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/Hey!/
I thought back.
/Good to hear from you./

/That’s what happens when you hand out your addy to just about anyone. They call./

/I’m glad you did./

/I’d put that ‘glad’ on hold until you hear why I’m calling./

/Don’t care./
I said.
/Glad still applies./

?So, what are you up to?
Even though it was just Alpha’s thoughts over the Link I could tell that she was nervous.

/Don’t ask./
I thought.

?That bad, huh?
Alpha replied.

/Bad enough./ ?Need some help with college work?

There was a long pause and I thought the Link had glitched out.

Then Alpha came back with:
/I – I’m in trouble. I need your help, Peter./

/Of course./ Anything./ ?What can I do?

/I couldn’t think of anyone else I could turn to. I need you to . . ./
Alpha broke off, and again there was a pause.
?Can you come and meet me?

?When?

/Well, I was kind of hoping you could come now./

I smiled.

/Tell me where./
I said.
/I’ll be right there./

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We arranged to meet up in town in half an hour. It was almost eight-thirty already, and the curfew for my age-range was eleven-thirty. I needed to get into town, help Alpha with her problem and get back home in a little over three hours.

Tricky enough; and I still had to get out of the house. I thought about doing something crazy like climbing out my bedroom window, but in the end I decided I’d do it in a more conventional fashion.

I made my way to the front door.

Of course it’s not the first time I have gone out at night– Perry and I sometimes meet up, just to hang out – but this felt very different to those occasions.

With every step I expected to hear my father’s voice asking me where I thought I was going at this time of night, but I didn’t see or hear him even as I was opening the front door.

The night was sticky and warm as I closed the door behind me. I felt a crazy thrill of excitement as I made my way to the security fence.

Amalfi was in trouble.

She asked for my help.

No one has ever asked me for help before.

The fence let me through without any biometric testing. It’s really not necessary to screen people coming
out
. If they got in, they are authorised to leave too.

I started towards the slider station, my mind a chaotic blur.

At night the city changes. The buildings, after storing solar energy all day, release light from every surface and glow in a multitude of different colours, although just
which
colours they are is determined by the person looking at them.

Colour is, after all, an illusion: more to do with how light is decoded after it is received into the eye than an actual, existing property. By switching the way we decode light, we are able – these days – to alter the colour scheme of the world around us. It takes just a thought, and suddenly the city is coordinated to our mood, or personal taste. I went for ‘NeonGlow’ and the world lit up in the strong, vibrant colours that are used in
Last Quest
. A custom filter that I bought, just so that I could feel like I was a warrior in an urban fantasy game.

Tragic, isn’t it?

But maybe, just maybe, I wanted to be the hero in my own life story for once.

It took me five minutes to get to the slider station and, according to the station’s display, it was going to be another fifteen before a slider showed up.

A couple of small groups of people were waiting too. I’m not paranoid like Perry, but I was sure they were staring at me. Which was ridiculous, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. I took myself away a little from them on the platform, listening to music and trying not to meet their eyes.

Something interrupted the music, something nagging me on the Link. I checked it, just to distract myself, I guess. It was Perry’s ghosts-of-the-Link thing from earlier, reannouncing itself. I thought
what the hex
and opened up the Link. I expected to be underwhelmed.

I was wrong.

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A woman is standing in front of the Trevi fountain in Rome. The sponsors’ logos have been carefully integrated into the fountain’s design.

Tall and blonde-haired, the woman seems tiny in front of the complex sculpture of rock, marble and cement that has stood since the 18th Century.

Other tourists throng around her, with some of them throwing credit chips into the waters as per tradition. The photo is a fraction overexposed.

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The photo is the same as the original with one striking addition.

A young woman is washing her hair in the waters of the fountain behind the friend. She is only half-visible, and zooming in on the image only serves to make her
less
visible. She is partly transparent and you can see the background through her body.

Transparency aside, there is something odd about her, but it’s hard to say just what it is. She looks old somehow, but not age-wise. It’s almost as if she is from another time period.

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A spectacular view over New London’s skyline. Geo-tagging identifies it as taken from the main observation deck of the TeleLink Tower.

The city spreads out, with the plasteen dome of the Parliament House visible in the background. The sky is threaded through with the reddish-orange of a Summer twilight.

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In the foreground, two figures – again transparent – can be plainly seen. A young couple are looking out over the city, and again it is possible to see the photo’s background through their bodies.

Their clothing is odd, old-fashioned.

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A wedding photo of a bride and groom grinning at the camera. The bride is in an exquisite dress, in the traditional bridal colour: light blue.

The pair are standing outside a building, and their expressions are a mixture of happiness and pride.

They are the only people in the photo.

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The couple are not alone in the photograph. A young man can clearly be seen off to the right of the groom. The young man is staring directly into the camera, and it looks like he was in the middle of saying something when the camera catches him. The young man, like the other ghost images, looks like he is from another period of human history. 

He is holding his hand up and is showing four fingers.

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I don’t believe in ghosts.

