“Aw, I don’t know that it would get anybody that excited when you get down to it,” Hatcher said. Hatcher was for suppression but resigned to a lost cause. Corrigan had vetoed the idea, there was not enough time left now to change the decision, and that seemed to be that. “These things tend to creep up on you so gradually, day by day, that you get used to it. I asked an astronaut the same question once. He said that they trained so hard for a mission that by the time it actually happened they couldn’t tell the difference anymore. But then, that was the whole idea, I guess. Pretty much the same as what we’re doing.”
It wasn’t just a matter of authenticity. There was the question of being better able to cope in an emergency, too. “What if something did screw up in there, Tom?” Corrigan said. “We’re going straight into people’s heads, interacting at deep perceptual levels that wire into emotional centers. And with the speedup, if anything unexpected did start happening, it would be hours out here before anyone knew about it.
Hatcher knew all that. He thought over it briefly, failed to come up with anything that hadn’t been said a hundred times already, and shrugged. “Well, that’s what the surrogates are being paid all that money for. We know there’s a lot we don’t know, and so do the volunteers who are coming in from outside. What else can anyone say, Joe?”
“I think Joe’s got a point, all the same,” Jorrecks put in. “Whoever’s in there needs to be able to abort the run from the inside if it really goes off the rails somehow. But how could they do that if they didn’t even know they were inside a simulation? I don’t think I’d want to go in there under those conditions.”
“You want an ejector seat,” Charlie Wade said.
Jorrecks nodded. “Yes. But of course you couldn’t have one if the memory was suppressed, since there would be no knowledge of the mechanism for using it. There’s no way you could get around it. Any knowledge that an escape mechanism existed would also be knowledge that there was a simulation to be escaped from, which would defeat the whole purpose.” Jorrecks looked at Corrigan for support. Corrigan nodded.
Charlie Wade looked at Hatcher questioningly. “Shall we tell them?” he asked.
“Why not?” Hatcher said.
Corrigan looked from one to the other. “Tell us what?”
“As a matter of fact, we think it is possible,” Hatcher said.
Corrigan looked skeptical. “How?”
“But everyone would have to do it for themselves.”
“What are you getting at, Tom?”
“Well, if it was me—if I was going in as a surrogate, and let’s say that shortly before the full-system phase I was suddenly told that all memories of, say, the last couple of days were going to be suppressed.”
Corrigan nodded. “Okay.”
“What I’d do is this. I’d plant something inside the simworld that would be significant to me in some way, something that nobody else would know about. Later, after the run was started and I was in it, I wouldn’t know I’d done it, because that memory would have been killed. But I’d still know the way I think, and I’d wonder what in hell this something—this whatever—was doing there. But if some kind of crisis developed to raise the stress level to the point where I had to get out, then I’d recognize it as a signal to myself. And from there it wouldn’t take much fooling around with it to figure out what I’d set it up to do.”
Jorrecks looked at Corrigan inquiringly. Corrigan thought about it for a few moments, and nodded. “That’s clever.”
“You think it could work?” Jorrecks said.
Corrigan smiled and had to nod. “It just might, at that, Des. It just might.”
Hatcher clasped his hands behind his head and stretched his length out over the chair. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind, Joe? Suppression’s in, after all? We can go with it?”
“Not at all,” Corrigan said, waving a hand dismissively. “It’s dead and buried. Forget it. We’ve enough else to do as things are.” Hatcher knew that and hadn’t really been serious anyway. Just then, the phone on Hatcher’s desk rang.