The Future We Left Behind (19 page)

‘Or a shrine,’ I said, feeling the word fit better, somehow.

If Alpha heard, then she ignored me.

‘If this is the Happy Shopper,’ she was saying, ‘then … then just down the road should be …’

She hurried down the road and I followed, my steps feeling heavy.

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Two minutes later I was standing on Millgrove’s village green, with recently cut grass beneath my feet and stretching out all around me. It boggled the mind that this place was actually tended: that the grass was cut and the buildings were preserved. This place clearly meant something to my father, but there was no way that he kept this place maintained by himself.

That meant there must be other people who knew that Millgrove was down here, under the streets of New Cambridge; but no one had shared that knowledge with the Strakerites, who must have dreamed of finding the place mentioned by their prophet.

I couldn’t work it out.

Why? Why would my father go to all this trouble? Why would he keep the mythical village clean and tidy and preserved in a plastic skin?

I watched as Alpha examined the bus shelter that squatted by the side of the green, and then as she ran on to the grass, laughing with pleasure.

‘The Millgrove talent show,’ she yelled. ‘Mr. Peterson and his ventriloquist act. It happened here. All of it. Peter, LOOK!’

She span around on the spot with her arms fully extended. ‘Thank you.’ She came over and whispered in my ear. ‘I never thought …’

It was all too much for her, I guess, for she couldn’t articulate the thought.

We stayed there for a short while, under the artificial suns of the dome’s lighting system, and then Alpha sighed and we moved apart. She started looking past the green, up the road that snaked by, and out of the village.

‘Do you think that THEY are still there?’ she said, and her tone was an odd mix of awe and terror.

‘The silos?’ I asked her. ‘That’s got to be the Crowley road,’ I pointed at the street that led out of the village, ‘so the Naylor farm should be up there somewhere.’

I consulted the GPS map and it confirmed what we already knew in our hearts.

‘We should go there,’ Alpha said. ‘I think it’s where we’ll find the answers.’

‘And maybe the man who knows them all,’ I said. ‘And has known them all along.’

Alpha gave me a sad look. ‘This must be hard for you. I’ve turned your world upside down, haven’t I?’

I shook my head.

‘No, Alpha,’ I told her, seriously. ‘I think you might just have put it the right way up.’

She studied my face for a couple of seconds, and then nodded.

‘Lead on,’ she said.

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The same care and attention that had been afforded Millgrove did not, it seemed, extend to the countryside outside the village. This should have been open fields, but it was all overgrown and chaotic, and looked like it was being claimed back by nature.

The road, however, was beautifully preserved and it looked so strange cutting through the tangled brambles and weeds that filled the land on either side.

We picked our way along, and soon we spotted the towers that meant we were approaching our destination.

A part of me wasn’t
that
happy to see to them.

They might hold answers to the questions that consumed us – that consumed me – but there was a grim inevitability about them that made me feel uneasy and scared.

And, of course, there was the other thing.

I had seen them before.

I realised it the moment I saw them. It was like an enormous flash of déjà vu that stopped me in my tracks.

I was just rationalising it away, thinking that of course I would recognise them if this was
really
where the farewell scene with my mother had played out, when the darkest thought of the day rose up and blotted out everything.

Because suddenly I remembered
exactly
where I had seen them before.

I didn’t even have to think back very far.

Just as far as that weird, disturbing dream I’d had. When the crystal towers suddenly sheared and changed, these were the concrete structures they had become.

A friendly tap on the arm from Alpha pulled me out of it, but a feeling of dread – like a lead weight in my stomach – persisted as we moved closer to the silos.

The dome was narrower here – no longer a dome at all
really, but something more like a high-ceilinged tunnel – and I could see that the countryside ended prematurely on either side, and the tunnel wall could be seen in the distance.

A path had been cleared though the brambles and weeds, leading to the Naylor farm and then the two towers that loomed above us, looking sinister and oppressive.

The closer we got, the bigger they appeared.

I thought of Kyle and Lilly, about Annette Birnie and the strange, moving language that enveloped her, turning her into one of them …

Or should that be ‘one of us’?
I corrected myself, and didn’t like the way the thought made me feel.

We rounded a bend and then both of us stopped and stared ahead of us, uncomprehending.

The silos stood, tall and silent, but they weren’t the only things there.

Someone’s been busy down here
, I thought.

A number of large holes had been bored into the sides of the towers, with bunches of wires and cables coming out and being fed down into banks of computer machinery. The machines themselves were sunk down in a vast circle,
accessible by four metal ladders at compass points around the edge of the crater.

The machines were all linked together with more cabling, and I could see that a number of tunnels led off from the rim of the crater like spokes on some gigantic wheel. Cabling ran from the crater down the throat of each tunnel.

A couple of white-coated technicians were working down there, attending to the machines, and they were making adjustments and programming data into old-fashioned keyboards on the front of each terminal. Alpha looked shocked to see them there, but I just gave her a shrug. I guess I was running short of the ability to be surprised.

The air felt different here. It was still cold, but the dampness had gone, and had been replaced by a weird kind of static charge that, although it was far from hot, made my skin feel so agitated that I was beginning to sweat.

The hairs on my neck were bristling, too.

Alpha was pointing at something and I followed her finger to a huge computer display that was part of the wall that split off into tunnels. It was showing numbers a metre high that were steadily counting down: 53.23, 53.22, 53.21, 53.20 …

In the areas in front of the clock, the banks of computers were arranged in concentric circles, and more cables led from each bank and into a metal and frosted glass dome made up of triangles that sat at the very centre of the man-made crater.

