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‘Fear and anxiety overtook his mind, and the whole world became one of surveillance and conspiracy.’

She broke off and I could see how much it had hurt when her husband’s suspicions turned to her, implicating her in his elaborate fantasy. But what if it hadn’t been a fantasy?

Because the people connected to Thomas Greatorex
had
disappeared, and that had to mean something, didn’t it?

‘So you’re absolutely sure that there was no one watching him?’ I asked her.

She looked genuinely surprised by the question.

‘I don’t see how there could have been,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘And a
million eyes
watching him all the time – that sounds like classic paranoia.’

Sometimes
, I thought,
a duck is a duck

‘Could he have meant that he was being watched
through the Link?
’ Alpha suddenly asked. ‘I mean that might seem like a million eyes, mightn’t it?’

Mrs Greatorex’s face turned pale. Her eyes moved quickly in her sockets as she tried to see a flaw in Alpha’s reasoning.

‘Oh,’ was all she said after a few seconds.

We waited and I turned and nodded approval in Alpha’s direction.

‘It all sounded so mad,’ Mrs Greatorex said, suddenly sounding like she was trying to convince herself rather than us. ‘That would mean . . .’ and she trailed off and sat there in shocked, contemplative silence.

I knew I needed to move her on fast.

‘Did you ever hear of something called the
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Straker Tapes
?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’ The question seemed to shake Mrs Greatorex out of her silence. ‘Thomas was a data analyst for the project. He looked at all the results of the enquiry. He wasn’t allowed to discuss it, not even with me, but I know how betrayed he felt when that . . .
that man
overrode the committee’s true findings.

‘I think that was the beginning of the end of his career. He disagreed with the official version of things and it made it very hard for him to find employment afterwards – he was the crazy one, the one who believed in the Straker Tapes . . .’

‘He wasn’t alone,’ Alpha said. ‘My father worked on that committee. He believed in Kyle, too.’

I felt a coldness in my spine.

‘You said “that man”.’ I said. ‘Who were you talking about?’

Mrs Greatorex’s face showed contempt.

‘The head of the committee,’ she said, her lips pursed. ‘The chairman. He stole my husband’s life from him. He said that my husband was unstable and that his conclusions were nothing short of delusional.’

She squeezed her eyes shut and spat the next two words out with such venom that I felt ashamed and terrified.

‘David Vincent.’

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We talked for a little while after that, but Mrs Greatorex started repeating herself. I tried pressing her for more information about mine and Alpha’s fathers, but apart from a deep-seated hatred directed towards mine, she didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, anything else of use.

I neglected to mention my relationship to the man who destroyed her husband’s career, and Alpha was sensitive enough not to bring it up.

Alpha made a few more odd references to the Straker Tapes – something cryptic about someone called Danny, and a joke about a dog called Bambi – and then we were being shown out.

We were getting ever closer to the edge of curfew. I’ve never been out anywhere
near
curfew, and it looked possible I was going to miss it.

I told Alpha that I needed to get home, and she nodded.

‘The weird thing is, I’m terrified of missing curfew, but I have no idea what would happen if I did,’ she said.

I realised that she was right.

Even while I was sitting on a sofa made of air in Mrs Greatorex’s place, the nagging discomfort that I would be late home was growing within me.

Now I was feeling close to panic.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘we can pick this up in the morning. Maybe a good night’s sleep will help us see some sense.’

She moved in closer to me, and her face looked pale and scared in the moonlight, but she still managed a smile.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘For what?’

‘For coming when I needed you.’

‘It’s like I told you,’ I said, ‘I like to help my friends.’ ‘Yeah, well this went above and beyond the call of duty.’ ‘Not at all,’ I said.

Alpha seemed about to say something, then she raised herself up on tiptoe and kissed me.

It was on the cheek, and only lasted a couple of seconds, but it was a kiss all the same.

‘We’d better get ourselves home,’ she said, and it seemed like there was regret in her voice.

I could only nod.

‘Fancy playing truant tomorrow?’ she asked, and I nodded again. I’m rarely at a loss for words, but just then I could hardly
remember
how to speak.

‘I like you Peter,’ she said as she walked away. ‘You’ve got a smart answer for everything.’

She’d already turned the corner when I realised that it was a joke.

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I arrived home with about four whole minutes to spare. My mind was a blizzard of thoughts, but none of them would settle and it all turned to slush.

I expected my father to be waiting for me, angry and accusing, and it was almost an anti-climax to discover that the house was as quiet as when I left it.

I made my way to my bedroom, and sat at my desk, trying to figure out an angle to approach all of this from. Still my mind chattered away, non-stop, filling my head with nearmeaningless static.

I took a calcium supplement and stared at my wall. What did it all mean? Did it mean anything at all? I stood up and moved to a blank space of wall. I touched it and thought about Alpha’s missing father. That made me think of the photograph and I opened up the image file in my head, deployed my filaments, and placed it on to the wall. It sat there in the middle of all that empty space and I looked at it for a while, before zooming in on the insignia on the lab coats in the photo and placing that on the wall too. I studied the design.

A snake eating its own tail.

I ran a LinkSearch and came up with a lot of hits. The design was called an
ouroboros
– which was ancient Greek for ‘tail-eater’, appropriately enough – and it was supposed to symbolise the idea that existence was somehow cyclical, that it constantly renewed, or recreated, itself.

I put the definition next to the insignia and thought about what it could mean.

