They went out through the living room and into the den. It was getting dark. Corrigan switched on the light and gazed around at the desk, the terminal, shelves of books, ornaments, pictures and other hangings on the walls. Finally he went over to the bookshelves and began peering more closely at the titles. “Now, I can’t remember exactly everything that was here,” he said. “But it seems the kind of place that I might have stuck a reminder to myself. . . . Ah! Now, see this one, for example.” He took down a thin, green-covered volume with the title The Stories Behind the Flags. “You see, I can’t remember where this book came from at all. It could be something that Evelyn put there and didn’t tell me about, or I forgot.” He glanced at Lilly pointedly. “Or maybe I put it there for a reason, just before Oz went live, and the memory got suppressed along with everything else from those last few days. See my point?” He rippled through the pages idly with a thumb.
Lilly caught glimpses of the pages, replete with text and illustrations. “The pages are all there,” she said, indicating with a hand. “Surely the people who scanned the house couldn’t have gone through every one.”
“No need,” Corrigan said. “You just get the titles from a high-resolution scan of the room, and the system obtains the contents electronically from a library.” He nodded toward the file cabinet in a corner. “I bet you’d find a lot wrong in there, though. Nobody’s going to wade through that lot.”
“Are you going to look?”
“Oh, we’ll get to it. Meanwhile, what about this book? Is it the clue to the magic word?”
Lilly turned up her hands. “I don’t know. How do we find out?”
“We experiment. . . . Maybe all you have to do is say the right words in the right place, like in a D and D game. Maybe it’s the title.” He raised his voice and recited, “‘The Stories Behind the Flags.’” He waited a moment, then shrugged. “Maybe the name of a flag. How about, The Stars and Stripes? . . . Old Glory? . . . Irish Tricolor? Union Jack?” He looked back at Lilly. “You see. Nothing happens.”
“Just like D and D games,” she remarked.
“Maybe we have to type it into the system.” He went over to the terminal, sat down and switched it on, and began entering any phrases and references to flags that came to mind.
“This could take until the next ice age,” Lilly said bleakly as she began to get the idea.
“I told you, having to try and hit on the right thing from twelve years back doesn’t help. If it was a connection that meant something a couple of days ago, the way it was supposed to, it would probably be obvious already.”
He carried on resolutely. Lilly looked around the room, searching for anything that might suggest itself. She was about to say something when the headlights from a car turning into the driveway outside came in through the window.
Corrigan stopped what he was doing and got up to cross the room and peer out. A familiar tall, loose-limbed figure, yellow-haired in the glow from a nearby streetlamp, straightened up from behind a Ford parked next to Corrigan’s Mercedes and headed with tense, agitated footsteps toward the front door of the house.
“Well, there’s one lot of questions we won’t have to worry about for very much longer,” Corrigan said, letting the drape fall back. “Tom’s here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The bell started ringing when Corrigan was halfway to the door and carried on ringing until he opened it. Hatcher looked as if he had been in a private war. His hair was tousled, his face showing two days of yellow stubble, and his eyes, which in all the years they had worked together Corrigan had never seen other than mild and mockingly easy-lazy, mirroring the way Tom ambled through life, were red-rimmed and glazed. He was wearing a gray, hooded zipper jacket, torn on one side, over a stained khaki shirt and blue jeans.
He gestured back toward the driveway and said without preamble, “Can I move the car into the garage? I need to get it out of sight, off the street.”
“Well . . . sure, Tom.” Corrigan went past him to open the garage door, while Lilly watched from the doorway. Corrigan heard the door of Hatcher’s car slam behind him, and the engine start. He fumbled with the keys and had to try several before he found the right one to open the door. Hatcher drove in past him and got out; Corrigan closed the garage door from the inside and led the way through a side door into the kitchen. Lilly joined them from the hallway a few seconds later.
“I was right, wasn’t I? It happened to you too,” Hatcher said, again wasting no words on preliminaries. “You couldn’t remember which key opened the garage. It’s been twelve years since you did it last, right?”
