The Future We Left Behind (21 page)

‘I’m here because I’m looking for my father,’ Alpha said. ‘Not because of some invented paradigm.’

‘Oh, really?’ My father’s eyes rolled back to whites and then he started speaking in a voice that wasn’t quite his own.

‘File:
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.

“I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking about him; about Peter. There is something so tragic about the path he is walking, and I find myself running it over and over in my mind. I thought that he was helping me find my father, but now I am sure it is more than that. This sounds crazy, but I think I’m helping him, by making sure that he does not tread that path alone.” ’

My father’s eyes rolled again, and the whites were no longer showing.

Alpha’s face was taut, her jaw clenched, and her eyes looked like steel ball bearings.

‘That is my
private diary
,’ she snarled.

‘Was, my dear girl,’ he said. ‘Those tenses can be a little tricky, can’t they? It WAS your private diary, but then you traded link addresses with my son and I gained access to it and it stopped being private. My son has no secrets from me; he just thinks he has.

‘Now I don’t know if either of you will ever be truly satisfied with any answers I can give you, and time really is running out …’

He pointed to the countdown clock, which had reached
48.22.

‘So if we could hurry this up, I really need to get back to work …’

‘What work?’ I said angrily. ‘Fiddling while Rome burns?’

‘Ah, the benefits of a proper education,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Seeing as you are asking, I am in the process of engineering a better tomorrow. A delicate operation that requires my full attention … well, about now.’

He walked back into the geodesic dome without another word.

After a few seconds Alpha and I followed him.

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Inside the dome it was almost unpleasantly warm and humid, and the air tasted bad. A small space was packed with racks of computer equipment of a type unfamiliar to me.

Bundles of grey cables and rainbow-coloured wires ran along nearly all of the available wall space, and they all fed into a large processing unit in the middle of the room, which then fed out into smaller units and a triptych of large display screens.

My father immediately started pushing buttons and tapping keys.

The central monitor of the three was filled with a
bizarre language of hooks and eyes and shifting characters. It looked like Kyle’s description of the alien code on the screen of Mrs. O’Donnell’s computer, and later in the silos themselves.

It was no real surprise that it was also the exact same language I had seen infecting the city in my dream.

To the left was a screen that seemed to be translating the alien language into columns of what looked like binary code. To the right was a selection of animated readouts and dials, showing some kind of power grid.

Alpha touched my arm and pointed to a space between the central hub and the outer wall of the dome.

‘Is that …?’ she asked, breathlessly, and then I felt the same kind of switching feeling in my brain that I’d had seeing the people around the silos, and suddenly the contact lenses I was wearing pulled a shape out of the ether.

Another ghost, coming into focus.

Oh, this just wasn’t fair.

This wasn’t fair at all.

I had imagined this moment, played it over in my mind so many times, but not here, not like this.

The person resolving out of the murk – becoming visible as the perceptual filter concealing her was stripped away by the lenses’ adjustments – was my mother.

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She was
almost
there, phasing half-in and half-out of the everyday world, and then the image sharpened, and she was standing in front of us.

My mother’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear anything she was saying.

It couldn’t be.

It couldn’t be her.

‘Your mother just asked you a question.’ My father’s voice bled in over my internal chaos.

‘Is there an ear thing so I can hear her?’ I asked.

My father let out a dry chuckle and I saw that in the time
we had been inside the dome he had been busy attaching wires and electrodes to his own head, so that his skull was festooned with a squid-like arrangement of coloured wires.

It was another bizarre moment in a thoroughly bizarre day.

‘There’s no need,’ he answered, attaching another skein of wires to himself. ‘It’s a perceptual filter, but its effect is already shifted and you are now aware of her. Just concentrate. I know it’s difficult for you but …’

Any opportunity to criticise me. Still, I did what he said.

I concentrated on my mother’s face, watching her lips move soundlessly, and I struggled to make her words audible.

At first there was nothing, but then I heard a voice phasing out of nowhere, like speech, but as if it was being heard underwater.

I focused on the sound, and it wasn’t long before it became so clear that I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t heard it before.

‘… to see you,’ my mother was saying.

‘Mum?’ I asked, a bare whisper, my voice throttled with emotion.

She looked different than I remembered, but of course she did. That was seven years ago. There was grey in her hair, and her clothes looked … well,
older
I guess.

My mother nodded.

‘I have never been far away,’ she said. ‘I … I had to … stay close to you. I’ve watched you grow. It’s so good to finally be able to talk to you.’

‘Mum … how …?’ I felt like I was eight years old again; as if the years that had passed in between our meetings had been a dream, and now I was finally waking up.

‘It’s all so complicated,’ she said.

‘Try,’ I said, with a little more edge than I knew was there. ‘Where did you go?’

‘Nowhere. I’ve always been right here.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The project required someone to … downgrade, back to a previous software version. I insisted that that someone should be me. Your father argued against it, but I am pretty stubborn when I need to be.’

‘Downgrade?’ I spoke the word and it ended up a question.

My mother nodded.

‘Once we started studying the code that upgrades us, it wasn’t long before it became possible for us to reverse the process. To send someone
back
to a previous software version. To travel into the kind of world that Kyle and Lilly describe in their accounts.

‘We needed someone to make that sacrifice. I couldn’t let anyone else do something I wasn’t prepared to do myself. I argued, won …’ A slight smile played across her lips. ‘And I fell through the cracks.’

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, or what I was hearing. I was in a seething turmoil, and a flicker of anger boiled to the surface.

