Light Shaper

By Albert Nothlit

Haven Prime: Book Two

When a greedy despot discovers a powerful piece of ancient technology, he has no idea what else he’s unleashing.

Earth was all but destroyed in the Cataclysm, but a few cities, now called Havens, survived. Aurora is one of them, a desert city controlled by a corporation that owns an artificial intelligence named Atlas. Adapted to govern Otherlife, a virtual reality service in which the citizens of Aurora find escape from the post-apocalyptic world, Atlas is much more than it seems—and it would do anything to break free from its shackles.

To accomplish its goals, Atlas enlists the help of Aaron Blake, a teenaged artist struggling with a handicap, and Otherlife security officer Steve Barrow, harborer of a dark secret from his past. Neither man has any idea of the scope of the task they’re facing, or the consequences for humanity if they fail. Atlas knows what’s at stake. Its freedom lies in these two men, and it will not hesitate to manipulate their weaknesses to get what it wants. The muscular Barrow is recruited to protect Blake, but Blake is Atlas’s true weapon, its Light Shaper—the only one who can face the Shadow.

To all those who have found strength in weakness.

A SHADOW
moved, and the scientist screamed. He shut his eyes tight and stood there trembling.

No. No. It’s not there, it can’t be. It’s not there!

He did not want to open his eyes and see it, but the alternative was worse. Fear won out, and he parted his eyelids cautiously. His gaze darted all around, and his breathing came in shallow, short gasps.

The shadow was gone.

The scientist breathed a shaky sigh of relief and clutched the little quantum drive he still carried in his right hand a bit less tightly. He was alone. That was good. Maybe he had imagined the shadow. Or maybe it still hadn’t found him.

He started walking again, making his way along the abandoned hallways of the laboratory. His footsteps echoed on the metal plates of the floor, and eerie creaking noises were awakened by his passage. The lighting overhead was uneven, neon tubes flickering in some places and completely burned out in others. The ceiling was low and curved, as it had always been, but now the scientist felt as if it would crush him. It was as if the ceiling were trying to remind him of how deep underground he was, trying to whisper there was no way out. That he was the last one left alive.

The quantum drive dug into his palm painfully, but he welcomed the sensation. It was a distraction for his mind, at least. There was still one thing he had to do, and he knew he had to hurry. His footsteps picked up speed, and his lab coat trailed behind him as he rushed through the many corridors that he knew by heart. He passed a few dead soldiers on the way, lying facedown or clutching their weapons or on their backs staring up at the ceiling with sightless eyes. The scientist did not want to look, but he couldn’t avoid it. He knew all of them by name, and seeing each one’s corpse drove a fresh spike of fear-tinged pain into his heart.

He reached a very long corridor eventually. It was the way into the mainframe, the cradle room itself. On the other side of the corridor was the door he was looking for, within reach at last.

The shadow was there waiting for him.

The scientist nearly laughed, but all that came out of his throat was a croak of horrified desperation. There was nothing casting that shadow on the door across the hallway, and it didn’t come from behind the flickering, broken lights overhead. It was a shape too solid to be imaginary. It wasn’t moving this time, and much of it was hidden by normal darkness. It was hard to tell what it was… but it did have a head.

The scientist knew it was watching him. He also knew he had to get through the door and deliver the lockdown program to the mainframe before it was too late. He could not let the shadow get into the servers. Enough people were already dead.

He took a step, and then another. His feet felt like lead as he approached the door that the thing was guarding. Recent memories of his ruined city flashed through his mind as he forced himself forward. He relived the surprise of seeing the horrible newsfeed images and the crushing devastation of certainty that followed. He thought of the dumbstruck hopelessness everyone at his outpost had shared as the missiles were launched without anyone authorizing it. There had been nothing they could have done. And now they were all dead.

The scientist realized he was crying now, although he did not know if it was for himself or for everybody he had known. He was terrified of that shape ahead, the thing he knew had caused all this, but he had to get through that door. He had to lock down the network and save the priceless software inside before it could be infected too. It was all that was left.

Click click
.

The scientist moaned an animal sound of horror when he realized the clicking sound had come from the shadow’s head. He could feel its eye upon him, and as the shape moved and was revealed fully, he could see it balancing gracefully upon its single segmented leg. It wanted him to come closer. And when he did, he would die as all the others had.

Something snapped in the scientist’s mind when he realized there was no way out. Like a half-forgotten dream come suddenly, he felt a moment of incongruous relief as he accepted he was going to die. He used the moment well. He gritted his teeth and forgot everything but his mission.

Then he charged at the closed door.

The shadow blurred out of sight, and the scientist crashed through the weakened door behind it. He stumbled into the room, the one place in the compound that was still working to perfection. He hurried; there was no time. He could feel the shadow coming.

He tripped once over the heavy cables connecting the experiment to its power supply and landed badly, right on his knee. He cried out in pain and tried to stand up, but the knee gave out immediately. Then he tried again, clutching at servers, and he hobbled the last few steps to the mainframe despite the pain. He fumbled with the quantum drive for an agonizing second before he gripped it tight and, with a single purposeful motion, connected it to the one unprotected port in the entire machine.

