1.4 (19 page)

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Down further into the pit.

That was how it felt.

Like I was descending into one of the dark places of

some strange, primitive myth, where souls burned in eternal torment for deeds performed in life.

There’s a reason we keep building upwards, you know: an instinctive need – somewhere in our race memory – to climb away from the dark spaces that lurk beneath the skin of our world.

As I climbed down the ladder into the crater I wondered what kind of person went against that primal programming; what kind of man my father was.

And here I was, following him down. Not quite what I expected the phrase ‘Following in his footsteps’ to mean.

I’d like to think that I was trying to help out Alpha, and maybe try to stop the whole of humanity being upgraded again by those . . . beings that saw us as nothing more than organic computers that they could reprogram whenever they got some weird cosmic urge.

I’d like to think my motives were good and noble and true, but I wonder if maybe I just wanted to confront my father with the things I knew, that I wanted to face up to him, then to make him tell me what he did to my mother.

Maybe it was a combination of both, I don’t know.

In the end, I guess, it doesn’t really matter.

The metal of the ladder’s guard rails vibrated as I lowered myself down, a deep rumble that pretty soon started to make my hand ache. I ignored it, finished the climb, and stepped off on to the floor of the crater. When I was clear, Alpha jumped down the last few steps.

‘What now?’ she asked, her face flushed.

I shrugged. ‘I’m making it up as I go along,’ I told her, and then pointed to the geodesic dome at the centre of everything. ‘But there looks as good a place as any to start.’

We used the backs of the computer banks as cover and headed into the centre of the labyrinth.

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I realised that my connection to the Link was down when I tried to flash Alpha a warning about a technician who had suddenly left his workstation and was heading our way. He hadn’t seen us yet, but we were going to be in his eye line pretty soon.

Alpha was following a metre or so behind me, so I thought:
/Alpha./Down./
But there wasn’t the usual sensation of the Link behind the attempt at a message. I tried again, and again there was nothing, as if the mechanism for transmissions had suddenly disappeared.

I might not wholly trust the Link, but it was a genuine shock to find it was no longer there when I needed it.

In the end I just waved at her, and gestured for her to get down. We both fell into crouches behind a computer, and the technician went by without even looking our way. He latched on to another computer and started punching keys. It was a case of modern technology meeting old: the only place you see keyboards these days are in museums.

Alpha caught up to me.

‘Can you access the Link?’ I asked her, and she spent a few seconds trying before shaking her head.

‘Must be something here jamming it,’ she said, then added: ‘We were in the middle of a mobile phone dead spot.’

I realised she was quoting from the Straker Tapes.

‘Pretty weird, isn’t it?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Show me something today that isn’t.’

We went another couple of banks down, then I peered around the edge, saw that we were unobserved, and hurried across towards the dome in the centre.

We circled around it, looking for a way in. Cables and wires went into the dome through un-glassed areas, but there didn’t seem to be anything as useful as a door on the whole structure.

We completed a full circuit of the dome and there simply was no entrance.

‘Now what?’ Alpha asked.

‘Scout around,’ I said. ‘Look for something we can use to smash our way in.’

‘We’re going to draw attention to ourselves.’

‘I’m counting on it.’

A quick recon of the area turned up a few loose tools, all too small to be of any use, and two lengths of metal piping. One was about fifteen centimetres long, but the other was a metre long and pretty heavy. I hefted it in my hand and nodded.

‘This should do it,’ I said, and then strode over to the dome, raised the pipe up, and smashed it into one of the glass panels. The pipe just bounced off it, doing no damage, and the vibrations sent the pipe spinning out of my hand.

The sound was loud and jarring and everyone in the area must have heard it.

Alpha was giving me a ‘What was that supposed to be?’ look, and I was about to explain that it wasn’t glass and all I’d done was hurt my hand, when a section of the dome suddenly unhinged and flipped open.

So that’s how it was done.

Seconds later my father emerged from within. If he was surprised to see me then he did a very good job of hiding it. He ran a hand through his hair, fixed Alpha with a coolly appraising look, and then turned to me.

‘Ah, Peter,’ he said. ‘Has no one ever told you that it’s rude to enter people’s property without being asked?’

I fixed him with my best steely look. ‘Has no one ever told you that you’re a liar and a hypocrite?’ I countered, furious. ‘And that sending swarms of your robot bees to kill your own son is evidence of pretty lousy parenting?’

He let out a single, measured, snort of laughter.

‘The answer to your first question is: yes, frequently,’ he said. ‘And do you know what? I don’t listen to them, either. While I salute your ingenuity and courage and even, to a certain extent, your wilful disobedience, this really isn’t the time or the place to trade insults.

‘Your second question, however, is fundamentally flawed. It presupposes knowledge of events of which I am entirely ignorant. It sounds like you fell foul of the security system I implemented to protect my own property. That they attacked you, and this is news to me, was purely accidental. It’s more than likely a result of bringing an unauthorised guest along with you. As you will have noticed on your way in I have things to protect.’

I thought that was probably as close to an apology as I was ever going to get from him:
It was an accident that a swarm of killer robot bees almost killed you

‘Now, much as this is a pleasant break in a very busy day,’ he continued, ‘I really must get back to work. We are perched on the cusp of the future, and I have things I must attend to. If we could pick this up later . . .?’

‘Later?’ I snorted. ‘I think we both know there isn’t going to be a
later
, don’t we? I don’t know what you’re up to, but I think I deserve an explanation at least.’

