The Future We Left Behind (15 page)

I nodded, accessed the file, and it played through again.

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
.

Ashley says, and I halt the memory.

I do as she says, and keep the memory frozen like a still picture. It just takes a little concentration.

Ashley says:

I ask.

Ashley says.

I say, slightly patronisingly.

syntax.> Ashley says. she explains before I ask.

The bees
, I think,
what is she talking about?

I’m about to ask her, but suddenly I feel her presence on the wires like an electrical current passing through me, and the next thing I know she is stepping into the memory itself.

One second I’m looking at my treasured memory, and the next … she’s in it.

Standing there. In
my
memory.

I can see her, just off to the side of that long-past me. She is looking around sort of absently. The rest of the image is frozen, but she is moving around it. All of a sudden I’m reminded of the Straker Tapes, and of Kyle and Lilly moving around the village green while the rest of the villagers are frozen.

Weird.

Suddenly she kneels down. She is concentrating on the dance of the bees.

she says. memory, and it will happen. Both of you.>

I concentrate on doing exactly as I am instructed and feel an odd tension, as if I am pushing against a solid surface, and then there’s some give and suddenly I am standing next to Alpha and Ashley …

And me
.

 … and a small boy …

It’s me!

 … who is studying the bees as they dance across the leaves of a flower.

The light is almost too real to be real.

Hyper-real.

It’s bright and warm and I can feel the sun of that long gone day beating down upon me. I’m supposed to be sitting in a dark little café and I still feel the urge to shade my eyes.

Ashley says, and I can only just manage a nod.

Although ‘weird’ is not a strong enough word to describe this. I’ve been using it already.

Weirdest, perhaps.

Ashley says.

She points to the boy –
to me! –
and I feel my head start to struggle with the situation.

I ask.

Ashley says.

So I do. In a daze.

I am walking around my own memory.

Like I’ve travelled back in time seven years.

I can see the boy as clearly as I have ever seen anything. His face is a little fatter than mine is now, and the hair a little curlier, but it is unmistakeably me.

Ashley says.

I don’t have to ask her what she is talking about. There’s a leaden feeling in my stomach and my mind is fizzing with the impossibility of what I am seeing.

I tell her.

I say breathlessly. see
me
seeing
it. I … I shouldn’t be there. I should be seeing this from that little boy’s point of view. How is this possible?>

Ashley replies. entirely
your own memory of the event. Someone else has constructed this for you. They’ve used enough of your own thoughts to give the feeling of it being yours, but it’s a fabrication. A cut and paste job made up of your memories and someone else’s.>

I can only nod. My mouth is completely dry and I feel like someone has pulled the world out from underneath my feet.

If I can no longer trust the evidence of my LinkDiary, then how can I trust anything?

So I search around the scene of that painful, wonderful memory looking for signs that it is constructed. Looking for things that don’t fit.

I look at the boy that I once was, his brow creased as he tries to figure what it is the bees are trying to tell him …

Ashley says.

Bees? What are the bees saying? She’s … oh wait, this is messed up.

The rest of the memory is frozen still, like a moment trapped in Lucite, but the bees are still moving! And I realise that they’re not humming, they’re not buzzing, they’re …

They’re talking.

They are talking to each other.

It sounds like voices overheard from a long way away: I can’t hear the actual words, but I do recognise them as words.

I kneel down next to that young Peter, his face frozen as he too studies the bees. It feels so utterly strange, to be so close to a past version of me, and I find I have to just kind of ignore him.

Ignore
me
.

Or go mad.

And the bees
are
moving, but not in an ordinary bee-like
pattern. Their metal and plastic bodies are smooth and clean, but there is something very odd … very
sinister
 … in what they are doing. They seem to be winking in and out of existence as they move, disappearing here, reappearing over there, as if there is some sort of a graphical glitch in the memory file.

I can hear them clearly now.

 … I don’t understand
, one bee is saying.
You’re scaring me, Mummy
.

