Corrigan was intrigued to note that Borth didn’t seem to be hearing anything especially unexpected, but doodled on a pad and nodded idly until Tyron had had his say. It was Amanda who came to the point of what this was all really about. And she did so with surprising candor.
“You’re all thinking like scientists,” she said, smiling in the manner of someone ending the joke they had all been playing, of pretending that they hadn’t known all along. “Most of the people that we deal with are frauds, flakes, and phonies. I mean, who are we talking about? PR departments that think reality is what they say it is. Madison Avenue and political hygiene experts who make their own reality. Media crazies who never knew the difference in the first place. They all operate in worlds of manufactured images—images built on the public’s credulity and wish-fulfillment fantasies, sustained by illusion and delusion. What matters is not what happens to be true, but what people believe is true, and what they want to be true.”
She held up a hand to acknowledge what Tyron had just said. “Yes, sure, we know that most of what happens in the world happens for reasons that nobody understands. But there will always be somebody who gets the credit for having called it: the leader of whatever the current in-fad is; today’s guru-of-the-moment . . . Anyone with the right reputation. Whether the reputation is based on fact or fantasy doesn’t matter.
“Well, right now the trendy word in cocktail-party science is AI. If somebody like us can make it believable that they can bring real AI to bear on the complexity-prediction problem, it’ll have the clients lining up all down the block.”
“Even if it has known . . . limitations?” Therese Loel still hadn’t fully gotten the message. She couldn’t bring herself to say, “won’t work.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Korven interjected softly. “In this world, what you believe to be real is real. Amanda said it: Reputation.”
“The Rainmaker Syndrome,” Amanda said. “If you dance long enough, eventually it’ll rain. If lots of people make predictions, some will hit lucky, and that will be good enough for the rest. When enough people try a cure for something, some percentage of them is going to get better anyway. And there’s your reputation. When it happens in the market we’re talking about, somebody’s going to collect a bonanza.”
Borth closed his pad and looked up. “But EVIE and Pinocchio aren’t it. They play at being what the world is right now. What I want to see is how the world is gonna be, say, five years from now. Show me that, and we can start talking deals.”
Chapter Fifteen
In the middle of 2008, Frank Tyron left the Space Defense Command to take up a position with CLC’s R & D division as “Development Manager, Simulation Graphics,” reporting to Pinder. In this, he took charge of a new group that combined the people still on assignment from SDC, plus the loosely structured graphics and holo-imagery section that Ivy Dupale had been heading informally. The remaining parts of the DNC department outside Shipley’s DINS lab were consolidated as EVIE and placed under Corrigan. The corporation assured all concerned that these moves represented an overdue streamlining and rationalization, needed to better serve a “fast-growing and exciting new area faced with increasingly severe competitive pressures from abroad.”
There was disgruntlement within the DNC group over Ivy’s being passed over in this way by an outsider. Evelyn was one of the most indignant, but being a comparative newcomer to the scene, she was hesitant about how much of a fuss it was her place to make over it. Privately, she made representations to Corrigan.
“I think it’s scandalous, Joe—especially after the job she did getting the synchronization bugs out of the EVIE imaging system. Can’t you talk to Pinder about it, or something?”
“My line is research,” Corrigan told her. “Corporate politics isn’t what I do.” He also wondered if the change was entirely bad; it could represent a step toward the more cosmopolitan flavor that he felt the project could do with.
“So you won’t do anything?”