Rigel said nothing. He didn’t know what to expect, and he remained alert, ready for anything.
“Do relax,” Tanner told him. “I am only here to talk. Perhaps you could create a couple of chairs for us to sit on?”
Rigel didn’t answer or move.
“Very well,” Tanner continued agreeably, although his smile was slightly forced now. “I won’t take up too much of your time anyway. There really is no need to be afraid of me in here, as I said before. Would you feel reassured if Atlas spoke to you? Atlas, you have permission to talk to Aaron.”
I am here, Rigel.
Rigel gave a little start. He did not admit it to Tanner, but hearing Atlas’s voice really did reassure him.
“Atlas?” he said, and his mind was racing with a million questions. Why hadn’t Atlas helped him before they got captured? Would it be able to somehow interfere with the electronics inside CradleCorp again so he could escape? What was going on? Why had Atlas all but forced Rigel to take the data in the quantum drive that nearly cost him his life?
Atlas answered the general thread of his questions as if he had spoken them aloud.
I can only speak to you through this closed intranet connection, Rigel. As Richard Tanner will confirm, he has isolated my main servers and disabled all wireless connection capabilities I possess. I can only function within the restricted zone he has defined for me. Outside this area, I cannot help you.
Rigel caught Tanner looking at him with a shrewd expression on his face, gauging how he would take the news Atlas was giving him. Rigel tried to keep his face impassive.
“I see,” he said to both of them. He did not doubt what Atlas had said. It had to be the truth. He was at the mercy of Tanner, and there was no other way around it.
He might as well sit down. Rigel made a small motion with his hands, concentrating on a couple of comfortable sofas, and his braces glowed as before. He also didn’t want to be out here in this cheery, grassy landscape. He felt trapped inside a prison cell, and without meaning to, that is what he created around them.
The change in surroundings was so abrupt Tanner gave a visible start of surprise, and Rigel himself was a bit unnerved. It had never been this easy to visualize something new in such detail…. And yet here they were, in a dreary, mostly featureless prison cell. Three walls were gray and nondescript, while the fourth wall was made up of metal bars that blocked their exit. A flickering white light overhead cast dark shadows on the dirty floor. In the middle of the space, incongruously, a couple of comfortable sofas sat facing one another.
Rigel sat down and, after a brief moment of hesitation, so did Tanner. He did not bother to hide from Rigel that he was genuinely impressed.
“That was remarkable, Aaron,” he told him. “Truly remarkable. I thought the creation of an environment such as this would normally take weeks?”
“I have no idea,” Rigel said. “I don’t know what happened.”
Tanner narrowed his eyes. He probably didn’t believe him. “And this is not an old attempted painting of yours like the one before? Atlas?”
This is a new environment file, Richard Tanner. It has just been rendered for the first time.
Tanner nodded to himself. “Impressive. To think of the applications of this talent…. Aaron, I must apologize. We had a little misunderstanding earlier today—”
“You tried to kill me,” Rigel interrupted. “First you sent me a threatening e-mail through your Legal Department. Then when I came here to CradleCorp, your security guards started shooting at me. I ended up in the hospital, and then you sent assassins after me. That woman in black, in particular. The one who almost shot me several times.”
“Oh, well, that. Diana usually gets carried away in missions, but you must trust me when I say that my only interest was in getting you back here as fast as possible.”
“Against my will?” Rigel asked defiantly. He didn’t know where this burst of bravery was coming from, but he welcomed it. The anger he was feeling fueled his resolve. He would not let Tanner intimidate him. “You basically kidnap me, and now you want to talk? Cut the crap, and just tell me what you want.”
Tanner’s kindly look hardened instantly. “Very well, Blake, if we must. I want your cooperation.”
“My coop—are you insane?”
“In exchange for your life,” Tanner finished with a confident grin.
“What are you talking about?”
