The Future We Left Behind (23 page)

Hard.

And then he ground his heel into my arm for good measure.

It was madness! This was Perry’s dad, who’d bounced me on his knee when I was still small enough to be bounced; who’d taken me out on family trips when Perry begged him hard enough; who’d babysat me when my father was called away.

A man who was now trying to break my arm.

My eyes were half closed in pain but I could just see Alpha out of the corner of my eye, creeping towards Mr. Knight until she was right behind him. I let out a primal roar and rolled my body so that it smacked right into his shins. The pain was intense, but I kept pushing and eventually he stepped
backwards. It released my arm – after he ground it underfoot once more – and then the backs of his legs made contact with Alpha’s hunched frame and he toppled over her, going down like he’d just been shot.

I tried my best to ignore the pain, but something in my arm had been badly hurt and I made a pretty poor show of getting to my feet. Mr. Knight was already half up, and he was going to beat me to it, there was no doubt.

But he hadn’t counted on Alpha.

She turned her body and swung her elbow back, fast and hard, until it connected with Mr. Knight’s rising face. The force of the blow sent blood spraying out of his nose and his eyes rolled back into his head.

He was out cold.

Alpha moved quickly, grabbing a skein of wires and wrapping them around Mr. Knight’s ankles.

‘You OK?’ she barked as she pulled the wires tight and knotted them, before passing them up his back and using them to secure his hands.

‘He almost broke my arm,’ I said, getting slowly to my feet. ‘That was one hex of a rescue. Thank you.’

Alpha inspected her handiwork, gave the wires a good hard pull for luck, then dusted her hands off.

‘No one beats up on my Kyle paradigm without answering to me,’ she said, and then nodded towards the geodesic dome. ‘What say we go and break up your father’s little control centre?’

I just nodded in reply and raced after her.

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The length of metal tubing was right where I’d dropped it, just outside the dome. The pain in my arm had developed into a grinding, throbbing sensation and there was no way I could pick up anything, so I pointed to it and Alpha bent down and retrieved it for me.

‘I’ll keep him busy,’ I said. ‘You … you just smash up everything in sight. The more expensive looking, the better.’

‘Was that a plan?’ Alpha joked. ‘Did you just formulate another actual PLAN?’

I tried to smile but it probably looked more like a grimace.

Then we headed to the entrance of the dome.

My father hadn’t thought he needed to close it up again, and we walked straight in through the opening. Another piece of evidence, if more was needed, of his poor judgment.

He had his back to us, and his head was festooned with wires. He was studying the screens and didn’t hear us coming in. Alien code flowed across one screen, always in motion.

I approached my father, holding my right arm crossed across my chest, the hand resting on my left shoulder. I heard the first of Alpha’s blows with the pipe, and so did he.

He turned, a look of surprise on his face. When he saw me and Alpha, surprise quickly changed to fury.

‘What the –’ he began, but I was already bending at the waist, aiming my left shoulder at his midriff and charging straight at him.

He raised a feeble hand to fend me off but my momentum was good enough that I connected with him. Hard. He had a computer console behind him and his spine hit the edge with quite some force.

He let out a dull
‘oof’
and then my good hand was reaching up and I got a handful of the wires that were attached to his head.

The side of his hand hit me between the eyes, making my vision go starry, but the wires finally came loose.

He let out a scream of anger, and then his defence mechanisms must have kicked in because he suddenly managed to get the meat of his hand under my chin and started pushing.

My head went back sharply before his other hand found my wounded arm and started to squeeze.

‘You stupid fool,’ he growled. ‘You’ll ruin everything.’

I felt the pain starting to overwhelm me, felt the raw redness threaten to consume me.

‘I really hope so, Dad,’ I said.

I could hear that Alpha was making the most of the distraction to really lay into the equipment around her. Glass was breaking and metal clanging. My father pushed me aside and lurched towards her, his hands outstretched into rigid claws of rage. It looked like he had murder in his eyes.

I clenched my teeth, let out a roar of my own, threw my arms out to grab his legs.

And missed.

I fell heavily on my injured arm and felt a terrible flash of pain through my entire body.

I saw my father reaching Alpha.

My mind screamed at my body to get up and help her out, but my body just wouldn’t obey.

We haven’t done enough
, I thought, and knew then that all was lost.

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I was utterly helpless and could only watch on as my father grabbed hold of Alpha’s shoulders and threw her aside. She bounced off some machinery and hit the ground, letting out a little whimper of pain.

I think if I could have, I would have killed him.

‘You can’t stop this,’ my father said, and the expression on his face was both crazed and euphoric. ‘No one can stop it. Least of all a pair of stupid children.’

‘Please don’t do this!’ Alpha yelled. ‘What if you’re wrong?’

My father glared down at her with contempt.

‘The last thing I need is advice from you,’ he snarled.

‘Stay down there, where you belong, and watch the future dawn.’

I didn’t even know that I had deployed my filaments until I felt them connect with the input panel on the computer I was lying next to. I looked up and saw them stretching further than I had ever extended them before, at least a metre.

My father spotted them as they interfaced with the computer panel.

‘What are you doing, Peter?’ he asked, a mocking tone in his voice.

I didn’t know. I mean I didn’t consciously send them out of my hand, and I had absolutely no idea what to do now that they were there.

And then it happened.

The Link was suddenly alive in my mind, but not like it ever had been before.

