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Record...

‘The Straker tapes tell us that a long time ago, the world was a very different place from the one we live in today.

‘This was a time before the Link, before filament networking, before bioluminescence and free renewable energy and World Government and any of the things we now take pretty much for granted.

‘New Cambridge was just ‘Cambridge’ then. There were villages surrounding it that have been swallowed up and are just parts of the city now, but back then they were individual places with funny names.

‘One of those villages was called Millgrove, and it is one of the most important places this world has ever known.

‘But it isn’t important for the usual reasons – because of any great inventions or discoveries that were made there, or any remarkable landmarks – but because of a boy called Kyle Straker, an average specimen of 21st Century humanity, who was born there, and lived there for the first fifteen years of his life.

‘Kyle’s world had wars and famines and greed and a criminal disregard for the environment, but to Kyle it was just the way things were. He lived his life without anything remarkable happening.

‘Until Kyle and his friend Lilly Dartington, and two older people – Kate O’Donnell and Rodney Peterson – were hypnotised as a part of a primitive ritual called
The Millgrove Talent Show
. When they woke up from their trances the world around them had changed.

‘Everyone they knew – their family, their friends – had suddenly become
different
. To begin with, Kyle believed that everyone had been replaced by alien replicas who were no longer human.

‘His tapes talk about his journey through this new world. They end with the realisation that humanity had simply been upgraded; that the changes he and his friends were seeing were the result of a new operating system for the human brain.

‘And the upgrade, well, it mended the world. But it missed out Kyle and the others. A lot of others. A whole group of people who stayed at version 0.4, while the rest of the world made the leap to 1.0.

‘While it was fully possible for Kyle and the other 0.4 to watch as these new people – the 1.0 – remade the world into the one that we know, it was not a two-way street. The 0.4 were inferior, and they were screened out, hidden from the eyes and minds of the 1.0.

‘They became invisible to us. Still there, forbidden from using our technologies, unseen.

‘I’ve often wondered what the nought-point-four might look like. What they might be doing now. How they might try to contact us. I’m not alone in this. Scholars have, for centuries, debated that same topic.

‘The thing is, Peter, I’d say those photographs your friend sent you look pretty much like answers to me.’

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End Recording

File:
113/47/04/cbt/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

I listened to Alpha’s alternate history lesson in silence. I wondered if what I was hearing was a new, frightening truth or just plain madness.

Truth and madness can sound pretty similar sometimes, I guess.

Yes, I
am
my father’s son, and I have been raised to believe that Strakerites are – at best – dangerous eccentrics with nothing but a fictional book and a crazy set of beliefs to define them.

And yes, the story of Kyle Straker’s adventures in a postupgrade world certainly
sounded
mad, but still I wondered.

Suddenly I had a glimpse of things that might link that strange, ancient story to things I had seen today.

The ghosts in those photographs could be hoaxes, the results of data corruption . . . or could they be the remnants of a past world?

Alpha believed in the truth of the Straker Tapes, and that made me give the story a more careful consideration than I perhaps would have if I had heard it from another source.

And then there was my father.

Mysterious disappearances.

A countdown?

A suicide.

That hexing committee.

‘So what do you think?’ Alpha asked me, and I could tell from her face that she was filled a whole host of thoughts and feelings that I could not read. ‘What do you want to do?’

I shrugged, touched her hand and said: ‘Why don’t we find an address for the family of Tom Greatorex. Let’s go find out what made him jump.’

File:
113/47/04/cbt/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

LinkMaps showed that the man we were interested in had lived in Ellery Tower, before he decided to take that last, lonely plunge.

According to the map it was a fifteen-minute walk, and I realised that Alpha and I were going to be skating rather too close to edge of the curfew.

But it couldn’t be helped.

We both felt the need to be doing something; hardly daring to remain still for fear that the things we were pursuing would pass from our reach.

We didn’t talk a whole lot while we were walking, we were both lost in thought.

I was still trying to work my father into the puzzle: but no matter how hard I tried I could not believe that he had been a member of a group that had made a serious study of the Straker Tapes. Even if his conclusion was that they were fictional, they had obviously once seemed believable enough that he had afforded them the full weight of his intellect.

I checked the Link, but there was no record that I could find of the committee, or indeed its findings.

It didn’t scan.

None of it scanned.

Ellery Tower was an ultra-modern sliver of glass, pointing up towards a curdled night sky. There was a dense chemical build-up in the air tonight, a by-product of our clean energy. Even though climate control keeps the skies clear during the day, at night it kind of let the stuff do its own thing. It’s harmless, but some nights it does make stargazing a little difficult.

Progress costs, it always costs
, I thought, then turned my attention back to the building.

A door hissed open as we stood in front of it, and we walked into a vast lobby with trees growing upwards into the apex of the tower barely visible overhead.

There was an
auto da fé
™ to access the upper tiers, so we walked towards the exact middle of the lobby, stepped on to the target square etched into the floor, spoke the floor we needed and rose up into the air.

I don’t know if it’s possible to get used to being lifted up with no visible means of support, no visible safety equipment, no sense of any mechanism or even a floor.

You seem to be breaking a law of physics just using one, but that’s an illusion, of course; I guess that’s how they got the name –
auto da fé
: an act of faith – because it feels like one. OK, it’s a faith in science and engineering, but it feels like . . . I don’t know . . .
magic
, I suppose.

We stopped on the 24th floor and stepped off on to the gantry, then made our way to apartment 9. We were at the door when we realised that neither of us had a clue how to proceed.

We were a couple of kids with no business asking anyone any questions.

We stood there until it started getting embarrassing and then I remembered an episode from Last Quest where the warrior I was controlling needed to get some information from the Guild of Thieves. The information was about some buried treasure that I never managed to find, but what I learned was that you just needed to keep up a dialogue until you found a way to turn things around to the topic that you wanted to discuss. Of course that was with a computer character programmed to give you the information if you used the right approach.