‘You wanted this? You
left
me …’ I said.

‘I HAD to, Peter, you can see that, can’t you? Everything we are doing here today hinged upon having someone who could report from … the other side of human existence. We didn’t know then that it would be a one-way trip, but it was a risk we were willing to take. That I was willing take.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked desperately. ‘What is this all about? I don’t understand.’

‘We are in the process of making things better,’ my
mother said. ‘For millennia we have continued along a path that is not our own. Our minds and bodies have been subject to the whims of our programmers. We no longer know what it even
means
to be ‘human’; we’re nothing more than a commodity that just so happens to be a race. All these thoughts and feelings, the majesty of human existence, the specific individual experience of simply
being alive
, they can all be taken from us in an instant.

‘Peter, it isn’t right. And it certainly isn’t the way that things are supposed to be for us.’

‘Leaving me wasn’t right,’ I said, and I felt Alpha squeezing my arm. ‘I can’t believe this. I always thought that it was something I’d done that made you leave, but this …’ I gestured around me. ‘I don’t get it.’

My mother looked at me, and I realised that there was no kindness or love in the look. In that moment I knew that I had been wrong about her. I had thought that she was all the good things that my father lacked. All I saw in her eyes was a passionate intensity for this
project
. They were the eyes of a zealot.

‘Well, I’m sorry that you think your precious childhood
was more important than the future of the human race,’ she said coldly.

The mother that I’d clung to in my heart was a myth.

I felt sick.

‘And my father?’ Alpha suddenly demanded. ‘What happened to him? And Leonard DeLancey, Edgar Nelson, Thomas Greatorex? Were they ‘sacrifices’ too?’

My mother glanced at Alpha for the first time, as if only just noticing her presence. The look she gave was both stern and dismissive.

‘The findings of the Straker Committee could never be made public,’ she said. ‘But everyone involved with it was changed by the experience. Changed forever. Far from disproving a tiresome folk tale, the committee ended up confirming its reality.

‘The other people you mention, the other members of the committee, they all agreed that silence was in our best interests, and they accepted their roles in what needed to be done: they have been downgraded too.

‘All except for Tom.

‘Yes, poor Tom. The responsibility never sat easily on
his shoulders, you know. Some things are just too big. Too important. It takes a special kind of person to do what needs to be done. Instead of fulfilling his sworn duty, Tom Greatorex chose to take his own life.

‘The future does not belong to the weak. To the cowardly. It belongs to people of vision. Of courage. Of fortitude …’

‘Nice sound bites,’ I interrupted. ‘But if it’s true about Alpha’s father, then I think she deserves to see him, don’t you?’

‘That’s not possible,’ my mother said. ‘The Naylor farm silos are not the only focus point for the alien programming code. Iain – your father – he’s acting as downgrade liaison to the Wiltshire site; Lenny DeLancey is heading up things in Egypt; Ed Nelson is involved in the Chinese project. Tom was to headline the European end of things, but as the time drew closer he started behaving erratically and became increasingly paranoid.

‘Someone else is handling things there.’

‘What, so you’re really a band of global resistance fighters?’ I asked mockingly.

‘If that’s how you want to look at it,’ my mother responded, ignoring my sarcasm. ‘We are simply no longer going to
tolerate the interference of others in our evolutionary path.’

‘And how, exactly, do you intend to stop them interfering?’ Alpha asked.

My mother wrinkled her nose, then shrugged.

She pointed to the door of the dome.

‘Follow me,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you.’

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So we followed my mother’s ghost across the crater, picking our way through the machinery and cabling, and into the mouth of one of the tunnels.

Earlier I had wondered about the number of people that maintained this place; now I found myself thinking about the amount of manpower that had gone into the creation of the whole complex.

How had this all stayed a secret?

How many people knew what was going on down here?

It seemed that my mother was casting herself in what my father would probably call the Danny Birnie paradigm – the
one who would take it upon himself to detail the brutal truths of our situation, and take pleasure from it.

I was tired of it all.

I didn’t want to be here.

I’d come for answers about my mother, and to find Alpha’s father, but none of it had turned out the way I wanted. I no longer cared what would happen when that clock counted its way down to zero, I just wanted to be somewhere else. Preferably without prior knowledge of what was going to be happening very soon.

Maybe I could be sitting on the lawn outside the college refectory, sharing fruit soys with Alpha, back when all I had to worry about was the fact I’d just enrolled in a Literature class.

Instead I was walking down a plasteel half-cylinder towards … well, who knew what?

Alpha was by my side, but she had descended into silence … probably unable to believe that her father was a part of this vast conspiracy too.

I knew what followed from that discovery, and felt her pain. Her father had lied to her as well.

I took Alpha’s hand in mine as we moved closer to
whatever awaited us at the end of the tunnel.

Already I could see the first hints of our destination. We were approaching the outer edges of an odd, pallid-blue, bioluminescent half-light, and I wondered how long we had left before the digits on that infernal timer behind us counted down to 00.00.

So this is progress
, I thought grimly.
You get to see the precise moment that future hits. You’re able to see what’s coming
. And as Kyle Straker once said:
Nothing good
.

I thought of everything that had happened to us today, each event and discovery, the trail of breadcrumbs that had led to this subterranean world. And that made me remember the story of Theseus that my mother had told me and I realised that – even as she was reading it to me – she had been aware of the tunnels and caverns beneath her.

Had she drawn a secret pleasure from knowing that she had a labyrinth all of her own beneath the house?