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of tests. The full, integrated-system phase wasn't going to be until much later if we ever got to it at all. I
hadn't put specifications together for a full-world scenario."
"Well, maybe somebody else did," Lilly retorted.
"You're being ridiculous."
"Why? How did the world turn so weird suddenly? What happened to families, people we knew? If this
is real, why isn't CLC papered with billion-dollar lawsuits?"
Corrigan scowled and shook his head. "I don't want to listen to any more of this. I think it's time to go."
Lilly sighed and conceded. "Perhaps it is," she agreed coldly. "We can talk about it another time."
"Good night, then."
"Right."
Lilly sat, staring ahead impassively while Corrigan showed himself to the door. He collected his coat and
let himself out. The morning air outside was cold. He called a cab and departed back for Oakland
without noting the address or the street he was on.
Chapter Eight
The employees at Cybernetic Logic Corporation called it their "museum." Officially it was known as the
Interactive Technologies Collection. Housed on the ground floor of the Executive Building of the
company's R & D facility at Blawnox, behind the reception area and conveniently close to the visitors'
dining room, it formed a fossil record of the evolution of experimental people-to-computer
communication' through the second half of the twentieth century.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
There was a working TX-2, the first transistor-based computer, used by Ivan Sutherland's group at the
MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the early sixties to pioneer interactive graphics; "Alto," the first personal
computer, which emerged from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the seventies; head-mounted
displays, from the early Air Force program at Wright-Patterson, to the flight simulators of the eighties and
NASA's experiments at Ames into telerobotics; and a whole range of eye-tracking devices, gloves,
bodysuits, and force-feedback hardware from university projects, industrial labs, and government
research institutes. Prized most of all was SNARC, Marvin Minsky's original neural network machine
from 1951. The "Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator" consisted of three antiquated
nineteen-inch cabinets containing over 400 vacuum tubes, with learning capability instilled by means of
forty industrial potentiometers driven by magnetic clutches via a pair of bicycle chains. The assembly was
lost in the late fifties, only to reappear half a century later in a government surplus supply store in New
Orleans. The proprietor said he had thought it was a gunlaying predictor from a World War II battleship.
The young woman standing in an open area of floor in front of a graphics screen was in her late twenties,
with fine-boned features, silky, shoulder-length fair hair bordering on platinum, and clear blue eyes. She
was a postgraduate in neurodynamic physiology from Harvard and had come to Pittsburgh for a job
interview. Her name was Evelyn. Evelyn Vance.
Corrigan made some final adjustments to the collar that she was wearing above the neck of her blouse.
It consisted of a lightweight aluminum frame entwined with electrical windings and pickup heads, rising
high under the chin like a surgical brace and close-fitting at the base of the skull. The whole assembly
rested on padded shoulder supports, and a cable connected it to an electronics cabinet alongside the
display unit, where another man was watching the screen as he entered setup commands from a
keyboard. He was older than Corrigan, graying, with a ragged mustache, and looking more Evelyn's idea
of the old-time engineer, in a tweed jacket with open-neck plaid shirt, and cords. Corrigan had
introduced him earlier as Eric Shipley, a senior scientist on the project.
"Did you ever hear of Tempest technology?" Corrigan asked Evelyn. "From the late seventies."
"I was just being born then," she replied.
Just turned thirty, smooth, confident, crisply dressed, Corrigan looked the part of the young, successful,
upward-bound executive. The pretty young thing from Massachusetts, nervous, yet excited at the
prospect of trading academia's security for the greater opportunities and hopefully glamour of the
commercial world, was impressed. And he knew it.
"It was a technique that the security agencies developed for tapping in to a data-transmission cable by
reading the magnetic field fluctuations around it." He nodded to indicate the collar. "This combines a
much more sensitive pickup system with standard front-end neural decoding and a lot of the mathematics
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