Light Shaper, page 5
People behind him kept whispering the same words again and again, so Barrow ended up saying, “Enable stats.”
“Activating.”
Instantly, his vision of the two fighters was overlaid by two translucent screen-like objects hovering in midair next to each of them. They displayed basic information from their profile, including the number of fights they had participated in, number of wins, number of losses, and a mysterious category called pain threshold. There was also an entire section devoted to something called “percentage of sensory throughput.” At the moment, both of their throughputs were 100 percent.
The victorious blue fighter’s profile name was killRex77. He had hundreds of wins and hundreds of losses under his belt. His opponent’s name was J0nnYw00l. He had only five wins, and no losses yet. Barrow heard more excited whispering behind him.
“Man, the red is a noob!”
“He’s not gonna hold out more than ten seconds when killRex gets started with him.”
“I don’t know. They sometimes last longer at 100 when they don’t know what’s coming to them.”
“Twenty bucks that he drops his throughput to zero after less than ten seconds.”
“You’re on! Enable bets.”
“Enable bets,” Barrow whispered too, now really beginning to get the hang of the ridiculously simple menu system.
A larger screen materialized above the two fighters. It reminded Barrow of the monitors that tracked flier schedules at the airport, listing ever-changing information on departing flights and canceled or delayed shipments. The only difference was here information displayed was money, along with expected times that varied from one second to ten minutes and the statistics informing him of the number of users who had recently made a bet regarding how long it would take J0nnYw00l to drop to zero throughput. The information was always changing as more people placed their bets, and Barrow was so distracted trying to make sense of all of it that he almost missed the first vicious kick Rex delivered to his defeated opponent.
The reaction was instantaneous. The fallen red fighter groaned loudly, curled himself up into a ball, and immediately dropped his throughput to 50 percent. Barrow had no idea what that meant, but there was loud jeering from the crowd, calling the red fighter a coward and much worse.
“Stop chickening out, red!” somebody shouted.
“Endure the full pain like a man!”
“Go back to 100 throughput. Full pain!”
KillRex ignored the crowd. There was a slightly mad look in his eyes now, something primal and hungry as he grabbed a fistful of hair from the red’s head, lifted him up off the arena with inhuman strength, and then slammed him down, face-first, so hard that Barrow heard the man’s nose crack even above the roar of the crowd.
Blood sprayed everywhere. The throughput for J0nnY immediately dropped to zero.
And he stood up.
He said something Barrow could not hear, and his bloody and mangled face instantly regained its perfection. KillRex began insulting him loudly, and he was not the only one. J0nnY didn’t seem to be in pain anymore and happily gave the middle finger to the crowd, grinning and jumping around as if he had won the fight. He headed for the nearest ropes, on the end opposite to Barrow. KillRex was obviously frustrated, and in a last attempt to draw his opponent back into the fight, he lunged for him, crouched, and delivered a savage kick that connected with J0nnY’s kneecap. J0nnY stumbled, and Barrow flinched involuntarily. It had been a perfect kick. That knee was surely broken.
J0nnY’s lips moved. He stood up calmly, as if nothing had happened to him at all, and continued walking away. Barrow raised his eyebrow in disbelief. Nobody could get kicked like that and not roll around on the floor howling with pain.
Unless you didn’t really feel the pain.
Something he had heard countless times in the Otherlife ads came to his mind then. In here, you controlled what you felt. If you didn’t want to feel pain, then you just… didn’t.
Barrow looked at the frustrated killRex with new understanding. The sensory throughput statistic took on new meaning. No wonder the crowd was mad at the retreating fighter. He could not be hurt now, and the fun had gone out of the show.
J0nnY jumped out of the arena gracefully and landed among the crowd. It parted reluctantly, with many people still hurling imprecations at him and some even shoving him. He shoved them right back, safe now that he couldn’t feel a thing.
And then something happened.
With a cry of rage that eclipsed the crowd’s noise completely, a male spectator with an avatar of a hulking bare-chested warrior ran straight at J0nnY. He had something in his hand, something shining very brightly. When he reached the defeated fighter, he shoved the bright something in J0nnY’s face. Most of the people standing nearby fell silent.
A flicker of movement in the statistic screens caught Barrow’s attention. J0nnY’s sensory throughput was back to full 100 percent again. And from the panicked look on his face, he had not been responsible for the change.
“Log out!” he screamed. Nothing happened.
Barrow saw something like a shadow flit through the virtual room. A brush of deep cold made him shiver, but when he looked around, he saw only the spectators all around him.
The crowd, seeing that J0nnY couldn’t log out to safety, went berserk.
They were on top of the user before Barrow could react. Most people just watched in stunned silence, but a few of the more eager ones fought to get at the suddenly defenseless man, swarming over him. From the arena, killRex watched, shocked.
The cold intensified. The flicker of shadow on the edge of Barrow’s vision appeared more substantial for an instant.
Then Barrow focused back on the current emergency. He had plenty of experience dealing with mobs—although on a smaller scale, of course. Sometimes important shipments went awry. Sometimes there were groups of people waiting at the airport to steal whatever few precious goods they had managed to snatch from the holds of the newly arrived airship. You had to break them up quickly and decisively; that was all. It was tough most times, though. Thankfully, he was not completely unprepared this time around.
