Cyber Rogues (59 page)

Sherri exhaled a sigh. “You can say that again.” She looked at Corrigan. “When the guy gave me the big order I told him, ‘That’s nice.’ Did I get it right?”

Corrigan stared down at the glasses as he poured, not knowing what to say. How did you explain inappropriateness to somebody who just didn’t have the wiring to feel it intuitively? This wanting to know why he thought something funny was another thing that he found all the time with people—and the main reason why he had stopped telling jokes. He was unable to understand why something that they obviously didn’t share should be so important to them. He could see why Sarah Bewley would be interested: trying to understand him was her job. But why would anyone else care about his peculiarities when
he
was the odd person out?

“Hey, bar,” the Merlyn Dree aide in charge of ordering called from across the room. “Back up on that order there. Make it another one for
everybody
!”
He looked around. “When
we
drink, everyone drinks. Right, guys?” The room yelled its approval.

Then another group arrived, and things got hectic. Corrigan worked nonstop until they finally closed things down around 3:00 A.M., in all of which time Lilly never did get a chance to answer his question. In one brief lull, however, they did agree to going for a coffee somewhere, afterward.

“I pretty much keep myself to myself,” Lilly said. They had come out into the night air and were turning off Fourth into a passage that connected through to the late-night lights around Market Place. There was a moment’s hesitation, as if she were unsure about confiding something. “I guess I don’t really relate much to most of the people you meet these days. Things seem to change faster and faster. Not a lot of it makes sense anymore.”

Her words mirrored his own situation perfectly. Was that what she had somehow recognized, and why she was showing such interest in a bartender? “I know what you mean,” he said.

“Yes, I think you do. I don’t feel that with people very often.” She glanced sideways at him as they walked. There was more than idle curiosity at work. “You must meet all kinds in a job like yours.”

“You saw a few of them yourself tonight.”

“But you don’t just see them,” Lilly said. “You seem to see into them, as well. I was watching.”

“I know you were,” Corrigan answered. “So that makes you a bit of the same yourself, doesn’t it?” Lilly conceded with the quick smile of somebody being caught out, at the same time managing to convey that it was because she was not used to it. Compared to the empty stares and clumsy gropings to extract meaning that he saw every day, it felt like communication bordering on mind reading.

A promotional scouting robot spotted them as they came out into Market Place and rolled across to intercept them, flashing colored lights and logos of nearby places that were open late. “Hello, there! Enjoying the city late tonight?” it greeted jovially. “For your further entertainment we have Jermyn’s cabaret bar less than half a block from here, still open for drinks, dancing, and shows until dawn. Getting hungry? The Lilac Slipper offers the best in contemporary and traditional Cantonese cuisine, ten-percent discount for Pirates. Or, for more erotic tastes, ho-ho . . .”

Lilly sighed. “Maybe I could pass on having that coffee out. I’ll fix you one at home. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good,” Corrigan said. “How far is it?”

“Over the river, north. We’ll need a cab. Do you have a compad? I’m not carrying one.”

“I hardly ever use them.” Corrigan looked at the robot. “Can you call us a cab?”

“Sorry, I just make reservations. But why do you want to leave? It’s Saturday night. You want to be part of the scene, right?”

“Wrong.” Corrigan steered Lilly away to search for a pay booth. The robot pursued them, babbling tenaciously, until a mixed group of people appeared on the far side of the street, and one of them called it away.

“Aren’t you into being part of the scene?” Lilly said it in a light, mocking tone that combined several wavelengths—phrasing it as a question, but simultaneously telling him that she already knew and understood his answer because they both recognized and laughed at the same absurdities.

“Guilty,” Corrigan replied.

“You don’t need to find yourself?”

“I wasn’t aware that I ever lost myself.”

“But that’s
terrible.
”

“
Now you know the worst.”

They both laughed. She slipped her arm loosely through his.

There was a gift store, with various curios and Pittsburgh mementos in the window. Suddenly Corrigan stopped and stared in at them. “What is it?” Lilly asked.

