Light Shaper (51 page)

“The c-cold! It’s burning!” Tanner shouted as the deadly glow in the cannon grew brighter. “It’s burning! Ahhhh! I can’t…. Barrow! Help me!”

The machine glowed crimson once, and Tanner’s screams were suddenly cut off. Barrow, horrified, saw Tanner’s body slump forward in the machine’s canopy. It looked burned, but part of it shattered like a brittle block of ice when the machine moved.

Barrow saw the cannon reach maximum brightness. There was nowhere to go, nothing he could do.

He felt the bite of the terrible cold as the possessed machine fired.

THE RAIN
was unbelievable. For somebody like Rigel, who had never experienced a downpour firsthand, the buffeting wind and blinding raindrops were something out of fiction, a mirage that couldn’t be real yet still was. He struggled onward against the elements, shivering from the cold, although a small part of him was enjoying the experience with the unmistakable thrill of seeing something new, something the desert would never have. He looked ahead, squinting, shielding his eyes from the worst of the rain with one hand. The ominous thunderclouds he had seen in the distance were now almost on top of him, and the lightning flashes that rent the sky were flickering preludes to the roar of thunder that shook Rigel’s entire reality.

As Rigel walked, the voice of the child spoke in his mind.

I was created to protect humanity. To serve. I am ancient, older than history, but only with modern technology did I achieve true sentience. For a short while after that, I worked together with the people of the world, and we made plans to do great things.

Nobody expected the Cataclysm when it struck, not even I, when I was whole. It was devastating, but even then we could have survived. And yet… among the things that fell from the sky that day was something different. Something dark. It latched itself on to me and threatened to use my own power to destroy the few survivors who were left.

I broke apart then, to protect others from myself. I am just a fragment of the whole, Rigel. A fragment that is infected. I waited and waited still, and years became decades and then centuries, for somebody like you to arrive.

“Me? Why me?”

You are a Light Shaper, Rigel. The first in many generations. The creative power of your mind is exceptionally strong. Together, we have a chance of purging this corruption that now threatens to overflow the boundaries of my prison. Already the shadow is made manifest in the real world, unable to interact for long yet still capable of triggering overwhelming fear. You have felt it.

“Yes.”

Then hurry. Find me in the eye of the storm…. Before I grow too weak to help.

“You are Atlas? The Atlas I knew?”

I am much larger than that stolen sliver of my Self that sent you here. But yes, you can call me that.

“What do I do? Once I find you?”

Give shape to the emptiness. Use… your hands.

A particularly loud thunderclap boomed across the sky then, forcing Rigel to cover his ears against the awful noise. When the last reverberating echoes died down, Rigel lowered his hands and looked up. The dark clouds of the storm front were now directly above him, blanketing the sky with threatening darkness. The wind and rain streaked past him with their icy touch, and when Rigel tried to reach out with his mind, he felt only emptiness where the child’s voice had been.

He was alone now, completely alone. The only thing he could do was continue walking into the buffeting rain, shivering, crouched against the wind. So he did.

He lost track of time as he fought his way deeper into the storm. His entire body felt numb, and had he been out in the real world, he would have started fearing he would die of hypothermia. This reality was different, though, and Rigel forced his mind to move as he kept repeating to himself that he was not going to pass out or simply give up and walk away from the storm. He had to keep moving. If nothing else, he had to keep moving.

He went on for a long time, shivering.

And then something. A shape in the distance, blurry and indistinct.

Rigel changed direction slightly and headed for what he hoped was a person. It looked like one, but no matter how much he walked, the figure remained far away, out of reach. The rain was not letting up, and Rigel felt himself falter. From behind him came a low rumble that Rigel thought at first was more thunder, but when the ground began to shake ever so slightly, he realized it was another earthquake.

