Cyber Rogues (91 page)

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.

“Oh, my God,” Lilly breathed. It was what Corrigan had feared.

Hatcher held the weapon between his hands above the tabletop, staring at it for a few seconds as if savoring the memories that it evoked. Then he looked up at Corrigan with a challenging expression and shrugged nonchalantly. “I started blowing ’em away. There’s probably something about it on the news if you turn it on.”

Corrigan groaned—not at the news so much as from the realization that his letting-up of fears had been a delusion. Tom was still very much borderline—right on the edge.

Hatcher interpreted his frozen expression as censure and rose up from the chair. “What’s the matter, Joe? Don’t you understand?—
I’ve had it
with animation freaks! There was
no way,
they were gonna shut me up inside anywhere again. . . . But it doesn’t matter a shit anyway. They’re just walking bundles of code. It doesn’t mean a goddamn thing—any of it.” He stood, waiting for a sign that they understood. But despite himself, just for that instant Corrigan was unable to return anything but a blank stare while his mind fumbled for the right thing to say. Lilly seemed to be affected the same way.

Hatcher looked at them and colored, angry now. He pointed back toward the front door, indicating the direction to the outside of the house but meaning the outside of the whole simulation. “Do you expect me to just walk around and carry on being a good guinea pig for those guys out there? I’m telling you, I’m getting out, and it won’t be with any of their permission.” He grinned crookedly as a new thought struck him, and turned the gun toward Corrigan. “I could get you outta here too, if you want, Joe—real quick.”

Corrigan’s reaction was reflexive. “Don’t point that bloody thing at me. Look—”

“What’s up, Joe? You’re getting this confused with reality. All that happens is the impact function of the bullet transforms as a superposition into the physical subfile of your physical matrix and makes it nonviable, and you’ll wake up in a cubicle. Why put up with any more of this shit?”

“Tom, you just let me handle it in my own way, okay?” Corrigan said tightly.

“We know how you feel, but why don’t we just relax and—” Lilly began, but Hatcher thrust the gun back inside his coat and was already moving toward the door. There was a look in his eyes that hadn’t showed earlier—final surrender when a last hope had failed to materialize.

“I came here because I thought you might be on an open wire out, Joe,” he said. “But it seems you’re just as trapped in here, and I sure as hell am not gonna sit around waiting for them to call me. Okay, you solve it your way, and I’ll solve it mine. This isn’t gonna get us anywhere. Sorry I messed up your evening. So could you just let me have my car?”

“Now don’t do anything—” Corrigan began, but Hatcher cut him off with a laugh.

“I don’t believe it. Joe. You still haven’t gotten it into your head. . . . There isn’t anything stupid that I can do. All those years must have got you really conditioned. Maybe I had it better after all.” He crossed the kitchen and opened the door leading to the garage. “Now the car, Joe—please?”

They watched the Ford drive off with a squeal of tires, and only then did Corrigan notice for the first time that one side of its front fender and the wing were mangled. He went back inside with Lilly, and they ate an uninspired meal of bachelor-fare oddments from the refrigerator.

Afterward, they resumed poking around the house for possible clues to an escape switch, but the enthusiasm went out of it as they soon found that Hatcher had been right about one thing: with no idea what they were looking for, the possibilities were virtually unlimited, and so was the amount of time that finding it was likely to take. Finally they agreed that it would probably be smarter to await a response from Sylvine as a first option. They retired early, Lilly taking the guest room, and drove back to Xylog first thing the next morning.

That was when they learned that Hatcher had hit a truck head-on at what witnesses said must have been eighty miles per hour, shortly after leaving them the previous night. According to the accounts, his car had been accelerating as it crossed the central dividing line, and had made no attempt at evasion. One driver, still in a state of bewilderment, who had been following a short distance behind told the police, “It was like nothing you ever saw—like it was deliberate. There wasn’t a piece left big enough that you could have made a planter out of. Nuthin’.”

Shortly afterward, the police released a statement that the driver of the Ford had been tentatively identified as the “Greater Pitt Gunman,” who had left a security guard and two city policemen dead, along with four others wounded, in the airport shooting earlier the previous day. Since then, there had been twenty-three further incidents of multiple shootings in public places, and reports were coming of other, similar happenings around the country.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Corrigan watched across his desk while detective Yeen from city police headquarters checked over the notes that he had made. “And you didn’t talk to him at all yesterday? The last time that you did see him, did he seemed to be acting normally?” Yeen’s tone sounded dubious, as if he were giving Corrigan a chance for second thoughts.

“We had a meeting scheduled for yesterday morning, but Hatcher didn’t show up,” Corrigan said. “I got a message late in the day that he’d called, but I was in a hurry and didn’t return it. That really is all I can tell you.” And neither was he really interested, nor especially inclined to make any effort at pretending that he was. None of this was going to make any difference. Besides which, some of Hatcher’s cynicism seemed to have rubbed off on him. There was something mildly degrading about the thought of acting out a charade to placate an internal construct of a computer. After seeing what this whole creation had driven Tom to, he was as ready as Tom had been to blow the whole thing sky-high from within. The problem was figuring out how, and that would take just a little more patience yet.

“The car was heading north on eight, which passes close to Fox Chapel,” Yeen commented. “At least one person remembers seeing a brown Ford with a damaged front wing just a few streets from where, you live.”

Corrigan shrugged and held up his hands. “He might have stopped by the house before we got back. All I can say is that I didn’t see him.”

