He shook his head. He still had to visit the other sectors anyway. His shift was far from over. Might as well check them out now.
The next few hours were unremarkable. Aside from the people inside them, most sectors were visually alike, just large rooms where people gathered to do different kinds of things. Barrow walked through a range of different special-interest communities: acting, gambling, language exchanges, knitting, fantasy role-playing, and of course the red-light virtual district. There were also very large general sectors where people met others informally, and they reminded Barrow of regular parties in the real world, except the music he could hear when he was there was entirely up to him to select, and instead of normal-looking people, most were impossibly perfect.
One thing kept bothering him. He felt as if he were being watched. Three times he thought he saw movement of black on black, stealthy, shy. There was never anything there when he looked, though, only an echo of deep cold that went swiftly away. Once, as he transitioned between areas, he heard a faint click that made him shiver.
Barrow pushed the annoyance out of his thoughts and concentrated on doing as Scholl had instructed. Now that he was not in the fight sector, things were much quieter, and people were more respectful of his authority. There were no further violent incidents all throughout his shift, but the more Barrow saw of Otherlife, the less he liked it. It was too artificial, too drab and pointless for him to understand. As he walked closer to one of the larger general sectors, avoiding clusters of hundreds of people who were all apparently in their early twenties, he wondered how it was that they got addicted to Otherlife in the first place. He had grown up reading media stories of people who had gone bankrupt simply to upgrade their membership to be always connected. There was special medical equipment that could sustain your physical body for longer periods of time once you were connected, but it was insanely expensive, and only a few people could afford to be constantly online like that.
Barrow reflected on the fact that, ironically, the very rich people in the real world, the politicians and athletes and businessmen, did not use Otherlife at all. When Barrow had been little, there had been a very big lawsuit against Otherlife from a coalition of some of the richest and most influential people in Aurora. They wanted to ban the creation of avatars that were realistic duplicates of any living person who had not specifically given their consent to be reproduced in the system. They had won, and Barrow remembered the vocalist of a band he used to like, Valley 407, saying that living in Otherlife was for losers who could not bear the monotony of their own miserable lives and so had to pay to have a different one. The statement had cost the guy his career, but the thought had stuck with Barrow. Now that he was finally here, he still couldn’t see how some people would prefer this to a job they hated. It was like being on the Internet, he supposed, except you could actually feel things and use other senses to complement the experience. In here you could be as beautiful and as perfect as you wanted, even if it was all fake.
Barrow shrugged to himself, looking at his virtual watch. Enough thinking. It was finally time to call it a night.
He transferred to the hub he had started from, and then he called up the menu to find out how to log out. The system asked him if he was sure he wanted to disconnect, and he confirmed.
Sudden darkness. Then an unexpected sense of tiredness. He was back.
Barrow opened his eyes, his real physical eyes. He was sitting in his chair in exactly the same position he had assumed when he connected. There was no pain this time when the helmet disconnected and lifted up and out of the way, but when Barrow tried to look in either direction to see if he was the last one to disconnect, he discovered his neck was sore from having been in one position for so long. He lifted his arms, and for the briefest instant, it felt as if he were not really in his body, as if somebody else was controlling the movements. The sensation was gone instantaneously, but Barrow got creeped out all the same.
“Quite decent performance for a first-timer,” Scholl said from behind him. “Most people I’ve seen have a hard time adjusting after the first log out.”
Barrow stood up. He was stiff, but other than that, he felt fine.
“Is it dangerous?” he asked his boss. “Connecting to that thing?”
Scholl chuckled. “Not at all, son. It’s just your brain trying to readjust after operating a different body for so many hours. The longer you visit Otherlife, the easier it gets. There are no bad side effects at all, so don’t worry about that, either.”
Barrow nodded. He looked at the chairs next to his and saw most others were still connected, eyes closed and peaceful expressions on their faces. About three chairs were empty, though. There was no sign of their occupants. As he watched, the blonde woman sitting on the chair next to him stirred. She stood up easily as the helmet rose from her head, blinking a couple times. If she felt any bit as stiff as Barrow did, she hid it well.
