The Future We Left Behind (5 page)

?Error Report? =

Wow … that hurt … a headache … diary crashed … it’s never done that before … has it?

What the hex was I …?

Ah, yes.

Walking.

Home.

Headache.

I used my filaments to increase my endorphin levels and to block the pain. It was a crude job, but I didn’t want to use the Link to get a proper painkilling package. I didn’t want to use the Link at all, but after a few paces I could
no longer remember why that might be.

So I just kept walking.

It’s weird but the simple act of walking distances has become alien to us now. My legs started hurting after ten minutes of walking; my knees and my feet starting to protest my decision to leave the comfort – and laziness – of the slider.

‘… your MEMORIES.’ Someone suddenly shouted, and it made me flinch.

I looked around me.

The human river flowed, upstream and down, tuned into the world, but no longer seeing it.

Had I imagined the voice? It seemed disturbingly possible, a lot more likely than one of the Link-tuned crowd suddenly shouting something out.

I was about to carry on walking when the voice tore through the air again.

‘MEMORIES!’

Just then the crowd parted a little and I saw who was making the noise.

On a street corner, a man was standing on some kind of
box or crate, shouting at people as they passed him.

‘If all that you REMEMBER is all that you are: who are you today? And who were you yesterday?’ The man demanded.

But no one was even looking at him; to the passers by it was as if he wasn’t even there.

He looked wild, with a long black mane of hair plastered down on top of his skull. His face was lined and creased by age. And his eyes blazed with what I could only describe as madness.

I was staring, but I couldn’t help myself. It was such a weird thing to see; to hear.

‘YOU!’ he roared, and I realised he was pointing at me.

Don’t look at him; pretend you haven’t seen him
, I thought.

There was a scuffling noise, then a thud, and when I looked up again the man had leaped down from his makeshift platform and was standing in front of me, blocking my way. Those mad eyes of his were wide and staring.

Staring at me.

I suddenly remembered an odd poem that my mother used to whisper to me when I was small. Something from a
long, long time ago. It used to scare me when I was small. It scared me now, too.

I shuddered.

If goblin men ever really truly existed, then surely this was one of them.

‘They can rub away our memories,’ he said as I stood there trying to figure out how to get out of the situation. I angled myself to go past him but he stepped in my path again.

‘They can change them into any colour or flavour they like,’ he persisted, putting his face close enough to mine that I could feel his breath.

I thought:
humour him
, and nodded, enthusiastically.

‘My memories are blue,’ I said. ‘And butterscotch.’

The man’s face went from ‘insane’ to ‘enraged’. It only
took a widening of the eyes and a tightening of the jaw.

‘HOLES!’ he screamed. ‘They dig them in your brain and things fall into them. Things crawl out of them. The answer’s under your feet and it always has been, you’re just too brainwashed to look. Haven’t you seen the symbols? The new …’

I was backing away, getting ready to run, when the man’s eyes suddenly went blank and his face seemed to sag.

He stood there, almost immobile.

In fact the only sign that he was still capable of movement was his hands, clenching into fists then unclenching, at his sides.

I took my chance and stepped around him, afraid that those hands would suddenly reach out for me, that they would grab me, clenching and unclenching around my throat.

I made it ten metres from him before I realised that I was actually running. Slowing to a walk, I looked back over my shoulder. The man was still there; still motionless; still doing that thing with his hands.

I looked away from him and hurried along the bands of the slideway.

File:
113/44/00/fgj/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

At the end of the long walk: home.

The mad words of the strange man had finally stopped ringing around in my head and I was thinking about Alpha again, trying to work her out.

I’d genuinely never met anyone like her before. She was clever in a way that I wasn’t. Not a learned-by-rote-in-a-classroom clever. She saw
through
the surface of things. I liked that.

I stood in front of the house’s security fence – a solid wall of energy that surrounds our home – and wondered what it was that we thought we were keeping out. Sure, crime is on
the increase for the first time in generations, but you don’t actually have to increase ‘zero’ that much for a bar chart to look like things are getting out of hand.

Perhaps it was part of my father’s distrust of Strakerites that made him so cautious; sometimes he referred to them as ‘barbarians’ and maybe he truly pictured them storming the gates of his castle, wanting to bring the world down into chaos and superstition.

And he
had
been publicly against the idea of teaching Strakerist ideas in schools and colleges.

If the Strakerites were as crazy as my father made out, maybe he was right to be cautious.

My hand disgorged half a dozen filaments, and I watched as the thin, whip-like structures merged with the circuitry in the guard post. The fence unlocked to my physical signature.

Filament biometrics. Got to love them.

The door section of the wall dimmed – but didn’t shut off entirely – and I moved into it, feeling the cold, tingling sensation as it performed its final verification checks. If, by some almost impossible chance, an intruder used filament identification to fool the guard post, the full body scan would
betray them and hold them inside its containment field until help arrived.

I have no idea who would answer such a call. The idea of a police force is
so
outdated. I guess it would be the employees of a private security company, but I’d never asked.

A paranoid part of my brain wondered if the scan could be configured to read my LinkDiary – or even my thoughts – but I pushed such fears away and just waited until the scan confirmed what I already knew: I was Peter Vincent, and I was allowed through the security fence.

My home is an old-fashioned manor house recreated in liquid granite, and finished in real wood. Not much of it, mind, but enough that it feels supremely decadent. You need a permit for real wood these days, and very few people are granted one.

There are some stables out back, and about two acres of land. It’s a far cry from the cramped, chaotic living conditions of the majority of the city’s population.