Just like I don’t believe in tribal god figures. Or fairies. If you want an answer to a question about how something in the universe works then you need to answer it with science. In the entire history of the world the answer to a question about the way things work has never been ‘magic’, ‘the supernatural’ or ‘pixies’.

Examples:

1) An apple falls.
Was it pulled down by hands of angels?

No, I think you’ll find the answer to that one is ‘gravity’. 

2) Bright fire fizzes across the night sky.
Are the Gods fighting?
No, that one is an electrical discharge, and we have called it ‘lightning’.

3) The sun is devoured by blackness in the sky.
Surely the Gods are angry with us?
Uh, no, the moon has just moved in front of the sun. We call that an eclipse.

We learned in pre-prep to look beyond superstition when trying to explain things around us, and to fall back on to the certainties of science.

But looking at those photographs gave me a chill. Now, I am thoroughly aware that photographs can be manipulated. I have seen pictures of my friends standing on the surface of the moon; and I have seen photographic evidence of the existence of dragons.

I’m friends with Perry, so I’ve seen more than my fair share of Link hoaxes.

But these photographs were different.

They felt like a sudden window into another, parallel path of existence. They made me think that somewhere, close to us but hidden by some trick of our senses, there was another world, where different people carried on living different lives as we bustled by, unaware of their presence.

Ghosts in the machine
, I thought.
I wonder: can they see us?
The young man in the wedding photo certainly seemed aware that a picture was being taken, looking directly into the camera and holding up those four fingers as . . .
as what?
I checked the datestamp on the wedding photo.

It was taken three days ago.

The slider arrived and I flashed cash to the ticket machine, taking a seat at the back.

Three days ago
, I kept thinking,
four fingers

I used Face-Recognition to scan through the rest of Ms Grabowski’s ghosted photographs, using the young man’s face as my comparison.

I guess it was a long shot, but sometimes they work out.

I found one more image with the young man in it.

Two women walking down a neon-lit street. The young man in the foreground, looking as out of place and out of time as before.

He was holding up three fingers.

The photo was dated two days ago.

It made me think:
He’s counting down!
First four days: then three.

Three days to go: two days ago.

Is he telling us that something is going to happen . . .
tomorrow?

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I got into town, only to find that Alpha was already there, waiting for me.

The cube-shaped retail units of downtown were on browse mode. You could still shop if you wanted to, but the service was automated and you couldn’t physically see or touch the things for sale until you had paid for them.

Although that was the way most people shopped these days.

You found things on the Link, you paid for them on the Link, and they arrived soon afterwards. I buy clothes on the Link and download their templates, and if I don’t like the garment then I don’t return it, I just delete it from my virtual wardrobe.

Sometimes the shops seemed like a determined effort to hang on to a past way of living that was almost wholly redundant now.

I guess the past holds a power over us that none of us can quite understand.

Alpha was just where she said she would be. I could tell, even from a distance, that something was troubling her. She was pacing, back and forth, her face turned down to the SlideWalk, and her shoulders were slumped.

Charles Darwin, captured forever in a liquid granite sculpture, looked down from on high, offering her no advice.

I sped up and called out. Her face brightened when she looked up and saw me approaching.

‘Peter,’ she said, almost breathless with relief. ‘Thank you for coming.’

‘I can’t resist a damsel in distress,’ I said. I think I’ve already mentioned I didn’t talk to many girls, didn’t I?

We both pretended I hadn’t said the ‘damsel in distress’ thing, found a bench and sat down.

‘Nice threads,’ she said, and I realised that I was still wearing the Bartlett suit.

‘Yeah, sorry, I should have dressed up,’ I joked lamely.

Alpha’s face was tense and pale, even in the light of the glowing buildings. It made me remove the stupid filter and see her in the natural glow of stored sunlight.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

Alpha shook her head.

I didn’t know whether that meant she didn’t know, or she wasn’t ready to say just yet, so we sat there in silence and looked across at the lights of the city.

I’ve seen pictures of Cambridge as it was hundreds of years ago – there are thousands of them in the library at the college – and it’s always hard to match up that city of the past with the present one. New Cambridge was now little more than a clone of every other city on the planet, with the same kind of buildings and the same branded retail units.

‘I looked you up,’ Alpha said finally. ‘I mean, a profile and all that. I didn’t find out much about you, but I thought I could trust you.’

‘You can.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t trust people all that easily.’ Alpha’s face was half in shadow, half brightly-lit and it reminded me of my father’s face, sometime recently, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where or when.

Alpha sat there for a moment, looking like she was thinking something through, then she puffed out her cheeks out and suddenly blurted: ‘Look, my family are Strakerites. Feel free to run away screaming. I won’t hold it against you.’

I tried to dismiss her fears with a laugh. ‘And there was me thinking your big secret was that you were a serial killer.’

Alpha looked shocked.

‘I would have thought being a Strakerite was worse,’ she replied.

I shook my head.

‘But your . . . your father . . .?’ she began.

‘My father may think that Strakerites are dangerously deluded, but then he
is
the man who killed off the last of the Earth’s bees.’ I reached out and touched the back of Alpha’s hand, gently, with my fingertips. ‘Me, I think everybody is entitled to their own opinions on things.’