The Future We Left Behind (9 page)

We learned in pre-prep to look beyond superstition when trying to explain things around us, and to fall back on to the certainties of science.

But looking at those photographs gave me a chill.

Now, I am thoroughly aware that photographs can be manipulated. I have seen pictures of my friends standing on the surface of the moon, and I have seen photographic evidence of the existence of dragons.

I’m friends with Perry, so I’ve seen more than my fair share of Link hoaxes.

But these photographs were different.

They felt like a sudden window into another, parallel path of existence. They made me think that somewhere, close to us but hidden by some trick of our senses, there was another world, where different people carried on living different lives as we bustled by, unaware of their presence.

Ghosts in the machine
, I thought.
I wonder: can they see us?

The young man in the wedding photo certainly seemed aware that a picture was being taken, looking directly into the camera and holding up those four fingers as … 
as what?

I checked the datestamp on the wedding photo.

It was taken three days ago.

The slider arrived and I flashed cash to the ticket machine, taking a seat at the back.

Three days ago
, I kept thinking.
Four fingers
.

I used Face-Recognition to scan through the rest of Ms. Grabowski’s ghosted photographs, using the young man’s face as my comparison.

I guess it was a long shot, but sometimes they work out.

I found one more image with the young man in it.

Two women walking down a neon-lit street. The young man in the foreground, looking as out of place and out of time as before.

He was holding up three fingers.

The photo was dated two days ago.

It made me think:
He’s counting down!
First four days, then three.

Three days to go: two days ago.

Is he telling us that something is going to happen … 
tomorrow?

File:
113/47/04/cbt

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

I got into town, only to find that Alpha was already there, waiting for me.

The cube-shaped retail units of downtown were on browse mode. You could still shop if you wanted to, but the service was automated and you couldn’t physically see or touch the things for sale until you had paid for them.

Although that was the way most people shopped these days.

You found things on the Link, you paid for them on the Link, and they arrived soon afterwards. I buy clothes on the Link and download their templates, and if I don’t like the
garment then I don’t return it, I just delete it from my virtual wardrobe.

Sometimes the shops seemed like a determined effort to hang on to a past way of living that was almost wholly redundant now.

I guess the past holds a power over us that none of us can quite understand.

Alpha was just where she said she would be. I could tell, even from a distance, that something was troubling her. She was pacing back and forth, her face turned down to the slidewalk, and her shoulders were slumped.

Charles Darwin, captured forever in a liquid granite sculpture, looked down from on high, offering her no advice.

I sped up and called out. Her face brightened when she looked up and saw me approaching.

‘Peter,’ she said, almost breathless with relief. ‘Thank you for coming.’

‘I can’t resist a damsel in distress,’ I said. I think I’ve already mentioned I didn’t talk to many girls, haven’t I?

We both pretended I hadn’t said the ‘damsel in distress’ thing, found a bench and sat down.

‘Nice threads,’ she said, and I realised that I was still wearing the Bartlett suit.

‘Yeah, sorry, I should have dressed up,’ I joked lamely.

Alpha’s face was tense and pale, even in the light of the glowing buildings. It made me remove the stupid filter and see her in the natural glow of stored sunlight.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

Alpha shook her head.

I didn’t know whether that meant she didn’t know, or she wasn’t ready to say just yet, so we sat there in silence and looked across at the lights of the city.

I’ve seen pictures of Cambridge as it was hundreds of years ago – there are thousands of them in the library at the college – and it’s always hard to match up that city of the past with the present one. New Cambridge was now little more than a clone of every other city on the planet, with the same kind of buildings and the same branded retail units.

‘I looked you up,’ Alpha said finally. ‘I mean, a profile and all that. I didn’t find out much about you, but I thought I could trust you.’

‘You can.’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t trust people all that easily.’ Alpha’s face was half in shadow, half brightly lit and it reminded me of my father’s face, sometime recently, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where or when.

Alpha sat there for a moment, looking like she was thinking something through, then she puffed her cheeks out and suddenly blurted: ‘Look, my family are Strakerites. Feel free to run away screaming. I won’t hold it against you.’

I tried to dismiss her fears with a laugh. ‘And there was me thinking your big secret was that you were a serial killer.’

Alpha looked shocked.

‘I would have thought being a Strakerite was worse,’ she replied.

I shook my head.

‘But your … your father …?’ she began.

‘My father may think that Strakerites are dangerously deluded, but then he
is
the man who killed off the last of the Earth’s bees.’ I reached out and touched the back of Alpha’s hand, gently, with my fingertips. ‘Me, I think everybody is entitled to their own opinions on things.’

Alpha looked at me, her eyes squeezed into suspicious
slits, like she was still expecting me to run away, or insult her or something. What she saw must have surprised her because her face softened, and her eyes opened wide.

‘You’re different,’ she said, quietly.

‘I am? To what?’

‘To everyone else,’ Alpha said. ‘I told you that I was in trouble,’ she said, ‘but that wasn’t the complete truth. It’s not me, exactly, it’s my dad.’

‘Why, what’s wrong with him?’

‘That’s the problem,’ Alpha said, close to tears. ‘I don’t know. He’s … gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Disappeared. No one’s seen him. He was supposed to meet my mother for lunch today and didn’t turn up. She couldn’t reach him in the Link. She checked everyone she could think of and no one has seen him since he left the house this morning.’ She grimaced. ‘Yes, we live in New Lincoln Heights.’

‘Looks like an amazing place,’ I said. ‘I like the crystal engineering methods – the buildings look like diamonds or something.’

‘It’s a scary place.’ Alpha said. ‘It may look great on the outside, but the way the authorities are cramming Strakerites in … it’s becoming a slum.’

