* * *
The den of Evelyn’s apartment at Aspinall was darkened, lit only by the green-shaded lamp on the desk. Corrigan stood by the window, brooding to himself as he stared out at the lights of the city. So what, exactly, was Tyron proposing to deliver that was generating so much excitement and attention? he asked himself. Functionally it would still be EVIE. For anyone using the system, the fact that a different behind-the-scenes technology was supporting the vision and acoustics would make only a marginal difference. It was still what Victor Borth had called a “toy”: something that played at imitating the world. That would be of interest to some enterprises, and no doubt Tyron and whoever he was in league with had identified some potential—possibly some quite substantial potential. But Corrigan knew that what the people with the real money wanted was something else. Okay, he thought to himself, so those were the rules, were they?
“Joe, are you coming to bed?” Evelyn’s voice said from the doorway behind him.
“Not really sleepy.”
“It wasn’t really sleep that I was thinking about.”
He turned and smiled tiredly in the light at the window. “I have to say my prayers first. You know how the Irish are.”
She came in and moved close to him. He slipped an arm around her. “Still letting it eat away at you?” she said.
“Oh . . . just thinking.”
“You can’t change anything. Start thinking about moving to another job if it’ll help. We’ll manage.”
“Just walk away? Wouldn’t some people like that!”
“I know that the Irish are fighters, too. But you can’t fight this.”
“Well, maybe you’re being just a little bit too quick on handing down that verdict.”
She turned her head and looked at him uncertainly. “Why? What have you got in mind?”
He thought for a second, then said, “Let me check on a few things first, before I start going into it. Okay?”
“If you say so.”
He squeezed her waist and patted her behind through her robe. “Go and get warm, then. I’ll be through in a minute.”
“Hurry up,” she whispered, kissing him on the cheek, and left the room.
It would still be before eleven in California. Corrigan went over to sit down at the desk and called Hans Groener’s personal record onto the terminal’s screen. He selected the phone number and pressed a key to initiate auto-call. Moments later, Hans’s features greeted him. They talked for most of the next hour about thalamus-level interfacing. The next morning, Corrigan extended his leave by a few days and caught a noon flight to San Francisco. He and Hans spent the rest of the afternoon talking in Hans’s lab at Stanford, and afterward into the early hours at Hans’s apartment, going through research notes and generating reams of charts and diagrams.
On returning to Pittsburgh, Corrigan went straight over to see Jason Pinder.
Chapter Twenty-five
Corrigan’s manner had changed since his last interview with Pinder. Although it had never come close to anything that could be called servile, common sense had always caused him to hold his opinions unless they were asked for, and then to couch them with a restraint appropriate to Pinder’s position. Now, however, the words poured forth as from an inspired evangelist. Pinder, aware that Corrigan was neither naive nor new to the business, listened with intrigued curiosity.
“Before the company leaps into putting up a lot of money and committing itself for years ahead, it ought to ask one last time what it stands to get in return for the investment,” Corrigan said. “When you sit down and analyze it, all that COSMOS is really promising is a more sophisticated version of what we’ve already got in the lab down there: a full-sensory interface. The only difference is that EVIE uses VIV for its vision and voice, whereas COSMOS will shift everything to the thalamus. But essentially it’s still the same thing. And that same thing is what the people from Feller and Faber told us they didn’t want—what Borth described as a `toy.’ What they do want, and what there’s still a huge market for out there if someone can come up with a way to achieve it, the thing that the industry has been after for decades, is true AI.” Corrigan drew a long breath as he came to the point that he was preparing to stake his future on. “Well, I think that I can deliver it.”