. Her name was Evelyn. Evelyn Vance.