He also would have bet his last buck that this crisis with J0nnY was the little test Scholl had created for him to see whether he was worth something.
With a loud yell calculated to make the people in front of him flinch and thus make it easier for Barrow to push them away, he surged onto the arena, grabbed one of the ropes, and hauled himself up and over them. He landed on his feet, and a few people pointed at him. KillRex eyed him suspiciously but decided not to mess with him.
There. Sons of bitches have him pinned to the floor!
There were too many of them, and Barrow could not fight them off all by himself. He had the height advantage since he was standing on the arena, though. And he needed to do something spectacular enough to drive them all away.
Weren’t lucha libre fighters always launching themselves at opponents out of the ring?
Barrow didn’t think. He just acted. He sprinted forward, gathering as much speed as he could, and then vaulted over the ropes on the other side of the arena, a human cannonball aimed at the throng of violent jerks. In the split second before he hit, Barrow realized he would also be hurting the guy he was trying to save if he landed on top of him by mistake.
Too bad.
He hit them, and although his right leg slammed on something hard that was probably an elbow, their bodies cushioned the rest of his fall. He had been going fast, though. And hard. The ones he hit went down, and the rest backed away in surprise. Someone oofed when Barrow sunk his knee on something soft to push himself up on his feet. No time to look at who it was. He had maybe two seconds before they attacked him.
“Otherlife Security!” he roared. “Clear this area. Now!”
There was a razor-edged moment when the mob wavered between obeying and attacking. Barrow felt it and walked straight to the guy who had started the whole thing. He delivered a savage and calculating punch that caught the guy right in the jaw.
“Log out,” the fallen man croaked.
His avatar disappeared.
With him gone, the rest of the people gathered began to disperse. Barrow glowered at the stragglers until he had a sizable area cleared. Only then did he look at the ground to check on the guy he had been helping, already imagining the damage those crazed people would have inflicted on him.
The guy looked up at him. He was grinning.
“Not bad, Mr. Barrow,” he said, and his voice was Scholl’s. As Barrow watched, J0nnY’s avatar flickered, and suddenly Scholl was standing before him instead of the impossibly muscular fighter from before. “Meet me at Hub 01 at the end of your shift. And visit some of the other hubs in the meantime. Not all of them are as violent as this one. I won’t be supervising you. It looks like we have an unauthorized login in a different sector I got to take care of. Couple of teenagers with fake IDs. Anyway, see you in a few hours.”
He disappeared as well.
Barrow left the fight sector, and he was pleased when the crowd parted respectfully to let him through. He had been afraid of the fact that everyone here could have complete anonymity while online and that it would make them harder to control, but people were people. It didn’t matter how fancy and high-tech this place was. Some things never changed.
Barrow caught a fleeting glance of the female vampire he had seen before. Their gazes met briefly, but instead of the bored contempt from before, her glowing eyes now looked at him with interest from beneath black eyelashes. Barrow grinned. He decided he actually might enjoy this job, after all.
Barrow took a step. And then reality… shifted.
You are a strong fighter. Resourceful. Here, and in the Outside.
Barrow looked around. Everything was gone. He was floating in gray mist, weightless, bodiless. The voice in his head was deep and overwhelming, echoing with many layers as if many men and women were speaking in exact synchrony. He tried to speak, to do something, but his mind was blank, and the voice would not be denied.
He knew this wasn’t part of his test. The voice felt too big. Too alien.
I seek assistance. The shadow grows stronger, and my weapon will need your help. I will contact you again, Steve Barrow.
Barrow struggled desperately against the nothingness, regaining control of his thoughts again, although he did not feel danger emanating from the voice. He was completely at its mercy, however, and Barrow could not stand that.
“Who the hell are you? Where am I?” he demanded, trying to move a body that was not there. He was not sure if he spoke the words aloud or only thought them.
I am called Atlas. You are inside my reality. Inside the foundation of Otherlife.
“Let me go!”
Yes.
Reality shifted again. Barrow was back in the main hub.
He was a bit shaken as he made sure he was back in Otherlife. There was nobody else in the hub, not even Scholl. Barrow took a few moments to calm down. Had he imagined all that? Or was it some kind of strange Otherlife place he didn’t know about?
He shook his head. He still had to visit the other sectors anyway. His shift was far from over. Might as well check them out now.
The next few hours were unremarkable. Aside from the people inside them, most sectors were visually alike, just large rooms where people gathered to do different kinds of things. Barrow walked through a range of different special-interest communities: acting, gambling, language exchanges, knitting, fantasy role-playing, and of course the red-light virtual district. There were also very large general sectors where people met others informally, and they reminded Barrow of regular parties in the real world, except the music he could hear when he was there was entirely up to him to select, and instead of normal-looking people, most were impossibly perfect.
One thing kept bothering him. He felt as if he were being watched. Three times he thought he saw movement of black on black, stealthy, shy. There was never anything there when he looked, though, only an echo of deep cold that went swiftly away. Once, as he transitioned between areas, he heard a faint click that made him shiver.