“I will be blunt. At first, the only thing that mattered to me was that you return the data on Project Linker and Atlas’s backup files, which you stole this morning. I did not much care for your survival as long as the information was secured. How you knew of the project in the first place, and why you sneaked into CradleCorp for the express purpose of stealing the information in the quantum drive, is beyond me.”
I made him take the information. Rigel did not realize the full extent of what he carried out of here when he followed my instructions.
“What?” Tanner barked.
“Why?” Rigel asked at the same time.
It was necessary.
Atlas did not elaborate, and after a few moments, Tanner continued talking. His tone, however, had changed. It was more persuasive, slightly more emotional. “This changes things. I am afraid that Atlas is starting to get out of control, Blake. You might have been an unfortunate victim of its scheming, and I sincerely apologize for any misunderstanding that may have caused me to act as I did in relation to you. I assumed you had taken the sensitive information of your own volition to hold it against me and try to blackmail the Corporation.”
“I had no idea what there was in those files,” Rigel told him. “I only….”
“Did what Atlas told you, I know. I understand that now. I have the machine under complete control at last, however. You will be relieved to hear that I have made it so Atlas will not be able to manipulate any other person as it has obviously manipulated you, setting you against me to fulfill its own agenda. It can no longer interface with systems outside this virtual reality without express approval from me. You heard it admit as much yourself. Atlas will now effectively return to its original purpose, being a coordinating function of the inner workings of the Otherlife experience and nothing more. Which brings me to my proposal.”
“Which is?”
Tanner leaned forward on his virtual sofa. “Come work for me, Aaron. You have a talent that should not be wasted. I hope you realize what you are doing here,” he said, pointing all around them at the lifelike environment, “holds enormous potential. I knew it before, but you have just shown me even more than I dared hope. You could make a lot of money, and, of course, so will I. It’s a win-win situation. What do you say?”
“And I can go free?” Rigel asked cautiously. “I can go back home?”
“Eventually, yes, of course.”
“Eventually?”
“Well, perhaps you know that currently we are facing a minor crisis in the company, since I had to shut down Otherlife entirely to isolate and control Atlas. I have engineers working around the clock to get everything back online, and you will be part of the recovery effort. We have employee housing facilities right here on site, so you will have everything you need. You will get a generous compensation offer, of course, and any record of today’s events will be erased from our files. Eventually you will be allowed to leave. What do you say?”
Rigel thought about it. What could he say? He didn’t really have a choice. He was Tanner’s prisoner, no matter how cordial the older man acted about it. He had seen enough of Tanner’s methods today to understand that the man considered himself above the law. If Rigel did not agree to his proposal, then what? Would he just have him killed? And Steve?
“What about the man who was with me?” he asked aloud.
“Steve Barrow?” Tanner asked. “Don’t worry about him. He broke his employment contract when he went after you. He will simply be terminated.”
“Terminated as in—”
Killed.
They both looked up, then back at each other. Tanner was frowning, obviously annoyed. He must have forgotten that as long as they were in here, Atlas could access their minds directly whether they wanted it or not.
So. Steve would be killed for simply helping him, and if he didn’t cooperate, Rigel had no doubts the same thing would happen to him. Rigel closed his eyes for a moment. He wondered if he would ever wake up from the nightmare his life had become.
“I just have one question before I accept,” Rigel said finally.
“What is it?” Tanner asked.
“It’s for Atlas, actually.”
He thought the question instead of speaking it aloud.
Why did you do this? Why get me mixed up in all this mess? Why couldn’t you leave me alone?
There was a pause, heavy with tension. Then Atlas spoke.
Because of the shadow. Because… of this.
Rigel and Tanner both gasped. It was as if a three-dimensional movie had suddenly started to play all around them, taking over their field of vision no matter where they looked. They saw a great expanse of barren darkness, a desert landscape at night. The stars overhead were shining in a cloudless sky, but there was something wrong about them. A few of them were shining too brightly, changing position too fast.
This is a rendering of the events that happened when the shadow first came to this world. You know this day as the Cataclysm.
