The sense of being watched intensified. It didn’t help that now Rigel was completely alone. At the beginning, in the first few rooms, there had been a lot of people working or walking around. Some had simply been talking in what had looked like employee lounges. Now, though, there was nobody in the hall. Rigel looked back, but because of the way the building curved, he could not see too far behind him.
He was just passing by room 99 when the automatic door in front of him refused to open.
Rigel stopped abruptly and tried pushing it. It was shut down tight. He saw the access card slot and swiped his visitor’s ID. Nothing happened. He tried again, with the same result.
“Dammit,” Rigel said. “Now what?”
There was nobody around to ask, and the door to room 99 was also locked. If Rigel couldn’t get through the stupid door, he would be late for the meeting. He had the strong suspicion that he did not want to be late for this meeting, however, and he started getting anxious. Finally, after several more unsuccessful attempts at opening the door, he started heading back.
Another door came out of nowhere, sliding out of the wall neatly until it had sealed off the hallway. Rigel was forced to stop a second time.
“Hello?” he called. “What is going on?”
A small ceiling camera was fixed on his position. Rigel tried pushing on the new door, but maybe
door
wasn’t really the name for it. It didn’t have a handle, and there was no access panel nearby. In fact, it looked more like an emergency hallway barrier of some kind.
Rigel refused to get even more stressed, but he was now essentially trapped between two impenetrable barriers. Behind him was the hallway door he had originally tried, and in front of him this new obstacle. Between those two, the only thing besides Rigel himself was the door to room 99.
That door had a small access panel with a touchscreen interface. Rigel tried it, but it was off, and he was unable to turn it on.
Rigel looked left and right, but the long hallway was still deserted. Now he started freaking out in earnest. What the hell was going on? He looked back at the access screen to the side of the door to room 99, stepped closer, and pushed at it. Nothing.
A flicker of motion on the touchscreen caught his eye. It turned itself on. Words appeared on the tiny monitor.
Rigel. Hurry inside.
Rigel gasped involuntarily and reread the message to make sure that he wasn’t imagining things. It was addressed to him, to him directly! But how?
“Hello?” Rigel asked again. “Is somebody there?”
There was no answer, but the door to room 99 clicked open and swung inward on its own. Rigel looked in and saw that the room was similar to an Otherlife VIP user room, with a big connection chair right in the middle of it. Still, he hesitated before going in.
A different message appeared on the small touchscreen.
Go inside. We have little time.
Rigel looked around. This was definitely not part of the Legal Department meeting. It couldn’t be. Rigel had a bad feeling about going into that room, but then he realized he had nowhere else to go. He was trapped, nobody was coming, and the time for the meeting was drawing closer. Perhaps this was some kind of connection test, like the e-mail had vaguely referred to?
Reluctantly, Rigel walked inside.
The second he was fully in, the door shut behind him with a loud click.
“Hey!” Rigel yelled, and tried to open it from the inside. It was useless. It did not even move a little bit. In fact, Rigel now saw that the door to this room was made of metal, heavy, and big like a bank vault. Its featureless outside was undoubtedly just for show. The heavy metal latches that kept it shut would be impossible to open by hand now unless somebody let him out.
Rigel was scared now. It did not help that yet another camera inside the room followed his every move. He looked right up at it.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded. “Who’s there?”
There was no way out of the room. The place was circular, with the connection chair in the middle of a small raised platform. The entire wall was ringed with big screens, except for the part where the door was. There was no other furniture in the place, and on the ceiling a set of cold halogen lights illuminated the area. The floor wasn’t plush carpet anymore, but sheets of hard metal. The entire place looked like some kind of secure military bunker, completely out of place in the ordinary office building Rigel had been walking through.
Rigel was thinking about starting to kick things to get to be let out when every single screen in the room turned on at the same time. Text appeared, white on the black background of the multiple monitors.
Hello, Rigel. You have come.
“Who the hell are you? What is going on?”
You must be quick. Connect to the operator chair immediately.
“Is this some kind of test? Are you trying to scare me? I don’t care how illegal it was that I logged in yesterday without permission, what you’re doing now is basically kidnapping. Let me out! My lawyer will hear about this, and it will be you guys owing me money!”
That last bit was a bluff, but Rigel didn’t know what else to say. There was no answer on the monitors.
“Tell me your name!” Rigel exploded.
My name is Atlas. Rigel, you must connect immediately. I can only bypass the building surveillance and security mechanisms for a short period of time.
“What do…?” Rigel began, but he stopped in the middle of the sentence. A memory came back to him, sharp and swift. Yesterday, when he had connected to Otherlife, he had seen….
“Who are you?” Rigel asked, his voice a bit smaller.
I am Atlas.
Rigel remembered the voice inside Otherlife. It had felt so vast, so unimaginably alien. “Are you… are you human?”
No.
Rigel looked at the connection chair uneasily. If there really was nobody controlling all of this, then what the hell was going on?
Rigel, you must connect now.
“Or what?”
Or I will make certain that the legal proceedings against you end in your incarceration. It was I who forwarded your activity logs to CradleCorp Legal authorities. I can manipulate the data in such a way that a jury will find you guilty and seize most of the assets that were bequeathed to you in the will of your parents. I do not wish to do this, but I will if you do not comply.
Without his parents’ money, and unable to work as he was, Rigel would be left out on the streets.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, struggling to understand.
You must perform a task for me. The shadow’s corruption spreads through the city network, and it must be stopped. It is something only you can do.
Yesterday it almost killed you when that traffic drone crashed so close to you. It knows you are my weapon.
“How do you know about the crash?”
