The Future We Left Behind (10 page)

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We never actually stood a chance
.

Our lives were mapped out for us even before we were born and there was no hope that we would ever break free of our destinies
.

I even thought that I could swap courses and learn about literature
.

One of the stories my mother used to read to me was about Chicken Licken. She used to do all the voices for all the animals that Chicken Licken enlisted in his mission to see the king. He had to see the king, you see, because he thought that the acorn that hit him on the head was a piece of the sky
.

I guess I’m a bit like Chicken Licken, you know
.

I am the boy running around trying to tell the world that the sky is falling
.

And you know what? It’s not an acorn this time
.

The sky really is falling in
.

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The bottom of my world didn’t quite drop out, but it suddenly got a lot shakier beneath my feet.

A photograph that proved my father was on a committee that had studied the Straker Tapes?

That was like finding a photograph of Charles Darwin, hidden away in a secret laboratory, creating a monkey out of clay, or something.

All I could think of was that the photo
must
have been faked.

I mean, my father, DAVID VINCENT, undertaking a scientific study of Strakerism? He would never be a part of such a thing.

Would he?

Not the David Vincent I knew. He
hated
Strakerites.

He despised the fact that their beliefs were given any weight in this world of ours.

So to suggest that my father had ever taken their ideas
seriously
…

I tried to turn my questions into something we could use and the picture that Mr. Del Rey had hidden beneath his desk seemed a good place to start.

‘The people in this picture – what else do you know about them?’ I said.

Alpha shook her head. ‘Nothing. My mother remembered a couple of the names, the others I got because they were meta-tagged into the photo. Then I searched the Link with the names and found out about the disappearances and the suicide.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, ‘but they must have families. Can we find them, talk to them?’

‘Sure,’ Alpha said. ‘But why? What help can they be?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I need to know whether they have anything
else
in common, apart from this photograph. Are
the people who disappeared all Strakerites? Did they say they felt they were being followed too? What have the families done to find the missing people? And, most importantly, what did the committee find out?’

‘You can ask your father …’

‘Yeah, I’m just not sure that is such a good idea. Not yet, anyway.’

I didn’t want to talk to him until I had more information. It could be a dangerous way to proceed – if everyone else on that photo was either missing or dead, then I had to at least
warn
my father – but I needed to find more information before approaching him.

Gather supporting evidence.

Test and retest the hypothesis.

Scientific rigour: my father would expect nothing less.

And he had to be safe inside our house – the security fence would surely keep anyone out who meant him any harm.

‘Are you suggesting that we play detective?’ Alpha asked, grinning at the idea.

‘I guess I am,’ I said.

‘You’re full of surprises, Peter. I’m glad I called you.’

‘Me too. This must be horrible for you.’

‘It was,’ Alpha said. ‘But I feel better doing something about it. People don’t just disappear, they have to be somewhere.’

The brain makes some weird connections. Something about her last sentence made me remember the Grabowitz photos.

‘People don’t disappear,’ I said. ‘But they’ve been
appearing
recently.’

Alpha raised an eyebrow.

I told her about the pictures that Perry had sent me, and she asked to have a look.

She frowned at the photographs for a while. ‘It’s weird,’ she said. ‘And it’s another of those coincidences.’

‘What is?’ I asked.

‘Have you ever heard of the zero-point-four?’ she asked me.

I nodded. It rang a bell somewhere.

‘It’s a Strakerite thing, isn’t it?’ I asked.

She sat there a while, looking at the pictures. Her pupils were reduced to pinpricks.

‘I need to tell you the story of Kyle Straker,’ she said. ‘I know that it’s going to sound a little … 
out there
, but I want you to keep an open mind.’

‘I’ll try.’

‘That’s all I can ask.’

She sat there a while longer, gathering her thoughts, and then she began.

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>
Record …

‘The Straker Tapes tell us that a long time ago, the world was a completely different place from the one we live in today.

‘This was a time before the Link, before filament networking, before bioluminescence and free renewable energy and World Government and any of the things we now take pretty much for granted.

‘New Cambridge was just “Cambridge” then. There were villages surrounding it that have been swallowed up and are just parts of the city now, but back then they were individual
places with funny names.

‘One of those villages was called Millgrove, and it is one of the most important places this world has ever known.

‘But it isn’t important for the usual reasons – because of any great inventions or discoveries that were made there, or any remarkable landmarks – but because of a boy called Kyle Straker, an average specimen of 21st century humanity, who was born there, and lived there for the first fifteen years of his life.

