The Future We Left Behind (22 page)

Well, I was in that labyrinth now, and at its centre two monsters had been waiting for me.

My parents. My own flesh and blood.

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The sickly blue light was an artificial sun for the things that grew underneath it.

At the end of the tunnel was another crater, a pit sunk even deeper into the earth.

Deeper and deeper into the underworld.

The geography of despair.

Where tunnels led on to craters led on to tunnels led on to more craters.

This one was vast. The size of two sports fields at least.

A forest of colossal, pink, fern-like structures pressed tightly together, filling the whole area, with cables and
wires entering into the pulsing biomass that sat below the fronds.

There had to be millions of the things in there.

I was looking at my father’s neural forest. It had been weird enough hearing about it at the Keynote – although my memories of that were sketchy at best – but seeing it in the flesh was truly, profoundly disturbing. A storage and processing device made entirely from living tissue. In effect: an artificial brain.

We stood on the lip of the pit, bathed in the pale light, and my mother stood back, letting us soak up the sight.

I could see that the ferns of the structure were swaying in unison, as if stirred by a breeze. But there was no breeze down here. The neural forest moved, and it moved by itself.

‘This is the MindFeather,’ my mother said, and there was wonderment in her voice.

Wonderment and something else.

Pride.

‘A network of interconnected minds. Each growth, each feather of the brain, is fractal: a geometrical shape that endlessly repeats down to the tiniest level. If you were to
magnify a single branch, then you would see exact self-similarity – another branch, identical to the larger one. Magnify that one, and you would see that it repeats, down and down to the microscopic level, utterly identical.’

‘What does it do?’ Alpha asked.

‘It thinks. It holds information. It is the engine of victory. It is, ultimately, our salvation.’

‘Yeah, and it makes toast,’ I said. ‘But what is it really? What is its purpose?’

My mother joined us at the edge of the crater.

‘With every upgrade, everything that we are is altered by a signal from
somewhere else
,’ she said. ‘We have had no success in tracing that signal’s origin, and we have no idea what kind of creatures may be transmitting it.

‘It didn’t take long for The Straker Committee to confirm that aliens were interfering in human affairs. There is evidence all around us. The existence of the Link was our strongest example. Kyle Straker told us that the creatures were using the human race as some kind of data storage. The storage units had to be connected somehow.

‘That’s the true secret behind the Link. It is nothing more
than a by-product of our necessary connectivity. It is a symbol of the power that enslaves us. And, ironically, it is our connectivity that will save us.

‘This neural forest is upgrade-proof; it exists in a state of deep hypnosis. It was designed to provide a massive memory that would not be affected by any future modifications to the human operating system.

‘But it has also been programmed with the history of, and the specific code for, every past upgrade.

‘Every MindFeather is aware of the different versions of human existence, stretching back to the earliest software.

‘In just under twenty minutes, the human race will be upgraded. This is unstoppable. We do not have the technology, nor the understanding, to disrupt the coming signal.

‘But this upgrade will not go the same way that all the others have. We might not be able to stop it, but we are now – for the first time in human history – in a position to make it happen on our own terms.’

‘You’re going to interfere with it,’ Alpha said, her voice shocked.

My mother shrugged.

‘We will no longer tolerate the interference of others in human affairs,’ she said proudly. ‘That was the decision of the committee. There is a period in human development where the child outgrows the parent. We have reached that point.’

‘What have you done?’ I asked.

‘We have made sure that this upgrade does not go as they intend. Running computer code adapted from the code in the silos, we are going to disrupt it. We have taught the fractal forests to resist and we are going to broadcast that resistance – via the Link – into the minds of every man, woman and child on planet Earth. We are confident that we will cause a fatal error in their process.

‘Very few people are going to be in the correct state for the latest upgrade to take. When the MindFeather starts transmitting, the message will be the history of human upgrades. We’re going to knock
everyone
back to one of many past software versions. Some will become 1.2. Some will become 0.4. Some will be 1.0. Just about everyone on the planet is going to be left behind.’

‘To what end?’ I asked, horrified by what she was telling us. ‘What can you
possibly
hope to gain?’

‘Only everything,’ my mother said, as if I was a total idiot and it was beneath her to have to explain it to me. ‘Can you imagine what our programmers might look like? The things that we would learn if we were to meet them? Can you even begin to comprehend how utterly different to us they must be? They must be to us as we are to amoebas. We might as well call them gods.’

My mother’s voice became quiet and reverential.

‘Well, we intend to see the face of God.’

Flashes of my nightmare came back, and I kept seeing those terrible creatures pressed against the skin of the sky.

Who said they even have faces?
I thought grimly.

‘What are you talking about?’ Alpha’s voice rose. ‘How will
this
allow you to see the face of God?’

‘It’s so easy,’ my mother said. ‘The people of Earth are nothing more than an organic computer to them. If a computer breaks down – if it freezes or crashes – what does a person do? Peter, your LinkPad suffers a fatal crash, what do
you
do?’

I thought about it. She couldn’t mean … She couldn’t … It was insane.

‘I’d call out a tech guy,’ I said, feeling the weight of the idea expanding within me, chilling and inescapable.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘When planet Earth malfunctions, they’re going to send out their technical support department.

‘And we are going to be waiting for them.’

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She grinned.

I had a clenched fist in place of a stomach, and the thoughts in my head were dark and ugly.

‘That’s your whole plan?’ I asked her. ‘You intend to lure
aliens
down to Earth to repair their
computer
?’

The tone of my voice made my mother narrow her eyes.

‘Don’t you see?’ she said. ‘We’re going to end this, once and for all.’