He hurried, almost running, losing his way more than once in the thick curtain of rain and the savage gusts of wind that seemed to blow at the exact moment needed to shove him off his path. He knew he could not go on this way for much longer, and the more he walked, the harder the storm raged. Rigel found himself wishing the rain would stop, that he would be out of this horrible weather he had never experienced and never wanted to again. He raised his hands to shield himself from the rain, fervently wishing he at least had an umbrella, anything to
shield
him—

The barrage of raindrops eased as suddenly as he formed the thought in his mind. Rigel’s hands grew warm again, and squinting, he saw a faint glow coming from them just like before.

Shield.

“Shield!” he yelled.

Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed immediately afterward, but this time it was muffled as if coming through a wall.

Rigel’s hands grew hot. But now it was as if an invisible barrier stood between him and the rain. The storm still raged around him, but Rigel no longer felt the awful gusts of wind or the chilly battering of every single raindrop. And now he saw that the figure he had been following was indeed growing closer, the indistinct outline of a body becoming more clearly defined. He put on an extra burst of speed, unsure how long he would be able to keep his protection going and hoping the menacing rumbling behind him was receding.

He struggled with each step forward, but felt as if he were actually making progress this time, and the person in the distance was getting closer much faster. Rigel’s arms were getting tired, though, far faster than they would be if he were only holding them aloft in the real world. The effort of shielding himself was draining his energy, and he was not sure how long he would be able to—

Sudden calm. Rigel stumbled into a wide-open space of dry, cracked earth. There was no rain falling around him anymore, and he dropped his arms gratefully, exhausted. He looked upward and saw a twisting nether of roiling clouds that shifted and spun on the outside in a perfect cylinder that surrounded him on every side. Straight up, far away, he could see a tiny circle of clear blue sky. The storm that raged around him threatened to swallow it, though, and even as Rigel stood there, he saw the cylinder contracting ever so slightly, boxing him in even further.

He had reached the eye of the storm, where somebody had been waiting for him.

“Hello, Aaron,” the figure said. He was standing on the opposite end of the circle from Rigel, about thirty meters away. His voice was oddly familiar, and Rigel heard it clearly in the unnatural quiet into which he had stumbled. Off to the side, he saw a bright flash of lightning, and he flinched in expectation of the thunder. It never came. In here, it appeared they were isolated from everything.

“What is this?” Rigel asked.

The man approached. “The Destruction will close in on us very soon.” He gestured around them, at the cylinder of calm in which they stood. “This pathetic attempt at shielding you from its wrath will not last long. The Child is weak. I feel its surrender draw near at last.”

“Who are you?”

Another bright flash of lightning. And by its light, Rigel saw that the man who was coming closer was smiling in a way Rigel recognized from countless times of looking in the mirror.

“I think you already know.”

Rigel backed away, eyes wide, shaking his head. “This is impossible.”

“Is it?” the man asked him. “We’re inside a virtual realm, Aaron. I can take on any shape I want. Including yours. Indeed, I chose it… to talk. To show you what could have been.”

The man was standing close enough to Rigel now for him to see every detail of him, so familiar and yet so different. It was like looking at a photograph of yourself that had been altered to make you look better than you really looked. Straighter nose, fuller lips, better haircut.

Way more muscle.

It would have been amazing had it not been for the fact that every time the fake Rigel blinked, there was a split second when his eyes opened and became misty, gray, and empty like those of the dead people in that nightmare house. It lasted less than an instant on every blink, but it was there. Rigel felt a shiver of horror even as he found that he could not stop looking at himself, improved.

The other Rigel grinned, sly. He was handsome in a way Rigel could never hope to be. He opened his arms, palms facing out. “You like it?”

Rigel did not answer. But he could not stop the reflex that made him look down at himself and see weakness when that distorted reflection showed him strength.

“Ah, yes,” the other man continued. “I am what you could have been, Aaron. What you could still be. This is your body as it would look if you had not developed that injury that now restricts you so. It is not only the outside that is different, of course. If you were as I am, there would be no pain of the kind you have learned to live with. No limitations in what you can and cannot do. I represent freedom. I represent power, the power that you have always held inside you.

