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.”Wells spread his hands.Despite the ropy muscles and prominent bones, they did not tremble.“Daniel.That’s a little wild.”Yacoubian was across the office and into his host’s body-space in a moment.He pushed his faceto within an inch of Wells’ own, then reached down and lightly finger-touched Wells’ hand as ittrailed toward the desktop security alarm, arresting its progress.“Just don’t ever dick mearound.Bob.Remember that.Our relationship goes back a long way.We’ve been friends, even.But you don’t ever want to find out what kind of enemy I can be.”Yacoubian stepped back, suddenly smiling, leaving Wells groping for the support of a chair arm.“Now.Let’s go see this little toy of yours.”The general stood in the middle of the darkened room.“Well? Where is it?”Wells gestured.The four wallscreens blazed with light.“This is a lab, Daniel, but it’s not theFrankenstein kind.We work with information here.The ‘toy,’ as you called it, isn’t the kind ofthing I can put on a table and point at.”“Then don’t be so damn theatrical.”Wells shook his head with mock-regret.“My people have put a lot of time into something wecan’t show anyone outside the company.Surely you won’t begrudge me a little bit ofshowmanship.” He waved his hand and all four screens darkened.A hologrammatic display ofsmall white dots formed in midair in the center of the room.They seemed to move randomly,like fast-motion bacteria or superheated molecules.“I’ll feel more comfortable if I can give youthe context, Daniel, so I’m going to explain a little bit of the history of this project.Feel free tostop me if I tell you too many things you already know.”Yacoubian snorted.“Stop you? How? Your security boys took my gun away.”Wells favored him with a wintry smile.“The problem seems straightforward on the surface.TheGrail Project is at bottom a simulation environment, although wildly more ambitious than anyother thus far.As part of the experimental procedure, a subject chosen by our chairman – we’llcall the subject ‘X’ for convenience’s sake, since we still haven’t been told his real name – wasplaced into the simulation.” Wells gestured.An image of a coffinlike metal cylinder festoonedwith cables appeared momentarily displacing the dots.“It hasn’t been easy getting anyinformation about the subject, by the way – the Old Man is playing everything close to the vest –but apparently X was subjected to various conditioning techniques to alter or efface his memorybefore they delivered him to us.”“Conditioning techniques!” Yacoubian’s laugh was short and harsh.“And you civilians makejokes about military euphemisms! What did they do, give him a bad haircut and an excessiveshampoo? They pithed his mind, Wells.They goddamn well brainwashed him.”“Whatever.In any case, about a month or so back there was a disruption of the monitoringequipment and a triggering of the splitting sequence – we still haven’t been able to say decisivelywhether this was accident or sabotage – and contact with X was lost.Contact with his mind, thatis.His body is still here on the premises, of course.About fifty feet beneath where you’restanding, to be precise.But that means his submersion in the simulation network is ongoing, andwe have no idea where in the matrix he is.”“Okay, now you’ve finally gotten to something I don’t know,” Yacoubian said.“ Why can’t wefind him? How hard can it be?”“Let me show you something.” Weils gestured again.The glowing white dots reappeared, thenfroze into something resembling a three-dimensional star map.Wells pointed; one of them turnedred and began to blink.“The old-line simulations were very simple – everything was reactive.When the subject looked at something, or touched it, or moved in a direction, the simulationresponded.”The red dot began slowly to move.The white dots clustered most nearly around it resumed theirearlier motion, but all the other dots remained frozen.“Everything occurred in relation to the subject.When there was no subject, nothing happened.Even with a subject involved, nothing happened beyond the edge of that subject’s perceivedexperience.But this kind of simulation, like the early experiments in artificial intelligence itresembled, made for a very poor version of what it tried to simulate – real human beings don’tthink in a linear series of ‘if-then’ statements, and real environments don’t stop changing ifthere’s no human observer
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