“We?”

“Lilly—Ms. Essell, who’s sitting outside. She’s a journalist from California, writing an article about the Oz project. We went back to talk about it in the evening. Yesterday was too hectic earlier.”

“And she’s still here this morning. Did she stay at the house?”

Corrigan sighed, wishing for an instant that he, too, could simply pull out a gun and dispatch the whole irritation. Already, he was understanding a lot better how Tom had felt. If he made up some other story and it didn’t fit with Lilly’s, there would be no end to this. He had other things to do.

“Yes,” he replied testily. “In the guest room. She also happens to be an old friend.”

The detective’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t pursue the point. “So you can’t really be of any more help?” he said.

Corrigan spread his hands in a suggestion of being tactful. “That is what I’ve been trying to say.”

“I see.” Yeen got up and put the notebook back inside his zippered document holder. “I appreciate the time, Mr. Corrigan. You will be available here if there are further questions?”

“Of course.”

Corrigan walked around the desk and opened the door. Lilly was sitting outside in one of the visitor chairs opposite Judy’s desk, where she had waited the previous evening. “Is there anywhere that I could have a few words with Ms. Essell?” Yeen asked Corrigan as they came out.

“There’s a room just along the corridor that you could use if it’s free,” Corrigan said. “My secretary can show you the way. Judy, could you check the small conference room and take Mr. Yeen and Lilly there if it’s free?”

Judy rose from her seat. “You’ve got some urgent messages,” she said, handing Corrigan a couple of slips. “One from Endelmyer, one from Pinder. They both want you to call back straightaway.” Corrigan nodded and took them.

“Would you mind answering a few questions, Ms. Essell?” Yeen asked Lilly, his tone not really leaving a lot in the way of options.

“Well . . . I guess not.” Lilly met Corrigan’s gaze as she got up, but Yeen had left them no opportunity for agreeing on details.

“I’ll see you later,” was all that Corrigan could say. Just like in the books. Somebody must have fed the system detective stories, he reflected as he watched the two of them follow Judy away around a corner.

A sandy-haired, wide-browed, bearded figure in a black, V-neck sweater with a white-stripe diagonal design approached from the other direction and caused him to turn. It was Barry Neinst. He looked solemn, but although it was he who had come to see Corrigan, he hesitated longer than would have been natural, letting Corrigan set the tone of what was appropriate by speaking or acting first. As had been the case with Judy, Corrigan could detect nothing from outward appearances that told him if he was talking to an animation or a surrogate. It was only their subtle differences in manner that set them apart. Corrigan waited curiously, deliberately refraining from offering any cue. Finally, the system capitulated, and Barry said:

“I don’t know what to make of it—about Tom. It’s just . . . too terrible. I mean, what do you say? . . .”

“What can you say?” Corrigan answered. “It’s been a lousy morning. Life goes on. Tomorrow might be better.” Barry’s eyes widened into circles of confused surprise behind his spectacles. In some half-amused, cynical way, Corrigan enjoyed being no help at all, watching the system dither and flounder.

“I guess you’re right,” Barry said. In a matter of seconds the about-face was complete. Yet such shallowness had been there all the time in the animations that had been all around him since yesterday, Corrigan reminded himself. So adept was the human mind at the art of seeing what it expected to see. “There’s nothing we can say that’ll change anything, eh?” Barry went on. Already the system was trying out the new line, fishing for confirmation that it had got it right.

Corrigan obliged. “Not a thing.” His eyes strayed down to the two slips of paper in his hand. The project—this unreal version of it, anyway—was no longer of any interest, and neither, therefore, were the concerns of unreal Pinders and unreal Endelmyers. He wondered what way of dealing with them would entail the least distraction from the things that did matter. Perhaps simply to ignore them.

“Let’s just hope he hasn’t started too much of a craze,” Barry said.

Corrigan looked up, only half hearing. “Who?”

“Tom.”

“What about him?”

“All the others.”

“Other what?”

“Haven’t you seen the news this morning?”

Corrigan’s brow creased. “No, I haven’t. What’s happened?”

“Oh. Then you don’t
know
!” Barry moistened his lips and moved a step closer. “Since it was on the news last night, more people have been driving their cars into oncoming traffic. It’s as if a lot of people out there suddenly discovered a new way of solving their problems that they hadn’t thought of before. When I was driving in, the count was up to fifteen. The whole city’s going crazy. People are afraid to go out.”

Corrigan stared at him in astonishment. First the shootings that had been breaking out since the incident at the airport. Now this. He thought back to the way Pinder and the others had behaved yesterday and the day before, the plasticity of Meechum, Borth, the CLC Board. . . . An instinct told Corrigan that there was some kind of pattern behind it, connecting them all. But before he could give the matter any further thought, the phone on Judy’s desk rang to announce a voice call.

“Excuse me.” Corrigan picked up the handset. “Yes?”

A man’s voice said, “Is there a Ms. Klein there, please?”

“She’s away from her desk at the moment, I’m afraid.”

“Is there a Mr. Corrigan?”

“This is Joe Corrigan speaking.”

“Good morning. My name is Ulsen. I work with Mr. Sylvine, at the Advisory Office of Advanced Technology in Washington. . . .”

“Yes! Good morning. Could you hold for a moment?” Corrigan covered the mouthpiece and made waving motions. “Sorry, Barry, but I have to take this inside right now. Can I catch you later?”