Realtime Interrupt

  Realtime Interrupt

  by James P. Hogan

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright (c) 1995 by James P. Hogan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-671-57884-7

  Cover art by Patrick Turner

  First Baen printing, August 2000

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Typeset by Brilliant Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Maurine Dorris

  Acknowledgments

  The help and advice of the following is greatly appreciated:

  Joseph Bates and Mark Kantrowitz, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

  Liam Cullinane, First National Building Society, Ireland

  Beverly Freed, for background on real reality

  Brenda Laurel, for background on virtual reality

  Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, and Thinking Machines Corporation

  John Moody and the staff of Holland's Lounge, Bray, Co. Wicklow, Ireland

  Brent Warner, NASA, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Maryland

  Patricia Warwick, University of Wisconsin

  Joe Corrigan looked at the monitor screen, which now read:

  CONGRATULATIONS!!! YOU ARE NOW IN COMMAND

  OF THE SYSTEM PRIMARY COMMAND EXECUTIVE.

  (COMMAND EXEC ANSWERS TO "ROGER")

  Tyron strode into the room ahead of the others. "Just what do you think you're doing?" he barked.

  Corrigan ignored him and spoke quickly to the computer. "Roger, operand class by name: Corrigan, Essell. Zero reaction coefficients of M-sub-M, M-sub-P, and delete spacial conflict restrictions."

  "Get away from that. . . . What the? . . ." Tyron grabbed at Joe's shoulder, but his hand met no resistance and went straight through. Corrigan had in effect turned himself and Lilly into ghosts.

  "You don't have control anymore," Corrigan said. "I do."

  "That's impossible," Tyron declared. He stepped forward, moving through Corrigan's body, but struck his knee on the edge of the chair, causing him to curse. Corrigan smirked and waved a hand invitingly toward the touchpad. Tyron stabbed savagely at several keys and saw that it was ineffective.

  "Roger, reset k-sub-g to twenty percent," said Corrigan. Papers in the office suddenly lifted and began blowing around in currents from the air-conditioning. Velluci, walking into the room, came loose from the floor in mid-step, in a strange, floating leap that carried him toward the wall. Corrigan had reduced gravity to a fifth of normal.

  "Roger, reset all mu-f to zero." Which reduced all mechanical friction to nothing. Velluci had been hauling himself back up, but went down again as his feet shot out from under him, as if the floor had turned into slick ice. Tyron managed to stay upright, but his spectacles slid off.

  "Roger, rotate k-sub-g vector field ten degrees northward." And gravity was no longer vertical, and all the horizontal surfaces were now sloping. Tyron tried pulling himself up the tiled floor, but his hands slid futilely.

  "You'll regret it, Corrigan," he screeched as a tide of books, folders, furnishings swept him down again. . . .

  BOOKS by James P. Hogan

  Inherit the Stars

  The Genesis Machine

  The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

  The Two Faces of Tomorrow

  Thrice Upon a Time

  Giants' Star

  Voyage From Yesteryear

  Code of the Lifemaker

  The Proteus Operation

  Endgame Enigma

  Mirror Maze

  The Infinity Gambit

  Entoverse

  The Multiplex Man

  Realtime Interrupt

  Minds, Machines & Evolution

  The Immortality Option

  Paths to Otherwhere

  Bug Park

  Star Child

  Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

  Cradle of Saturn

  Prologue

  Faces, places, formless spaces. Blurred thoughts, smeared thoughts. Images dissolving away under swirling water. Words tumbling in dislocated time. Then, clearness emerging suddenly, like a momentary calming of the wind in a storm.

  There was a small, plain room with a bed, a closet, and a window with closed slats. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing a heavy plaid robe. Where this was or how he came to be there, he didn't know. It could have been a hospital. He had a strange feeling of unreality about everything, as if the walls around him were all there was: stage props brought together in a void, with nothing behind.

  He rose and moved to the window. The motion felt remote and disconnected, as if he were watching it from a vantage point that was distant yet still strangely within. Beyond the glass was a city with tall buildings and a river spanned by steel bridges. It felt familiar, but he was unable to name it. He searched his memories but found only faded and scattered fragments from long ago. Of his recent past—anything that might have some connection with where he was and why—there was nothing.

  He turned as he heard the door behind him open. A man entered, dressed in a physician's smock. "Good morning, Joe. How are you feeling today?" the man said.

  So his name was Joe? He made no answer.

  The physician closed the door behind him and crossed the room. He had a square jaw and brow, smooth, pink features, wavy blond hair, and heavy-rimmed spectacles: a physician caricature, the generic of a type, giving the fleeting feeling of possessing no more substance than the room.

  "Do you know who I am?" he asked. Joe shook his head. "I'm Dr. Arnold. We've known each other for quite some time now."

  "Oh," Joe said.

  Arnold peered at him closely. "Do you know who you are?"

