1.4 (5 page)

I stood in front of the house’s security fence – a solid wall of energy that surrounds our home – and wondered what it was that we thought we were keeping out. Sure, crime is on the increase for the first time in generations, but you don’t actually have to increase ‘zero’ that much for a bar chart to look like things are getting out of hand.

Perhaps it was part of my father’s distrust of Strakerites that made him so cautious; sometimes he referred to them as ‘barbarians’ and maybe he truly pictured them storming the gates of his castle, wanting to bring the world down into chaos and superstition.

And he
had
been publicly against the idea of teaching Strakerist ideas in schools and colleges.

If the Strakerites were as crazy as my father made out, maybe he was right to be cautious.

My hand disgorged half-a-dozen filaments, and I watched as the thin, whip-like structures merged with the circuitry in the guard post. The fence unlocked to my physical signature.

Filament biometrics. Got to love them.

The door section of the wall dimmed – but didn’t shut off entirely – and I moved into it, feeling the cold, tingling sensation as it performed its final verification checks. If, by some almost impossible chance, an intruder used filament identification to fool the guard post, the full body scan would betray them and hold them inside its containment field until help arrived.

I have no idea who would answer such a call. The idea of a police force is
so
outdated. I guess it would be the employees of a private security company, but I’d never asked.

A paranoid part of my brain wondered if the scan could be configured to read my LinkDiary – or even my thoughts

– but I pushed such fears away and just waited until the scan confirmed what I already knew: I was Peter Vincent, and I was allowed through the security fence.

My home is an old-fashioned manor house recreated in liquid granite, and finished in real wood. Not much of it, mind, but enough that it feels supremely decadent. You need a permit for real wood these days, and very few people are granted one.

There are some stables out back, and about two acres of land. It’s a far cry from the cramped, chaotic living conditions of the majority of the city’s population.

The path leads up from the gates and through an elegant but spartan front garden that had more space than anyone in New Lincoln Heights could ever dream of owning.

Genetically recreated peacocks paraded the lawns, their electric plumage catching the half-light of a slowly descending twilight. I stopped to watch a neon male fanning out his digital feathers, sending rays of many colours in all directions.

Most people have never even seen a peacock, and we have a half-dozen of them in our garden. Previously that would have given me a real sense of pride; today it just felt wrong somehow. Unjust. It didn’t diminish the beauty of the birds, but it sort of tarnished them a little in my mind.

On both sides of me were vast bushes of some hybrid plant with purple, bell-shaped flowers that bobbed in a faint breeze. I could hear the electric drone of a couple of bees at work within them and found myself wondering what real bees had sounded like.

I was halfway up the path when the front door suddenly opened and my father came out. He was dressed in a sharp, metallic suit and the expression on his face told me that he was impatient and angry.

I felt a sudden jolt of panic that my father had found out about my little course change. I mean, it would only have taken a LinkMail from the college to tell him that I had put in the request. Maybe that was the kind of thing they notified parents about, I don’t know.

Anyway, I didn’t need to worry.

Not about that, anyway.

‘You’re late,’ My father said.

Uh-oh
. I thought.
What have I forgotten?

‘I know,’ I said defensively. ‘They were scraping up another leaper off the tracks of the slideway and I had to walk.’

‘Tonight of all nights,’ he said, and his tone betrayed the fact that he was still holding me personally responsible for my lateness. ‘Hurry up and get changed.’

‘Changed?’ I asked him.

He looked exasperated.

‘You
do
know what tonight is, don’t you?’ he barked.

I scanned my LinkCalendar and found nothing there to help me. Which meant that it was my father’s error, not mine. If he had told me it would have been automatically entered on to the calendar.

Still, it wouldn’t help to point out who was to blame. So I just shook my head and tried to look sorry.

My father wasn’t impressed. Status report: normal, then.

I can’t remember the last time my father was anything but unimpressed with me. Since mother . . . left . . . he’s been increasingly worried about what he calls his
legacy
– the ideas and inventions he’ll leave behind when he takes off into the great unknown – and I am, I guess, an important part of that legacy. He wants me to carry on with his work, to take his ideas forward, so that a future historian will look back and say
this is where it all started, and David Vincent was the man who started it.

But here’s the thing.

I’m nothing like him, not really. For my father, work is everything. And life is just something that happens in the gaps
between
the discoveries and the theories.

He’d work twenty-four hours a day, if he could. Fun and poetry and music and . . . I don’t know . . . just hanging out . . . are only distractions to him. He’s only truly happy when he’s saving the world, or building the next great supercomputer, or meeting up with his high-powered friends and planning the future of the human race.

Me, I like the moments in between: I like goofing off and relaxing, kicking back and letting the world pass by me.

I’m not
driven
like my father. I realise that I might have a part to play in society, but it’s never going to be the only thing I use to define myself.

My father was looking at me like I was an important experiment that had just failed.

‘The Keynote?’ he said, as if that was going to be any help to me at all.

I did some more head shaking. Paired it up with a blank look.

‘I’m addressing the
Science Council
,’ he explained. ‘And their families. A little bit of enforced PR that I was
expecting
you to attend.’

I guess ‘expecting’ is more real to my father than ‘asking’.

I gave him a nod.

‘I’ll get changed,’ I said.

I scanned the Link for something appropriate to the occasion, found a Nevri Bartlett evening suit, which was expensive, but elegant. I paid with FlashCash, downloaded the template, and then let my filaments turn my outfit into the suit.

It took seconds. And fit perfectly.

The material was iridescent, and alternated between midnight blue and a much lighter LED purple depending on the angle that light hit it.