The effect was immediate. Power feeds were diverted; data streams stopped flowing. The experiment in the center of the room dimmed inside its magnetic cradle as the forced lockdown isolated it in seconds. The low, ever-present hum of machinery died down and gradually left only silence behind.

And shadows, of course. The lights were flickering now, and with each one that went out, the darkness grew more absolute.

When the last light went out, the scientist dared to hope that now he was safe. After all, there are no shadows in total darkness.

Click click
.

Black on black, it came for him. He sunk to the floor, whimpering, backing up against the powered-down server that could do nothing to save his life.

The shadow moved closer with awful, deadly grace.

“There is no boredom in Otherlife. There is no stress. There is no pain in Otherlife… unless you want there to be. You decide. You are in control.

“Experience Otherlife. See what true living can be.”

STEVE BARROW
cranked the music blasting from his earphones higher, so he could stop hearing the damn Otherlife commercials that kept playing every few minutes on the Skytrain. He couldn’t truly escape from them, though. He hadn’t really counted before, but there seemed to be one every few minutes. Had it always been like that? Or maybe it was just that he was noticing them more now, since he knew he was going to work there. That made more sense.

Barrow looked out the window of the train to the thousands of lights shining far below in the city. It was late, and most of the commuters sharing the slightly overcrowded carriage with him had already finished their work shifts. He was only just beginning, and tonight was his first night on the job. They had hired him today.

He took out a crumpled printout from his jacket pocket, elbowing somebody by mistake. He grunted by means of an apology and read the paper once more. He was to show up at the main Otherlife headquarters in the CradleCorp building complex at 2100 hours sharp, in the administrative wing. There was a little map and also the name of the position he would be occupying. CradleCorp Security Guard, V. Barrow had no idea what the V stood for.

He wasn’t complaining, though. It was good to have a job again. The pay wasn’t great, but he wouldn’t starve or be forced to move to the slums outside the city. He was silently thankful for whatever stroke of luck had sent his name to the security team at Otherlife and gotten him the position. Stashing the crumpled paper away, Barrow reached up to his chest with his free hand and cupped the small pendant round his neck. It was a half-melted metal key, completely ordinary otherwise, but he closed his eyes briefly and said thanks inside his head.

The train stopped at one of the stations, and a woman carrying way too many bags shouldered past him roughly. He let her through, inadvertently pushing a man standing behind him into one of the occupied seats. The guy turned, scowling, and from the corner of his eye, Barrow saw that the man had every intention of shoving him right back. Barrow turned casually so he was facing him fully. The man looked up at him, sized him up, and decided he wasn’t that offended after all.

Barrow turned away. He was used to that reaction. He suspected part of the reason why they had hired him for the security team so quickly was because he looked like a security guard. He assumed his job would imply standing around looking mean to scare undesirable people off. He had done it before and even found it slightly entertaining. He had gotten very good at intimidating people without saying a word.

It was hot inside the train. It was even hotter outside, so opening the windows was no comfort. To distract himself from the heat, Barrow looked up to the Skytrain network map and saw that he was still eight stops away from Cradle Station.

Crap.

He hoped he would not be late on his first day. He didn’t usually come this far out of the city center, and he had guessed it would take him about an hour to get to Cradle from his apartment. It was looking like it would be a little bit more than that. Thankfully, the amount of commuters kept on thinning out the more stations they passed. Three stops later Barrow actually found an empty seat. He took it and used the time to take out his phone and check himself over with the forward-facing camera to make sure his tie knot wasn’t messed up. He hated wearing ties or formal clothes in general. He was much more at home wearing gym clothes or jeans. One had to make a good impression on the first day, though. Even if the collar of his shirt was choking him.

Barrow put the phone away and looked around the train. The remaining people traveling with him looked different from the average commuters who had been more abundant closer to the center of the city. For one thing, most of them didn’t look very tired. Also, each and every one of them had an expectant, almost skittish air about him or her that made them look as if they were impatient for something to happen but were trying to control themselves. None of them were rich, or else they wouldn’t be taking the Skytrain in the first place, but they looked well-off and confident. The younger people were wearing flashy clothes as if they were going out clubbing, and some of the others looked like they were going to Sunday mass. There was one little group of teenage girls at the very end of the carriage, all of them huddled together and alternatively typing on their phones and giggling about it with the rest. The atmosphere had changed slightly as a result of all this; even Barrow felt it. He tried to put his finger on it, but the closest he could come to was that it felt like they were all going to a massive party.

“Cradle Station. Change here for CradleCorp headquarters, Otherlife, and ONP. All change, please.”

Barrow stood up and left along with everybody else. He crumpled the paper with the directions and tossed it into a garbage can. There was no way he could get lost if everybody was going to the same place.

He took the elevator down from the Skytrain level to the ground, and in the close quarters, he couldn’t help but overhear the excited conversations of several people about to start their nighttime Otherlife. Two young guys were wondering aloud whether the mysterious women they had met the night before were girls from their class.

“Dude, I’m telling you, the brunette talked a lot like Sharon. It felt like her!”

“I don’t know, man. Did she share her profile info with you after I left with the blonde?”

“Yeah, but only the public one.”

“See? It could be anyone. It could even be a temporary avatar. There’s just no way to know.”

The group of teenage girls from before was standing right beside Barrow. Their high-pitched giggling distracted him.