“Exactly,” Hamils said.
Which gave a clear and concise picture, certainly. And it was obviously the kind of thing that the customer wanted to hear. The only problem was that it bore no resemblance to what was actually envisaged at CLC. Pinocchio Two was aimed at shifting the coupling level of the existing motor interface to a higher region of the brain stem and adding speech; EVIE was a short-term kluge to gain experience with vision before the whole thing was redesigned to DNC. The kind of thing that Hamils was talking about, if it ever materialized at all, was years away in the future, at least.
Corrigan tried to inject some measure of perspective but received a firm “not now” signal from Hamils. Borth gave no indication of wanting a detailed technical explanation of either project. It made Corrigan wonder what he was doing here at all. He suspected that the reason was primarily for effect: to maintain an image of CLC’s corporate responsiveness. Therese Loel knew of the huge potential market within F & F’s client base, and had mentioned the DNC program simply to be sure that nothing of possible relevance was missed. Borth had asked for a specialist; the company had obliged. Now everyone was reading too much into it.
“Have you seen our research organization down at Pittsburgh?” Hamils asked Borth.
“I’ve been to the head office in the city a couple of times, but never out at the labs, no,” Borth replied.
Hamils inclined his head for a moment. “Maybe we could offer you a trip down there to see what goes on?” he suggested. “Then Joe’s people could show you the whole state of the art. What do you think?”
“Sounds good,” Borth replied. “I’d like that.” He glanced at his colleagues. They seemed interested. “We’ll all come,” he announced.
Hamils looked pleased with the morning’s work. “Joe will set it up when he gets back,” he said. “Okay, Joe? Can you fix that for us?”
There it was at last: a direct question. What else was Corrigan supposed to say? “Sure, I’d be happy to.” He forced his expression to remain calm and composed. “That would be no problem at all. But we are in changeover mode to the new project just at this moment. . . . Could we schedule it for a little later in time?”
Chapter Thirteen
“You come home at some unearthly hour, and all you’ve done since is drink coffee. No sleep, nothing to eat. Why can’t you admit that it’s a textbook case of delayed shock response, following your recent emotional trauma?”
“Horace, shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. In fact, you don’t know anything about what’s going on at all.”
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Joe. It’s perfectly normal. The symptoms were described exactly by Fenwick Zellor in—”
Corrigan flipped the manual override on the kitchen monitor panel to “off.” Then he returned to his chair at the table, topped up his mug, and resumed contemplating the design of floral bunches and foliations on the wallpaper opposite.
Although he was looking away from it, he knew that above the work surface behind him was a spice rack fixed to the side of a cabinet—a flimsy, wooden affair of two shelves and supporting ends, holding an assortment of small glass jars. It was outside the range of his immediate attention—as far as could be ascertained from outward appearances, anyway—and the likelihood of anything else in the room affecting it in some way in the next few seconds was vanishingly small. That meant that it would rank low in the probability tables constantly being updated by the program that tried to guess which features of the surroundings were likely to be objects of action or change in the immediate future.
The number of discrete objects needed to make up a simulated world that aspired to be in any way authentic was stupendous. Every one of those objects had, associated with it, a list of latent attributes that might require activating at any time, according to circumstances. A book taken randomly off a shelf and thumbed, for example; a rug kicked back across the floor; a candy bar broken—all would involve the sudden revealing of new information that had previously been hidden. The number of conceivable ways in which a given situation might develop in the next instant was so astronomic that no method of organizing the data could make all of the possible continuations equally available for processing in the time necessary to create smooth, realistic transitions: the computers couldn’t generate dirt and worms under every square foot of grass in Pennsylvania all the time, just in case somebody were to decide on a whim to pick up a shovel and dig a hole somewhere.