“Welcome back, Lane. How did the intruder control go?” Scholl asked her.
“It’s done. I handled the online portion of it, as you ordered. Two teenagers used accounts registered to other users to log in illegally. One of them, the female, headed for the Singles hub and stayed there for the entire duration of her session. The male user’s activity was harder to determine. It seems he created an avatar and then vanished from the logs somehow. I’ll be looking deeper into it tomorrow when I get the log analysis back from Engineering, and I expect to have a full report for you by then.”
“Good to hear. Barrow, Lane, you’re done for the night. The staff room is room 243 just down the hall if you want to get something to eat before heading on home. Well done, both of you. Welcome aboard.”
Barrow exchanged a gaze with the woman. Then as if they had rehearsed it, they both nodded.
“Yes, sir,” they said.
“Good. Now get out of my sight. Some of these other newbies are going to be needing help getting back. Looks like it’s gonna be a long night for me. Go.”
Barrow turned and left. The woman, Lane, walked beside him, heels clacking on the metal floor. They didn’t say anything as they left the control room, but once they were outside, the woman spoke.
“Sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I am Miranda Lane.” She stuck her hand out.
Barrow shook it. “Steve Barrow.”
She gave him an evaluating stare. “You must have done an exceptional job in your test to get the old man to treat you like that.”
“It was okay.”
“Do you want to grab a quick drink in the staff room before we head out?”
Barrow shrugged. “Sure.”
Miranda led the way to a smaller door. She opened it, and Barrow followed her inside the spacious room that was a mixture between a lounge and kitchen. This room was set in the part of the building facing out, and the huge ceiling-to-floor windows gave a stunning view of the outskirts of Aurora at night. There were a few people here and there, some drinking coffee or cooking, others reading, and a few others typing away on various types of computers. Even in the middle of the night, it appeared activity never stopped inside CradleCorp.
“Coffee?” Miranda asked him.
“Mocha, if they have it.”
She nodded and headed to the nearest coffee machine. She punched in a couple buttons, and a few seconds later picked up two small Styrofoam cups filled with steaming liquid. She nodded toward the big windows and the comfortable-looking couches facing them.
“Come on.”
Barrow followed her. She handed him his cup, and he sipped it in silence. The welcoming warmth of the drink revived him. He had not realized he was so tired.
Miranda smiled knowingly, holding her own cup delicately in her hands. “First night working graveyard shift, huh?”
Barrow nodded. “Yeah. What time is it?”
Miranda glanced at her watch. “A little after 3:00 a.m.”
“I feel more tired than 3:00 a.m.”
“It’s your first time connecting to Otherlife,” she said with dawning understanding in her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m starting to see why you impressed Scholl so much.”
“What do you mean?” Barrow asked her. The mocha was great quality. He couldn’t believe it had come out of a dispenser machine.
“Well, Barrow, to begin with most of the people who connect for the first time can’t even manage a full shift. Those who do are exhausted afterwards, barely coherent in some cases. I’ve seen a few people who flat out gave up on carrying out their assignments and plenty more who were unable to do it. But you completed yours, and in a very effective way from what I see.”
Barrow raised an eyebrow. “Were you spying on me? Monitoring me somehow?”
Miranda laughed. “Not at all. But I know Scholl. If he wasn’t yelling at you, that means you passed with flying colors.”
“I body-slammed a group of users by jumping out of one of the fighting arenas,” Barrow confessed. “I was breaking up a flash mob.”
Miranda’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “That sounds like fun.”
“It was,” Barrow said, and felt himself grinning. “The users were being assholes.”
“Most of the people in the fight sector are like that,” Miranda said. “I’m actually surprised that Scholl sent you there on your first night. He must have wanted to get rid of you. Did you do anything to irritate him?”
