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‘NO!’ He protested. ‘This is . . . it can’t be . . . WHY?’

I was thinking about symmetry and neatness, about how it felt like my life was running along hidden tracks beneath my feet, and about the odd connections that today had shared with the crazy dream I’d had. In that kind of mental environment nothing comes as a surprise any more.

THEY got closer.

And closer. Until their ferocious buzzing was unmistakable. Bees. And by the sound of it: MILLIONS of them.

They were thundering through the air, through the underground complex, towards us, and they were so loud that I felt a moment’s fear myself.

The stings that a small swarm of them had inflicted had been bad enough.

This swarm was something different entirely.

A deafening buzz.

Oh, and you programmed them to be so fast, didn’t you?
I thought.

And then the buzzing sound drowned out even my own thoughts, and metal bodies pinged and smashed and scraped against the shell of the dome.

Alpha had made her way over to me and she took my hand in hers and looked at me with something like wonderment. She said something, but even though her mouth was less than twenty centimetres from my ear, her words were buried beneath the noise.

Suddenly the dome was breached, and the bees poured in. Relentless and unstoppable, within seconds the air was thick with them.

My father was waving his arms in some mad dumb show, but the bees ignored him, ignored me, ignored Alpha, and they went straight for the computer terminals.

Like sentient bullets they smashed into the equipment. Unlike bullets, however, they could go back for another go.

And another.

And then another.

Metal rang against metal, and the loudest sound I had ever heard became louder still. I felt Alpha’s hand clench tighter on to mine, and I realised that if the bees decided to turn to attentions our way then we were dead.

No doubt.

But it seemed as if they had no interest in us at all.

Metal casings buckled under their relentless onslaught.

Monitors smashed.

And still the bees attacked.

Within the space of a mere twenty seconds or so they had managed to batter their way into the hearts of the computers, and then they turned their fury on to the innards: chipsets and capacitors; logic boards and quantum chips.

Sparks flared, became flames, and soon smoke was pouring from the computers. It wasn’t long before it became a dense cloud that made my eyes water and my throat sting.

Through the smoke, and the thick cloud of bees, I could vaguely see my father. He stood there, waving his arms and swatting at the invading army, as if he stood any chance at all of repelling them.

They ignored him.

He was irrelevant.

I turned to Alpha, then we got up from the floor, ignored the storm of metal creatures around us, and made for the door of the dome.

File:
113/50/05/wtf/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal\

Outside the dome the air was fresher.

A little, anyway.

At least it didn’t make me feel sick to breathe. I was struggling to find a part of me that didn’t hurt. My arm throbbed, my neck ached, my eyes were streaming and felt like they were full of grit, the bridge of my nose hurt, and I don’t know how many bee stings I was still carrying from earlier, but they had decided to start screaming out now too.

I looked back and saw that the flames within the geodesic dome were really hitting their stride, and black smoke was billowing from its entrance.

I grinned in spite of myself, then a hand mussed my hair and I looked at Alpha standing there, right by my side. She looked a little frazzled, with smoky marks on her face, but she returned the grin.

Then I looked up to the doomsday clock: 08.57.

‘I’ll love you to the end of the world,’ I muttered, immediately regretting it.

‘Not good enough,’ Alpha said, smiling. ‘I’m needy. Something trifling like the end of the world is not a good enough excuse for you to stop calling.’

My father had finally given up on trying to save his precious project from destruction at the hands – or should that be wings? – of another of his precious projects. He emerged from the dome looking worse than I felt, with black smoke-marks staining his face.

He looked small and diminished.

‘The bees . . .’ he said incredulously. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I connected with your computer terminal and told the bees that your whole network was an unauthorised intruder.’

‘How the hex did you do that?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s a little hazy,’ I said.

‘This isn’t the only complex like this.’ It sounded like my father was trying to convince himself, rather than us. ‘You may have destroyed my work here, but it goes on around the world. You have achieved nothing.’

‘We’ll see,’ I said, ‘in eight minutes or so.’

‘Why did you do this?’ my father asked, and he sounded like he genuinely didn’t know.

For the smartest man I knew, he was also the stupidest.

‘Because you didn’t kill the mites,’ I said and he looked at me like I was insane.

He shook his head.

‘Millgrove was important, but not vital,’ he said. ‘You and your girlfriend here just destroyed millions of credits worth of equipment and started a couple of fires, but that’s it.’

‘At least we gave it a pretty good try,’ Alpha said.

‘In eight minutes it won’t matter,’ my father said. ‘Things are going to change, one way or the other.’ ‘Things always change,’ Alpha said. ‘It’s what you do when it does that’s important.’

He gave us a really ugly smile. ‘If you DID succeed in ruining thirty years of work then the only thing you’ve won is another upgrade. In eight minutes you’ll be monsters.’

I hadn’t thought of that. I’d been so caught up in stopping him, I hadn’t really had time to consider what would happen if we actually succeeded.

My father saw the realisation as it dawned on my face. ‘I wonder if you’ll even remember each other,’ he said spitefully. ‘Anyway, you haven’t got much time, Peter. You’d better get started.’

‘Started?’ I had no idea what the hex he was talking about.

‘Obey the paradigm,’ my father said.

‘What does that EVEN mean?’

‘Every upgrade has a Kyle and it has a Lilly,’ my father said. ‘Don’t ask me why. It’s the way things
always
are. We call them paradigms, but you could call them archetypes, or echoes, it doesn’t matter. The Lilly paradigm follows her Kyle into the fire.’

‘And what does the Kyle paradigm do?’

‘You already know the answer to that one, my son. He leaves behind a record.’