I have to go away
, the other bee replies. I
just have to, that’s all
.

But … I … I need you, Mummy
. It’s my voice, from the past.

I’ve never heard this part of the memory before.

I need you to be strong
, my mother’s voice tells me, and I feel the tears welling up in my eyes at the sound of her voice. It sounds so sad, so full of regret.

Mummy! I
hear myself shout.
Mummy. Don’t go. Please
.

I have to. I love you, Petey, always remember that. I’m doing this … I’m doing this for you. For all the children like you. I … I have to go, Petey. I have to go back
.

Go back? I
think
. Go back where? What is she talking about?

The bees are moving normally now, they are no longer appearing and disappearing, they are just moving in their incomprehensible dance across the leaves in the garden.

someone asks me, and I realise that it is Alpha. She is next to me in the memory, and she puts her hand on to my shoulder.

It restarts the memory.

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
.

Ashley tells me and I do just as she says. The memory once more becomes a still frame.

I am overwhelmed with a sense of loss. I mean, it’s a miracle that I am here, standing so close to her, but it’s just
a reminder of everything that I lost when she walked out of our garden seven years ago …

Ashley says and I realise that I am broadcasting my thoughts.

The edges? What the hex is she talking about …

Oh, wait
.

Now that is odd
.

I move closer and I see immediately what Ashley is talking about. The edges of my mother are hazy, strange, and it looks like she is an image that has been … cut away from its background.

Like the memory itself has been … 
edited
.

Ashley says. this
is
really
where this scene took place.>

I reach out my hand and touch the tattered edges of my mother’s image. Here, up close, it’s so obvious that the memory has been tampered with. I can even feel the edit marks tingle in my fingertips as I touch them, like tiny electric shocks.

I realise that Ashley is right, and just about everything about this memory is a lie.

This is the most important memory that I have,
I think,
and it’s not even real
.

I feel a blood-red anger that boils inside me.

I demand, urgently.

Ashley says, and there is a lightness in her voice that puzzles me. She sounds like she’s enjoying this … This is just a technical problem for her to solve, and she must like solving problems.

Ashley tells me.

Ashley was suddenly right beside me. that a part of you wanted to hold on to the truth of this scene, and that you hid that conversation in the nearest data store, which just so happened to be the bees. Even though you were only eight years old you managed to preserve that piece of data. I doubt if you even did it consciously.>

hidden
the true memory
within
a faked memory?> I ask incredulously.

Alpha says.

It makes me smile. Makes it sound less like craziness, too, somehow.

Alpha says.

I say grimly.

Ashley says:

I get down on my hands and knees and I scan the area. The garden of that lost summer’s day. Flowers and bees and grass.

There’s nothing here.

Nothing except the questions I’ve got running around inside my head.

Alpha says.

I do exactly what she says.

I feel myself smile
.

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

And then I notice something
.

My mother is not smiling
.

She’s 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 stop the memory again.

I look at my mother’s edges, blurred by the brightness of the sun.

And I think about finding the edit marks around her image and how obvious they looked when they were pointed out to me. I think that the dazzling aura that surrounds her must have made it easier to edit the image, and that maybe the person doing the editing might have just slipped up, figured that the brightness would do a lot of their work for them, by masking the edges.

Maybe there is an answer in that aura.

I move closer and study the light around her. There are no longer any of the crude editing marks around her edges. I imagine a control panel and it appears in my hand as a controller. I locate a zoom and use it to enlarge a section of the aura. And I can see
something
in the midst of the light. I use my tools to alter the image, trying different filters.

Ashley says.

It looks like the surface of some pretty rusty metal – which seems to prove that the background this memory originally occupied certainly was not our garden – but metal
is metal and there is nothing to help place it in the real world.

But the rusty texture that I have revealed – poorly masked around my mother’s image – makes me certain that my father
has
made a mistake. I’m sure that he never expected me to subject this memory to this type of scrutiny.