I thought about what my father said about them being ghettoes, and it was odd to be hearing the same sort of ideas being spoken by someone on the
other side
of those crystal walls.

‘So where do you think he’s gone?’ I asked her. ‘Your father, I mean.’

She shrugged.

‘If he was the only one that had disappeared I guess I wouldn’t be worried,’ she told me. ‘But I have to show you something. I just don’t want you to freak out on me.’

‘I’ll try not to,’ I said, wondering what she was talking about.

She put her hand next to mine and deployed a single filament, and I did the same. We interfaced and she sent an image that hung in the air between us.

The image was a photograph of a row of five people – all men – standing in a line.

They looked like friends, and they were all grinning at the
camera lens, arms around each other’s shoulders.

They were all wearing identical lab coats.

I didn’t know who four of them were, but was shocked to see that the one in the middle was my father.

He was a fair bit younger-looking, but it was unmistakably him.

Alpha used her hand to point to the people in the photo, starting on the left and working right.

‘This is Edgar Nelson,’ she said pointing to a tall, thin man. ‘His family reported him missing five days ago.’

She moved on to the next, a shorter, grey-haired older man with a kind smile. ‘Leonard DeLancey: missing now for three weeks.

‘I’m sure you know the next person in the line, and the next one along from your father is
my
dad, Iain Del Rey. And this man …’ she pointed to the last in line, an intense-looking man with piercing dark eyes, ‘was called Tom Greatorex. Apparently he told his family he was sure he was being followed, and when they didn’t believe him he said they were “in on it too”. They thought he was paranoid, and he ended up jumping from a high building.’

I felt my skin bristle.

‘When did that happen?’ I asked her, little more than a croak.

‘Earlier today,’ she said.

I shook my head to clear the image of the bystanders gathering around the person on the tracks of the slideway earlier.

‘It seems that our fathers used to work together,’ Alpha said. ‘And judging by this picture they used to be friends.’

‘But if all the others are …’

‘… either missing or dead,’ Alpha finished my sentence, ‘it means
your father
, the great David Vincent, is probably next on the list.’

File:
113/47/04/cbt/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

It didn’t make sense.

Any of it.

So many things were happening today, it was like time was being compressed, and I wasn’t fast enough to keep pace.

‘Where was this photograph taken?’ I asked Alpha.

She shrugged. ‘I’d never seen it before. Neither had my mother. She was in a state when she couldn’t get in touch with him – I mean, now that we have the Link it’s not as if we can’t find anybody whenever we need to – and she went through the house trying to find some clue as to where he could have gone.

‘Eventually she found an old-fashioned data storage drive hidden away in my dad’s study; it was taped to the bottom of his desk. It’s an antique – the drive, I mean, not the desk. We were surprised it still held data. The only thing on it was this picture.

‘My dad never hides anything away; what you see is what you get with him. But he hid this, and then he disappeared. It makes no sense. My mum vaguely remembered that this photo was taken just after Dad graduated – when he was an information technologist on some special project.

‘Don’t you think it’s a real coincidence that your father is in the photo too?’

‘My mother used to say that a coincidence was just what we called events that we hadn’t seen the connection between yet,’ I said.

‘Sounds like your mother had read the Kyle Straker Tapes,’ Alpha said. ‘When Kyle reaches the silos on the outskirts of Millgrove he makes a very similar observation.’

I gave her a quizzical look.

‘Do you know anything about Strakerites?’ she asked.

‘Only what I hear from my father,’ I said.

She frowned. ‘Maybe not the best source. Strakerites believe that Kyle Straker existed. He was a boy who lived a long, long time ago. He watched on as the whole of the human race was upgraded by unknown forces, but remained untouched by the programming.’

‘I’ve heard that much,’ I said. ‘I just couldn’t really make the leap to believing it.’

Alpha winced.

‘The Straker Tapes are only the start of the journey,’ she continued. ‘But it’s not just blind faith in an unprovable proposition – there’s a lot of evidence to back it up.’

‘My father would disagree,’ I told her.

‘Yeah, well, he probably has his reasons.’ Alpha disconnected filament networking abruptly. ‘Look, maybe this was a bad idea.’

‘What was a bad idea?’ I asked, suddenly feeling like I’d upset her.

‘Asking you for help. You are, I guess, your father’s son.’

‘That’s hardly my fault,’ I argued. ‘Yes, he raised me, but I’m not the same as him.’

‘You sounded like you thought I was insane for believing
in Kyle Straker though,’ she said.

‘OK, I’m sorry about that,’ I replied. ‘I have been raised to believe that science shows the way forward and that Strakerites are trying to drag humanity back to a dark age of superstition. I’m completely open to hearing another side of things. And I didn’t mean to make out that you were crazy, it’s just hard to fight against …’

‘Your father’s programming?’ Alpha finished, and she actually smiled. ‘I think you might be surprised by how much science Strakerites employ in their attempts to make sense of the words of Kyle Straker.’

I felt the tickle of her filament against my hand and linked back. The photograph reappeared in front of us.

Alpha pointed at the line of men, or rather at the white coats the men were wearing, and I could see an indistinct crest or logo on the breast pocket of each coat.

Alpha did an ‘expand’ gesture with her thumb and forefinger and the image zoomed in, on to the pocket of my father’s lab coat.

Thanks to the image’s fractal compression the tiny details of the zoomed image were stored along with the
larger ones, and the blow-up of the pocket was sharp and clear.

There was a design that looked like a snake. The snake seemed to be eating its own tail.

Beneath it, in embroidered lettering, were the words:

Committee for the Scientific

Investigation of the Straker Tapes.

‘The Doomsday Clock’

I saw the people in the crowd, all of them, and they had become … were becoming …
something else.
Something … impossible
.

Rodney Peterson