The path leads up from the gates and through an elegant but spartan front garden that had more space than anyone in New Lincoln Heights could ever dream of owning.

Genetically recreated peacocks paraded about the lawns, their electric plumage catching the half-light of a slowly descending twilight. I stopped to watch a neon male fanning out his digital feathers, sending rays of many colours in all directions.

Most people have never even seen a peacock, and we have a half-dozen of them in our garden. Previously that would have given me a real sense of pride; today it just felt wrong somehow. Unjust. It didn’t diminish the beauty of the birds, but it sort of tarnished them a little in my mind.

On both sides of me were vast bushes of some hybrid plant with purple, bell-shaped flowers that bobbed in a faint breeze. I could hear the electric drone of a couple of bees at work within them and found myself wondering what real bees had sounded like.

I was halfway up the path when the front door suddenly opened and my father came out. He was dressed in a sharp, metallic suit and the expression on his face told me that he was impatient and angry.

I felt a sudden jolt of panic that my father had found out about my little course change. I mean, it would only have
taken a LinkMail from the college to tell him that I had put in the request. Maybe that was the kind of thing they notified parents about, I don’t know.

Anyway, I didn’t need to worry.

Not about that, anyway.

‘You’re late,’ My father said.

Uh-oh
. I thought.
What have I forgotten?

‘I know,’ I said defensively. ‘They were scraping up another leaper off the tracks of the slideway and I had to walk.’

‘Tonight of all nights,’ he said, and his tone betrayed the fact that he was still holding me personally responsible for my lateness. ‘Hurry up and get changed.’

‘Changed?’ I asked him.

He looked exasperated.

‘You
do
know what tonight is, don’t you?’ he barked.

I scanned my LinkCalendar and found nothing there to help me. Which meant that it was my father’s error, not mine. If he had told me it would have been automatically entered on to the calendar.

Still, it wouldn’t help to point out who was to blame. So I just shook my head and tried to look sorry.

My father wasn’t impressed. Status report: normal, then.

I can’t remember the last time my father was anything but unimpressed with me. Since my mother … left … he’s been increasingly worried about what he calls his
legacy –
the ideas and inventions he’ll leave behind when he takes off into the great unknown – and I am, I guess, an important part of that legacy. He wants me to carry on with his work, to take his ideas forward, so that a future historian will look back and say
this is where it all started, and David Vincent was the man who started it
.

But here’s the thing.

I’m nothing like him, not really. For my father, work is everything. And life is just something that happens in the gaps
between
the discoveries and the theories.

He’d work twenty-four hours a day, if he could. Fun and poetry and music and … I don’t know … just hanging out … are only distractions to him. He’s only truly happy when he’s saving the world, or building the next great supercomputer, or meeting up with his high-powered friends and planning the future of the human race.

Me, I like the moments in between: I like goofing off and
relaxing, kicking back and letting the world pass by me.

I’m not
driven
like my father. I realise that I might have a part to play in society, but it’s never going to be the only thing I use to define myself.

My father was looking at me like I was an important experiment that had just failed.

‘The Keynote?’ he said, as if that was going to be any help to me at all.

I did some more head shaking. Paired it up with a blank look.

‘I’m addressing the Science Council,’ he explained. ‘And their families. A little bit of enforced PR that I was
expecting
you to attend.’

I guess ‘expecting’ is more real to my father than ‘asking’.

I gave him a nod.

‘I’ll get changed,’ I said.

I scanned the Link for something appropriate to the occasion, found a Nevri Bartlett evening suit, which was expensive, but elegant. I paid with FlashCash, downloaded the template, and then let my filaments turn my outfit into the suit.

It took seconds. And fit perfectly.

The material was iridescent, and alternated between midnight blue and a much lighter LED purple depending on the angle that light hit it.

And it had a cleaning function, like a lot of designer attire, which meant I didn’t even need to take a shower.

‘Ready,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

My Top 5 Virtual MiniBreak Destinations

5. Old New York

OK, its programming is a little loose and there are far too many recursive glitches for it to be a long stay (an hour and a half is my longest visit) but what it lacks in subtlety it more than makes up for with its sense of danger
.

Whether taking a cab ride through Times Square, eating bagels and MacDougal’s hamburgers in the famous Restaurant of Liberty, or just walking around Linkin Park after dark, there’s a real sense that anything can indeed happen in the red white and blue apple
.

4. The Cold Wilds

One of the newer virtual experience packages, the Cold Wilds is a kind of snowboarding environment, but it’s a hex of a lot more than that. The physics have infinite levels of customisation, so you can make a
mere half-pipe into a zero-gravity death run; or switch gravity to any surface so that you can grind horizontally along the side-lock courses
.

3. Centra-Sphere

After a complete overhaul, the new Centra-Sphere has opened, and it was worth the wait!

VibrAtioN is the new must-visit attraction, a neutral field environment that turns sound into sensory stimulus. You haven’t lived until you’ve felt your LinkTunesLibrary converted into waves that surround your body and physically interact with you. A LinkUpgrade to v2.14 will even allow generation of unique imagery skimmed from your library! Wow
.

2. Sea-Side Evolved

Back in the day, the world used to lo-o-o-ove the seaside, but then coastal protection, marine conservation and sand mites made it a thing of the past
.

Now it’s back in virtual form and, although it is a little weird getting used to doing nothing more than lying in the sun (a UV-neutral version) and picking sand out of everything you own, it’s surprisingly relaxing
.

1. Last Quest Resort