Light Shaper (6 page)

“Who are they?” Barrow shouted to make himself heard above the din.

The woman flicked her eyes at him, and then ignored him.

“Hey!” Barrow insisted. “Who is fighting?”

She briefly rolled her glowing eyes. “No real names. Duh.”

Barrow barely heard her. “Then how do you know who is fighting?”

She looked at him fully then, as if she could not believe that he was really that stupid. “Um, you call up their username? Ugh.”

She edged away from him with a sneer, and Barrow let her go. He looked back at the two fighters. “Username?” he murmured to himself.

“Enabling username display,” the disembodied voice said inside Barrow’s head. He looked around, but nobody else seemed to have heard it. Besides, it had sounded clear, undiminished by the loud noises all around him. “To disable this feature, please call up the relevant menu option or say ‘disable username.’”

Barrow blinked. In the next instant, each and every person surrounding him had a little bubble on the left side of the chest, like a name tag. Each tag displayed that person’s username clearly for Barrow to read. The people who were not facing him were tagged on their backs, and the people who were much farther away in the crowd had a little glowing arrow pointing from them to their tag hovering in the air. Since there were hundreds of people in a relatively small space, the tags were all over the place, constantly moving and shifting as their owners moved. It was extremely distracting.

“Uh, disable username,” Barrow said. The tags vanished.

A particularly loud collective shout drew his attention to the arena. The fighter wearing blue boxers had just connected a vicious uppercut square to his opponent’s jaw. The guy went flying and landed heavily a few centimeters from the ropes encircling the arena and so close to Barrow that he could have reached out and touched his sweat-matted hair. There was blood coming out of his nose, and he stumbled as he struggled to get up. His opponent approached slowly, relishing the cheers of the crowd. He made a fake lunge at his fallen opponent, and the weaker man cringed. There were derisive insults hurled at him, and some people laughed. The blue fighter waited patiently for him to get up, and when the red fighter finally managed it, the blue rushed in and punched him viciously in the stomach. The red fighter went limp.

There were more cheers. The red fighter tried to get up again but failed. He lifted a shaking hand, palm forward, in an unmistakable signal of surrender. Except Barrow realized for the first time that there was no overseer, no ref of any kind to call off the fight. And the blue fighter knew this as well.

“Enable stats!” several people around him whispered eagerly. “Enable stats!”

The blue fighter did a slow circuit of the arena, calling out to the crowd and posturing with his impossible physique. He obviously enjoyed being the center of attention. As he approached the other fighter, though, his smile changed. It became cruel, anticipatory.

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?