The Future We Left Behind (20 page)

‘Ah, Peter,’ he said. ‘Has no one ever told you that it’s rude to enter people’s property without being asked?’

I fixed him with my best steely look. ‘Has no one ever told you that you’re a liar and a hypocrite?’ I countered, furious. ‘And that sending swarms of your robot bees to kill your own son is evidence of pretty lousy parenting?’

He let out a single, measured, snort of laughter.

‘The answer to your first question is: yes, frequently,’ he said. ‘And do you know what? I don’t listen to them, either. While I salute your ingenuity and courage and even, to a certain extent, your wilful disobedience, this really isn’t the time or the place to trade insults.

‘Your second question, however, is fundamentally flawed. It presupposes knowledge of events of which I am entirely ignorant. It sounds like you fell foul of the security system I
implemented to protect my own property. That they attacked you, and this is news to me, was purely accidental. It’s more than likely a result of bringing an unauthorised guest along with you. As you will have noticed on your way in, I have things to protect.’

I thought that was probably as close to an apology as I was ever going to get from him:
It was an accident that a swarm of murderous robot bees almost killed you
.

‘Now, much as this is a pleasant break in a very busy day,’ he continued, ‘I really must get back to work. We are perched on the cusp of the future, and I have things I must attend to. If we could pick this up later …?’

‘Later?’ I snorted. ‘I think we both know there isn’t going to be a
later
, don’t we? I don’t know what you’re up to, but I think I deserve an explanation at least.’

‘Do you now?’ my father said, irritated. ‘And what makes you think I owe you
anything
, my boy?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘Maybe because I’m your son? Or if that isn’t reason enough, how about out of human decency? You know that the Straker Tapes are true, and you lied to keep it a secret; you’ve made their believers
out to be idiots who are beneath society’s contempt. I think I deserve to know why. I think we both deserve to know why.’

My father gave Alpha another look, wrinkled his nose and then shook his head.

‘There really is no time. I must confess that I miscalculated. I thought that you would spend your day with those contact lenses in your eyes, chasing ghosts, and leave me free to do what has to be done.’

The contact lenses.

His ‘gift’ to Alpha and me.

I’d forgotten all about them.

We’d looked at them, thought it was a weird sort of gift to give, and then they’d gone straight back in my pocket.

‘You didn’t even put them in, did you?’ my father laughed. ‘It really is true, about parents not knowing their children, isn’t it? You were supposed to be consumed with curiosity. You were supposed to put them in your eyes, and then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

He seemed genuinely stunned by his miscalculation.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘Why don’t you pop them in now, see what you were missing?’

‘We haven’t got time for games,’ I said. ‘I want answers.’

‘Then do as you are told,’ my father said curtly. ‘And I’ll even stick around to explain.’

File:
113/50/05/wtf/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

So, with the future of the world we knew ticking down on the clock on the wall of the crater, I lifted two of the lenses from the case, and offered the other pair to Alpha.

We looked at them, not sure just how they were supposed to be used, until my father lost patience, took an identical case from his own pocket, took out a lens on his fingertip and proceeded to demonstrate how to place it over an open eye.

‘Simple,’ he said, as if explaining it to infants. ‘Now you do it.’

I copied his actions, brought up my finger, steadied it
because it was shaking, and popped the lens in place on my right eyeball.

It stung as it made contact, and my eye started to water. I blinked a few times and felt it move, then settle, on the curve of my eye. It was a horrible sensation, and I really couldn’t believe that people ever used to do this so they could see normally.

The left one was next, but I hesitated. I had a pretty nasty sting to that eyelid and I had to be more careful getting the second lens in place.

Soon I had two watering, stinging eyes and completely blurred vision.

‘You have to wait a few seconds,’ my father said. ‘The circuitry inside each lens has to connect to your optic nerve.’

Already my vision was resolving out of the murk.

Then, suddenly, it was clear.