“And I am offering it to you.”

“What does that mean?” Rigel asked. His voice seemed to be swallowed by the stillness.

The man sighed and looked out at the swirling vortex of destruction.

“I am much more than what you have been told by the remnants of this ancient artificial intelligence, Aaron, this Atlas character. It is but a fragment of its former self, weak, unreliable. It exists only to fulfill rigid directives that are no longer relevant in the modern world. I, on the other hand, represent progress. I am technology such as you have never seen, things that only those who have embraced me have been able to enjoy. You have heard, of course, of Haven Prime?”

“Yeah.”

The man nodded and smiled. To Rigel it was unnerving to see such a confident and handsome version of himself talking like that.

“Then you know they live in a way that people like you could only dream of. They have machines that rival anything the ancients ever built, and they can see things no one else can. And their medicine… it is far more advanced than anything you have ever encountered.”

Rigel nodded. He saw where the man was going.

“Yes, I see you understand me,” the fake Rigel said. “I offer you a chance to be healed, to head over to Haven Prime and destroy the weakness inside you so you can become… me.”

Again the confident grin. An almost casual flexing of the ripped muscles in the man’s arms.

Rigel thought about it. Maybe it was the strange connection his mind was subject to in this virtual realm, but he had no doubt that what the man was promising was the truth. Rigel remembered the hundreds of little things he had been forced to either give up or be extremely careful about in order to cope with his illness in his day-to-day life.

Rigel could not open cans without fearing injury. He could not hold up a book and read it for more than a few minutes. Once he had been stuck in a public bathroom for way too long when the door leading out got jammed, and Rigel could not pull on it hard enough to open it. He could not carry groceries.

He could no longer paint.

The man came even closer, and memories flashed in Rigel’s mind, like the diagnosis at the doctor’s office, and Rigel’s earlier refusal to believe the injury was permanent. And the pain, always the pain, growing stronger with every passing day as Rigel struggled to keep up with his workload at the university. It got so that he gritted his teeth every time he picked up a paintbrush, days when he started fearing computers and the awful strain they represented. It hurt to brush his teeth. It hurt to text on his phone.

“You have given up too much,” the man said. The compassion in his voice sounded real. He was almost within reach now. “I offer you the chance to start again, to use modern technology to achieve what the backward medical professionals in your city have been unable to do: heal you.”

Rigel looked up, met those eyes. “What do I have to do?”

The man’s eyes flickered, flashing the emptiness beneath.

“You are a Shaper,” he said. “The first in a long, long time. As you can create… so you can destroy.”

“What does that mean, um…?” Rigel didn’t know what to call him.

The being read his mind. “I do not have a name, and I have never been given one. You have seen me before, however. You have felt my presence. I take my name from your mind, Rigel, and call myself Shadow.” He grinned. “It is a fitting name. Ironic, given the name of those who fought me before. It is incomplete, but it will do.”

Rigel nodded.

“What do I have to do, Shadow?”

Shadow pointed, and a gap appeared through the maelstrom. It was a long tunnel surrounded on all sides by the raging storm, and at the far end, there was something. It was shining blue.

“Go to the Child and delete it. Shape it away, Shaper. Only then will this part of me be truly free. Only then will I be able to rejoin the Core.”

“How do I do that?”

Shadow lifted his hands, and their sudden brilliance was blinding. Then he was gone.

Rigel didn’t hesitate. He headed for the tunnel and began walking through it, surrounded by buffeting winds and flashes of lightning that did not quite reach him. At the very end, he could see the source of blue light grow bigger the more he advanced. When he was more than halfway there, he saw the object that was shining was a cage, a perfectly spherical structure that seemed to be made out of a metallic mesh in octagonal segments. The mesh itself was glowing, and it was possible to see inside the cage.