1.4 (14 page)

‘Hey, Peter,’ he said. ‘You blame yourself, don’t you?’

‘Why else would she go?’ I asked. ‘I must have done something . . .’

‘You didn’t,’ Alpha said and her certainty startled me. ‘Look, I don’t know if this will help, but there was something . . .
wrong
with that memory.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not one hundred per cent certain, but something makes me think that we didn’t see the whole memory.’

‘That’s all I’ve got,’ I said, feeling a sudden flash of anger at the suggestion that I could be holding something back from her.

‘Maybe.’ Alpha stood up. ‘But I reckon we need ourselves the services of a decent hacker to be certain. Wait here.’

I watched her as she went over to the man at the counter. She chatted with him for a while and then he nodded and pointed to a woman at a table on the other side of the room. Alpha approached her, had another conversation, and then the woman looked over at me.

She followed Alpha back to the table where I was sitting.

‘Peter, right?’ The woman said as Alpha took her seat in front of me.

The woman continued to stand. She was tall and thin and had a narrow, wary face, topped off with a brief scrub of black hair. Her eyes were dark and locked on to mine.

I nodded. ‘Peter Vincent.’ I said.

‘Hey, Peter Vincent,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Ashley.’ She cracked a wide smile and sat down. ‘You ever hacked your own code before?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’m not even sure what that is,’ I confessed.

‘That’s fine. Just think of it as gaining access to things you know subconsciously. We are creatures of data, but we rarely take the time to analyse any of the information that flows through us. Which is kind of stupid, right? I’m going to help you do just that. You up for it?’

I looked at Alpha and she gave me an encouraging nod. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What do I have to do?’

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

Ashley went away into a back room but returned quickly with a wooden box.

She placed it in the middle of the table, flipped open the top, and revealed a cone-shaped device festooned with wires and circuits. Some of the wires terminated in flat plates of shining metal. It all had an odd, homemade look that made me think that the woman was playing some kind of joke or trick.

She put the wooden box on the floor under the table and then gestured at the cone.

‘This is what we call a LinkCrawler,’ she explained. ‘It’s not the best name ever, but what the hex. We use them to hack into our own operating systems. It’s pretty new tech, and we haven’t got it
all
worked out yet, but it allows a person to look at the code for the software that we’re running.’ She noticed my disbelieving look.

‘I’m not kidding you,’ She said, somewhat defensively. ‘It’s not something we’re particularly good at reading yet, but there’s definitely code.’ She shrugged and then grinned. ‘It’s a total blast, by the way.’

I stared at the object on the table. It looked kinda stupid.

‘Now Alpha was saying that this is a rather . . . emotional memory for you,’ Ashley continued. ‘You sure you don’t mind if a complete stranger joins in?’

I shook my head. ‘Alpha also said she thinks there might be some data missing from the memory,’ I told her. ‘I’m pretty keen on finding out if she’s right.’

Alpha gave me a smile, warm and encouraging.

‘OK,’ Ashley said, as she moved wires on the LinkCrawler, performing some final adjustments. ‘The Link pulls data from loads of sources, and it’s doing it all of the time. Much of that time we don’t even realise it’s doing anything at all. It even runs while we sleep. Do you want to know the weirdest thing, Peter? We are the most curious creatures this planet has ever known, we have discovered the secrets of the atom, taken ourselves into space in search of answers out there, we have plumbed the deepest depths of the planet’s oceans, and yet we don’t ask questions about The Link. About what it is, what it does, whether we even need it in our lives . . .’

‘Or how it works?’ I said.

Ashley raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, that’s the BIG question that no one asks,’ she said. ‘That no one dares to ask. Because it shouldn’t work, should it? The Link happened pretty much overnight,’ She continued. ‘There was no sudden technological breakthrough, no patent was ever filed, there are no records of the commercial development of this worldchanging technology. It just happened. Like we woke up one day and the Link was suddenly there. We could communicate across vast distances with nothing but our minds to make it happen.

‘Have you read the Straker Tapes?’

‘Last night,’ I said. ‘Kind of eye-opening.’

‘So you know the odd things that Kyle said towards the end of his account? About how the unknown programmers were upgrading humanity for purposes of their own? That they were networking us as storage space . . .’

‘And you think that the Link might be a result of that networking?’ I asked.

Ashley looked impressed. ‘Think about how the people in the later stages of Kyle’s account seemed linked together. Maybe networking is necessary, not to us, but to our programmers.

‘Humanity, however, just came along and did what it always does: it took advantage of an existing resource. I think that the Link is a use we found for it.’

She finished tinkering with the device and smiled.

‘All done,’ she said. ‘You ready to give this a try.’

I nodded.

‘Smart AND brave.’ Ashley smiled a reassuring smile. ‘Just put your hand on the table,’ she instructed. ‘You too, Alpha.’ We both did as we were told. ‘Link up, folks.’ We all deployed our filaments. ‘Now connect yourselves up to a platen . . .’

I stared at her.

‘One of the flat metal plates,’ Ashley explained.

The metal was warm and vibrated as the connection was made. Alpha and Ashley linked up to it too.

‘Alpha says that she felt something odd about this memory file from the outset,’ Ashley said. ‘So why don’t we start at the very beginning?’

I nodded, accessed the file, and it played through again.

