Free Light Shaper by Albert Nothlit Page A

understanding of the old technology increased over time. Otherlife was a marvel of ingenuity, of course, but Tanner saw it primarily as a great way to make money off people who quickly became addicted to the excesses that anonymity and disposable avatars provided them. It was almost too easy to get users hooked into experiencing the decadent pleasures and thrills their avatars could provide—and all without consequences except for their pockets. Nothing you did in Otherlife was illegal, and why should it be? As far as the law was concerned, it was all just a game, and Tanner’s lawyers lobbied aggressively every year in the Auroran government to keep it that way.
    However, those who considered Otherlife the pinnacle of potential applications for the technology that Atlas embodied were pathetically shortsighted. Otherlife could be the key to so much more. Tanner was certain he was the only one who saw that people who willingly connected to Otherlife were essentially providing the machine with direct access to their minds and everything in them. The connection currently went in a single direction only, with the complex algorithms Atlas coordinated providing a simulacrum of sensory input to the brains of users and allowing people to control an avatar. However, there was nothing preventing the connection from going both ways…. If correctly configured, the network would potentially be able to take data directly from anyone connected to it. Data such as memories. Passwords. Secrets.
    Information was power, and the man who controlled all of it would be unrivaled, in Aurora or anywhere else in the world. The only thing Tanner needed to make his project a reality was time. Lots of it. Discouragingly, his handpicked team of scientists and coders, assigned to the highly classified project of finding out how to turn Otherlife against its users, had been working on the problem for close to fifteen years. They were still no closer to the solution. The architecture underlying Atlas’s network was too advanced, they kept telling him. Even the structure of the virtual avatar templates Atlas automatically created for every user was beyond their capacity to fully comprehend.
    They were excuses, of course. Tanner was confident that if ancient scientists had been able to create Atlas and its supporting network in the first place, then it could be done again. It didn’t matter how advanced that dead society had been—a machine was a machine. Those long-dead geniuses had even made sure to lock Atlas down before abandoning it, installing safety mechanisms that kept it under control to this very day. Those locks were standing testimony to the fact that such technology could be fully bent to an overseer’s purpose. All that was required was a proper understanding of it.
    Time was short now, though. Somehow, someway, the interaction between Atlas and the mind of that young man had unlocked Atlas’s potential. If left unchecked, Atlas’s AI would find a way to break free of its constraints. It would become a direct threat to Tanner.
    He had to deal with this immediately.
    A shame, though. There was also opportunity there. The environments Aaron Blake could have created for him, working together with Atlas, would have convinced even the richest snobs in the city to join Tanner’s Otherlife user ranks, even those who currently disdained it because they thought of it as a poor man’s escape from reality. Who wouldn’t like to walk through the ancient cities as they once were, after all? Or visit the faraway continents that now lay out of reach across the impassable seas? Blake could have made it possible with his unique connection to the system and proper… motivation. With him, Otherlife would have evolved beyond its current limitations into a true simulacrum of the world.
    Tanner checked Aaron Blake’s status. He was being held by Security now along with a female companion. He quietly gave the order to release them with no charges filed. It