An actual human being had no such programming.

Still, it was better than nothing, wasn’t it? So I knocked on the door.

Alpha shot me a look but I smiled to reassure her and she shrugged.

There were noises from within.

Then silence.

We had just decided that the person inside was going to ignore us when, suddenly, the door burst open.

A woman in her mid-forties stood there looking down at us. She was tall and elegant, but her eyes were dark and joyless, the flesh around them red and puffy. Her mouth was kind of twisted up in a way that reflected that inner pain.

‘What is it?’ she demanded, and her voice, too, was laced with sorrow. ‘What do you want?’

‘Ms Greatorex?’ I asked, trying a warm tone. ‘We need to talk to you.’

‘I don’t think I want to talk to anyone,’ she said. ‘Not now. Please, leave me alone.’ She moved her hand to shut the door. ‘And it’s Mrs,’ she added as her voice started to crack.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, not sure if I was apologising for the intrusion, her grief, or for addressing her incorrectly. ‘I don’t want to interrupt, but we really need to talk to you. It’s about Tom.’

The very mention of his name caused her face to soften. It was only a little, just a loosening of her tightened jaw muscles, but enough to give me a tiny bit of hope.

‘Thomas . . .?’ she said, only turning it into a question on the last syllable.

‘Thomas. Yes.’ I figured it might be a good idea to adopt her use of the longer form of the man’s name. ‘I need you to help me . . .
us
.’

I gestured at Alpha and she gave a tiny nod, solemn and earnest.

‘It’s my father,’ Alpha said. ‘He used to work with Thomas. Now he’s missing. Vanished. No one has seen him.’

‘Oh,’ Mrs Greatorex looked confused, but her hand fell to her side and no longer looked ready to slam the door in our faces. ‘Your father . . .?’

‘His name is Iain, Iain Del Rey.’

‘Iain?’ The woman’s face looked puzzled. ‘Iain was the name of Mr Peterson’s son.’

I looked at Alpha, primarily to pull a face that meant I thought the woman was losing it, but Alpha frowned at me.

‘That’s right,’ Alpha said warmly. ‘Iain was four years old when he developed leukaemia, and Mr Peterson made Mr Peebles to get him to laugh.’

The woman nodded, and I saw a miraculous thing. Her mouth finally untwisted and became a smile. Not much of a smile, but a smile nonetheless.

She looked at Alpha with something like admiration.

‘Please,’ Mrs Greatorex said. ‘Won’t you come inside?’

We followed her and she led us through a huge minimalist hall lined with marble tiles. There were five doors along the hall, and she took us into the closest room. It was a lounge featuring the same lack of décor, with no seating: just four silver vents of differing sizes on the floor.

Mrs Greatorex gestured to the larger of the vents, while she went towards a smaller one, then sat down. She hung in mid-air as if there was a chair underneath her.

The seats were an act of faith, too.

I had to lower myself down and hope that there was something there to catch me, half-expecting to hit the floor with a thump.

But, just as I reached the point-of-no-return and would have found it hard to stop myself, I felt my body come into contact with something . . .
soft

It was so weird.

I realised that there had to be some sort of controlled blast of air coming up through the vent, forming a kind of cushion of air that was strong enough to support my weight, and focused enough so that it fit to the contours of my body perfectly.

It was, I was surprised to discover, incredibly comfortable. And slightly warm. Alpha said: ‘Wow.’ I nodded in agreement.

Mrs Greatorex waved a hand in the air. ‘Thomas designed the seating, because it tied in with the invisible way that makes the
auto da fé
work,’ she said. ‘He did so love to link things together, develop themes . . . He never stopped, you see. Even when they took it all away from him . . .’

‘Who took what?’ Alpha asked. ‘I mean, we don’t know anything about Thomas, we just found a photograph of him in my father’s study . . .’

Mrs Greatorex frowned.

‘My husband is . . .
was
. . . a remarkable man,’ she said. ‘Truly remarkable. He had a great mind, an uncommon, brilliant mind. He was able to turn himself to any problem and see through the most complex sets of data to find the simple answer that everyone else missed.

‘He saw patterns that no one else could. He would look at pages and pages of statistics and numbers and suddenly he would see order. Even when they took away his lab and his livelihood he carried on, trying to find answers to questions that no one else had thought to ask.’

Mrs Greatorex shook her head, slowly and sadly. ‘He became obsessed with the Link. Not with using it, but with how it worked. He had noticed some glitches in the system and he wanted to work out how to stop them happening. That was him, really. He identified a problem and then he
had
to work out a solution.

‘He ran a whole series of experiments, and then set out to find some kind of pattern; something that tied all the glitches together.

‘The problem is that our minds seek out patterns. I think that Thomas became so desperate to find
something
, he started to imagine that even chaos made sense.

‘He started acting strangely. He became secretive and distant. I just thought he was wrapped up in his work, but it was something else . . .

‘Towards the end he got very scared. He was sure that something was happening, something that he was powerless to stop. He wouldn’t talk about it . . . he couldn’t . . . but it was eating him up inside. You could see it on his face. He had always been so happy and full of life, but something was draining the joy and life from him, and I hardly recognised him at all.’

I felt Alpha’s hand squeezing my arm. Hard. I looked over but she wasn’t looking at me, she was staring at Mrs Greatorex with unblinking attention and I realised that she probably wasn’t even aware that she had hold of me.

‘Then it got really bad,’ Mrs Greatorex continued. ‘He started to look at me . . . with
suspicion
. He said that I was ‘one of them’, that they were everywhere, that there were ‘a million eyes’ watching him all the time.