“Not forever, surely,” Lilly objected. “What happens when you come to somewhere you know? I mean, suppose I decided to drive back to L.A.? I might get taken in by a lot of invention along the way, but not when I got there. Even if they mapped in a few blocks around Inglewood, there couldn’t have been anything as comprehensive as what was done for Pittsburgh.”
Hatcher was nodding in the slightly impatient way that said yes, anyone with a brain functioning on the positive side of imbecile level knew all that. It wasn’t intentional, Corrigan told himself. Tom had spent too long surrounded by animations that he knew were animations, and by the sound of it, hating them. Tact was not a habit that could be regained instantly after years of dealing with elaborate mimes that had no feelings.
“Last night I had a ball just being out around the city again, even if it was all a fake,” Hatcher told them. There was a strangely satisfied, yet at the same time malicious look in his eye as he spoke. Corrigan had never seen Tom quite like this. Here was something that they had never really stopped to consider in all their debating about the project and its possible consequences: a personality being radically altered in a space of what, in the outside world, had amounted to only a few days. He wondered what alterations had taken place in himself—perhaps irreversibly—that he was even now unaware of.
“Where did you go last night?” Corrigan asked uneasily.
Hatcher’s expression broadened into a smile that Corrigan wasn’t sure he liked—the smile of a chain-saw murderer bragging about his exploits. “Here, there—what does it matter?”
“What did you do?”
“I was getting even, man!” Hatcher’s voice began rising again, with an edge to it that said his patience was being stretched. Maybe he’d had enough of interrogations in the last few years. “I had a lot in my system that I needed to get rid of. Smashing bottles can be very satisfying, even if it wasn’t them that got you mad, and they don’t know they’re being smashed.”
“Okay, okay.” Corrigan put a hand up to his brow and nodded, not really wanting to hear all the lurid details spelled out. So what had Tom done? Started a fight? Broken up a bar? Heaved bricks through a jeweler’s window? A lifetime’s instincts tried to feel shocked, but they were overridden by the intellectual awareness that in a simulation such acts carried no more moral significance than shooting monsters on the screen of a video game. In fact, now that the worst was out, Corrigan found himself tempted to smile.
Hatcher looked across at Lilly. “Then, today, I asked myself what you just asked—only, I wasn’t about to go driving for days to get to L.A. or anywhere else to find out. So I went out to the airport, walked up to the ticket desk, and said I wanted to go to Vancouver.”
Lilly was catching the changing mood on Corrigan’s face and did smile. “That’s one way to give them a hard time,” she said. “How did they handle it?” But Corrigan had stiffened at Hatcher’s mention of the airport.
Hatcher snorted. He seemed to be enjoying reliving the experience. “By getting flustered and irrational and stupid,” he replied. “First they tried to say the flight was canceled. Then, when I said okay, I’d take the next, they said the airport there was closed—there had been a freak blizzard, and the area was a national emergency.” Corrigan recalled the antics that he himself had forced the system into when he put the call through to Ireland. Hatcher showed an upturned palm. “Would you believe, the turkey of a supervisor there tried to talk me into making it Japan instead? Who ever heard of a passenger showing up at an airport, who wants to go to Vancouver, being told maybe they ought to try Japan instead?”
“That was because it’s in the bank,” Corrigan said needlessly. The parts of Tokyo realscaped by Himomatsu had been merged into Oz as part of the project.
“So, since you’re still here, what happened?” Lilly asked.
Hatcher sighed heavily and pushed himself back from the table. “Well, it got kinda noisy. First, airport security showed up, then the cops came muscling in . . . and I guess after all the crap I went through last time, the freaks just pushed me too far. But I’d probably gone there with trouble in mind anyhow.” He reached inside his coat and drew out a handgun—a large one, .44 or .45.