Corrigan waved a hand to indicate one of the chairs by the kitchen table. “Why don’t you take a load off your feet before we get into this, Tom? You look beat. We’ve just made some fresh coffee.”
“What does it matter—any of it? We’re not really here. None of it’s really here. Coffee? You act like . . .” Hatcher checked himself, then indicated the surroundings with a wave of his arm. “Just to be sure that we’re talking the same language—we do both know what all this is, right?”
Corrigan nodded. “It’s the simulation. We know that. And to save any more comparing of notes, yes, we both went through twelve years of it. And yesterday we woke up back at the beginning, all set to start over.”
“Her too? You mean she’s not a . . .” Hatcher threw up a hand in a way that said call them anything you want.
“This is Lilly Essell,” Corrigan said, his tone making the point that bizarre circumstances didn’t excuse bad manners. “Space Defense Command, Inglewood. Lilly’s a scientist with OTSC—one of the surrogates recruited from outside. She was involved with DIVAC development. We met in the simworld the first time around.”
Hatcher sighed, sank down onto the chair, and nodded wearily. “Excuse me, Lilly. . . . Yeah, man, could I use some coffee.”
Lilly had already taken down an extra mug and was filling the three of them from the pot. “Thanks,” Hatcher acknowledged as she set one of them down in front of him. Some of the fury that Corrigan had sensed when Tom came into the house was abating, but his movements were still tense. He picked up his mug and sipped from it, clasping it in both hands. “Having those freaks around for too long,” he said by way of explanation. “That’s what it does to you.”
“It’s been tough all around,” Lilly said.
“This is the Tom Hatcher that we talked about,” Corrigan told her. “Worked with me on software for years. Now he runs a big slice of the development work at Xylog.”
“I’ve heard a few things about you, Tom,” Lilly said.
“Well, wait until you hear my version before you make your mind up. You know how it is with these Irish guys.” Hatcher’s voice had dropped. The forced humor was an offering to placate.
“Hi,” Lilly conceded with a nod.
Hatcher turned his head back to look up at Corrigan. “I figured out how it must have happened. You remember how it was between you and Frank Tyron back then? There was a group who had him all set up as their man to run COSMOS as a way of cashing in on the work done at SDC. But you screwed that up by selling the company on Oz, and the war changed to which one of you would move into Jason’s slot when he went back to Blawnox. You remember all that?”
“How was I supposed to forget?” Corrigan said.
Hatcher went on. “They had another group somewhere that we didn’t know about—probably back in SDC—that they kept updated with all the research work that we did. These other guys worked it up to a full-world sim and added in a memory suppressor. You, me, and the others who were part of the regular schedule got wiped as soon as we were inside, and the Tyron campaign committee has been running a gimmick-tester for Madison Avenue ever since. That’s how come all that money kept pouring in. And now somebody has decided to restart the whole thing. But this time there isn’t going be a discontinuity at the changeover that needs to be camouflaged. The simulation has gotten good enough to merge in smoothly with reality. We wer
en’t supposed to know anything about that, but this time the suppression screwed up.”
Corrigan made a sign that there was no need for Hatcher to go on. “Okay, we pretty much figured it out the same way, Tom,” he said. “I found myself coming together again after supposedly being messed up in the head by a project that was canceled years ago. After years of being a convalescent, I ended up working as a bartender.” He looked across at Lilly. “Lilly was on the right track before I even suspected.”
The news seemed to deflate Hatcher, as if something that he had been pinning a hope on had collapsed. “So you’re not . . . you’re not just in here as an observer right now?” he said. “You can’t decouple and go stop this from the outside?”
Corrigan looked surprised. “How could I? We’re both in the same situation. You just spelled it all out. . . .” His voice trailed away as he realized that Hatcher had been asking him again to double-check: Was Corrigan really a memory-suppressed surrogate? Or did he know more than he had let on? In short, had Corrigan been a party to the group that had sprung this?
Hatcher’s manner became more subdued. “I had to ask,” he said. Clearly this had been one of the reasons why he had contacted Corrigan.
“I understand,” Corrigan said.
Lilly caught Corrigan’s eye in a way that asked if any of this mattered. Weren’t they missing the whole point that this was supposed to be all about? Corrigan got them back to it.
“On the phone earlier, you said we put in ejector buttons. What was that all about?” he said.
Hatcher took a long drink from his mug. “By the time we got into the serious tests, some funny things were going on. More strangers being brought in from outside that we hadn’t expected. Installations and integrations that weren’t scheduled. We couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody. . . .”
Corrigan could only shake his head. “I don’t really remember.” It was all mixed up in the confusion of half-memories from immediately after that time, twelve years ago.
“We didn’t like it, Joe. And the more we talked it over, the more we agreed there was no way we were gonna go into the sim with all these guys we didn’t know pressing buttons on the outside, without taking out the kind of insurance that we’d figured out for memsupped surrogates. You went into the simworld that night—the day we talked about it. Your memory must have been wiped back to take out that day, which is why you don’t know anything about it. But I wasn’t due to go in until a day later. So I remember us talking about it.”
Lilly, who had been looking from one to the other as she tried to follow, raised a hand to hold everything there. “Wait a minute, let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You’re saying that sometime between the time that you two talked and the time Joe went into the simworld, he placed some kind of escape device in here that only he would recognize when the right time came. But he’s not only forgotten what it was; he’s even forgotten that he ever had the intention.”
Hatcher made a face. “Well, I can’t know for sure that he did. But from the way we talked about it, yep . . . I’d be pretty sure that he did.”
Lilly still wasn’t clear as to the problem. She shook her head. “But I thought you said that you both set up one. Your memory wasn’t wiped that day. So why do you need Joe, anyway? Don’t you know what your escape button was?”
To her surprise, Hatcher set down the mug, showed both his empty hands, and shook his head helplessly. “There’s nothing there that I can recall. Maybe I didn’t get around to implementing it until the next day—because I knew I wouldn’t be going inside until then. Then that day got wiped, just like the day before it did with Joe, so I ended up remembering saying that I was going to do something, but not what I actually did.”
Lilly looked at him dubiously for a moment or two. “Then it doesn’t sound as if it was very effective, does it?” she commented. “I thought that was the whole idea.”
“We were thinking in terms of something that would only need to have some kind of significance after a matter of days,” Corrigan said. “We never dreamed it would have to mean the same years later. Things get fuzzy over time. Who can remember what was and wasn’t important twelve years ago?”
Hatcher shook his head, and all the pent-up feelings that had been simmering boiled up again. “You take it all so cool, Joe. They’re in charge right now, goddammit! Doesn’t it mean anything, what these people are doing out there?” His voice rose. “It might be only a few more days to them—that they think they’ll be able to buy their way out of when it’s over. But it’ll be more years for us!”
“Tom, I do know that,” Corrigan said, trying to calm him.
Hatcher didn’t seem to hear. “Do you know what it means to me?” he asked, pointing at his own chest. “What those twelve years were for me in there? I didn’t end up convalescing and meeting lots of people as a bartender. I figured out early on what was going on. Only, those . . . ‘people’ I was dealing with didn’t know any better. They thought I really was crazy, and they weren’t about to let me out.”
“What!” Lilly gasped. “You mean, all that time? . . . You were shut up in an institution or something?”
“They called it a ‘remedial care center.’”
Corrigan stared, horrified. Whatever the reasons in the cases of the other surrogates, it explained why he had never bumped into Tom during those years in the simulated city. Surely, though, he thought to himself, a case like Hatcher’s would have been monitored by a contact from outside, as had his own by Dr. Zehl.
“But aside from animations, there must have been outside controllers showing up too,” he said. “You could tell them apart. You’d have been looking for it.”
Hatcher nodded cynically. “Oh, sure, there were several of those—usually passing themselves off as ‘supervisors’ to the regular animations, or some such. But they could only ever see it from the angle that it was just a few days. They’re probably the ones who told the animations to keep me off the streets—they didn’t want to risk me meeting other surrogates and blowing the whole thing.”
