The Future We Left Behind (14 page)

‘Places like this try to recreate the world as we think it should
really
be; to bring ourselves closer to what the world would be if it wasn’t for the constant interference of those alien programmers.

‘So we use books and video files of things as they once were, and we try to live the
old
way. We use old technologies
and old things. To better understand ourselves as
separate
from the programmers.

‘To work out who we would be, if things were different.’ She broke off and rolled her eyes.

‘It’s OK,’ I told her. ‘I really don’t mind. I want to know all about you … er … all about Strakerites …’

My last minute revision was so obvious, so blatant, that I stared down at the table top and tried to will my face not to blush with embarrassment.

Alpha looked at me and I could see a tinge of sorrow in her eyes. ‘It must be hard being David Vincent’s son,’ she said.

‘I don’t know what it would be like to be anyone else.’

‘Until the next upgrade,’ Alpha said solemnly. ‘So, is there a Mrs. Vincent?’

‘No, I never married.’

She swatted my arm. ‘Very funny. I meant your mother …’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘And I deflected your question with some sparkling wit. It’s called a defence mechanism.’

Alpha arched an eyebrow, surprised that I should remember her words of the day before so clearly.

‘My mother …’ I stammered, searching for the right words, ‘my mother is no longer with us.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Peter, I didn’t mean to …’

‘It’s OK,’ I told her. ‘I was a little kid when it happened.’

‘So what
did
happen?’ There was a softness to Alpha’s question that made me feel that I could actually talk about it, perhaps for the first time ever. I mean, I don’t even think I’ve talked about it in my LinkDiary before.

But Alpha had asked and I suddenly flashed on the dream I’d had, the strange man talking to me just before the sky fell in.

She wants to find her father
, he had said,
but the key is with
your
mother
.

‘Let me show you,’ I said, and extended my hand towards hers, placing it on the table.

She hesitated for a couple of seconds then laid her hand flat on the table in front of her, next to mine.

We let our filaments out, and the glistening ropes met, joined and merged.

I accessed deep memory storage and selected the file.

File:
040/7/113/mother

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Deep_Storage\key_memory

I am eight years old
.

I’m in the garden, watching the bees
.

And I am recording it straight on to the Link
.

They fascinate me, the bees; they always have
.

It’s the way that they seem to be living creatures, even though I know that they aren’t
.

I mean they move and fly and buzz and – occasionally – swarm, and if you sit and watch them you can see them do something that looks too much like play to be anything that could have been programmed into their circuits
.

I’m watching two of them as they perform a sort of dance on the leaves of a flower in the garden. One is circling around in a clockwise direction, shaking its body every few seconds or so; the other is moving anticlockwise and seems to be echoing the shakes of its companion
.

I think they are talking
.

Communicating
.

And I’m wondering just what it is that synthetic bees have to talk about
.

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
.

I feel myself smile
.

She is my world, I think, and it makes me feel safe
.

And then I notice something
.

My mother is not smiling
.

She is just 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’m wondering what it is that I have done to make her look so upset, but then she is swooping down and wrapping me up in her arms and I feel her breath on my face and feel her tears on my cheek and she holds me for a long time and I can hear the bees buzzing and feel her heart beating against me and I know that it’s not me that has made her sad, but that I am somehow the focus of her sadness
.

‘Mummy?’ I say, and I feel her whisper against my ear in reply
.

‘I love you, Peter,’ she says, little more than a soft breath made into words by the shaping of her lips. ‘If you remember nothing else, remember that.’

I touch her hair and it feels like silk, looks like spun gold in the sunlight. I can feel more of her tears, and I don’t know what to do, what to say
.

Parents are supposed to make a child’s tears go away, and I am overwhelmed by the discovery that they can cry themselves
.

I hold on to her for a long time, and then she ruffles my
hair, releases me from her hug. She looks down at me, her face filled with sorrow, with regret. Then she bends down and kisses my cheek, stands up, turns and walks away
.

The sound of bees is the soundtrack to her departing
.

There is a shimmer, like a mirage, a trick of the light, and I am momentarily blinded
.

By the time my vision clears, my mother is gone
.

File:
113/47/04/sfg/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

I let the memory run its course and then retracted my filaments. I wasn’t surprised to find that there were tears in my eyes.

I rarely visit that memory.

It hurts too much.

That was, after all, the last time I saw my mother.

Alpha was studying my face, looking confused.

‘I – I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘That was the last time you saw her?’

I nodded. It was all that I could manage by way of reply.

‘Where … where did she go?’ Alpha’s voice was quiet, but
there was a tension to it, too, as if she wasn’t quite satisfied by the contents of the memory I had shown her.

I shrugged. ‘My father said that she left us. That she no longer wanted to be with us. That she had other places she wanted to see, other things she wanted to do, and those plans just didn’t include a family.

‘I never understood. I still don’t. I’ve spent the last seven years wondering what could have been so important that she walked out on her own son. She loved me; at least, I think she did.’

Alpha stroked the back of my hand with her fingertips.

‘What else does your father say about it?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘He’s never spoken about it since that day,’ I told her. ‘He’s not really the type to talk about feelings and stuff. I guess it’s too painful for him.

‘You know the stupid thing? For the first year or so there wasn’t a day that passed that I wasn’t thinking about her, hoping to see her face in a crowd, hoping to get a LinkMessage from her telling me she was OK. Anything.

‘But as time passed I started to think about her less and
less. Now I can only remember her face if I look at stored memories.’

