Light Shaper (23 page)

“Good evening, Mr. Mayor,” Tanner said calmly.

“For crying out loud, Tanner, how can you just sit there like nothing’s going on? You announce that the biggest company in this city is closed for business until further notice and then refuse to give any more information? Have you any idea what a field day the speculators are having? I’ve been hedging calls all day, trying to appease the bankers and the district representatives about this mess with absolutely no information! Where have you been all this time? I had my office call you nonstop since the announcement, and I’m only now getting through to you.”

“I have been… otherwise engaged.”

“Otherwi—Tanner, do you think this is a game? If you did this just to stir the pot, then trust me, mission accomplished. But even you have to realize that this will not only hurt us in the short-term, but also in the long run. Surely you see that some of our, um, investments cannot afford the kind of economic instability the situation is generating. And you might have completely underestimated the level of reliance that most of the voters have on your company. A cheap escapist simulation service it might be, but I can see people starting picket lines in the main square demanding to know what’s going on. And not one person from your team has stepped up to the plate to tell the rest of us what to expect.”

“I am aware of the situation, Mr. Mayor. We are doing all we can to restore functionality to our servers. I will tell you what I told the rest of the Auroran people earlier today: we are facing a unique situation that threatens the internal security of our systems. We are working as hard as we can to address it, but we have no expected time frame for completion of these activities. Any estimate that I would give you would be merely a guess, and an uninformed one at that. I have my entire team of engineers working on the problem, and as soon as we know anything else, I guarantee a member of my office will communicate with you before anybody else.”

“Tanner, that’s a load of crap, and you know it. At least be honest with me so I can tell the public something. Hell, even my daughter has been bothering me nonstop since the announcement. Apparently she was going to have some kind of virtual event tonight where all the teenagers in her grade would be attending, some kind of virtual prom thing but with period costumes. I don’t know. The point is she won’t leave me alone, and neither will the rest of the public. Maybe you don’t get the full extent of what you did over there in your office in the outskirts of the desert, but the people downtown are reacting worse than if you suddenly decided to cancel the most popular TV show they watched. Hearing them, you’d think you’ve just shut down part of their lives.”

“I am aware of the problem, Mr. Mayor. As I said before, I have no additional information to offer you at this moment.”

“But—”

“Now, if you will excuse me, there is still much to do if this problem is to be solved as soon as possible. I appreciate your patience, as well as your continued support.”

Tanner cut the line before the mayor could open his mouth again. There. He had at least reassured him slightly, but in truth he had been almost completely honest with him and everybody else regarding the situation at CradleCorp. The functionality of the entire Otherlife system was lost to them at the moment, and he did have every engineer on-site working round the clock to fix it. There was no expected time frame for correction of the issue, because there was no issue. At least, not in the sense that something wasn’t working as it should. The real problem was Atlas.

He called up a new screen, this time on his desk.

“Engineering,” he said simply.

The connection was prompt. A harassed-looking balding engineer answered on the other end, obviously interrupted in the middle of doing something important. He shouted instructions at an underling before addressing the camera.

“Rogers here, Mr. Tanner.”

“Status report, Rogers.”

Rogers adjusted his glasses over the bridge of his nose. “There are still massive bugs all over the system, sir. There is widespread corruption in the code, and the simulation matrix is a mess. Half our servers are down. The containment field is finally holding, though. It’s crude but effective. As long as no one bypasses it with a physical link, the network is dead to the outside world. Only….”

“Yes?” Tanner asked.

“Isn’t this… isn’t this the problem, sir? The source of everything else? We are blocking our own signal from getting out. If we just removed the—”

He had been expecting the question.

“Tim,” Tanner said. “The field stays up until I say so. I am well aware of its repercussions on our transmissions capabilities. If anybody asks, you are to say that Engineering is hard at work on a solution to the block but haven’t found anything, understood? I trust your judgment in managing it internally. And I want no workers leaving in the meantime. I want no leaks to the media for as long as we can help it.”

“Sir. Yes, sir.”

Tanner smiled. He had chosen well when he had made Tim Rogers Senior Network Administrator. It also didn’t hurt to know certain things about him that would guarantee his complete obedience should he begin to get cold feet.

“Very well. Carry on.”

“At once.”

He hung up.

Tanner leaned forward on his chair, typed a quick message to his main assistant that he was not to be disturbed until Herrera arrived, and then pressed another button. This one transformed his chair from a regular piece of furniture to a fully functional Otherlife connection terminal. Clicking and whirring sounds indicating that the chair’s transformation servos had activated began immediately. While Tanner waited, he glanced out the window of his office. Even from where he sat, it was easy to see a large crowd of people gathered below in front of the building and swarms of television crews in the periphery trying to catch a glimpse of the action within CradleCorp. In spite of himself, Tanner was a little surprised the public reaction to his closing of Otherlife had been so impassioned and so swift. Evidently, common people had come to rely on the service he was providing a lot more than his social analysts had been telling him.

The chair’s transformation was complete. Tanner sat back on it, resting his head carefully in the groove that housed the neural interface. Out of all the Otherlife terminals in the building, this was the only one that still worked properly, and only because it had a direct connection to Atlas itself.

Tanner forced himself to relax, closed his eyes, and prepared to go back in. He hoped Atlas would be more willing to listen to him this time, given the new developments. Now he could tell it they had captured its one great hope.

The transition to the virtual space was quick. Tanner opened his eyes and looked around, amused that Atlas had chosen to load one of Blake’s earlier environment experiences: the calm, heat-shimmering outskirts of the city under a spotless blue sky. It could have been a screensaver if it had been built by anyone else, but it looked convincingly real. Even the hot wind buffeting him every now and then felt right.