I recognised the shape.

It was the same geodesic design that my father had on his study wall; the only picture that had ever been there.

Alpha was still staring, transfixed by the countdown on the screen – 53.15, 53.14, 53.13 – and I put my hand on her shoulder.

‘You know that it’s counting down to the next upgrade, don’t you?’ she said, looking back at me. ‘We’ve got less than an hour until the world changes. Forever. Again.’

She was only saying what I already knew in my heart, but hearing the words spoken made it seem all the more true, all the more terrifying.

Words gave concepts power.

Once they were released, there was no choice but to understand them, no matter how painful they might be.

I’d known that time was counting down. I’d known it
since I realised that young man in the Grabowitz photos was showing us the time we had left on his fingers. I’d known what it meant for all of us, but it wasn’t until I saw that clock, and heard Alpha’s words that I
truly
understood our situation.

My father was able to predict the time of the next upgrade. He’d put wires and cables into the silos and was processing the code within, all so he could … 
so he could what?

What was to be gained by knowing the precise time of the next transmission from the alien programmers that Kyle Straker talked about?

What could my father possibly hope to
gain
?

Even though it felt like the last thing in the world I wanted to do, I knew I had to get inside the geodesic dome. It was the only thing there was left to us: we had to find my father.

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Down further into the pit.

That was how it felt.

Like I was descending into one of the dark places of some strange, primitive myth, where souls burned in eternal torment for deeds performed in life.

There’s a reason we keep building upwards, you know: an instinctive need – somewhere in our race memory – to climb away from the dark spaces that lurk beneath the skin of our world.

As I climbed down the ladder into the crater I wondered what kind of person went against that primal programming;
what kind of man my father was.

And here I was, following him down. Not quite what I expected the phrase ‘following in his footsteps’ to mean.

I’d like to think that I was trying to help out Alpha, and maybe try to stop the whole of humanity being upgraded again by those … beings that saw us as nothing more than organic computers that they could reprogramme whenever they got some weird cosmic urge.

I’d like to think my motives were good and noble and true, but I wonder if maybe I just wanted to confront my father with the things I knew, that I wanted to face up to him, then to make him tell me what he did to my mother.

Maybe it was a combination of both, I don’t know.

In the end, I guess, it doesn’t really matter.

The metal of the ladder’s guard rails vibrated as I lowered myself down, a deep rumble that pretty soon started to make my hand ache. I ignored it, finished the descent, and stepped off on to the floor of the crater. When I was clear, Alpha jumped down the last few steps.

‘What now?’ she asked, her face flushed.

I shrugged. ‘I’m making it up as I go along,’ I told her,
and then pointed to the geodesic dome at the centre of everything. ‘But there looks as good a place as any to start.’

We used the backs of the computer banks as cover and headed into the centre of the labyrinth.

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I realised that my connection to the Link was down when I tried to flash Alpha a warning about a technician who had suddenly left his workstation and was heading our way. He hadn’t seen us yet, but we were going to be in his eye line pretty soon.

Alpha was following a metre or so behind me, so I thought:
/Alpha. Down./
But there wasn’t the usual sensation of the Link behind the attempt at a message. I tried again, and again there was nothing, as if the mechanism for transmissions had suddenly disappeared.

I might not wholly trust the Link, but it was a genuine shock to find it was no longer there when I needed it.

In the end I just waved at her, and gestured for her to get down. We both fell into crouches behind a computer, and the technician went by without even looking our way. He latched on to another computer and started punching keys. It was a case of modern technology meeting old: the only place you see keyboards these days are in museums.

Alpha caught up to me.

‘Can you access the Link?’ I asked her, and she spent a few seconds trying before shaking her head.

‘Must be something here jamming it,’ she said, then added:
‘We were in the middle of a mobile phone dead spot.’

I realised she was quoting from the Straker Tapes.

‘Pretty weird, isn’t it?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Show me something today that isn’t.’

We went another couple of banks down, then I peered around the edge, saw that we were unobserved, and hurried across towards the dome in the centre.

We circled around it, looking for a way in. Cables and wires went into the dome through un-glassed areas, but there didn’t seem to be anything as useful as a door on the whole structure.

We completed a full circuit of the dome and there simply was no entrance.

‘Now what?’ Alpha asked.

‘Scout around,’ I said. ‘Look for something we can use to smash our way in.’

‘We’re going to draw attention to ourselves.’

‘I’m counting on it.’

A quick recon of the area turned up a few loose tools, all too small to be of any use, and two lengths of metal piping. One was about fifteen centimetres long, but the other was a metre long and pretty heavy. I hefted it in my hand and nodded.

‘This should do it,’ I said, and then strode over to the dome, raised the pipe up, and smashed it into one of the glass panels. The pipe just bounced off it, doing no damage, and the vibrations sent the pipe spinning out of my hand.

The sound was loud and jarring and everyone in the area must have heard it.

Alpha was giving me a ‘What was that supposed to be?’ look, and I was about to explain that it wasn’t glass and all I’d done was hurt my hand, when a section of the
dome suddenly unhinged and flipped open.

So that’s how it was done.

Seconds later my father emerged from within. If he was surprised to see me then he did a very good job of hiding it. He ran a hand through his hair, fixed Alpha with a coolly appraising look, and then turned to me.