The Future We Left Behind (4 page)
Read The Future We Left Behind Online
Authors: Mike A. Lancaster
‘You won’t fail,’ I told her. ‘You’re a lot smarter than you admit.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure you won’t be saying that when I fail Biogenetics. Spectacularly.’
Before I could stop myself, I heard myself saying: ‘I guess I can help you catch up if you need.’
There was a moment’s silence that was almost awkward.
‘And why, pray tell, would you do that?’ Alpha wrinkled her nose.
I gave her an answer that wasn’t entirely true. ‘I like to help. Especially my friends.’
The misleading bits of that answer were: I only have one true friend, and he has
never
needed my help with his studies before.
But there was something about Alpha that made me think it would be worth helping her out. Because in a few short minutes she had helped
me
out considerably, putting all that stuff into words for me.
‘Friends then,’ Alpha said. But there was an odd note of sadness in her voice.
‘It’s the least I can do for my identical fruit soy twin,’ I told her.
‘You know I
am
going to take you up on your kind offer?’
‘Well, let me give you my LinkAddress.’ I offered her my hand and she took it in hers. We both turned on our
filaments. I gave her my addy, and she blinked to save it, then transmitted hers. I saved it to ‘friends’, bookmarked it too, and smiled.
‘I gotta dash,’ I said, standing up. Blades of grass clung to my trousers. I slung my bag over my shoulder. ‘I have to spend the afternoon plotting some quantum uncertainties.’
‘Hey, have fun with that,’ Alpha said.
‘I will.’ I replied.
Alpha looked as if she was about to say something else, had her mouth open to do it and everything, but then she thought better of it and gave me a smile instead.
Walking back towards the Physics block I found myself wondering what had just occurred. I was thinking about the way she was … different to anyone else that I had come into contact with.
It was confusing and weird, and I still didn’t know why I’d offered to help her out with her coursework, but I suddenly felt like the world had got a little bit lighter, brighter, and a lot more interesting.
My Top 5 LinkApps
5. Diary Plus+
A filing app for LinkEntries that simplifies the whole tagging process. It could almost be called “Tagging for Dummies”. And it supports geotagging, accurate to the metre, of all LinkDiary entries. Pros: Fast, easy to use, with multiple tags for multiple formats. Cons: The MemoryFlow view is still seriously laggy, even since the upgrade to Plus+. And the templates are still a little restrictive – couldn’t they let us design our own?
Overall: ****
4. BubblePop Evolved
Sometimes you don’t want to save the world; sometimes you just want to use your filaments to pop bubbles! For those times, this is the app for you. With multiple levels of difficulty, and a pretty
near infinite number of game configurations, this one will just last and last
.
But the fun doesn’t stop there. There’s an add-on that lets you take the app into the real world, harnessing the electrical fields generated by your filaments, and allowing you to physically pop real soap bubbles!
Pros: Frantic and fun
.
Cons: Real world implementation is calcium hungry, so stock up on supplements
.
Overall: ****
3. CrowdMap
Like FaceSpace, and MyBook, CrowdMap is a social linking programme that brings all your bookmarks and LiveFeeds into one easy-to-manage app
.
Pros: Cross-posting between social connection pages
.
Cons: Geotagging still a little buggy
.
Overall: ****1/2
2. LinkHangers
What can I say? A perfect filing system for all your templates, file by colour, style, material. There’s even a place to put your embarrassing CosPlay purchases, but I would keep quiet about that if I was you. Pros: Simply the best there is
.
Cons: None
.
Overall: *****
1. Last Quest: Diamond Dust
OK, it’s just a shrunk down version of Last Quest, and is a series of smaller campaigns that don’t devour huge chunks of your free time, but its vast number of mini-games will keep you busy on slider trips and between lectures
.
Pros: Those addictive mini-games
.
Cons: The graphics are a lot less convincing than in the full game, but then I think they’re pretty cute.
Overall: *****
File:
113/44/00/fgj
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal
On the way back from college, the northbound stretch of the city slideway was snarled up around New Lincoln Heights.
Outside the slider’s window, a forest of huge, sparkling, milk-white towers rose up from a seedbed of jewel-like structures.
Inside the slider, people were getting agitated.
I reluctantly stopped reading
Gulliver’s Travels
on my LinkPad and connected to the Link by thinking
Open Link
and then
News. Local
. The information started to flow into my mind and I narrowed the stream to concentrate on news relevant only to my GPS position.
It was reporting that a crew was clearing another leaper off the tracks.
It was the third one in the city this week.
It’d take a whole lot of time for the authorities to sort out, so I grabbed my college bag from the seat, stuffed my Pad into it and made for the slider doors. I was still a couple of klicks away from Amicus Park, my station, but I started to walk anyway.
I passed a group of onlookers who were trying to see over the medical cordon, to catch a glimpse of the person who had let gravity solve their problems for them.