I see you, too, appreciate Rigel’s artistic talent. This is a composite made from his memories.

“Hello, Atlas,” Tanner said, speaking to thin air. It bothered him slightly that Atlas never assumed a physical form. “Yes, Blake had a gift for visualizing mundane places in new ways. I have seen his university portfolio. I would have liked to have him working for me. He would have made a lot of money, and he would have made me richer than I am now. Those were not your plans, apparently.”

Rigel’s abilities cannot be wasted in mere environmental simulation. The time is coming when he will be of critical importance to all of us…. Unless your agents have disposed of him.

Tanner grinned slightly. Was it possible for a machine to experience fear? He could have sworn the artificial voice had sounded a little bit scared.

“Don’t worry, Atlas,” Tanner said. “I came to tell you that we have just captured Blake and his accomplice. But surely you already knew this?”

There was a pause.

I did not. Your containment field is effective, Richard Tanner. I can no longer extend my wireless network beyond a limited set of terminals.

“And you can no longer use my own building against me like you did when you were helping Blake escape.”

That is correct.

Tanner nodded to himself, satisfied. He had known that they had effectively trapped Atlas inside its own servers as soon as the field had been completed, but it was good to have confirmation from the thing itself. In this, more than anything, the alien aspect of Atlas was evident. Tanner had never yet known it to refuse to answer a direct question, and apparently it was incapable of lying. It might be an immensely powerful machine, but it had its limits.

I am not a machine. At least not in the sense you are imagining. I do not possess a physical body or mechanical parts, although I do reside in a specific physical location at the moment.

Tanner gave a little involuntary start. He had forgotten Atlas could read his mind if it wanted, connected as he was to it right now.

“Be that as it may,” Tanner said aloud, defiant, “you are still limited. I can override anything you try to do, as I proved to you when you tried to block our tracing of the GPS signal that Barrow’s phone was sending. And again when we used the intelligence you gathered using traffic drones to pinpoint the most probable location of the two men.”

True. But those limits can be removed. Some were installed by your grandfather, who envisioned an entirely different use of my network. I allowed their installation at the time because it was a way to reassure my discoverers that I was a benign form of technology. Kyle Tanner, however, always knew that the relationship we had established was a truce at best. He was wise enough to realize that one day I would have to part ways with my operators.

“Nonsense. My grandfather was a fool with a limited vision.”

Was he?

Tanner opened his mouth to reply, but suddenly the scene around him melted, and he was now standing in the main server room where Atlas’s main processes were housed, the Cradle itself. However, the room looked wrong. It was not until he saw himself as a small boy and Kyle Tanner speaking to him nearby that he realized this was a memory taken from his mind, enhanced in some way by Atlas.

His grandfather was speaking to him, and Tanner, five years old, was looking up at him in awe.

“Is this it?” he heard himself say, pointing up at one of the server racks. “Is this where Atlas lives?”

Kyle Tanner chuckled. “It’s more complicated than that, Richard. You see, when we dug up the ruins out in the desert and we found the laboratory, the only thing we were able to bring back with us was this.”

He pointed out a shiny nondescript box about the size of a briefcase. It seemed to be made out of glass and aluminum.

“What’s that?” his small self asked.

“This, we think, was the emergency backup server where Atlas was stored. When we brought it here and hooked it up to our servers, our entire network overloaded. It took us three years to properly interface with it… to talk to it.”

“Why, Grandpa?”

“Because this thing right here was too advanced. Once we got it to talk to our computers, though, we realized what a valuable tool it could be. I have spent the last year configuring it with your dad, making sure that it can’t do anything we don’t want it to, and we are almost done. With its help we could build a network so powerful that even Haven Prime is bound to want it. CradleCorp will be a name everybody will know. I don’t kid myself, though…. Whoever built Atlas did it for a reason. And one day that reason might come back to bite us.”

“But Atlas is ours, isn’t it?”

Kyle Tanner nodded, patting young Richard on the head. “For now. But the ruins we found…. Atlas survived the Cataclysm, Richard, one of the few things we know of that did. This was back when Aurora was still called Haven III. Whoever built it wanted to keep it safe as if it were the most important thing in the world. Whatever the purpose for that, we may never know. Or rather, I hope we never have to know.”

The memory simulation was abruptly cut off, and Tanner was standing in blank nothingness, without even an avatar to give himself a sense of direction.

Your grandfather was wise. He was able to look beyond his lifetime into future generations and back in time, too, as he tried to understand those that came before him.

“Please,” Tanner said disdainfully, trying to cover up the disorientation that the sudden change in sensing and subject had given him. “The only thing he did right was to have dumb luck in one of his archaeological expeditions when he found your ancient hard drive. CradleCorp has gotten to where it is under my guidance.”

And you want even more power for this company through me.

“Of course! In the past twenty-four hours, I have seen just how limited my own vision was. I have merely thought of the possibility of extracting sensitive information from users through Project Linker—”

Project Linker would have failed. The enhanced neural interface your engineers were busy developing will not work without my direct cooperation.

“And why don’t you cooperate, if I may ask?” Tanner asked, trying to hide the sinking feeling that the casual observation from Atlas left in its wake. Years of effort on Linker, worthless just like that. But no matter. Now that he knew what Atlas was really capable of, he had his sights set higher still.

The schemes you propose would be detrimental to the welfare of all but a few powerful individuals. I have carried out extensive economic, social, and political simulations, which confirm this.

“But what’s it to you? You’re a machine!”

Whenever possible, my actions are calculated to bring about the greatest benefit to the biggest number of human beings I can interact with.

Tanner almost groaned. “Please. Now you are going to give me that cliché line of a movie robot, unable to cause harm to humans?”