The Future We Left Behind (18 page)

‘Looks like Tom Greatorex underestimated,’ I said, feeling sick at the thought that had just occurred to me. Alpha looked at me blankly. ‘He said there were a million eyes watching him, all the time …’ I explained. ‘What if he was talking about the
bees
? Tiny little spies that no one pays attention to?’

‘What have we got ourselves into?’ Alpha said, horrified. She looked at me and I saw three livid stings on her face – one on the cheek just below her right eye, one on the side of
her nose and one on her chin – and it suddenly flipped my mood from confusion to anger.

My father had no right to do this to us.

Any of it.

Alpha’s father, my own mother, the bees, the lies, the secret machinations.

Whatever he was up to, I was going to stop him.

Or die trying.

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First, though, we were going to have to get out of my room.

Again, I thought of Kyle Straker and the moment he tried to escape from his own bedroom. I looked over to my window.

My heart sank.

The plexiglass was thick with the bodies of my father’s bees, clambering over each other, urgently trying to get in. I wasn’t even sure it would hold them.

Epic fail there, then. Door or window: both were out of the question.

And that left … nothing.

We were trapped.

I almost gave in to despair. It would have been so easy. But when I looked at Alpha I saw an expression on her face that pulled me back from the brink.

I’d been expecting to see fear, or pain, or resignation, but I got something else entirely:
expectation
.

A look that said:
so, what are we going to do now?

And that also said:
I know you’ll sort it out
.

And the spark of an idea came to me almost immediately.

I stood up and searched my room for something to help. Ideally I needed a sheet of metal, but I thought the chances of finding one of them was slim to none. Alpha watched on with a puzzled look, but didn’t interrupt with unnecessary questions.

In my drawer I found a clothing blank: a neutral garment ready to have a style and a material type flashed on to it.

They’re pretty much all that I wear these days. People can still buy clothes, but it seems a bit outdated and unnecessary. I just use my LinkHangers app, and I have any garment I need.

Any garment I need
 …

I sat down on my bed and thought about it.

A clothing blank had the potential to become any material.

ANY material.

I needed metal.

I’ve worn metal before.

I accessed my LinkHangers and navigated to a small and slightly shameful hanger section filed away as ‘CosPlay’.

CosPlay, or Costume Play.

I only have a couple of templates hanging there. Last Quest stuff, from when I was completely obsessed with the games, instead of the ‘mildly obsessed’ I am now.

See, there are Last Quest get-togethers called QuestCons, where people turn up and meet up with people that they know from online activities but have never met in the flesh. And the true Last Quest fans … well, they kind of dress up as their online characters.

I selected a chain-mail shirt from a hanger and connected my filaments to the clothing blank.

Result: a metal mesh shirt.

I looked up at Alpha.

She was gazing at the garment in my hands with something close to amazement.

I guess she didn’t know about Cosplay, Last Quest, or a Beserker called Tempest who wore a similar garment.

‘We need a bee,’ I told her.

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My father’s bees used micro-electronics and some pretty amazing nano-engineering to give them the illusion of life. But they were, when all was said and done, machines. At their heart was a power cell, rechargeable of course, but it was not infallible.

Lightning could take them out in vast numbers.

It wasn’t a problem – the factories that manufactured them could turn them out in batches of millions – and I’d even heard my father confessing that it wasn’t cost-effective to make them hardier against electrical storms; lightning was actually a cash
generator
.

Bees that stop functioning need replacing.

My father’s factories were only too happy to supply the replacements. At the usual price.

I’d got to thinking that storm clouds weren’t the only things capable of generating bursts of electricity.

Anyone who’s ever played BubblePop Evolved knows that.

However, instead of inanely popping soap bubbles, I was going to have a go at popping a bee.

Alpha stood by the door holding a glass, which I’d just used to take a legendary dose of calcium supplements. I had one hand on the door handle and my shoulder pressed against the door.

‘Ready?’ I asked, and Alpha was so tense and focused that she only managed a curt nod in reply.

I opened the door a crack.

Two bees made it into the room through the crack almost immediately and I slammed the door shut. By the time I’d finished, Alpha was standing with the glass pressed against the wall. The two bees were trapped within.

‘Nicely done,’ I said, and gathered up the mesh shirt. I connected to each arm of the garment with filaments from
each hand and then put the shirt on the wall, next to the glass.

‘Do it,’ I said.

Alpha manoeuvred the glass along the wall, and then on to the shirt. The bees buzzed angrily against the glass but remained trapped.

‘Here goes nothing,’ I said, and thought about sending an electric charge from my body into the garment, but not the little charge that could pop a soap bubble; I thought much much bigger.

I felt a sharp, tearing pain in my spine and then through all the bones of my body as the electrical energy used up calcium at an alarming rate.

I felt the current discharge along my filaments and out along the metal mesh.

Nothing happened.

Oh, well, I
thought,
it was a stupid idea anyway
.

The pain was levelling out into a dull throb of heaviness through my body.

So, we were well and truly trapped, then. I had been thinking that the charge would have been enough to knock the bees out of their flight at least.

Suddenly, one of the bees stopped flying about inside the glass and came to rest upon the mesh.

A blue spark leapt from the mesh to the bee and I could smell something like burnt ozone. The bee kind of bumped up off the mesh for an instant and, when it hit it again, it was dead.

Switched off.

Blown.

Alpha let out a whoop of triumph.

