The Future We Left Behind (24 page)

‘We’ll see,’ I said, ‘in eight minutes or so.’

‘Why did you do this?’ my father asked, and he sounded like he genuinely had no idea.

For the smartest man I knew, he was also the stupidest.

‘Because you didn’t kill the mites,’ I said and he looked at me like I was insane.

He shook his head.

‘Millgrove was important, but not vital,’ he said. ‘You and your girlfriend here just destroyed millions of credits worth of equipment and started a couple of fires, but that’s it.’

‘At least we gave it a pretty good try,’ Alpha said.

‘In eight minutes it won’t matter,’ my father said. ‘Things are going to change, one way or the other.’

‘Things always change,’ Alpha said. ‘It’s what you do when it does that’s important.’

He gave us a really ugly smile. ‘If you DID succeed in
ruining thirty years of work then the only thing you’ve won is another upgrade. In eight minutes you’ll be monsters.’

I hadn’t thought of that. I’d been so caught up in stopping him, I hadn’t really had time to consider what would happen if we actually succeeded.

My father saw the realisation as it dawned on my face. ‘I wonder if you’ll even remember each other,’ he said spitefully. ‘Anyway, you haven’t got much time, Peter. You’d better get started.’

‘Started?’ I had no idea what the hex he was talking about.

‘Obey the paradigm,’ my father said.

‘What does that EVEN mean?’

‘Every upgrade has a Kyle and it has a Lilly,’ my father said. ‘Don’t ask me why. It’s the way things
always
are. We call them paradigms, but you could call them archetypes, or echoes, it doesn’t matter. The Lilly paradigm follows her Kyle into the fire.’

‘And what does the Kyle paradigm do?’

‘You already know the answer to that one, my son. He leaves behind a record.’

‘You want me to write this down?’ I said mockingly.

‘I don’t want anything from you,’ he said, turning his back on us.

‘What you were doing was
wrong
, Mr. Vincent,’ Alpha said.

‘I guess we’ll find out soon enough,’ he said and started to walk away.

I leaned on Alpha and we went to follow him, but he turned around and pointed down one of the tunnels.

‘There’s some storerooms in a corridor off the side of Tunnel 3. You might find something there you can use.’

‘Use for what?’ I asked him.

‘Playing out your role,’ he said and then started up the ladder.

File:
113/50/05/wtf/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

Discussion took about ten seconds. It wasn’t as if we were exactly spoiled for choices.

‘You do realise that my father is quite mad?’ I said.

‘Mad or not, I think someone should make some sort of a record of what happened here today,’ Alpha said.

‘You want to spend the last few minutes we’ve got left obeying my father’s stupid paradigm theory?’

‘It’s either that or sit here and wait.’

We made our way across the crater and I looked up to the silos towering above us. There were more ‘ghosts’ gathered around them, some of them kneeling, all of them
staring intently at the concrete structures.

I was about to turn away when I saw that one of them was looking our way.

My mother.

She raised her hand in acknowledgment, and I gave her a solemn nod.

Then I noticed a figure standing next to her.

An old man with a mane of black hair.

The man I’d seen and heard just after my LinkDiary crashed; who had been shouting about memories and holes. The man I’d thought was a goblin man from the poem my mother had read to me, and who’d later appeared in a dream and delivered just enough vague and cryptic clues to lead us here.

Here he was, standing next to her, by the silos.

I thought again of invisible connections that linked everything together. I thought about tech-guys and alien programmers and how they might be a little more clever than my father had given them credit for when it came to fixing systems that were
going
to be a problem.

Maybe they would fix things
before
they got out of hand.

Maybe they had already been, done the job, and gone.

I looked at the man and he made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

I wasn’t sure if it was an ‘OK’ sign, or a snake eating its own tail.

I decided that it really didn’t matter.

I gave a replica of the symbol back, and then we hurried down the tunnel.

File:
224/09/12fin

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Live\Peter_Vincent\Personal

It’s starting
.

Alpha and I are walking back down the tunnel towards the silos, and I don’t know whether it’s the contact lenses, or our imaginations, but the air is thick with the alien code. It bristles on our skin like heat rash
.

We are hand in hand and I’m carrying the flash drive, recording live on to it, just in case it captures something that will be useful, next time around
.

Assuming there will be a next time
.

I can’t stop thinking about my father, and his crazy plan, and the way that his own bees proved to be his downfall
.

How did I do that, exactly?

Convince the bees that my father’s computers were a threat that needed to be eradicated?

I mean I’m not even 100% certain that’s what happened, but it just kind of feels like that’s what I did
.

I am sure that I didn’t deploy my filaments to connect with the computer. I remember feeling shocked when I felt them touch the metal input panel
.

So what happened, exactly?

The only thing that I can think of is my feelings when I saw the goblin man standing on the ridge above us, next to my mother
.

What if someone else – something else – had been guiding my hand?

Maybe the tech-guys my father had so wanted to see for himself
had
pre-empted him. Used me to do their dirty work for them
.

Is that even possible?

Because if they are capable of such actions, why didn’t they stop him before? I mean there is such a thing as cutting things too fine
.

Unless …

Unless they wanted something
.

Too many questions will never find answers, I guess
.

But I don’t feel afraid now; I don’t know why
.

Maybe it’s that I’m with Alpha, and whatever happens, happens to us together
.

Whether my father’s plan to see the face of God succeeds, or whether he has doomed us all, or whether this will be just another upgrade that we don’t even know happened … we’re going to be finding out about now
.

I wonder if anyone will ever discover this record. If they do, I hope they don’t bookend it with editor’s notes like the Straker Tapes
.

The alien language is everywhere now
.

There is a sound in the air, a static crackle, and then a wave of …
something … 
hits us
.

Hot and electric and

My colleagues think me mad.

They point to the fact that we are still here, that the WorldBrain contains no other records like this, that I have been working too hard, that there is no evidence for any of the events Peter Vincent describes, and they have chosen to paint me as the victim of an elaborate hoax.

I know that it sounds incredible. But still, I believe in Peter Vincent. Amalfi Del Rey. Millgrove. Kyle Straker.

Even if I am the only one who does, it is enough.

I have been removed from duties at the University. It was when I pointed out the similarities between the WorldBrain
and the ‘neural forest’ that Peter described that the department heads started to worry about me.

Maybe, I argued, the MindFeather WAS our WorldBrain. Maybe that was the sole purpose of the David Vincent project. The REAL purpose.

Maybe our alien programmers WANTED him to create it. Maybe it was a hardware upgrade that was required BEFORE the software could be installed this time.

It would provide answers to the questions that Peter was asking just before the upgrade hit and his story was silenced.

The WorldBrain is integral to everything we do. It is a living organism that dreams up new technologies, new philosophies, new structures and systems, new solutions to age-old problems. It has changed the way we think about ourselves, and the way we behave towards each other.

I am on an extended leave of absence. I suppose I should
be working on regaining my reputation, on putting the Vincent archive behind me, but I can’t. Everything else seems pointless compared to the data.

I have copied the files and I spend most of my time trying to rebuild the damaged sectors, to find out what was lost in that final, critical shutdown.

Is the actual, physical experience of being upgraded contained in those few, scrambled lines of data?

If it is I will decode it.

I must know.

My colleagues call it madness.

Me, I call it faith.