He pointed to a figure of an Irish leprechaun, identical, as far as he could judge, to the one in his hallway back at the flat. “That’s Mick. He keeps popping up wherever I go. Do you know, I’ve one the same as that at home. It was a wedding present.”

“Was that to the wife who left yesterday?”

“No, there was one other before—a while back, now.”

“Maybe he’s haunting you,” Lilly said. “Can you have leprechaun ghosts?”

“Well, if it’s a crock of gold that he’s after, he’s wasting his time haunting me,” Corrigan said.

They resumed walking. “So, when you see into people, what things do you see?” Lilly asked, getting serious again and picking up their earlier subject.

Corrigan thought back to Wilbur, Oliver, and Delia. “Oh, the strange ways they go about trying to get what they want,” he replied.

“Such as?”

“Well, if you asked them, I suppose most of them would say that what they want is to be happy, wouldn’t you think?”

“Uh-huh.”

“A young fella was in earlier. He’s pinned everything on a job that he’s after, and if you want my opinion it’s a scoundrel he’ll be working for.” Corrigan made a brief, empty-handed gesture. “You see these people chasing after money and success and the like, because those are the things that they think will make them happy. But they’re making their happiness depend on what others have the power to give or take away. So don’t they become slaves to the people who control those things? And can people who are not free be happy? They cannot. So have such people obtained what they set out for? They have not. They’re looking in the wrong places.”

They found a pay booth. Corrigan called a local cab company, giving his name and their location. “I see you’re not listed with us,” the synthesized voice commented. “We have an introductory discount for opening an account tonight.”

“No, thanks.”

“Can I register you for our bonus-mileage club?”

“No.”

“How about the all-in-the-family group scheme? Brand new.”

“We’d just like to go home. Is that all right?”

A baffled pause, then, “A cab will be there in five minutes.” Corrigan shook his head as the call cleared.

“Are you free, then, Joe?” Lilly asked.

“I’d say so, yes,” he replied.

“And why’s that?”

He shrugged and gave her a quick, easy grin. “I’m what you might call a self-unmade man. I didn’t always do what I do now, you know. It took a lot of effort to work my way down to it. But now I’m free to live according to the things I believe in, and nobody can compel me to think or believe anything I choose not to. So the things I do value, nobody can take away.”

“Are all the Irish like that?” Lilly asked. She sounded fascinated.

“Oh, God, not at all. You’ve never met such a crowd of rogues and villains in your life.”

“So how come you’re different?”

“Ah, well, I went through some bad experiences a few years back. Maybe that changed some things, if you know what I mean.”

Lilly hesitated, obviously wanting to be tactful. But for some reason it seemed important to her. “Things?” she repeated. “What kind of things? Do you mean psychologically?”

Corrigan spotted the cab approaching and stepped forward, raising an arm. “Exactly,” he said over his shoulder. “The pieces are coming back together again, but they don’t seem to function the way that most people’s do.”

They climbed in, and Lilly gave the address on North Side. As soon as the door closed, a screen in the rear compartment began running commercials. Corrigan paid an extra dollar to shut it off.

“Being different might not be such a bad thing,” Lilly said. “You said you used to work in computers, but you sound more like a philosopher. What kind of a society lets its philosophers end up working in bars?”

“Believe me, there’s no better place to learn the subject,” Corrigan assured her as the cab pulled away.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Lilly lived in a two-bedroom unit in a complex north of the Allegheny Center. It was clean and comfortable, feminine but not cute and lacy, casual without being a mess: all about what Corrigan would have expected. She produced a liter of Californian Chablis to go with the steak sandwiches that they had stopped for on the way.

Now Corrigan was able to give her his full attention for the first time. She was attractive not just physically but in the rarer, more appealing way that comes with the feeling of two minds being in tune. He hoped that his coming back here with her wasn’t going to be interpreted as going along with anything more intimate that she might have in mind. The day had been emotionally fatiguing, and he had worked a hectic shift through to the early hours. Enough was enough. If ever there had been a time when a rain check was in order, this was it.