That made me think of the Straker Tapes, and how Kyle believed that the human race was reprogrammed, by a software upgrade from . . . somewhere else.

I put the Grabowitz photographs up on the wall and studied them. Did they really show the ones left behind after the human race was upgraded? I studied the face of the young man, the one who was holding up fingers as if passing on a message. Was he photographic proof of what the Strakerites believed, or just another Link hoax?

I pulled up a LinkImage of the aftermath of Thomas Greatorex’s suicide – the cordon with a crowd of people gathered around – and fixed that to the wall too.

Then I stood back and looked at the whole montage, trying to see the connections between the photographs. As far as I could see there was only one connection. The Straker Tapes.

Maybe it was time to actually read them.

I accessed the global bookshop and found it instantly. It was a top seller. Up 853% in popularity in the last week. That was a huge spike in sales by any standards. I looked at the link and thought about it for a while, already hearing my father’s furious voice in my head, and then I thought
Buy
and downloaded it anyway.

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I could have read it in my head, there and then, but that didn’t feel right somehow, so I transferred it over to my LinkPad instead and sat down on the bed.

The liquid memory mattress adjusted to my form instantly.

I looked at the file for a while, sitting there amongst downloaded college textbooks, fantasy strategy guides and my secret stash of English literature, and I had the oddest of feelings. There was a small part of excitement – the odd thrill that comes from doing something that you KNOW your parents would not approve of.

I opened it up and started to read. Twenty minutes later I was done.

The story had been strange and disturbing, made all the more so by the sincerity with which Kyle Straker had related the peculiar events that happened on that single summer day.

I felt a weird chill when reading about the silos, but I couldn’t explain why it was that bit of the story that should affect me the most.

I sat there, trying to get it all straight in my head. A story from many centuries ago, that I had been raised to regard as a fairy tale, but now looked to be the secret history of the world.

Then I messaged Alpha.

/Hi Peter./
she replied.
?What’s up?

?Any sign of your father?

/No. Mum’s beside herself. He’s never done anything like this in all the time they have been married. I made up some explanations that sounded pathetic even to me, but she seems to have quietened down. For now. ?Is that all you wanted?

/I just read it./
I said.
?It? /The book./
I said.
/The Straker Tapes./
There was a moment’s silence.

?What did you think?

/Well... I’ve certainly never read anything like it before./ ?Which version did you read?

?Version?

/There are a few different versions of the Straker Tapes, some better than others./

?Better?

/Less . . . interfered with. ?Did you have author’s notes, footnotes, or just the pure text?

/No notes. Just the story./

/That’s the way I prefer it. In later versions with notes and things the book gets a little confusing.../

/It wasn’t confusing. But if it’s true then... everything we think we know is a lie. I mean, all of it. I don’t think I want it to be true./

/I know, but it’s surprising how much evidence there is to support the tapes./

?Why isn’t it common knowledge?
I asked.
?I mean, something this important, it should be all over the Link, shouldn’t it?

/Oh Peter, I don’t think the Link is the limitless fount of knowledge that people make it out to be. I think that its information is controlled./

?By who?

/I don’t know. By people who think that we’ll panic if we find out the truth. Or by people with an interest in keeping things the way they are.../

?People like my father...?

/I don’t know what he’s up to, Peter, but yes. I think your father is somehow involved in keeping secrets./

/I’ve got to sleep on all of this./
I told her.
/I’ll meet you tomorrow./ ?Same place? ?About 9.30?

/I’ll be there./

/Good night./

/Good night, Peter./

I sat there, my mind picking over the details of the book I had just read.

Kyle and Lilly and the village of Millgrove.

The end of one phase of humanity – the beginning of a brave new world.

Millgrove.

I’d never heard of it.

And that worried me.

I ran a search on Millgrove came up with nothing.

It was like the Link didn’t have any information on the place.

That’s the way it would be, of course, if the story was pure invention. There would be no Millgrove because it never existed in the first place; nowhere except in Kyle Straker’s imagination.

But.

But.

But.

Kyle Straker wasn’t the only person who believed in the world of the 0.4.

He recorded his story on to tapes, and those tapes were written down, and somewhere along the way between then and now the story
was
believed by others. The Strakerites.

The growing movement that was reaching what my father called ‘epidemic proportions’.

So where was the
evidence
of that
epidemic
on the Link?

I widened my search to include Kyle Straker, and got a few hits but – apart from a Linkipedia entry — they were nothing more than arguments
against
Strakerism. It was as if a blanket of obscurity had been thrown over the topic, with little to be gleaned, even for the most dedicated searcher.

I put the Linkipedia entry on to my wall, and made a few notes around it, mostly about the lack of decent information on the subject. I copied some of my favourite parts of the Straker Tapes –the bits that I thought most relevant to the things that were happening today — and added them to the rest of the evidence.

Evidence

Weird word to be using, I know, but it felt like the right one. This was turning into an investigation. There was something at work here that was so big I could only glimpse the tiniest parts of it. How those parts tied together, what they were for and what they meant, was beyond my ability to see.

And that annoyed the hex out of me.

A million eyes...
I suddenly remembered what Mrs Greatorex had said about her husband, about the way he became convinced that he was being watched, and I made a note of that on the wall too.

Then I sat on my bed and stared at all the data.

I felt an urgency to sort things out, was aware that a clock I couldn’t see was counting down to . . .