Even now, Corrigan found that it needed an effort to tell himself that what he was looking at had never happened. The conditioning processes of twelve years, everything he had seen, read, and been told through all that time added up to a powerful weight of persuasion that his instincts fought against simply dismissing. This had been Xylog. He could remember how it looked in those final weeks, the hectic days and bleary-eyed, all-night sessions to complete the preparations on time and straighten out the inevitable last-minute hitches. He had made some initial sorties into the final test simulations to check details from the inside. . . . And after that his recollections became confused and indistinct.
It was only long afterward, when he was well on the road to recovery, that he had learned how those final tests had damaged him, along with many others, with mental disruptions, hallucinations, breakdowns, periods of total blankness. The government intervened to halt the project. There had been hearings and investigations, and finally the project was abandoned and the site sold off. He had read the reports, watched the tapes. And here, in front of him, was what was supposed to be the incontrovertible evidence.
Except that none of that could have happened, for the simulation was still running.
“You weren’t a permanent inhabitant like most of the other surrogates,” Lilly said. “You were supposed to be one of the controllers—entering and leaving whenever you wanted.”
“That’s right.” Corrigan had no explanation. He could only agree.
Lilly turned to him with an air of finality, as if that summed up everything that she had been saying since their first meeting in the Camelot. “So something that you weren’t expecting must have happened during the last week or so.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Corrigan groaned wearily. “It’s all so confused from around that time. I can’t remember.”
“What happened, obviously, was that your memory was wiped too,” Lilly said. “But according to you, it shouldn’t have been. Which can only mean that somebody else set it up.”
“You don’t know that,” Corrigan protested. “I could have agreed to something they sprung on me in the last few days. If that’s the case, then of course I don’t remember anything about it. That would have been the whole idea.”
“You were one of the main designers,” Lily pointed out. “Your place would have been supervising from the outside.” She raised an arm to take in the locality of Southside around them, the river off to one side, and beyond it in the visible part of downtown Pittsburgh. “We’re twelve years into this, and it’s still running,” she said. “Didn’t you tell me before that this goes way past anything that had been planned? All that had been scheduled was a series of more extended testing. Nothing like this.” She waited for a moment, saw that he had no immediate answer, and went on. “It’s clear what must have happened. Somebody else had arranged a far more elaborate simulation than you were told about.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Which meant that you weren’t. as in control as you thought. Your position wasn’t so unassailable—that’s what you won’t admit. Sometime during the early phases you entered the simulation on a routine visit, and while you were inside they switched over to the extended version and wiped your memory to keep you here for the duration. Meanwhile, they’re running things on the outside. . . . And you’re telling me not to worry, everything’s going just fine? That I should trust them?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you’ve been watching too many movies,” Corrigan retorted irritably. He had a more than gnawing suspicion that she was right, but he needed time to think. “You don’t have any evidence for all this. It’s pure fabrication. These weren’t the sinister people that you’re trying to paint—just ordinarily ambitious people in a competitive environment. You’re making it sound like intrigue inside the Kremlin.”
“Oh, yes? Look what they did to you. You’d already stabbed your best friend in the back. And things with Evelyn were heading for the rocks. How soon afterward did that come apart? In circumstances like that, it would have been easy for them to convince anyone who asked that you’d elected to go in as a surrogate on your own initiative—to get away from it all for a while to wouldn’t it?”