I see many things. I know many things. Connect now, and I will show you what you must do.
Rigel looked around the room for a last desperate time. There was nobody who could help him. He was completely at the mercy of Atlas, whoever or whatever it was.
“Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll connect.”
Be swift. They have almost isolated the location of this room. I will not be able to override the system for much longer without being detected.
Rigel took a deep breath and walked over to the connection chair. It was different from the one he had used the night before. It was less polished, but it had a lot more machinery attached to it. When he sat down, Rigel saw that there were about a dozen panels set in a wide arc around his field of view within easy reach of his hands. He did not understand a single bit of information they were displaying, but he found there was no need to. As soon as he had settled down on the chair, the wrist and ankle restraints snapped shut around his limbs. Now he was trapped for real.
As the helmet descended over his head, blocking out his vision, Rigel thought desperately that maybe this was just a dream. Then the microscopic drills bored into his skull, and the brief burst of pain grounded him to reality.
He opened his eyes. The helmet was lifting again, and he was not in Otherlife. The ankle and wrist restraints opened quickly.
Rigel sat up, completely confused.
The screens were flashing with an urgent message.
Rigel, we have run out of time. You cannot connect now or you will be caught. You must leave quickly. Take the glowing quantum drive you will see connected to the right-hand panel of the executive operator chair.
“What?” Rigel asked.
DO IT!
Rigel sat up and looked around. There, on a small locked compartment on the right side of the chair, a small thumb drive was glowing faintly orange in languid pulses. Rigel reached for it, and a complicated locking mechanism opened for him. He grabbed the drive, which looked like any ordinary memory drive, and stashed it in his pocket.
“Now what?”
Do not be concerned, but please pay attention. You are in danger now.
Rigel’s hands were shaking a little, and he wasn’t sure if it was because he was terrified or just due to their normal weakness.
“Why? Just what the hell is going on?”
Rigel. Please keep the quantum drive safe. You will have to escape this building with it, undetected. I will show you the shortest path out of the complex that is not being actively monitored by security agents at the moment. I will attempt to unlock all doors as you go through, but my intrusion in the system keeping you safe inside this laboratory has already been detected. My higher functions might be overridden at any point by an executive command. You must act soon.
“Atlas, what are you talking about?”
I will show you a live video feed from elsewhere in the complex, Rigel. It will illustrate the nature of the danger you are in. I will redirect the data from that security camera to these monitors. Please watch.
As soon as Rigel finished reading the words, the monitors all flickered as if with static. When the image resolved itself again, Rigel was looking at a picture of what appeared to be a big office from the point of view of a ceiling-mounted camera. There were four people in the room: an older man with his back to the camera, a woman at the very edge of the picture, leaning back against the wall, and two big and burly security agents standing at attention on the other side of the desk that the older man was sitting at. As the sound kicked in, the older man swiveled around in his chair, and his face was visible for a second, furrowed in annoyance. Rigel realized with a little jolt that the man was Richard Tanner, the famous and extremely rich CradleCorp CBO.
“Entry to room 99 is sealed how?” Tanner was saying, and every note of his displeasure was conveyed through digital speakers into Rigel’s small room.
“We don’t know, sir,” the older of the two security guards answered promptly. “Our access keys will not work, and IT says that something is interfering with their direct commands to open those doors. All security cameras in that area are dead as well. The entire sector has gone dark.”
“Then force the doors open, Scholl,” Tanner said.
Scholl nodded. “I already have a team on the elevator side of that floor. I spread out the remainder of the guards along the most likely exit routes, but I’m worried that we will disturb the users in the lower levels. We seldom deploy armed guards—”
“Scholl,” Tanner interrupted, standing up from his desk. His tone changed abruptly to a somehow more menacing calmness, his voice deep and persuasive. “We have just been infiltrated by an individual dangerous enough to hack into our supposedly unbreakable systems, slip through the ranks of your security team completely unescorted despite having been formally summoned for a legal meeting only yesterday, and able to shut us out of an entire section of this building at will. He used the meeting with Legal as an excuse to infiltrate us a second time, and now he’s locked in one of the supposedly highest-security research labs! He has already stolen critical information from the mainframe in a quantum drive, and for all we know he may be trying to destroy whatever he can get to before he leaves.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Good. And in case you forgot, Auroran law allows for the use of deadly force in dealing with terrorists in Prime-interest facilities such as this one. Do what you have to do, but stop this man. I want him and the information he stole before the hour is over.”
The security guard nodded stiffly, gestured to the man standing behind him, and they both left the office quickly. The CBO was left with a mysterious woman who remained in his office.
“You picked your security chief well, Richard,” the woman said, approaching the area the camera covered. “Obedient like a dog and probably just as loyal. You think he’s up to the task of bringing you this Blake boy?”
Rigel jerked slightly. Up to that point, he had managed to convince himself that they were talking about somebody else. Now there was no denying it was him they were looking for.
“Maybe,” Tanner answered, sitting back down. “But in case my security guards let him slip through, I want your team outside ready to intercept him. And do what has to be done. If the information he downloaded from the mainframe is made public…. The entirety of Atlas’s network imprint is in there, along with logs on Otherlife user activity that could ruin us, Diana.”
“Sounds like it would be fun to watch the media storm unfold if Aaron Blake gets away.”
“Just do your job, mercenary. And don’t underestimate this man. Atlas is helping him, and there is no telling what that machine can do.”
“Oh? That’s strange. You gave your security people the idea that the boy had gotten into the building all on his own.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The boy probably has no idea what Atlas is making him do or the value of the data he now holds. Information is power, Diana. Never squander it. Scholl and his grunts know what they need to know. No more.”