‘You want me to write this down?’ I said mockingly.

‘I don’t want anything from you,’ he said, turning his back on us.

‘What you were doing was
wrong
, Mr Vincent,’ Alpha said.

‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough,’ he said and started to walk away.

I leaned on Alpha and we went to follow him, but he turned around and pointed down one of the tunnels.

‘There’s some storerooms in a corridor off the side of Tunnel 3. You might find something there you can use.’

‘Use for what?’ I asked him.

‘Playing out your role,’ he said and then started up the ladder.

File:
113/50/05/wtf/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal\

Discussion took about ten seconds. It wasn’t as if we were exactly spoilt for choices.

‘You do realise that my father is quite mad?’ I said.

‘Mad or not, I think someone should make some sort of a record of what happened here today,’ Alpha said.

‘You want to spend the last few minutes we’ve got left obeying my father’s stupid paradigm theory?’

‘It’s either that or sit here and wait.’

We made our way across the crater and I looked up to the silos towering above us. There were more ‘ghosts’ gathered around them, some of them kneeling, all of them staring intently at the concrete structures.

I was about to turn away when I saw that one of them was looking our way.

My mother.

She raised her hand in acknowledgment, and I gave her a solemn nod.

Then I noticed a figure standing next to her.

An old man with a mane of black hair.

The man I’d seen and heard just after my LinkDiary crashed; who had been shouting about memories and holes. The man I’d thought was a goblin man from the poem my mother had read to me, and who’d later appeared in a dream and delivered just enough vague and cryptic clues to lead us here.

Here he was, standing next to her, by the silos.

I thought again of invisible connections that linked everything together. I thought about tech-guys and alien programmers and how they might be a little more clever than my father had given them credit for when it came to fixing systems that were
going
to be a problem.

Maybe they would fix things
before
they got out of hand. Maybe they had already been, done the job, and gone.

I looked at the man and he made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

I wasn’t sure if it was an ‘OK’ sign, or a snake eating its own tail.

I decided that it really didn’t matter.

I gave a replica of the symbol back, and then we hurried down the tunnel.

File:
224/09/12fin
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Live\Peter_Vincent\Personal

It’s starting.

Alpha and I are walking back down the tunnel towards the silos, and I don’t know whether it’s the contact lenses, or our imaginations, but the air is thick with the alien code. It bristles on our skin like heat rash.

We are hand in hand and I’m carrying the flash drive, recording live on to it, just in case it captures something that will be useful, next time around.

Assuming there will be a next time.

I can’t stop thinking about my father, and his crazy plan, and the way that his own bees proved to be his downfall. How did I do that, exactly? Convince the bees that my father’s computers were a threat that needed to be eradicated?

I mean I’m not even 100% certain that’s what happened, but it just kind of feels like that’s what I did.

I am sure that I didn’t deploy my filaments to connect with the computer. I remember feeling shocked when I felt them touch the metal input panel.

So what happened, exactly?

The only thing that I can think of is my feelings when I saw the goblin man standing on the ridge above us, next to my mother.

What if someone else – something else – had been guiding my hand?

Maybe the tech-guys my father had so wanted to see for himself
had
pre-empted him. Used me to do their dirty work for them.

Is that even possible?

Because if they are capable of such actions, why didn’t they stop him before? I mean there is such a thing as cutting things too fine.

Unless... Unless they wanted something. Too many questions will never find answers, I guess. But I don’t feel afraid now; I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s that I’m with Alpha, and whatever happens, happens to us together.

Whether my father’s plan to see the face of God succeeds, or whether he has doomed us all, or whether this will be just another upgrade that we don’t even know happened... we’re going to be finding out about now.

I wonder if anyone will ever discover this record. If they do, I hope they don’t bookend it with editor’s notes like the Straker Tapes.

The alien language is everywhere now.

There is a sound in the air, a static crackle, and then a wave of...
something . . .
hits us.

Hot and electric and

@&^*($*23KJLKASDLKJSSeawiuro9034028140eria[po-/sdjf hgasd/90452poweiqwifadslkfasderqntveexndfa

DFJKKEWLRQNWDXSXDSCkjdsflsflfeoiwr98998989888 **** ))))l`kdfsjadlfewr

Heisenberg University

My colleagues think me mad.

They point to the fact that we are still here, that the WorldBrain contains no other records like this, that I have been working too hard, that there is no evidence for any of the events Peter Vincent describes, and they have chosen to paint me as the victim of an elaborate hoax.

I know that it sounds incredible. But still, I believe in Peter Vincent. Amalfi del Rey. Millgrove. Kyle Straker.

Even if I am the only one who does, it is enough.

I have been removed from duties at the University. It was when I pointed out the similarities between the WorldBrain and the ‘neural forest’ that Peter described that the department heads started to worry about me.

Maybe, I argued, the MindFeather WAS our WorldBrain. Maybe that was the sole purpose of the David Vincent project. The REAL purpose.

Maybe our alien programmers WANTED him to create it. Maybe it was a hardware upgrade that was required BEFORE the software could be installed this time.

It would provide answers to the questions that Peter was asking just before the upgrade hit and his story was silenced.

The WorldBrain is integral to everything we do. It is a living organism that dreams up new technologies, new philosophies, new structures and systems, new solutions to age-old problems. It has changed the way we think about ourselves, and the way we behave towards each other.

I am on an extended leave of absence. I suppose I should be working on regaining my reputation, on putting the Vincent archive behind me, but I can’t. Everything else seems pointless compared to the data.

I have copied the files and I spend most of my time trying to rebuild the damaged sectors, to find out what was lost in that final, critical shutdown.