  "I'm Joe," Joe told him.

  The physician frowned and seemed momentarily perplexed. "Well, of course you'd know that. I just told you," he said.

  "It was a joke," Joe explained.

  "That was funny?"

  Joe shrugged. "Not in a way that you'd split your sides over. But kind of, I guess."

  "Why was it funny?"

  Joe was beginning to find this a strange conversation. "Well, if you don't know, I don't know how to tell you," he replied.

  "Then tell me why you think it's funny," Arnold said.

  "Look, you don't need to lose any sleep over it. It's not that big a thing. Why are we making such a deal out of this?"

  Arnold stared at him intently. "But I need to know. It's important that I know everything that goes on inside your head. It's been pretty messed up, I'm afraid. You've been a very sick man, Joe."

  Joe didn't feel as if he had been sick. Not just at that moment, anyway. He did feel that Arnold was a strange kind of person to be telling him that he had been. But then the coherence that had momentarily given clarity to his thoughts fell apart again, and what happened next dissolved back into confusion.

  * * *

  "It's great that you're up and about, Joe. We can show you the place, and you can start meeting some of the other patients. That will do you a lot of good."

  The nurse's name was Katie. They walked slowly along a wide corridor with windows on one side, looking out at the river and the bridges. Moving felt more natural, but he still had occasional attacks of giddiness—especially when he changed his direction of vision
too suddenly. Sometimes everything would go completely blank for a moment. Arnold said it was because different parts of his nervous system were out of synchronization and needed time to accommodate to sudden changes of input.

  "What city is this?" Joe asked.

  "That's good: you're getting curious about things. This is Pittsburgh," Katie said.

  Somehow it did not come as a complete surprise. He had a vague recollection of coming to work here. But the clearer details of his still-blurred memories were from another city of high buildings with a river.

  "How long ago did I come to Pittsburgh?" he asked.

  "The second-largest city in Pennsylvania, with a population of over two million, once known as the Gateway to the West," Katie recited, ignoring his question. She went on, sounding like a talking commentary at a museum exhibit whose button had been pushed. "In the eighteenth century it was a scene of intense rivalry between the British and the French, which caused five forts to be built here. It was a major producer of armaments for the Union during the Civil War, and subsequently grew to become the center of the steel industry through the 1960s."

  Joe shook his head. "No, I was asking about me. How long have I been here? What did I come here for?"

  "I think you'd better talk to Dr. Arnold about that," Katie replied.

  Joe sighed. In his scattered moments of clearer perception, he was getting used to this kind of thing. Arnold said it was because his mind wandered off into its own internalizations and lost logical continuity. "Are you a history major or something?" he asked as they resumed walking.

  "No. I'm a nurse. Why?"

  "Do all nurses talk like that?"

  "Why shouldn't they? Don't most people take an interest in such things?"

  "Hardly."

  "What kind of things would you expect me to be interested in?"

  It was such a peculiar question that Joe didn't know how to answer. When he looked at her, her eyes, although fixed on him, seemed to have an emptiness that gave him the feeling of talking to a shell.

  "What do you think when you look at me like that?" she asked.

  "That everyone I meet here is strange."

  But it could be because of the way he was seeing things, he told himself. Maybe people never had been the way he thought he remembered.

  * * *

  He remembered being with a group of young people, laughing and teasing each other as they walked along a road by a shore, where waves broke over rocks below. It was an old town somewhere, of imposing, high-fronted houses built in terraces around squares with green lawns. Ships sailed out of a harbor, past a lighthouse at the end of a long stone pier.

  * * *

  "You were involved in some unconventional experiments involving processes deep in the brain, which have affected your mind and altered the way you see the world," Dr. Arnold told him.

  "I seem to remember I worked with computers. I came to this country to work with them from somewhere else."

  "Ah, excellent! You're getting better every day. Now I want you to meet Simon, who's going to be your regular counselor. Simon, this is the man we want you to help. His name is Joe. Do you remember your full name, Joe?"

  "Corrigan. . . . Joe Corrigan. Pleased to meet you, Simon."

  * * *

  One Saturday night there was a dance for the patients to get to know each other and begin rediscovering long-unused social skills. Corrigan felt as if he had been caught up in a charade of walking character clichés.

  "How are you finding it, Joe?" Dr. Arnold inquired, rubbing his hands together like an anxious headmaster showing his face at the annual high-school ball.

  "Tell me these people aren't real," Corrigan answered.

  Arnold seemed unsurprised but interested. "Why? What's wrong with them?"

  "I feel as if I'm in an old, corny movie."

  "The parts of your memory are starting to come together again. Not as much of what you think you see is really out there. Your mind is filling the gaps by projecting its own, stored stereotypes from long ago. Don't worry. It's a healthy sign."