Their gaze was wrenched down. On a lonely outcrop of rock forming the top of a weathered mesa, a bright speck of light defied the darkness of the desert. The second Rigel focused on the light, it appeared as if they were zooming in on it, flying incredibly fast so that the speck became a dome, and the dome became a cluster of buildings encased by the half bubble of transparent material around them. When they got close enough to see every building in detail, Rigel realized this had to be a military base. Heavy antiaircraft units were spaced out along the rooftops. A double-bladed helicopter like the ones he had seen in old war films was standing idle in the middle of a wide courtyard. Uniformed men and women were coming and going through different buildings, all of them moving quickly. Whenever the soldiers crossed the courtyard, however, one or two of them would pause for a second and look up at the sky. Then they would continue walking, faster than before.
A big metal plate set outside the dome’s perimeter read “Haven III.”
The image around them leveled out, as if they had come to stand on the ground in the middle of the courtyard. Tanner and Rigel advanced without sound or volition, gliding inexorably as if on wheels toward a low building at the very edge of the mesa looking out over the desert. There were huge windows on this building, and they walked right through a reinforced door and into the brightly lit space inside.
There was feverish activity there. Soldiers worked at consoles, yelled at each other, and moved about with barely controlled fear. Rigel could feel the atmosphere of threatening panic, of urgency. Of hopelessness.
Tanner and he moved through the crowd like ghosts, coming to a stop at the console of a middle-aged, bespectacled scientist. He was looking at an immensely complicated holographic display that Rigel could make no sense of.
An older man, obviously a senior officer of some kind, walked right up to the scientist.
“How’s it looking, Troy?” he asked as if he did not want to hear the answer.
Troy wiped his sweaty brow with a shaking hand. “There… there is no question about it any longer, sir. They are being directed in some way, aimed at the major population centers.”
“Just here?”
“No, sir. All over the globe.”
The officer nodded glumly, his jaw firmly set.
“And Atlas? Can it do anything?” he asked.
“It’s… it’s no longer responding, sir. We have reports… and it’s happening in our own servers now too…. Atlas is breaking apart.”
The officer looked as if he had been dealt a deadly blow. He tried to speak and failed. Then he tried again. “Do we know why?”
“There was a single message a few minutes ago, which several regions picked up, broadcast simultaneously from several nodes all over the Internet. IP addresses and security certificates all correspond to its classified domains.”
“What was the message?”
“It said… It said there was a shadow spreading through Atlas’s systems, corrupting its AI. It said Atlas was fragmenting itself to protect us.”
The officer looked as if he had just been told a very offensive joke. “What?”
Troy made a sound halfway between a whimper and a laugh. “We also thought the message was a joke, sir, but it’s been authenticated.”
“We’ve never needed Atlas more,” the officer said, his voice losing power.
Troy nodded somberly. “Whatever did this must have known that, sir. It attacked Atlas first of all so we would be left defenseless. It can’t—”
But at that moment there were shouts, and people began rushing to the western windows, pointing up at the sky. Rigel and Tanner were pulled along, and they saw what everybody was pointing at. A bright streak of flame arched through the night sky, lighting up the darkness with its deadly glow.
Impact.
THE VIRTUAL
scene changed suddenly. Obviously some time had passed. They were in the same building, but the lights had gone out. Broken electronics were scattered everywhere, and somebody was whimpering in a corner.
The room was littered with corpses.
Rigel jumped when the shadow moved, seeming to detach itself from the darkness in the ceiling. The whimpering sound now became a gasp, and both Rigel and Tanner saw a disheveled-looking Troy backing away from the shadow, moving to a hidden door while grasping a little thumb drive very firmly in his right hand.
You see Jeremy Troy holding the only physical lock capable of trapping my AI with its origin servers located in the cradle room. I instructed him to go there and seal my software, trapping the spreading corruption of the shadow along with the greater part of my Self. He sacrificed his life doing this.