If it wasn’t for the slight alien pressure on my eyes, I guess I wouldn’t have known I was wearing them.

I looked around, wondering what I was supposed to be seeing with the lenses in place, but they had no effect on me at all. I looked at Alpha and she looked at me.

She shook her head.

Nothing.

‘These are great and everything …’ I started, but my father cut me short.

‘You actually have to be looking in the right place,’ he said, sounding like he thought I was about five years old. ‘If you turn your attention up a level, to the silos, I think you’ll see what I mean.’

He pointed as he spoke and Alpha and I followed it to the place he was indicating with his finger.

‘They’re drawn to them,’ he said. ‘Goodness only knows why. I think they sense what’s coming … I think they can always sense it …’

I stopped listening to him and stared.

At first there was nothing; just the silos. But then there was an odd feeling in my head, as if my brain had just … 
clicked …
and there they were.

I could see them.

I could really see them.

Three shadowy figures stood next to one of the silos, staring up at it. There was a man, a woman and a child,
where once there had been nothing.

I shuddered.

Ghosts
, I thought,
I’m looking at ghosts
.

They had the same kind of look of
not-belonging
that the other people in the Grabowitz photos had possessed: an out-of-time look that was partly to do with the style of their clothing and partly to do with the fact that something about them just looked … 
wrong
.

I thought about the Straker Tapes, and Mr. Peterson saying how things from Earth follow visual rules, and I realised that he hadn’t been entirely correct.

These people looked wrong, but it wasn’t because they were from elsewhere. It was because I wasn’t supposed to be seeing them.

The three figures were holding hands, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They looked as if at any second they could just wink out of existence.

Ghosts.

A previous software version.

Only made visible by the lenses in my eyes.

I felt a tremendous surge of sorrow for them, and
suddenly the woman looked back over her shoulder, as if she had sensed that she was being observed.

Her eyes met mine.

For a moment I thought that we had just made some kind of contact, that the look we were sharing was profound and meaningful, but then she looked far past me, shook her head, and turned back to the silo.

And then I saw the others.

It was like a gate had been opened in my mind, only it was more like a floodgate because now … now there were more of them.

I could see maybe twenty-or-so other figures, standing around the base of the silo and staring up at it. Young and old, male and female, but all of them possessing that strange quality of not-belonging.

‘The lenses correct the perceptual screening process,’ my father was saying. ‘They undo the programming that filters out the past versions of humanity.’

I looked over to Alpha and saw that she was watching the
other
people too.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. I was
shocked to find it was my father’s hand.

‘There is a secret human history,’ he said, and there was something in his voice that sounded like regret, ‘that runs a parallel course to our own. And it is a history of the lost.’

‘The ones left behind,’ I said. ‘The 0.4.’

My father laughed, and removed his hand from my shoulder.

‘Oh, Peter,’ he said, and there was genuine disappointment in his voice. ‘I had such high hopes for that brain of yours, but it stubbornly refuses to see through to the
heart
of things. The Straker Tapes were recorded a millennium ago; we’ve been upgraded many times since then.

‘The silos are the key, you see, and the information they contain unlocks so many secrets for those brave enough to look.

‘Brave enough and smart enough.’ He said the last without a hint of self-consciousness, just as a plain statement of fact.

‘It’s breathtaking, really; the data that we have managed to extract from the Naylor silos. We have been able to tap into much of the history of our software upgrades, and
to trace human development by the computer code that caused its changes.

‘Did you know that an earlier upgrade, about five hundred years ago, actually produced humans without lips? It didn’t last long – a decade, give or take – before it was reversed in a small update that also corrected a bug they were having with our dreaming states. But do you see what it means?

‘We have always believed that our evolution was a one-way process of development, and that when we lose things we lose them forever. That there is no regaining lost abilities, lost attributes.

‘Turns out that it’s completely untrue,’ he said, with something approaching glee. ‘Tomorrow could see us with fins and gills.’