  * * *

  There came a day when Corrigan grew tired of being restricted. He wanted to get out in the air and work with his hands. In a shed in the rear grounds of the hospital he found some garden tools, and decided on impulse that he would plant a vegetable patch. There was no need to seek approval—one of the advantages of being deemed unstable was that nobody was surprised at anything one did. In any case, asking would simply be an invitation to be told no. A phrase came to mind from somewhere in his past and made him smile: "Contrition is easier than permission."

  The world was coming more together now, and although he hadn't said so, inwardly he considered himself to be virtually back to normal. But when he turned over the first fork of soil, there was nothing underneath—just blackness. He stared, confused, then closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them again, nothing was amiss: he saw earth, roots, a shard of pottery, and a few rocks.

  "You see, you're not as well as you imagine yet," Arnold told him when Corrigan described the experience. "Your perceptions can still be disrupted by sudden changes of mood or intent. That is why it is important for you to get into the habit of thinking smoothly. Avoid discontinuities. . . . But wanting to get out and about again, I can understand. It's perfectly natural."

  "Maybe I could visit my old company?" Corrigan suggested. He could remember a little now about the organization that he used to be with, and his work there. It had involved supercomputers and other advanced hardware.

  "That project was abandoned a long time ago now, Joe," Arnold replied. "And I'm not sure that digging up those ghosts would really be for the best. But I agree that we should begin broadening your experiences as a start to getting you on the road back to a normal life."

  "How long have I been here?" Corrigan asked.

  "It's getting close to three years now," Arnold said.

  "Don't I have any family? Why does nobody come and visit?"

  "They did, in the early days. Don't you remember?"

  "No."

  "You didn't respond well. It set off a regression that threw us back months."

  "I'm better now. Can't we try again?"

  "Sure. But it would be best if not for a while just yet. All in good time, Joe. All in good time. . . ."

  * * *

  He remembered courts of cobblestones and lawns, closed in by tall buildings with frontages of old stone. An archway led through to a busy street with green, double-decked buses. There was a pub by a river, filled with talkative youths in heavy-knit sweaters and pretty girls who wore black stockings. They danced and sang to music in the back room.

  * * *

  "You have to get rid of Simon," Corrigan said. "I can't get along with him. It's not working."

  "What's the problem?" Arnold asked.

  "There isn't any communication. I feel like I'm talking to a sponge."

  "Are you sure the problem is with him and not you?"

  "I didn't say it was him."

  "What's the biggest problem area?"

  "He doesn't understand jokes."

  "Is that so terrible?"

  "It means he isn't human. To be effective, a counselor really ought to come from one's own species."

  Arnold considered the statement. "I'm not so sure of your conclusion," he replied finally. "I believe there are traits among certain animals that some researchers have tentatively identified as indicative of humor." To Corrigan's amazement, Arnold showed every appearance of being perfectly serious.

  "That was a joke," Corrigan said wearily.

  * * *

  They gave him an apartment of his own—still under supervision, but at least it was a start toward regaining independence.

  "I had a wife," he said to Arnold one day.

  "Things weren't so good between you, though, were they?" That was true. Corrigan could recall more now of the conflicts of those final months—both professional and domestic.

  "What happ
ened to her?" Corrigan asked.

  "She got a divorce on the grounds of your incapacitation," Arnold said. "I think she's abroad somewhere now."

  "Now that I'm out again, maybe we could track down some of the people I used to work with. There must be some of them still around. Maybe I could even get some kind of a job there again."

  Arnold didn't seem overenthusiastic. "Maybe, in time. But we feel that reviving those associations too soon could trigger another relapse. Let's see how well you rehabilitate in the short term first."

  * * *

  "Joe, this is Sarah Bewley. She's going to be your new counselor. We've been talking about you to a company that does a lot of work in your field, and they're willing to give you a try at a job. Isn't that great? It will also be farewell from me pretty soon. I'm moving on."

  Sarah elaborated. "It's a Japanese corporation called Himomatsu, who are concentrating on virtual, self-modifying environments. That is the kind of thing that you used to do, isn't it? Naturally, it won't be as senior a position as you had before, but we have to start somewhere. I've arranged an interview for you with their local general manager on Monday—his name is Rawlings. If they do decide to take you on, you'll be going on a familiarization trip to Tokyo."

  "You've been busy," Corrigan complimented.

  "We just want to see you functioning again, Joe."

  * * *

  "Sarah," Joe said, "is the world going crazy, or am I not as well as I feel?"

  "Didn't you like Japan?"

  "It was all the bad tour guides you've ever seen, come to life. They do everything in regiments over there. Somebody's churning them out of a clone factory."

  "It's a different culture. You have to make allowances," Sarah said.

  "They drill their employees on parade grounds. I thought I was joining a company, not the Marine Corps," Corrigan protested.

  Sarah smiled patronizingly. "That's just a new idea that they're trying out. Employee motivation is important. You can't learn if you don't experiment."