Millions of voices suddenly invaded my head, the Link turned up to extreme, overwhelming me with its chatter. I heard music and traffic reports, news stories and diary entries, secrets and lies and hopes and dreams and fears. And I heard them all at the same time, bruising my mind with
their sheer volume. I felt them building up like a mad pressure inside my skull, a skull that was surely going to burst from all that information.

I opened my mouth to scream, just to release some of the pressure, but no sound came out. Instead I felt that pressure converted into data; felt the data pass through my body into my hand; and then I felt it disperse outwards through my filaments.

I unloaded the Link into the computer.

‘Take that!’ I shouted.

And nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

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I lay there, trembling and drained, with a head that felt like it was about to explode, and still the countdown to our extinction ticked away, second by terrible second.

‘Well?’ my father asked, ‘What was that about?’

I didn’t have a clue. For a moment or two then it had been as if I was
channelling
some energy, or something, and I had allowed myself to feel hope.

But nothing was going to save us.

My father started laughing.

Laughing at me. I looked over at Alpha. She started to give me a wan smile, and then stopped halfway through it.

Her head moved from side to side, and then I saw the smile develop into a massive grin. And she started laughing too.

I thought she had lost her mind, and it even stopped my father. He looked down at her, puzzled.

Alpha pulled herself together, but was still grinning.

‘Listen,’ she said triumphantly.

So I did.

Then I retracted my filaments.

And started laughing myself.

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‘What’s that?’ my father asked, although he of all people should have recognised the sound.

As it got closer – and louder, of course – I saw a look of panic settle on to my father’s face.

‘NO!’ He protested. ‘This is … it can’t be … WHY?’

I was thinking about symmetry and neatness, about how it felt like my life was running along hidden tracks beneath my feet, and about the odd connections that today had shared with the crazy dream I’d had. In that kind of mental environment nothing comes as a surprise any more.

THEY got closer.

And closer.

Until their ferocious buzzing was unmistakable.

Bees.

And, by the sound of it: MILLIONS of them.

They were thundering through the air, through the underground complex, towards us, and they were so loud that I felt a moment’s fear myself.

The stings that a small swarm of them had inflicted had been bad enough.

This swarm was something different entirely.

A deafening buzz.

Oh, and you programmed them to be so fast, didn’t you?
I thought.

And then the buzzing sound drowned out even my own thoughts, and metal bodies pinged and smashed and scraped against the shell of the dome.

Alpha had made her way over to me and she took my hand in hers and looked at me with wonderment. She said something, but even though her mouth was less than twenty centimetres from my ear, her words were buried beneath the noise.

Suddenly the dome was breached, and the bees poured in. Relentless and unstoppable, within seconds the air was thick with them.

My father was waving his arms in some mad dumb show, but the bees ignored him, ignored me, ignored Alpha, and they went straight for the computer terminals.

Like sentient bullets they smashed into the equipment. Unlike bullets, however, they could go back for another go.

And another.

And then another.

Metal rang against metal, and the loudest sound I had ever heard became louder still. I felt Alpha’s hand clench tighter on to mine, and I realised that if the bees decided to turn their attentions our way then we were dead.

No doubt.

But it seemed as if they had no interest in us at all.

Metal casings buckled under their relentless onslaught.

Monitors smashed.

And still the bees attacked.

Within the space of a mere twenty seconds or so they had managed to batter their way into the hearts of the
computers, and then they turned their fury on to the innards: chipsets and capacitors; logic boards and quantum chips.

Sparks flared, became flames, and soon smoke was pouring from the computers. It wasn’t long before it became a dense cloud that made my eyes water and my throat sting.

Through the smoke, and the thick cloud of bees, I could vaguely see my father. He stood there, waving his arms and swatting at the invading army, as if he stood any chance at all of repelling them.

They ignored him.

He was irrelevant.

I turned to Alpha, then we got up from the floor, ignored the storm of metal creatures around us, and made for the door of the dome.

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Outside the dome the air was fresher.

A little, anyway.

At least it didn’t make me feel sick to breathe.

I was struggling to find a part of me that didn’t hurt. My arm throbbed, my neck ached, my eyes were streaming and felt like they were full of grit, the bridge of my nose hurt, and I don’t know how many bee stings I was still carrying from earlier, but they had decided to start screaming out now too.

I looked back and saw that the flames within the geodesic dome were really hitting their stride, and black smoke was
billowing from its entrance.

I grinned in spite of myself, then a hand mussed my hair and I looked at Alpha standing there, right by my side. She looked a little frazzled, with smoky marks on her face, but she returned the grin.

Then I looked up to the doomsday clock: 08.57.

‘I’ll love you to the end of the world,’ I muttered, immediately regretting it.

‘Not good enough,’ Alpha said, smiling. ‘I’m needy. Something trifling like the end of the world is not a good enough excuse for you to stop calling.’

My father had finally given up on trying to save his precious project from destruction at the hands – or should that be wings? – of another of his precious projects. He emerged from the dome looking worse than I felt, with black smoke-marks staining his face.

He looked small and diminished.

‘The bees …’ he said incredulously. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I connected with your computer terminal and told the bees that your whole network was an unauthorised intruder.’

‘How the hex did you do that?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s a little hazy,’ I said.

‘This isn’t the only complex like this.’ It sounded like my father was trying to convince himself, rather than us. ‘You may have destroyed my work here, but it goes on around the world. You have achieved nothing.’