File:
040/7/113/mother/
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Deep_Storage\key_memory

I am eight years old. I’m in the garden, watching the bees. And I am recording it straight on to the Link. They fascinate me, the bees, they always have. It’s the way that they seem to be living creatures, even though I know that they aren’t.

I mean they move and fly and buzz and – occasionally – swarm, and if you sit and watch them you can see them do something that looks too much like play to be anything that could have been programmed into their circuits.

I’m watching two of them as they perform a sort of dance on the leaves of a flower in the garden. One is circling around in a clockwise direction, shaking its body every few seconds or so; the other is moving anticlockwise and seems to be echoing the shakes of its companion.

I think they are talking.

Communicating.

And I’m wondering just what it is that synthetic bees have to talk about.

Ashley says and I halt the memory.

I do as she says, and keep the memory frozen like a still picture. It just takes a little concentration.

Ashley says:

I ask.

Ashley says,

I say, slightly patronisingly.

Ashley says. she explains before I ask.

The bees
, I think,
what is she talking about?

I’m about to ask her, but suddenly I feel her presence on the wires like an electrical current passing through me, and the next thing I know she is stepping into the memory itself.

One second I’m looking at my treasured memory, and the next . . . she’s in it.

Standing there. In
my
memory.

I can see her, just off to the side of that long-past me. She is looking around sort of absently. The rest of the image is frozen, but she is moving around it. I’m suddenly reminded of the Straker Tapes, and of Kyle and Lilly moving around the village green while the rest of the villagers are frozen.

Weird.

Suddenly she kneels down. She is concentrating on the dance of the bees.

she says.

I concentrate on doing exactly as I am instructed and feel an odd tension as if I am pushing against a solid surface and then there’s some give and suddenly I am standing next to Alpha and Ashley . . .

And me.

And a small boy . . .

It’s me!

who is studying the bees as they dance across the leaves of a flower. The light is almost too real to be real.

Hyper-real.

Bright and warm and I can feel the sun of that long gone day beating down upon me. I’m supposed to be sitting in a dark little café and I still feel the urge to shade my eyes.

Ashley says and I can only manage a nod.

Although ‘weird’ is not a strong enough word to describe this. I’ve been using it already.

Weirdest, perhaps.

Ashley says.

She points to the boy –
to me!
– and I feel my head start to struggle with the situation.

I ask.

Ashley says.

So I do. In a daze.

I am walking around my own memory.

Like I’ve travelled back in time seven years.

I can see the boy as clearly as I have ever seen anything. His face is a little fatter than mine is now, and the hair a little curlier, but it is unmistakeably
me

Ashley says.

I don’t have to ask her what she is talking about. There’s a leaden feeling in my stomach and my mind is fizzing with the impossibility of what I am seeing.

I tell her.

I say breathlessly. see
me
seeing
it. I . . . I shouldn’t be there. I should be seeing this from that little boy’s point of view. How is this possible?>

Ashley replies. entirely
your own memory of the event. Someone else has constructed this for you. They’ve used enough of your own thoughts to give it the feeling of it being yours, but it’s a fabrication. A cut and paste job made up of your memories and someone else’s.>

I can only nod. My mouth is completely dry and I feel like someone has pulled the world out from underneath my feet.

If I can no longer trust the evidence of my LinkDiary, then how can I trust anything?

So I search around the scene of that painful, wonderful memory looking for signs that it is constructed. Looking for things that don’t fit.

I look at the boy that I once was, his brow creased as he tries to figure what it is the bees are trying to tell him . . .

Ashley says.

Bees? What are the bees saying? She’s . . . oh wait, this is messed up.

The rest of the memory is frozen still, like a moment trapped in Lucite, but the bees are still moving! And I realise that they’re not humming, they’re not buzzing, they’re . . .

They’re talking.

They are talking to each other.

It sounds like voices overheard from a long way away, I can’t hear the actual words, but I do recognise them as words.

I kneel down next to that young Peter, his face frozen as he too studies the bees. It feels so utterly strange, to be so close to a past version of me and I find I have to just kind of ignore him.

Ignore
me

Or go mad.

And the bees
are
moving, but it is not in an ordinary beelike pattern. Their metal and plastic bodies are smooth and clean, but there is something very odd . . . very
sinister
. . . in what they are doing. They seem to be winking in and out of existence as they move, disappearing here, reappearing over there, as if there is some sort of a graphical glitch in the memory file.

I can hear them clearly now.

... I don’t understand§,
one bee is saying.
You’re scaring me, mummy.

I have to go away
, the other bee replies.
I just have to, that’s all.

But . . . I . . . I need you, mummy
. It’s my voice, from the past.

I’ve never heard this part of the memory before.

I need you to be strong
, my mother’s voice tells me, and I feel the tears welling up in my eyes at the sound of her voice. It sounds so sad, so full of regret.

Mummy!
I hear myself shout.
Mummy. Don’t go. Please.

I have to. I love you, Petey, always remember that. I’m doing this . . . I’m doing this for you. For all the children like you. I... I have to go, Petey. I have to go back.

Go back?
I think
. Go back where? What is she talking about?

The bees are moving normally now, they are no longer appearing and disappearing, they are just moving in their incomprehensible dance across the leaves in the garden.