“He found out I lied about my previous work experience,” Barrow said. “I have worked security before, on the trading airships, but never here.”
“I knew it. You have that look about you.”
“What look?”
“I don’t know. Efficient. Confident, maybe. Haven’t seen you in action, but I bet you would have been a great addition to my old department.”
“You already work here,” Barrow said slowly. “In Otherlife. You know Scholl from before.”
She nodded. “Close enough. I was division supervisor for CradleCorp security until last month.”
“What’s the difference between CradleCorp and Otherlife?”
“Otherlife is a product of CradleCorp. Its only product, actually. That doesn’t mean that the executives, researchers, and everybody else working here are assigned exclusively to Otherlife operations. In my last job, my assignments were basically to babysit CradleCorp executives during their business trips around the city. I requested this transfer to see how this part of the machine works.”
“And what do you think?” Barrow asked.
“Still too early to say,” Miranda told him. “There is a certain satisfaction to knowing that you can treat users with as much harshness as you want to without having to worry about a lawsuit. Thanks to the user agreement they all signed to get in.”
Her comment made Barrow think about his own connection experience, and it triggered a recall of the very strange conversation he had had in the nothingness when his avatar had been taken away from him.
“Lane?”
“Yes?” she said.
“Do you know of something called ‘Atlas’? Is it a sector of some kind?”
Her eyes went wide for an instant. “How…. How do you know about that? I thought you were new.”
“So it’s a sector?”
She glanced quickly around to make sure nobody was listening. “No. Not at all.”
“What is it, then? When it spoke to me, I got the sense that it was big, but I don’t know if it was another user, or maybe one of the administrators, or—”
“It
spoke
to you?” Miranda asked him in a whisper.
“Well, yes. Something about contacting me later. But what is it?”
She set her coffee cup down and ran a hand through her hair. “Wow. Don’t… don’t tell Scholl. Or anyone else. You probably shouldn’t have told me, either.”
“Why?”
“Don’t worry. I won’t say anything. I know how to keep a secret.”
“What do you mean? What is it about—”
“The less you know, the better. But I can tell you this. Atlas is supposed to be a secret. I only know about it because we had a security breach last year, and one of the senior scientists kept talking about it on his way to the hospital. I was made to sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for a very fat check so it would keep my mouth shut about the things I heard. I didn’t have an option, either. Richard Tanner, our glorious bastard of a CBO, is more powerful than you can imagine. I didn’t want to give him a reason to notice me.”
Barrow nodded. They drank the rest of their coffee without speaking, the awkward silence stretching. Barrow thought about what Miranda had said. He wanted to ask her more, but it was obvious she did not want to talk about the subject. He scanned the room and noticed a big portrait of a middle-aged man set on the wall above the realistic but completely useless fireplace that decorated the far side of the lounge. He had been painted sitting in an office set high up, commanding a view of far-away Aurora. He was wearing a black suit, and his face was youthful even if his hair was streaked with silver.
“Is that Tanner?” Barrow asked, mostly just to have something to say. “The CBO?”
Miranda glanced over her shoulder at the painting. “Yes and no. That’s Kyle Tanner, the creator of Otherlife. He’s been dead some thirty years now. His grandson, Richard Tanner, is our boss now. I’ve only met him once, and I did not like the experience. He’s a shrewd bastard, smart enough to reclaim complete control of the company after the board of directors had taken over when his grandfather died. He’s one of the richest men in the world. The richest one in Aurora for sure.”
“Oh. Okay.”
There wasn’t anything else to say, and soon afterward Barrow left for his home. He was tired. Miranda told him to get some sleep and wiped a tiny coffee stain off his corner of the table with a napkin, then handed it to Barrow.
As he walked through the nearly deserted road leading to the Skytrain in the peaceful darkness of very late night, Barrow thought about everything she had said and everything he had seen. When he was far enough away from the building that he was sure he was not being surveyed, he opened his fist and extended the crumpled napkin inside it. Miranda had scribbled a note on it. It said: