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.”