Alpha’s face was creased with concern. She was frowning and I had a sudden horrible thought that I had upset her somehow by showing her the memory. Then her expression changed, and there was a sudden intensity to it.

‘Hey, Peter,’ she said. ‘You blame yourself, don’t you?’

‘Why else would she go?’ I asked. ‘I must have done something …’

‘You didn’t,’ Alpha said and her certainty startled me. ‘Look, I don’t know if this will help, but there was something … 
wrong
with that memory.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not one hundred percent certain, but something makes me think that we didn’t see the whole thing.’

‘That’s all I’ve got,’ I said, feeling a sudden flash of anger at the suggestion that I could be holding something back from her.

‘Maybe.’ Alpha stood up. ‘But I reckon we need to find ourselves the services of a decent hacker to be certain.
Wait here.’

I watched her as she went over to the man at the counter. She chatted with him for a while and then he nodded and pointed to a woman at a table on the other side of the room. Alpha approached her, had another conversation, and then the woman looked over at me.

She followed Alpha back to the table where I was sitting.

‘Peter, right?’ The woman said as Alpha took her seat in front of me.

The woman continued to stand. She was tall and thin and had a narrow, wary face, topped off with a brief scrub of black hair. Her eyes were dark and locked on to mine.

I nodded. ‘Peter Vincent.’ I said.

‘Hey, Peter Vincent,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Ashley.’ She cracked a wide smile and sat down. ‘You ever hacked your own code before?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘I’m not even sure what that is,’ I confessed.

‘That’s fine. Just think of it as gaining access to things you know subconsciously. We are creatures of data, but we rarely take the time to analyse any of the information that
flows through us. Which is kind of stupid, right? I’m going to help you do just that. You up for it?’

I looked at Alpha and she gave me an encouraging nod. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What do I have to do?’

File:
113/47/04/sfg/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

Ashley went away into a back room but returned quickly with a wooden box.

She placed it in the middle of the table, flipped open the top, and revealed a cone-shaped device festooned with wires and circuits. Some of the wires terminated in flat plates of shining metal. It all had an odd, homemade look that made me think that the woman was playing some kind of joke or trick.

She put the wooden box on the floor under the table and then gestured at the cone.

‘This is what we call a LinkCrawler,’ she explained. ‘It’s not
the best name ever, but what the hex. We use them to hack into our own operating systems. It’s pretty new tech, and we haven’t got it
all
worked out yet, but it allows a person to look at the code for the software that we’re running.’ She noticed my disbelieving look.

‘I’m not kidding you,’ she said, somewhat defensively. ‘It’s not something we’re particularly good at reading yet, but there’s definitely code.’ She shrugged and then grinned. ‘It’s a total blast, by the way.’

I stared at the object on the table. It looked kinda stupid.

‘Now Alpha was saying that this is a rather … emotional memory for you,’ Ashley continued. ‘You sure you don’t mind if a complete stranger joins in?’

I shook my head. ‘Alpha also said she thinks there might be some data missing from the memory,’ I told her. ‘I’m pretty keen on finding out if she’s right.’

Alpha gave me a smile, warm and encouraging.

‘OK,’ Ashley said, as she moved wires on the LinkCrawler, performing some final adjustments. ‘The Link pulls data from loads of sources, and it’s doing it all of the time. Much of that time we don’t even realise it’s doing anything at all.
It even runs while we sleep. Do you want to know the weirdest thing, Peter? We are the most curious creatures this planet has ever known, we have discovered the secrets of the atom, taken ourselves into space in search of answers out there, we have plumbed the deepest depths of the planet’s oceans, and yet we don’t ask questions about the Link. About what it is, what it does, whether we even need it in our lives …’

‘Or how it works?’ I said.

Ashley raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, that’s the BIG question that no one asks,’ she said. ‘That no one dares to ask. Because it shouldn’t work, should it? The Link happened pretty much overnight,’ she continued. ‘There was no sudden technological breakthrough, no patent was ever filed, there are no records of the commercial development of this world-changing technology. It just happened. Like we woke up one day and the Link was suddenly there. We could communicate across vast distances with nothing but our minds to make it happen.

‘Have you read the Straker Tapes?’

‘Last night,’ I said. ‘Kind of eye-opening.’

‘So you know the odd things that Kyle said towards the
end of his account? About how the unknown programmers were upgrading humanity for purposes of their own? That they were networking us as storage space …’

‘And you think that the Link might be a result of that networking?’ I asked.

Ashley looked impressed. ‘Think about how the people in the later stages of Kyle’s account seemed linked together. Maybe networking is necessary – not to us, but to our programmers.

‘Humanity, however, just came along and did what it always does: it took advantage of an existing resource. I think that the Link is a use we found for it.’

She finished tinkering with the device and smiled.

‘All done,’ she said. ‘You ready to give this a try?’

I nodded.

‘Smart AND brave.’ Ashley smiled a reassuring smile. ‘Just put your hand on the table,’ she instructed. ‘You too, Alpha.’ We both did as we were told. ‘Link up, folks.’ We all deployed our filaments. ‘Now connect yourselves up to a platen …’

I stared at her.

‘One of the flat metal plates,’ Ashley explained.

The metal was warm and vibrated as the connection was made. Alpha and Ashley linked up to it too.

‘Alpha says that she felt something odd about this memory file from the outset,’ Ashley said. ‘So why don’t we start at the very beginning?’