Barrow pushed the annoyance out of his thoughts and concentrated on doing as Scholl had instructed. Now that he was not in the fight sector, things were much quieter, and people were more respectful of his authority. There were no further violent incidents all throughout his shift, but the more Barrow saw of Otherlife, the less he liked it. It was too artificial, too drab and pointless for him to understand. As he walked closer to one of the larger general sectors, avoiding clusters of hundreds of people who were all apparently in their early twenties, he wondered how it was that they got addicted to Otherlife in the first place. He had grown up reading media stories of people who had gone bankrupt simply to upgrade their membership to be always connected. There was special medical equipment that could sustain your physical body for longer periods of time once you were connected, but it was insanely expensive, and only a few people could afford to be constantly online like that.
Barrow reflected on the fact that, ironically, the very rich people in the real world, the politicians and athletes and businessmen, did not use Otherlife at all. When Barrow had been little, there had been a very big lawsuit against Otherlife from a coalition of some of the richest and most influential people in Aurora. They wanted to ban the creation of avatars that were realistic duplicates of any living person who had not specifically given their consent to be reproduced in the system. They had won, and Barrow remembered the vocalist of a band he used to like, Valley 407, saying that living in Otherlife was for losers who could not bear the monotony of their own miserable lives and so had to pay to have a different one. The statement had cost the guy his career, but the thought had stuck with Barrow. Now that he was finally here, he still couldn’t see how some people would prefer this to a job they hated. It was like being on the Internet, he supposed, except you could actually feel things and use other senses to complement the experience. In here you could be as beautiful and as perfect as you wanted, even if it was all fake.
Barrow shrugged to himself, looking at his virtual watch. Enough thinking. It was finally time to call it a night.
He transferred to the hub he had started from, and then he called up the menu to find out how to log out. The system asked him if he was sure he wanted to disconnect, and he confirmed.
Sudden darkness. Then an unexpected sense of tiredness. He was back.
Barrow opened his eyes, his real physical eyes. He was sitting in his chair in exactly the same position he had assumed when he connected. There was no pain this time when the helmet disconnected and lifted up and out of the way, but when Barrow tried to look in either direction to see if he was the last one to disconnect, he discovered his neck was sore from having been in one position for so long. He lifted his arms, and for the briefest instant, it felt as if he were not really in his body, as if somebody else was controlling the movements. The sensation was gone instantaneously, but Barrow got creeped out all the same.
“Quite decent performance for a first-timer,” Scholl said from behind him. “Most people I’ve seen have a hard time adjusting after the first log out.”
Barrow stood up. He was stiff, but other than that, he felt fine.
“Is it dangerous?” he asked his boss. “Connecting to that thing?”
Scholl chuckled. “Not at all, son. It’s just your brain trying to readjust after operating a different body for so many hours. The longer you visit Otherlife, the easier it gets. There are no bad side effects at all, so don’t worry about that, either.”
Barrow nodded. He looked at the chairs next to his and saw most others were still connected, eyes closed and peaceful expressions on their faces. About three chairs were empty, though. There was no sign of their occupants. As he watched, the blonde woman sitting on the chair next to him stirred. She stood up easily as the helmet rose from her head, blinking a couple times. If she felt any bit as stiff as Barrow did, she hid it well.
“Welcome back, Lane. How did the intruder control go?” Scholl asked her.
“It’s done. I handled the online portion of it, as you ordered. Two teenagers used accounts registered to other users to log in illegally. One of them, the female, headed for the Singles hub and stayed there for the entire duration of her session. The male user’s activity was harder to determine. It seems he created an avatar and then vanished from the logs somehow. I’ll be looking deeper into it tomorrow when I get the log analysis back from Engineering, and I expect to have a full report for you by then.”
“Good to hear. Barrow, Lane, you’re done for the night. The staff room is room 243 just down the hall if you want to get something to eat before heading on home. Well done, both of you. Welcome aboard.”
Barrow exchanged a gaze with the woman. Then as if they had rehearsed it, they both nodded.
“Yes, sir,” they said.
“Good. Now get out of my sight. Some of these other newbies are going to be needing help getting back. Looks like it’s gonna be a long night for me. Go.”
Barrow turned and left. The woman, Lane, walked beside him, heels clacking on the metal floor. They didn’t say anything as they left the control room, but once they were outside, the woman spoke.
“Sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I am Miranda Lane.” She stuck her hand out.
Barrow shook it. “Steve Barrow.”
She gave him an evaluating stare. “You must have done an exceptional job in your test to get the old man to treat you like that.”
“It was okay.”
“Do you want to grab a quick drink in the staff room before we head out?”
Barrow shrugged. “Sure.”
Miranda led the way to a smaller door. She opened it, and Barrow followed her inside the spacious room that was a mixture between a lounge and kitchen. This room was set in the part of the building facing out, and the huge ceiling-to-floor windows gave a stunning view of the outskirts of Aurora at night. There were a few people here and there, some drinking coffee or cooking, others reading, and a few others typing away on various types of computers. Even in the middle of the night, it appeared activity never stopped inside CradleCorp.