And it had a cleaning function, like a lot of designer attire, which meant I didn’t even need to take a shower.

‘Ready,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

LinkList/Peter_Vincent
333/F11B/355

My Top 5 Virtual MiniBreak Destinations

5. Old New York

OK, its programming is a little loose and there are far too many recursive glitches for it to be a long stay (an hour and a half is my longest visit) but what it lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for with its sense of danger.

Whether taking a cab ride through Times Square, eating bagels and MacDougal’s hamburgers in the famous Restaurant of Liberty, or just walking around Linkin Park after dark, there’s a real sense that anything can indeed happen in the red white and blue apple.

4. The Cold Wilds

One of the newer virtual experience packages, the cold wilds is a kind of snowboarding environment, but it’s a hex of a lot more than that.

The physics have infinite levels of customisation, so you can make a mere half-pipe into a zero-gravity death run; or switch gravity to any surface so that you can grind horizontally along the side-lock courses.

3. Centra-Sphere

After a complete overhaul, the new Centra-Sphere has opened, and it was worth the wait!

‘VibrAtioN’ is the new must-visit attraction, a neutral field environment that turns sound into sensory stimulus. You haven’t lived until you’ve felt your LinkTunesLibrary converted into waves that surround your body and physically interact with you. A LinkUpgrade to v2.14 will even allow generation of unique imagery skimmed from your library! Wow.

2. Sea-Side Evolved

Back in the day, the world used to lo-o-o-ove the seaside, but then coastal protection, marine conservation, and sand mites made it a thing of the past.

Now it’s back in virtual form and, although it is a little weird getting used to doing nothing more than lying in the sun (a uv-neutral version) and picking sand out of everything you own, it’s surprisingly relaxing.

1. Last Quest Resort 

Big surprise about my number one!

This experience kind of transplants the whole Last Quest world into a vivid – although still a little underdeveloped – interactive experience. Go Chickaboo racing at the Crystal Plains Raceway, or search for treasure in the Vile Wastes; challenge the one of the Knights of Fear to a duel, or fly with the MechMages through the skies of Avalon; steal the magic of the Summoners, or just shop at the KingTown Market.

It’s all there, and the experience is so immersive, so breathtakingly beautiful, that it is my absolute favourite getaway. Still a little on the pricey side, but perfect to escape from real life. 

File:
113/44/00fgj/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

The Science Council is an architect’s layer cake of metal and glass on the southernmost edge of New Cambridge. Surrounded by a lush park it rises up with a look of unshakeable confidence in its own importance.

As well it might.

It is, after all, where all the
really
clever people research the future, developing the technologies and building the devices that will make the general population’s lives easier. And lining their own pockets.

I don’t know how I became so cynical. There’s no reason for it really. I’d lived a privileged life and I had wanted for nothing – except my mother back, I guess, and things like that wouldn’t happen even if we had all the credit in the world

– so there really was no reason for me to think such things.

My father’s Mercedes-Royce Electric Shadow is flashed with premium software, so it’s allowed to travel on the higher tiers of the beltway. Below us was another gridlock, but up here – on the pay-as-you-drive tiers – there were less than twenty cars in both directions between home and the South of the city.

The rolling traffic restrictions put in place to deal with the vast numbers of road users simply don’t apply if you have the software, and the money, to roll out on the private beltways.

My father was silent as he steered the car towards our destination. He had stopped speaking pretty much the moment I suited up. I’d tried to get him talking, but he made it clear that he was thinking about his Keynote speech, and preferred not to be distracted by conversation.

Or
my
conversation, anyway.

Which, I guessed, was because of his latest research project. I didn’t get to hear much about it; it was classified work for the World Government. I assumed it was an extension of his usual research into the construction of a new way of computing, but, for all he told me, he could have been working on a way to turn the sky into blueberry jam.

I might have pressed him, just to stave off the boredom, but I got an instant message on the Link.

?Are you going to be there tonight?
Perry hit me.

/Yeah./
I bounced back.
I’m on a three line whip./

?What does that even mean?
Perry queried.

/I really don’t know./
I offered.
/Something my mother used to say. She was obsessed with political history, so I guess it’s something that’s long gone now./

Perry waited, to give my reference to my mother the proper measure of respect; then came back with:
/ Whatever./

?I take it you’re attending too?
I asked.

/Pops wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer./

?Who are you going to be wearing?

?What are you, the fashion police?

/Just want to make sure I’m looking better than you./
I said, only half-joking.

/Bound to be. Pops has put a ceiling on my Flash. I’m reusing an old template./

/Tough./

?Ain’t it? ?You?

/Bartlett./

Oh. ?Big guns, huh? /Well, I submit to your superior might./

/Good to hear that you know when you’re beaten./ / Always give a fellow his due, that’s my motto./

?Since when?
I asked, incredulously.

/Since now./
Perry replied.

I don’t even know what it is about Perry and me and our clothes. It started when we were in Prep, and has just kind of continued.

It’s like a designer escalation; a clothes war.

Trying to dress the best for events we were both attending.

Looked like tonight I was going to win.

I was about to disconnect when Perry said something weird.

?Hey, did you hear the latest about the ghosts on the Link?

?Huh?
I had no idea what he was talking about.

/Oh, Peter,/
Perry said,
/Sometimes I forget just how little you really see of the Link. The ghosts in the photographs. Everyone’s talking about them./

/Not everyone./
I said.
?So what are we talking?

/Ghosts./
Perry reiterated.
/Molly Grabowitz saw ghosts, and they passed through her photo albums and left an image of themselves in every photo. Ruined them all. Here’s a bookmark. You can view the photos. Pretty scary stuff./