He switched from gleeful to solemn without missing a beat. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You both know what today is, don’t you? It’s why you’re here.’

‘It’s the last day for humanity as we know it,’ Alpha said, and her voice was raw and full of anger.

‘And here’s the thing,’ my father said. ‘If they can control our development, then they can always make sure that we
are
less
than they are. By upgrading us they can
limit us
. Keep us their slaves. Forever.’

‘And you’ve known about all of this, and kept it a secret, for how long? Years?’

I’m not sure what Alpha had been expecting my father to say, but she seemed genuinely derailed by what he
did
say.

‘Decades,’ my father answered. ‘So you’re the girl that’s filling my son’s ‘Lilly’ paradigm. How sweet.’

Alpha looked at him with wide eyes, and demanded: ‘What does that even mean? What the hex is a Lilly paradigm?’

My father gave her a cryptic look.

‘Why did Lilly Dartington put her hand up at the Millgrove talent show?’ he asked her.

‘No one knows,’ Alpha answered quickly. ‘We only ever find out Kyle’s side of the events; Lilly’s thoughts are never revealed.’

My father shook his head.

‘The Straker Tapes weren’t the only record of the events at Millgrove,’ he said, and there was a triumphant note in his voice. ‘Lilly left a diary, you know. Handwritten, if you can
believe it. It takes up pretty much where Kyle’s story left off, as if he had passed the baton on to her as chronicler of the new world.

‘
The Travel Diary of Lilly Dartington
is, in many ways, a more fascinating text than the Straker transcriptions, because Lilly had an intellectual depth to her observations that is often missing in those of her boyfriend. She also details the mental struggle of being left behind, and describes encounters with some of the 1.0.’

‘There is no such book,’ Alpha said through gritted teeth.

My father smiled.

‘Not seeing something is not a logical case for something not existing,’ he said smugly. ‘I’ve never seen gravity, but I know it exists.

‘Lilly’s diary is real. I should know. I own it. Anyway, in an early entry she recalls the moment that she volunteered to be a subject for Daniel Birnie’s stage hypnotism. What is the Strakerite view on the subject of her motivations?’

‘That it is unknowable,’ Alpha said, and there was an edge to her voice.

My father didn’t notice.

‘You don’t even while away the evenings in New Lincoln Heights by wondering?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Alpha said. ‘We don’t. There is enough information in the tapes without us creating groundless interpretations.’

My father stroked his chin thoughtfully.

‘Well let me clear up the mystery for you,’ he said, ‘using evidence from another contemporary source. Lilly saw Kyle’s hand go up, and she was aware that his own experiences as a stand-up comedian made that a courageous thing for him to do. He was willing to risk embarrassment in front of his peers, just to save his friend from being embarrassed himself.

‘Lilly couldn’t bear to be a part of an audience that was laughing at Kyle. It took less than a second for her to run it through in her head and for her to reach her decision; indeed her hand was already rising before Kyle’s hand made it fully up into the air.

‘In that instant, she sided with Kyle against the majority. And against Simon, who was, nominally at least, her boyfriend at the time.

‘Lilly later says in her diary that in that moment, when she chose to side with Kyle, she also chose her future path; that
while Kyle blundered into being a 0.4 in a 1.0 world – with his attempt to save Danny from embarrassment – Lilly chose to follow him, and thus chose her path.

‘And never once in her diary does she consider that the choice that she made was the wrong one.

‘That is the Lilly paradigm.

‘Peter was always going to be a Kyle, someone dragged into events beyond his understanding; I’ve known that since the day he was born.

‘But you.’ He shook his head. ‘You are the proof of the Lilly paradigm. That someone always chooses to follow a Kyle into the fire, regardless of the consequences.’

I suddenly felt my scalp bristling. I could hear the voice of the strange man in my dream as he said:
She’ll follow you into fire, but why would you lead her there?