‘Do you now?’ my father said, irritated. ‘And what makes you think I owe you
anything
, my boy?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘Maybe because I’m your son? Or if that isn’t reason enough, how about out of human decency? You know that the Straker Tapes are true, and you lied to keep it a secret; you’ve made their believers out to be some kind of idiots who are beneath society’s contempt. I think I deserve to know why. I think we both deserve to know why.’

My father gave Alpha another look, wrinkled his nose and then shook his head.

‘There really is no time. I must confess that I miscalculated. I thought that you would spend your day with those contact lenses in your eyes, chasing ghosts, and leave me free to do what has to be done.’

The contact lenses.

His ‘gift’ to Alpha and me.

I’d forgotten all about them.

We’d looked at them, thought it was a weird sort of gift to give, and then they’d gone straight back in my pocket.

‘You didn’t even put them in, did you?’ my father laughed. ‘It really is true, about parents not knowing their children, isn’t it? You were supposed to be consumed with curiosity. You were supposed to put them in your eyes, and then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

He seemed genuinely stunned by his miscalculation.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘Why don’t you pop them in now, see what you were missing?’

‘We haven’t got time for games,’ I said. ‘I want answers.’

‘Then do as you are told,’ my father said curtly. ‘And I’ll even stick around to explain.’

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So, with the future of the world we knew ticking down on the clock on the wall of the crater, I lifted two of the lenses from the case, and offered the other pair to Alpha.

We looked at them, not sure just how they were supposed to be used, until my father lost patience, took an identical case from his own pocket, took out a lens on his fingertip and proceeded to demonstrate how to place it over an open eye.

‘Simple,’ he said, as if explaining it to infants. ‘Now you do it.’

I copied his actions, brought up my finger, steadied it because it was shaking, and popped the lens in place on my right eyeball.

It stung as it made contact, and my eye started to water. I blinked a few times and felt it move, then settle, on the curve of my eye. It was a horrible sensation, and I really couldn’t believe that people ever used to do this so they could see normally.

The left one was next, but I hesitated. I had a pretty nasty sting to that eyelid and I had to be more careful getting the second lens in place.

Soon I had two watering, stinging eyes and completely blurred vision.

‘You have to wait a few seconds,’ my father said. ‘The circuitry inside each lens has to connect to your optic nerve.’

Already my vision was resolving out of the murk.

Then, suddenly, it was clear.

If it wasn’t for the slight alien pressure on my eyes, I guess I wouldn’t have known I was wearing them.

I looked around, wondering what I was supposed to be seeing with the lenses in place, but they had no effect on me at all. I looked at Alpha and she looked at me.

She shook her head. Nothing.

‘These are great and everything . . .’ I started, but my father cut me short.

‘You actually have to be looking in the right place,’ he said, sounding like he thought I was about five years old, ‘If you turn your attention up a level, to the silos, I think you’ll see what I mean.’

He pointed as he spoke and Alpha and I followed it to the place he was indicating with his finger.

‘They’re drawn to them,’ he said, ‘Goodness only knows why. I think they sense what’s coming . . . I think they can always sense it . . .’

I stopped listening to him and stared.

At first there was nothing; just the silos. But then there was an odd feeling in my head, as if my brain had just . . .
clicked
. . . and there they were.

I could see them.

I could really see them.

Three shadowy figures stood next to one of the silos, staring up at it. There was a man, a woman and a child, where once there had been nothing.

I shuddered.

Ghosts
, I thought,
I’m looking at ghosts

They had the same kind of look of
not-belonging
that the other people in the Grabowitz photos had possessed; an out-of-time look that was partly to do with the style of their clothing, and partly to do with the fact that something about them just looked . . .
wrong

I thought about the Straker Tapes, and Mr Peterson saying how things from earth follow visual rules, and I realised that he hadn’t been entirely correct.

These people looked wrong, but it wasn’t because they were from elsewhere. It was because I wasn’t supposed to be seeing them.

The three figures were holding hands, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They looked like that at any second they could just wink out of existence.

Ghosts.

A previous software version.

Only made visible by the lenses in my eyes.

I felt a tremendous surge of sorrow for them, and suddenly the woman looked back over her shoulder as if she had suddenly sensed that she was being observed.

Her eyes met mine.

For a moment I thought that we had just made some kind of contact, that the look we were sharing was profound and meaningful, but then she looked far past me, shook her head, and turned back to the silo.

And then I saw the others.

It was like a gate had been opened in my mind, only it was more like a floodgate because now . . . now there were more of them.

I could see maybe twenty-or-so other figures, standing around the base of the silo and staring up at it. Young and old, male and female, but all of them possessing that strange quality of not-belonging.

‘The lenses correct the perceptual screening process,’ my father was saying, ‘They undo the programming that filters out the past versions of humanity.’

I looked over to Alpha and saw that she was watching the
other
people too.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. I was shocked to find it was my father’s hand.

‘There is a secret human history,’ he said, and there was something in his voice that sounded like regret. ‘That runs a parallel course to our own. And it is a history of the lost.’

‘The ones left behind,’ I said. ‘The 0.4.’

My father laughed, and removed his hand from my shoulder.

‘Oh, Peter,’ he said, and there was genuine disappointment in his voice. ‘I had such high hopes for that brain of yours, but it stubbornly refuses to see through to the
heart
of things. The Straker Tapes were recorded a millennium ago; we’ve been upgraded many times since then.

‘The silos are the key, you see, and the information they contain unlocks so many secrets for those brave enough to look.

‘Brave enough and smart enough.’ He said the last without a hint of self-consciousness, just as a plain statement of fact.