‘Kyle’s world had wars and famines and greed and a criminal disregard for the environment, but to Kyle it was just the way things were. He lived his life without anything remarkable happening.

‘Until Kyle and his friend Lilly Dartington, and two older people – Kate O’Donnell and Rodney Peterson – were hypnotised as a part of a primitive ritual called
The Millgrove Talent Show
. When they woke up from their trances the world around them had changed.

‘Everyone they knew – their family, their friends – had suddenly become
different
. To begin with, Kyle believed that
everyone had been replaced by alien replicas who were no longer human.

‘His tapes talk about his journey through this new world. They end with the realisation that humanity had simply been upgraded; that the changes he and his friends were seeing were the result of a new operating system for the human brain.

‘And the upgrade, well, it mended the world. But it missed out Kyle and the others. A lot of others. A whole group of people who stayed at version 0.4, while the rest of the world made the leap to 1.0.

‘While it was fully possible for Kyle and the other 0.4 to watch as these new people – the 1.0 – remade the world into the one that we know, it was not a two-way street. The 0.4 were inferior, and they were screened out, hidden from the eyes and minds of the 1.0.

‘They became invisible to us. Still there, forbidden from using our technologies, unseen.

‘I’ve often wondered what the zero-point-four might look like. What they might be doing now. How they might try to contact us. I’m not alone in this. Scholars have, for centuries,
debated that same topic.

‘The thing is, Peter, I’d say those photographs your friend sent you look pretty much like answers to me.’

>
End Recording

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I listened to Alpha’s alternate history lesson in silence. I wondered if what I was hearing was a new, frightening truth or just plain madness.

Truth and madness can sound pretty similar sometimes, I guess.

Yes, I
am
my father’s son, and I have been raised to believe that Strakerites are – at best – dangerous eccentrics with nothing but a fictional book and a crazy set of beliefs to define them.

And yes, the story of Kyle Straker’s adventures in a post-upgrade world certainly
sounded
mad, but still I wondered.

Suddenly I had a glimpse of things that might link that strange, ancient story to what I had seen today.

The ghosts in those photographs could be hoaxes, the results of data corruption … or could they be the remnants of a past world?

Alpha believed in the truth of the Straker Tapes, and that made me give the story a more careful consideration than I perhaps would have if I had heard it from another source.

And then there was my father.

Mysterious disappearances.

A countdown?

A suicide.

That hexing committee.

‘So what do you think?’ Alpha asked me, and I could tell from her face that she was filled with a whole host of thoughts and feelings that I could not read. ‘What do you want to do?’

I shrugged, touched her hand and said: ‘Why don’t we find an address for the family of Tom Greatorex. Let’s go find out what made him jump.’

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LinkMaps showed that the man we were interested in had lived in Ellery Tower, before he decided to take that last, lonely plunge.

According to the map it was a fifteen-minute walk, and I realised that Alpha and I were going to be skating rather too close to the edge of the curfew.

But it couldn’t be helped.

We both felt the need to be doing something; hardly daring to remain still for fear that the things we were pursuing would pass from our reach.

We didn’t talk a whole lot while we were walking, we were
both lost in thought.

I was still trying to work my father into the puzzle: but no matter how hard I tried, I could not believe that he had been a member of a group that had made a serious study of the Straker Tapes. Even if his conclusion was that they were fictional, they had obviously once seemed believable enough that he had afforded them the full weight of his intellect.

I checked the Link, but there was no record that I could find of the committee, or indeed its findings.

It didn’t scan.

None of it scanned.

Ellery Tower was an ultra-modern sliver of glass, pointing up towards a curdled night sky. There was a dense chemical build-up in the air tonight, a by-product of our clean energy. Even though climate control keeps the skies clear during the day, at night it kind of lets the stuff do its own thing. It’s harmless, but some nights it does make star gazing a little difficult.

Progress costs, it always costs
, I thought, then turned my attention back to the building.

A door hissed open as we stood in front of it, and we
walked into a vast lobby with trees growing upwards into the apex of the tower barely visible overhead.

There was an
auto da fé
™ to access the upper tiers, so we walked towards the exact middle of the lobby, stepped on to the target square etched into the floor, spoke the floor we needed and rose up into the air.

I don’t know if it’s possible to get used to being lifted up with no visible means of support, no visible safety equipment, no sense of any mechanism or even a floor.