1.4 (15 page)

someone asks me, and I realise that it is Alpha. She is next to me in the memory, and she puts her hand on to my shoulder.

It restarts the memory.

A gentle hand on my shoulder pulls me out of my thoughts. The hand squeezes and I know it is my mother without turning around. My father doesn’t do shows of affection.

I turn around and there she is, my mother, and the way she’s standing – in front of a blazing sun – makes it seem like there’s a halo of light surrounding her.

Ashley tells me and I do just as she says. The memory once more becomes a still frame.

I am overwhelmed with a sense of loss. I mean, it’s a miracle that I am here, standing so close to her, but it’s just a reminder of everything that I lost when she walked out of our garden seven years ago . . .

Ashley says and I realise that I am broadcasting my thoughts. Ashley continues.

The edges? What the hex is she talking about . . .
Oh, wait.

Now that is odd.

I move closer and I see immediately what Ashley is talking about. The edges of my mother are hazy, strange, and it looks like she is an image that has been . . . cut away from its background.

Like the memory itself has been . . .
edited

Ashley says. this
is
really
where this scene took place.>

I reach out my hand and touch the tattered edges of my mother’s image. Here, up close, it’s so obvious that the memory has been tampered with. I can even feel the edit marks tingle in my fingertips as I touch them, like tiny electric shocks.

I realise that Ashley is right, and just about everything about this memory is a lie.

This is the most important memory that I have
, I think,
and it’s not even real

I feel a blood-red anger that boils inside me.

I demand, urgently.

Ashley says, and there is a lightness in her voice that puzzles me. She sounds like she’s enjoying this . . . this is just a technical problem for her to solve, and she must like solving problems.

Ashley tells me.

Ashley was suddenly right beside me.

hidden
the true memory
within
a faked memory?> I ask incredulously.

Alpha says.

It makes me smile. Makes it sound less like craziness, too, somehow.

Alpha says,

I say grimly.

Ashley says:

I get down on my hands and knees and I scan the area. The garden of that lost summer day. Flowers and bees and grass.

There’s nothing here.

Nothing except the questions I’ve got running around inside my head.

Alpha says.

I do exactly what she says.

I feel myself smile. She is my world, I think, and it makes me feel warm. And then I notice something. My mother is not smiling. She’s standing there, looking down at me, her edges 
blurred by the brightness of the sun, and her face looks . . . sad. As if she is on the edge of tears.

I stop the memory again.

I look at my mother’s edges, blurred by the brightness of the sun.

And I think about finding the edit marks around her image and how obvious they looked when they were pointed out to me. I think that the dazzling aura that surrounds her must have made it easier to edit the image, and that maybe the person doing the editing might have just slipped up, figured that the brightness would do a lot of their work for them, by masking the image.

Maybe there is an answer in that aura.

I move closer and study the light around her. There are no longer any of the crude editing marks around her edges. I imagine a control panel and it appears in my hand as a controller. I locate a zoom control and use it to enlarge a section of the aura. And I can see
something
in the midst of the light. I use my tools to alter the image, trying different filters.

Ashley says.

It looks like the surface of some pretty rusty metal – which seems to prove that the background this memory originally occupied certainly was not our garden – but metal is metal and there is nothing to help place it in the real world.

But the metal texture that I have revealed – poorly masked around my mother’s image – makes me certain that my father
has
made a mistake. I’m sure that he never expected me to subject this memory to this type of scrutiny.

We are missing something.

Something elementary.

I need help, so I decide to message Perry.

/Hey man./
I say.

?Where the hex are you?
Perry answers, sounding perplexed.
/You’ve never missed a day’s schooling in your life, buddy boy./ ?And now, what? ?You playing hooky?

/Something came up./
I tell him.
/Something I really can’t get into now. But I need your help./

/Of course you do, Petey. And I want to help you. I really do. But first you have to tell me something./

/Go on./

?Is this to do with the mystery girl? ?Gee, you realise that she’s probably trying to get at me through you? ?you know, date the friend first...?

?Er, Perry?

?Ah, hex, she’s listening, isn’t she?
His voice sounds embarrassed.
?OK then, what do you need?

/I was thinking about the tiger on the train./

?You’re weird, you know that?

?I’m weird? /It was you who thought it was a real picture. I remember I was the one who told you it was a fake./

Another one of Perry’s bizarre photos, the tiger on the train was a Link sensation a few months back. An anonymous picture showing a White tiger on-board a slider, that had tapped into the gullibility of the LinkGazing masses, and had people believing it without really questioning it.

Perry had sent it to me and I had replied with . . . well, pretty much what I’ve just said. Perry had then examined the photo and managed to break it down into its component parts. The source of the tiger in the picture had been a zoo in China.

?Is this an I-told-you-so call?
Perry says, grumpily.

/On the contrary, I want you to tell me how you managed to work out where the tiger was from./

/Ask me a hard one, Peter! The answer is geotagging, simple as./

Geotagging. I really am a fool sometimes. I tell Perry thanks and promise to explain later and then I cut off the conversation.

I have always used Diary Plus for my LinkDiary. It costs, sure, and a lot of people don’t use it, but it automatically logs geographical information and encodes it into every entry in the Diary.

I check the geotag for the entry and it tells me that it was logged as:

Location = outside\714-3256-6245 which is a numeric way of saying it happened in the garden at my home. I don’t need to look it up, the software’s already done it for me:

LocationLookUp = 7256 Avalon, New Cambridge, UK.

But I know that’s not true so I access the entry’s code log and scan through code. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t understand, but I know what kind of tag I’m looking for and it doesn’t take long to trace the history of the image.

And I see that the tag was altered:

\rewrite geotag\

and I see what it was altered
from:
Location = outside\612-9841-1793.

Again I don’t need to look it up, because the software’s there way ahead of me.

LocationLookUp = Naylor  silos,  Millgrove,  New  Cambridge, UK.

I hear both Ashley and Alpha gasp.

I think ‘leave’ and step out of the memory. I don’t want to see any more.

I lost my mother at a place that appeared in the

Kyle Straker Tapes. A place that still appeared on the map software I’m running. Map software that I snagged from my father’s home network.

It turns out that my father had map software that shows places that no longer exist, that were supposed to have never existed, if you were to believe his words.

I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t think of a single word to say.