“One of them showed up at Xylog yesterday,” Corrigan said. “I called his number and left a message saying we know the score and want out. But it’ll be tomorrow before we hear anything back.”
Hatcher sighed, closing his eyes for a moment. “You think they’re really going to take any notice?” he said. “Come on, Joe, let’s get real. They’ve got high stakes riding on this. You and I don’t even come into it anymore. You’re wasting your time.”
Maybe. But at least Corrigan had been looking around constructively for the hope of a way out, Lilly thought. Perhaps if Hatcher had kept a cooler head in the previous run, he might not have ended up as an interesting test case for animation counselors to sharpen their notions of human psychology on.
“We’re not just waiting for the guy from Washington to call back,” she said. “Even since we got back here, we’ve been looking for the whatever-it-is that you say Joe set up somewhere. Did you? I mean, have you even tried, instead of saying it was all too long ago and you can’t remember?”
Hatcher made a tired throwing-away motion in the air. “Ah, there’s no way you’d even know where to start. The possibilities are endless. What am I supposed to do—go running all over the place like some kid chasing clues in a treasure hunt, because people like them won’t talk to me? The hell I will.” He waited for Corrigan or Lilly to disagree, and when they said nothing, waved a hand to indicate the house. “Show me I’m wrong. How did you two make out? Find anything?”
Lilly shook her head and drew back with a sigh. “No. We didn’t.”
Corrigan reversed one of the other chairs and sat down on it straddle-legged. “Okay, then suppose you tell us what else you’ve been doing since yesterday that didn’t work either,” he suggested. “At least we’re not driving around looking like a survivor from the Burma Railway. What happened to get you into that mess?”
Although the question had to come sooner or later, Hat
cher sat with his shoulders hunched, contemplating the mug between his hands for some time before replying. At last, instead of answering directly, he went back to the morning of yesterday.
“Suddenly, the whole crazy nightmare was over. I woke up at the start of a day I’d lived twelve years ago when the project was about to go live. It took me half a day in a daze to be sure that it hadn’t all been some kind of way-out, unheard-of lucid dream.”
“I had the same problem,” Corrigan said. “In fact, it had me fooled until Lilly walked into my office a few hours ago—even after the last experience. Would you have believed it could get as real as this?”
Hatcher shook his head. “No way. This is scary.”
“What put you onto it?”
Hatcher looked at Corrigan curiously for a second. “Did you talk to Barry at all since this flip-back thing happened—since yesterday?”
“Barry Neinst? No, I’ve had all kinds of things going on. What about him?”
“It isn’t him. Not the real Barry that you and I knew. The one who’s been walking around Xylog since yesterday is an animation.”
Hatcher waited for Corrigan’s reaction. It was not as strong as it might have been had it not been for Corrigan’s own experiences with Pinder and Judy Klein. He just nodded and said, “I’ve seen it too.”
Hatcher went on. “There were some things that Barry and I talked about twelve years ago that the Barry yesterday didn’t know anything about. And in any case, after twelve years of dealing with animations, you can tell.”
Corrigan nodded to say that Hatcher didn’t have to go into that. They had been there too—they knew what he meant. “So what did you do?” he asked.
“The first thing? I just walked out. Screw it. I wasn’t gonna be part of the game anymore. . . . Then I got in a car and went driving—out, away from the city. I wanted to see just how far they’d extended the realscape. And do you know something—you can’t tell. It just goes on and on. Somewhere there’s a join where it stops being a replication from the image banks and turns into a synthesis that the system will keep spinning for you for as far as you wanna go, but you can’t tell where it is. It’ll just keep painting highway. Stop at a Waffle House and go inside for a coffee, and it’ll create an inside of a Waffle House—it knows how. And it’ll put people in there who’ll talk to you all day. Kind of strange—like some of those games you can play that keep generating landscapes that go on forever.”
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