The Future We Left Behind (6 page)

Big surprise about my number one!

This experience kind of transplants the whole Last Quest world into a vivid – although still a little underdeveloped – interactive experience. Go Chickaboo racing at the Crystal Plains Raceway, or search for treasure in the Vile Wastes; challenge one of the Knights of Fear to a duel, or fly with the MechMages through the skies of Avalon; steal the magic of the Summoners, or just shop at the KingTown Market
.

It’s all there, and the experience is so immersive, so breathtakingly beautiful, that it is my absolute favourite getaway
.

Still a little on the pricey side, but perfect to escape from real life
.

File:
113/44/00/fgj/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

The Science Council is an architect’s layer cake of metal and glass on the southernmost edge of New Cambridge. Surrounded by a lush park, it rises up with a look of unshakeable confidence in its own importance.

As well it might.

It is, after all, where all the
really
clever people research the future, developing the technologies and building the devices that will make the general population’s lives easier. And lining their own pockets.

I don’t know how I became so cynical. There’s no reason for it really. I’d lived a privileged life and I had wanted for
nothing – except my mother back, I guess, and that wouldn’t happen even if we had all the credit in the world – so there really was no reason for me to think such things.

My father’s Mercedes-Royce Electric Shadow is flashed with premium software, so it’s allowed to travel on the higher tiers of the beltway. Below us was another gridlock, but up here – on the pay-as-you-drive tiers – there were fewer than twenty cars in both directions between home and the south of the city.

The rolling traffic restrictions put in place to deal with the vast numbers of road users simply don’t apply if you have the software, and the money, to roll out on the private beltways.

My father was silent as he steered the car towards our destination. He had stopped speaking pretty much the moment I suited up. I’d tried to get him talking, but he made it clear that he was thinking about his Keynote speech, and preferred not to be distracted by conversation.

Or
my
conversation, anyway.

Which, I guessed, was because of his latest research project. I didn’t get to hear much about it; it was classified work for the World Government. I assumed it was an
extension of his usual research into the construction of a new way of computing, but, for all he told me, he could have been working on a way to turn the sky into blueberry jam.

I might have pressed him, just to stave off the boredom, but I got an instant message on the Link.

?Are you going to be there tonight?
Perry hit me.

/Yeah./
I bounced back.
/I’m on a three line whip./

?What does that even mean?
Perry queried.

/I really don’t know./
I offered.
/Something my mother used to say. She was obsessed with political history, so I guess it’s something that’s long gone now./

Perry waited, to give the reference to my mother the proper measure of respect, then came back with:
/Whatever./

?I take it you’re attending too?
I asked.

/Pops wouldn’t take no for an answer./

?Who are you going to be wearing?

?What are you, the fashion police?

/Just want to make sure I’m looking better than you./
I said, only half joking.

/Bound to be. Pops has put a ceiling on my Flash. I’m reusing an old template./

/Tough./

?Ain’t it. You?

/Bartlett./

/Oh. Big guns, huh. Well, I submit to your superior might./

/Good to hear that you know when you’re beaten./

/Always give a fellow his due, that’s my motto./

?Since when?
I asked, incredulously.

/Since now./
Perry replied.

I don’t even know what it is about Perry and me and our clothes. It started when we were in prep, and has just kind of continued.

It’s like a designer escalation; a clothes war.

Trying to dress the best for events we were both attending.

Looked like tonight I was going to win.

I was about to disconnect when Perry said something weird.

?Hey, did you hear the latest about the ghosts on the Link?

?Huh?
I had no idea what he was talking about.

/Oh, Peter./
Perry said.
/Sometimes I forget just how little
you really see of the Link. The ghosts in the photographs. Everyone’s talking about them./

/Not everyone./
I said.
?So what are we talking?

/Ghosts./
Perry reiterated.
/Molly Grabowitz saw ghosts, and they passed through her photo albums and left an image of themselves in every photo. Ruined them all. Here’s a bookmark. You can view the photos. Pretty scary stuff./

?Who the hex is Molly Grabowitz?

/Oh, boy. Look her up. I gotta go./

/Catch you there./
I said.

/Most def. Later./

I smiled.

The Link might be a bank of the world’s knowledge, accessible by anyone with the right credit rating, but it’s also a place where all the world’s crazy people meet up and trade conspiracy theories.

For some reason Perry seems to find the things the crazy people leave on the Link, and feels it’s his duty to direct me towards them.

So he’s had me checking out cats the size of horses, which even a rudimentary grasp of the principles of photo
manipulation should have told him was faked.

I searched for the name he’d given me on Linkipedia and found that Ms. Grabowitz was an actress in some new Link Opera.

Probably had a new role coming up and the ghost thing Perry seemed so interested in was just some promotional viral to get the world talking about her.

I didn’t even bother to follow Perry’s link to the photos.

File:
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LinkData\LinkDiary\Live\Peter_Vincent\Personal

This is hard, this next entry
.

I’m trying to get everything in the right order, to make sure that the thing I’m committing to permanent memory is indeed the event that occurred and not some altered, corrupted version of the truth
.

This next bit, though
, has
been altered, and I’m not just talking about the way the diary crashes at a crucial part of the proceedings
.

There are things missing, I feel it intuitively, but I have no way of filling in the gaps, of physically remembering the event so that I can reconstruct it from memory
.

That’s the thing about the Link, you see, the thing that we never thought about or acknowledged, or even suspected: We have stopped remembering things. We trust the Link to remember them for us
.