‘Oh, you’re going to end it all right,’ I said. ‘But what makes you think they’ll want to fix us?’

‘What?’

‘Sending out technical support is only one solution for them. But the last time I broke a LinkPad – when I dropped it on a slider and watched it smash to pieces at my feet – do you know what I did? I decided it wasn’t worth repairing, and I bought a new model. Shinier, with more features.’ My anger took over. ‘Your whole plan hinges on some mighty big assumptions,’ I pretty much shouted at her. ‘That they will think that coming here will be viable; and that there are no other races in the universe that they can use as the latest, shinier, model. How can you be so sure?’

The question hung there in the air like a tangible thing.

My mother suddenly looked uncomfortable as my words sank in. ‘Even if they don’t come we will be free of them … ’

‘Really?’ Alpha interrupted. ‘Peter, what happened to your old LinkPad?’

‘It was recycled,’ I said. ‘Broken up for its components, and then melted down.’

Alpha nodded.

‘It’s David Vincent’s fatal flaw,’ she explained. ‘It always has been. He has tunnel vision. He sees one way forward
and pursues it. And that leads to the Law of Unintended Consequences.

‘Our first discussion.’ She turned to me and smiled. ‘Our first point of similarity.’

Already I could see my mother’s face had completely altered, from superior, haughty pride to immediate concern.

‘He invented an artificial honey bee and then stood by and watched as the last real bees died out,’ Alpha said, ‘when he should have targeted the mite that was killing them. His ideas are so bold, so
clever
, so
visionary
that people kind of forget to question them. They get so wrapped up in them, in his sureness, in his arrogant certainty, that they forget that he might not be right.

‘You really should have questioned this one, Mrs. Vincent. I suspect that this time he’s gone one better than killing off the bees. This time he might just have killed us all.’

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My mother looked at Alpha like she was genuinely seeing her for the first time. Her belief in what she was doing had suddenly melted away. Then her face hardened.

‘How do we stop it?’ I demanded.

‘Stop it?’ My mother looked aghast. ‘Peter, you can’t.’

‘What I can’t do is trust that things will turn out the way you
hope
they will,’ I told her.

‘It’s too late.’

‘It hasn’t happened yet, Mrs. Vincent,’ Alpha said. ‘So it can’t be too late. How do we stop it?’

My mother looked dazed, and I felt a moment’s pity for her.

‘The computers …’ she said. ‘The neural forest … it’s a big circuit …’

‘How do we disrupt it?’

‘There’s no time …’

‘HOW DO WE DISRUPT IT?’

‘The computers …’

‘We destroy them?’

My mother stared back at me. I shook my head in frustration.

‘If we destroy the computer, will it stop this from happening?’ I demanded.

‘I – I don’t know.’ she looked lost. ‘David is controlling the whole thing … the neural interface …’

Alpha said: ‘She must mean all those wires that he was applying to his head.’

I nodded.

Guess it meant that we had to stop HIM; we had to stop my father.

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We ran back down the tunnel, Alpha and I, leaving my mother standing in the glow of the neural forest, looking lost.

A week ago I would have given anything to see her again, now I was relieved to be leaving her. Dreams so often become nightmares. Family can so easily become foes. And people are always more stupid than you give them credit for.

We reached the first crater and the countdown had already reached 12.42. Just seeing it up there on the clock made me feel sick.

‘Do we have a plan?’ Alpha asked, out of breath and puffing hard.

‘Stop him,’ I said.

‘That’s a goal,’ Alpha said. ‘Not a plan. A plan would tell us how we were going to achieve it.’

She was right, of course.

I looked around me. ‘These wires,’ I said. ‘These wires and cables. They’re everywhere.’

‘If you’re thinking about pulling them all out,’ Alpha said, ‘then we have ourselves a bona fide plan.’ She gave a huge smile, leaned in and kissed me.

‘For luck,’ she whispered.

‘See you on the other side,’ I said, and then we got to work.

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I grabbed a handful of the cables nearest me and pulled. They were connected to the back of one of the computer banks, and looked pretty important.

There was a horrible second where I felt no give at all, but then I put more shoulder into it and they tore loose of their housings with such ease that I fell over, clutching the wires to my chest.

That’s done it
, I thought. I dropped the cables, got to my feet and moved to the next computer. I heard Alpha tearing wires free from somewhere nearby and grinned.

I was pulling a second bunch free when an alert
sounded somewhere close by, loud and metallic.

That’s REALLY done it
, I thought.

I yanked the wires, but these ones really didn’t feel like they wanted to be torn out. I pulled and pulled, but was getting nowhere.

I wrapped them around my arms to brace them, leaned back until all of my weight was concentrated on the wires, and finally they started to tear away from the computer.

‘COME ON!’ I said through gritted teeth. In desperation I threw myself backwards, and then I was on the floor again, with another bunch of useless wires in my hands.

‘YES!’ I cried triumphantly, feeling like maybe we DID have a chance of stopping this mad plan of my father’s; and it was then that I saw the white-coated technician standing above me, looking down with anger in his eyes.

I recognised him, of course.

It was Perry Knight’s dad.

Parents.

Again with the parents.

Was there anyone’s dad who
wasn’t
involved in this?

‘What are you doing here, Peter?’ Mr. Knight asked me,
although it was obvious from his voice that he already knew the answer: he started edging closer to me.

‘You’re in on this lunacy too?’ I asked him, and was about to get up, but he moved too quickly, bringing his foot up and bringing it down again on my right arm. He kept it there, putting his weight behind it, and for a moment there was a red flash behind my eyes, as the pain hit home.