“Okay.”
“Well, I spent some of my free time wandering around, taking in the sights. I like the older, East Coast cities—they’re all so much alike in California. Anyway, I was standing watching something in one particular small street—it’s not all that far from here—that had lots of old, cracked paving stones in the sidewalk, and I noticed that the pattern of the cracks near the base of a lamp outside an antiques store looked like the coastline of Labrador.”
Corrigan shrugged. “What about it?”
Lilly drank from her mug, frowning with the effort of trying to keep clear what had happened around that time. “Soon after that it all gets lost. That was when the intensive tests began, and we were supposed to have had the breakdown and the rest of it. . . .”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Much later, after all the therapy and rehabilitation, when I was out and about again, I ended up one day in that same street. The stones were still old and cracked, so they hadn’t been replaced—but the pattern wasn’t there.” She raised her eyes and looked across at Corrigan. “And that was when a lot of other strange things that I’d been noticing started making more sense. It was a simulation. The system had the data to create realistic views of that street; it knew that the street had old paving stones, and that old paving stones would have cracks. So it put cracks in them. But it didn’t put in the right cracks.”
Corrigan looked at her, astonished. “And that was it?”
“That was it.”
He sat back, nodding. All for the want of a nail . . . “I noticed similar things from time to time, too. I put it down to my own faulty memories.” He shrugged, as if accepting the need for some kind of explanation. “That was what all the authority figures in my life had been telling me for years.”
Lilly looked at him doubtfully over her mug. “You know, for someone who was involved from the start, there seems to be a hell of a lot that you don’t know,” she remarked.
“I’m not really in any better situation than you,” Corrigan said. “We talked a lot about the pros and cons of suppressing the surrogates’ memories, but as far as I was always aware, the decision was not to go with it. So what must have happened is that top management of the project set up another group to implement it secretly. . . .”
“But I thought you were project top management,” Lilly interrupted.
Corrigan waved a hand. “Okay, maybe I should have said company top management. There were all kinds of people involved in Oz, both inside CLC and out—it was a hugely complicated undertaking. . . . Anyway, the idea was to make reactions to the simulation valid. But I always thought it was the wrong decision. Things work better if you know what’s going on.”
Lilly stopped him again. “Wait a minute. Are you saying that you didn’t know about it—that there was going to be any memory suppression?”
Corrigan shook his head and showed his hands appealingly. “I couldn’t be allowed to, could I? Think about it. If a surrogate knew in advance what the intention was, he’d see straight through any attempt at a cover story. If it was going to be done, that part had to be done by other people—without my knowing. Sneaky, yes. But what other way was there?”
Lilly tapped her spoon absently against the side of the mug, frowning to herself and watching it in a distracted kind of way. Corrigan realized that she was far from appeased. She had let herself be led into a diversion about the project’s early days and cracks in paving stones to give herself time to mull over the things he had said earlier.
Finally she shook her head and said, “It still doesn’t add up, Joe. You said you were one of the principal architects of this experiment, right? It practically grew from a proposal of yours in the first place.”
Corrigan had a premonition then of where she was leading. Suddenly he felt less comfortable. “Right,” he agreed.