The problem is we shouldn’t have trusted the Link to remember things the way they happened. Details can be changed, and memories edited
.

History itself can be rewritten. You only need to change a word here, an event there. Even things like emphasis and importance can be up or downgraded to make history say what they want it to say. To make it read how they want it to read
.

My memories are no different. I remember things because I put them on the Link. That’s what we all do
.

But I can no longer be sure that what’s stored there is the truth
.

File:
113/44/00/fgj/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

At the doors of the Science Council my father gave me a tired-looking smile, told me to find a seat in the chamber, and disappeared into the crowd milling around the foyer. I stood there for a few seconds feeling abandoned, then shrugged myself out of it.

I made my way down a couple of white corridors and then through an arch that led into the Council’s main chamber.

My father once told me that the chamber was modelled after a natural cave formation that had been discovered somewhere in South America. Now, walking into it, I was
struck by the weirdness of its design. It had a ceiling that stretched high over the heads of the assembled people, with sculpted stalactites dangling down. Some of the stalactites were two metres long, and made of a material that made them look as if they were natural formations, made over many thousands of years.

Except for the fact that they were hanging from the ceiling of a room in a modern building.

Still, it sort of took your breath away just being in the room and I realised that – as a percentage – very few people got the opportunity to see it for themselves.

I looked around for Perry, but couldn’t see him, so I flashed him an enquiry and he replied with an image of the inside of the chamber, then an image of his seat number: Row F, Seat 23.

I made my way towards him.

Seating was in tiered concentric semicircles, facing a central hub, and I found Perry easily.

‘Looking sharp,’ Perry greeted.

I nodded at his suit, a dark plum-coloured Nehru affair with a cravat that changed colour every twenty-or-so
seconds. It might have been a suit I’d seen him wear a couple of times before, but the chromatic cravat was something new and, I had to admit, a pretty neat touch.

‘Not looking so bad yourself,’ I told him, taking the seat next to him. ‘What have I missed?’

Perry rolled his eyes.

‘A talk on the place of science in our brave new world, complete with a holographic presentation that was inferior to the ones we were doing for show-and-tell to the class in pre-prep.’ Perry faked a yawn. ‘Look, we’re nearly sixteen years old, have we really got nothing better to be doing of an evening?’

‘Are we not our fathers’ sons?’ I replied, then added: ‘They didn’t have the holographic giraffe again, did they?’

‘And the duck-billed platypus,’ Perry said scornfully. ‘But they’d re-skinned them both in company colours, with a logo and everything.’

‘Making nature better, one animal at a time,’
I said. ‘I’m
sooo
sad I missed that.’

‘I just bet you are,’ Perry replied. ‘Told your father about the course change yet?’

‘Of course,’ I said, waited a couple of beats and finished it with: ‘Not.’

Perry’s cravat switched from orange to grey.

‘Leave it long enough and you’ll have graduated by the time he finds out,’ he smirked.

‘That’s kind of what I’m hoping,’ I said.

Perry suddenly looked around in a decidedly shifty way, and lowered his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. ‘So what’s this I’ve been hearing about you and a mystery girlfriend?’

I swallowed and it must have been loud enough for Perry to hear.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, in my best version of a ‘deny everything’ voice.

Perry just grinned.

‘You can’t hide your filthy little secrets from me,’ he said. ‘There were confirmed reports, from many sources, of a secret tryst between my main man Peter and an as-yet-unidentified female. I just want to hear your side of it so I can keep spreading the rumours.’

I shook my head. My cheeks felt hot. I’d kind of thought
that lunch with Alpha wouldn’t have been important enough for anyone to even notice, let alone remark upon.

‘Nothing to tell,’ I muttered. ‘I did buy a girl a fruit soy, but the last time I checked that wasn’t really an important occurrence.’

Perry tutted.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘OK,’ Perry said. ‘Since when is fraternising with girls anything other than an important occurrence?’

‘Well …’

‘The answer, my friend, is:
never
.’ Perry raised his eyes to the ceiling, then back down.

‘It was a soy,’ I said feebly. ‘Sometimes a soy is just a soy.’

‘Matter. Of. Opinion,’ Perry shot back, making three sentences out of one. ‘Now quit dodging the question and spill the goods.’

But I really didn’t want to
spill
.

I wanted Perry to shut up.

He knows as well as I do that I’m not supposed to befriend girls, not yet. I am practically
forbidden
from having any female friends, let alone a
girlfriend
.

Romantic love is something that is scheduled in when I hit twenty-one.

It’s standard practice that when I make that age, a list of suitable candidates will be drawn up for me, and I will have a month to decide which three are going to make it on to my shortlist.

Negotiations will begin, final criteria will be set, and a month after that I’ll be announcing my engagement.

If my father found out about me sharing a fruit soy with a
girl
, then it would be even worse than him finding out about me swapping to a ‘soft’ course like English Literature.

The latter could be viewed as an error of judgement, a slip, a moment of madness.

The former would be viewed as something else entirely.

Disobedience.

I guess that was why I was so worried to hear that I was already the subject of college gossip. In a world where all information flows around the Link, nothing is private and no one can tell where it will end up.

My mother used to quote someone called Horace when she came across Link gossip. She’d say:
a word once let out
of its cage cannot be whistled back again
, and I had never really thought about what it meant.

Now I knew.

People talked and stories spread. It made me feel angry.

I was saved from these dark thoughts, however, by the bell. Or, rather, by the start of the Keynote address.