I shook my head. I have no idea what it is in human nature that makes people want to see sights like that. The world was falling apart and there were people craning their necks to see its final collapse.
I stopped.
Whoa
. I thought.
Where did that thought come from?
I quickly opened a media channel on the Link and shopped for some music to shut my brain up.
All, literally, in the blink of an eye.
I downloaded something with old-fashioned guitars and
a pounding – almost industrial – beat.
I set my stride to the rhythm and tried not to do any more thinking.
Within five minutes I’d reached the foot of the crystal towers I’d been looking at from the comfort of the slider.
New Lincoln Heights rose up into the sky, a crystalline neighbourhood that had literally been grown from minerals seeded into the earth.
Where the sun struck its angled surfaces rainbows were formed, making the buildings seem less than solid.
I slowed then stopped, just to take in the wonder of the sight close up, but I was holding up the flow of the pedestrian walkway and people started grumbling.
The city’s planners were growing the Crystal Projects to house the rising number of Strakerites who, it seems, have decided that they need to live separately from the rest of the population.
My father calls the new developments
the diamond ghettoes
, and the Strakerites superstitious primitives. He blames all of society’s problems on the Strakerites, as if they are deliberately making his life harder. His opinions are
reinforced daily by LinkStreams transmitted by people who already agree with him.
I’ve started to doubt the wisdom of drawing one’s opinions from the same data well every day. But my father refuses to acknowledge that there
is
another way. You either agree with him or you are wrong.
My walk had taken me around New Lincoln Heights and on to the Middle Beltway that served as a dividing line between the ordinary and the Strakerite neighbourhoods. Rush hour restrictions meant that the beltway was reserved for solar gigs and battery carts, but even taking all other vehicles out of the equation there were still four solid lanes in both directions standing at gridlock.
We came down from the trees, built cities over paradise, and suddenly we’re all sitting in traffic.
It seemed absurd, as if the more we progressed as a race, the smaller our lives actually became.
Maybe that was why I was turning to English lit. To try to find something larger for my life.
Or maybe it was simply that my mother loved to read.
She had owned a small collection of
real
books; wondrous
old things that smelled of dust and vanilla and almonds and wood. Some of my earliest memories are of her, sitting by the side of my bed, an impossibly old volume held in one hand, while the other turned the pages as she read to me.
Wonderful memories, but they always left me feeling sad and bewildered: tainted forever, I guess, by the fact that she is gone.
My father must have disposed of her books. I remember him disapproving of her reading.
I carried on moving towards home and I thought of Lemuel Gulliver making his way through lands that made no sense. Before long I was smiling.
From Linkipedia, the everywhere encyclopedia
A Strakerite is a believer, practitioner or follower of Strakerism, a movement of people who believe that human beings are, at crucial points in human history, upgraded by alien programmers
.
The term derives from the Kyle Straker Tapes, a set of audio cassettes believed to have been recorded by Kyle Straker, a fifteen-year-old boy, in the early years of the 21st century. Much controversy surrounds the tapes themselves and their later transcription, which was published in book form as
Human.4
.
More>>>>>
File:
113/44/00/fgj/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal
I walked and the people of the city flowed around me, lost in their own interior worlds. Faces passing, eyes open, but distant. Most of them were surfing the Link while walking.
The Link, we are told, is our friend.
It allows us to work, chat, swap data, study, shop, play games, watch films, listen to music, connect with friends, take a virtual vacation or augment reality with filters, menus and even animations – the same things we have been doing for thousands of years – on the go. The Link is there in our heads – there’s no onboard hardware and the software that runs it is external, carried through the air.
It works, we’re reminded, because of our marvellous capacity for filament networking. Yes, we’ve always been able to swap data through our filaments; the Link just provides a constant connection without the need for physical contact. It’s not actually as intense as doing it by filament networking, it is a lot less immersive, and that’s why people can be plugged into the Link and go about their daily business.
The Link helps by screening out the unnecessary details of the environment.
Like, well, the environment.
It makes us more productive.
More useful.
I rarely use it for anything but listening to music when I’m out and about. That and keeping my LinkDiary, but that takes no effort, or even conscious thought. LinkDiary just happens when you turn it on. You don’t even realise you’re making an entry, most of the time.
Like it’s second nature. Or habit.
I can’t remember a precise moment when I decided to stop using the Link for everything, all the time; I’m not even
certain that there
was
a moment where I consciously
chose
to cut down on my use.
It just got so exhausting to have all those voices and images, all that data, in my head the whole time. So I experimented with spending time off-Link, every now and again.
You know, I’ve been thinking that my life is getting a little weird since I signed up to study literature, but I might as well be honest with myself and say that it actually started some time before that.
There’s something about the Link that scares me, that makes me wonder if …
?
?
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