But such fears proved groundless. Lilly was more interested in hearing about his years in computing and the “bad experiences” that he had mentioned which put an end to them. For anyone to ask was a novel experience in itself. So, although the hour had surpassed ungodliness, he refilled the glasses and settled himself back to regard her across the empty plates on the table.

“Is it stuffy in here after the food?” Lilly asked suddenly. “I can’t tell. I’ve got a sinus problem that stops me smelling things.”

“It’s okay,” Corrigan said. “I used to be with one of the big companies here: Cybernetic Logic Corporation—I worked at their corporate research center out at Blawnox. They were big in Artificial Intelligence-based systems. Still are, for that matter. The aim of the AI field had always been true, human-level intelligence, one day. But around the turn of the century, the technology was plateauing out. After some progress and mixed results, there didn’t seem to be any obvious way to advance things further.”

“Yes, I know CLC,” Lilly said. “They’ve got a building downtown, near Westinghouse.”

Corrigan nodded. “Well, about twelve years ago, CLC set up a big research project to try a new way of achieving AI. It might come as a surprise, but I practically invented it.” He paused, but Lilly merely returned a stare that could have meant anything. Corrigan went on: “You see, traditionally there had been two approaches to AI: top-down and bottom-up. Top-down meant trying to understand all the complexity of this thing we call ‘mind’ in sufficient detail to code it into programs.” He waved a hand in front of his face. “Forget it. The immensity of the task would make it intractable, even if we knew what to code.”

A strange half-smile was playing on Lilly’s lips, but in his soliloquizing Corrigan failed to notice. He continued: “The other way, bottom-up, meant trying to create simple neuronlike configurations that could be made to evolve, the same as we did. The problem you run into there is that you don’t realize how efficient animal nervous systems are until you try imitating them. You can spend ten years, fifty million dollars, and the best brains in the business putting TV cameras and legs on a computer to make it walk, and the average twelve-month-old will run rings around it—literally. The simple fact is, computers don’t interact very well with the real world outside. They haven’t had a billion years of evolution optimizing them for it. They operate better on their own, internal worlds.”

Lilly nodded, finally, and raised a hand. “It’s okay, Joe. You don’t have to go on. The project was called Oz—set up under a new CLC division called Xylog, across the river, along Carson Street—yes? The idea was to let an AI evolve by interacting with a virtual world.”

Corrigan stared at her in astonishment. “Xylog! That’s right. Some of the buildings are still there . . . I don’t know what they’re used for today. How in heaven would you know about that?”

Instead of answering immediately, Lilly continued, “But Oz was shut down in the preliminary test phase. Before that, were you working on the program that led up to it: a project called EVIE?”

Corrigan shook his head bemusedly. “How in God’s name—”

“I’ve got one more,” Lilly said. “Then you’ll get your answers. What happened? Why was the Oz project abandoned, and what did it have to do with your winding up in a place like the Camelot?”

It wasn’t something that Corrigan normally talked about, especially to people he hardly knew. But these were hardly normal circumstances. “How much do you know about how the interaction was going to be implemented?” he asked, to avoid launching off into needless explanation.

“Enough,” Lilly answered. “The idea was that the system would learn by manipulating humanoid animations to emulate real-person surrogates projected in from the outside.”

The AI would evolve by controlling artificial characters in a virtual world. As a substitute for the directional thrust of biological evolution, the system would endeavor to shape the behavior of its creations closer to that of surrogate representations of volunteer participants coupled in from the outside. Thus, the virtual world would contain two kinds of inhabitants: humanoid “animations,” manipulated by the computer; and “surrogates,” controlled by real people, represented as themselves. The test would be to see if the machine could make the behavior of the animations indistinguishable. From her reply, Lilly was aware of all this.

“And am I right in supposing that you know how the surrogates were coupled in?” Corrigan said. “VIV? DIVAC? You’ve heard of them?” He meant the latest developments at that time in direct-coupled neural I/O, which had appeared on the scene after the earlier VR paraphernalia of head-mounted displays, bodysuits, and so forth. It had come out of work going on at places like Carnegie Mellon and MIT, certain government departments, and Advanced Telecomms at Kyoto, that involved interaction directly with the neural structures of the brain.