Corrigan shook his head. “You live your way, I’ll live mine. I couldn’t accept a philosophy like that.”
Shipley seemed unperturbed. “Maybe you should go back and get in touch with your roots again, sometime, Joe,” he said. “To Ireland. There’s a tradition there, too, that understands the kind of things I’m talking about.”
“Oh, you don’t buy that load of rot, too, do you, Eric?” Corrigan groaned. “Thieves, rogues, and scoundrels, the lot of ’em. They’d sell their grandmothers for the price of a pint—and then leave you stuck with the tab if you look the other way.”
“I’d still like to go there,” Evelyn said. It was something they had talked about a number of times.
Corrigan looked at her. “Well, maybe it is about time that you and I took a break somewhere.” He raised his eyebrows. Her face split into a smile, and she nodded eagerly. “How about Florida, or maybe Mexico?” he suggested.
“Somewhere a bit sunnier than Pennsylvania in December, anyway,” she said. “It’s no better than Boston.”
Corrigan thought for a few seconds longer. “Then let’s make it California,” he said. “There’s a string of places dabbling in neural stuff on the West Coast that I’ve always been meaning to check out. And there’s an old friend of mine from MIT called Hans Groener who’s doing things at Stanford on sleep and dreams that sound interesting, but I’ve never had a chance to see it.”
“Sure, California’ll do. Why not?” Evelyn said. “I’ve never seen Yosemite.”
“Do it,” Shipley told them. “Everything’s slowing down here for the holidays. And you’ve probably got some leave that you need to take before the year’s out, Joe.”
Why not? Corrigan thought. “I’ll call Hans tomorrow and see what we can do,” he promised.
Chapter Sixteen
Despite his fatigue and having been up all night, Corrigan did not sleep well. He awoke halfway through the afternoon, still feeling woolly headed and groggy. All he could remember from his disjointed recollections of the early-morning hours was that Lilly’s place was north of the river, somewhere near the Allegheny Center. He cleaned up and put on some fresh clothes, then fixed himself a snack. Computer-injected hunger signals felt just the same, even if his real body was in repose, getting its nutrients from dermally transfused solutions. After that, he left without turning Horace on again, and caught a bus to the North Side.
But nothing that he saw jogged his memory as he wandered up and down the streets of the district contained in the crook of the I-279 Expressway, north of Three Rivers Stadium. Any of a score of apartment-block entrances that he passed could have been hers. Any of the streets that he walked along could have left the hazy image that was all he could piece together of unremarkable frontages glimpsed in predawn shadows.
It made sense to him now why recent years should have seen so much redevelopment around Pittsburgh. For every part of the old city that was “demolished,” new, simulated scenery could be substituted that would not have to conform to anybody’s real-world experiences. Nobody could walk around inside the Camelot, for example, and be puzzled by not finding things the way they used to be. The “realscaping” task was thus considerably eased.
He wanted to tell Lilly that she had been right, but everything was okay—the experiment was going as it should. Yes, their memories of the actual commencement of Oz had been suppressed, and alternative stories given to mask the transition from the real world to the illusory. But it didn’t follow that something sinister was going on. Some such provision would have been necessary to ensure that the responses of the surrogates—the real-world participants coupled into the simulation—would be natural and valid.
And boy, had that part of the scheme worked as planned! Until Lilly waved the facts in front of his nose, he himself—one of the principal creators of the simulation—had failed to realize that he was inside it. She had thought to question where he had not because she had known less. He had been involved in the planning of Oz. Hence, if any deception were intended, he would have known about it. Since he didn’t, there couldn’t be any; and once the impossibility was established in his mind, there was no place for the possibility to coexist. The irony was that it had been able to work in his case only because of his knowledge that it couldn’t work.