Me, I just breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Then we watched as the other bee found its way on to the mesh and suffered the same fate as its cellmate.

I shut off the current. Alpha took the glass away from the wall and the bees fell to the floor.

She grinned, poking at them with the toe of her shoe.

‘When this is over you’re going to tell me why exactly you have a chain-mail vest,’ she said.

‘Maybe,’ I said, smiling. ‘We’ll see.’

I held the vest up.

‘Wanna try it for real?’ I asked her.

‘Let’s go,’ she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

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This time Alpha dealt with the door, while I held the mesh up in front of me like a shield. I turned the current back on, and on a three count she threw open the door and then fell in behind me.

I moved forward towards the swarm.

The bees came straight at me, going directly for my face.

They hit the mesh and I stepped up the current even more, just to make sure.

I felt a surge of panic, that was still a HEX OF A LOT of bees, but then they started falling out of the air, and it was
relatively easy to move the mesh around taking out any that I’d missed.

It was over in seconds.

It was almost an anticlimax if I’m honest.

‘Wow,’ was all Alpha could manage, a single word more than me.

We stepped over the fallen bodies of the slain bees and I disconnected from the mesh, bunched it up in my hand and made my way down the hall, Alpha following closely behind.

My father’s study was unlocked and we went in. For the first time ever I noticed how empty the room was. A desk and a chair and a single picture on the wall that had always been his sole concession to stamping his personality on the place. He spent so much of his home time in here, thinking and working, but you would have been forgiven for thinking that the room was never used.

The picture was of a weird dome-like structure and I’d asked my father about it once.

‘It’s called a geodesic dome,’ he had said, mildly irritated by the question. ‘A beautiful construction that provides
remarkable strength for its weight.’

I’d always thought that it was an odd picture for him to have on his wall, but then that’s my father for you.

On the wall behind my father’s desk was a door. The entrance to his laboratory.

I nodded towards the door and we made our way across the study and stood in front of it.

‘This must be the way,’ I said.

‘You have a room in your house that you’ve never even been in?’ Alpha said, in wonderment. ‘You rich people are weird, you know that?’

‘I know,’ I said, and touched the metal plate that served as a locking mechanism.

Nothing.

I pushed at it.

Still nothing.

I put two hands on it and gave it a good hard shove.

More nothing.

I deployed filaments. When they touched the plate the door slid open. It didn’t even seem to have any personalised coding to it. Anyone could have opened it, I reckoned.

What did that say about my father?

Was he incredibly trusting?

Or arrogant?

I stepped over the threshold.

It was dark inside.

Dark and cold.

And something else.

Moist …

I turned on my bioluminescence, and felt the usual tingle pass down my spine as I lit up the air around me. The dull red light was sufficient to show us that we were entering a tiny anteroom, with a platform that looked a lot like the
auto da fé
™ from Ellery Towers.

Alpha and I looked at each other, then stepped on to the platform.

It gave a high-pitched
beep
and then started to descend slowly.

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The platform took us on a slow climb down a narrow shaft. Alpha clung on to my arm as we descended, and I was only too happy for her to do it. I felt a tension that could easily grow into fear, and Alpha’s closeness gave me some comfort.

After about twenty metres, we reached the bottom. The platform lurched, then steadied, and we stepped off into another small anteroom. It was even colder down here, and the air felt damp and unpleasant.

There was a reinforced metal door in front of us and, as we approached it, there was a loud noise as a mechanism inside ground and crashed, and then the door moved
aside and there was bright light within.

We emerged, blinking, into a vast metal dome that stretched as far forward as the eye could see, and there were lighting rigs in bands across the ceiling high above us. My bioluminescence was unnecessary, and I killed it.

‘Oh, my,’ Alpha said. Which was two whole words more than I could manage. We moved forward, hardly able to believe the evidence of our senses.

The dome itself was an impressive feat of structural engineering, and the fact that it was hidden beneath the ground under part of the city was bizarre … but what it contained was truly mind-blowing.

It was an ancient, but perfectly preserved, village.

On all sides of us were buildings of a type that simply no longer existed in the world: squat little houses made of brick and wood and glass, none of them over three storeys high. They were like even older versions of the café that Alpha had taken me to earlier, and I had no doubt at all in my mind that I was walking along the streets of the village of Millgrove.

The light from above revealed every detail with almost
alarming clarity: an old-fashioned pavement; a weed-choked road.

We walked along, wide-eyed, and after a while Alpha pointed at something excitedly. A sign on the wall identified it as the Happy Shopper.

‘It’s smaller than I thought it would be,’ she said, her voice over-brimming with excitement. ‘Will you just look at that! It’s real!’

I gave her a tight-lipped smile in reply. For her this was the confirmation of a lifetime of belief, and I could imagine that it must be intoxicating to finally discover proof as undeniable as this.

To me it had somewhat the opposite effect.

This place was proof that my father had been lying to me all of my life.

That he had been lying to the world.

That he had painted Strakerites as superstitious fools, while building a house above their most sacred place – Millgrove.

I felt sick and angry and betrayed.

Alpha was trying the door of the Happy Shopper, only to
discover that it steadfastly resisted her efforts.

‘It’s been
sealed shut
,’ she said. ‘There’s some kind of transparent skin around the whole building.’ She moved on further down the road. ‘It’s around all of the buildings. This must be why they are so perfectly preserved after all this time. It’s like … it’s like it’s been kept as a museum …’