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, Hatcher 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.”