The Future We Left Behind (11 page)

You seem to be breaking a law of physics just using one, but that’s an illusion, of course; I guess that’s how they got the name –
auto da fé
: an act of faith – because it feels like one. OK, it’s a faith in science and engineering, but it feels like … I don’t know … 
magic
, I suppose.

We stopped on the 24th floor and stepped off on to the gantry, then made our way to apartment 9. We were at the door when we realised that neither of us had a clue how to proceed.

We were a couple of kids with no business asking anyone any questions.

We stood there until it started getting embarrassing and
then I remembered an episode from Last Quest where the warrior I was controlling needed to get some information from the Guild of Thieves. The information was about some buried treasure that I never managed to find, but what I learned was that you just needed to keep up a dialogue until you found a way to turn things around to the topic that you wanted to discuss. Of course, that was with a computer character programmed to give you the information if you used the right approach.

An actual human being had no such programming.

Still, it was better than nothing, wasn’t it? So I knocked on the door.

Alpha shot me a look but I smiled to reassure her and she shrugged.

There were noises from within.

Then silence.

We had just decided that the person inside was going to ignore us when, suddenly, the door burst open.

A woman in her mid-forties stood there looking down at us. She was tall and elegant, but her eyes were dark and joyless, the flesh around them red and puffy. Her mouth was
kind of twisted up in a way that reflected that inner pain.

‘What is it?’ she demanded, and her voice, too, was laced with sorrow. ‘What do you want?’

‘Ms. Greatorex?’ I asked, trying a warm tone. ‘We need to talk to you.’

‘I don’t think I want to talk to anyone,’ she said. ‘Not now. Please, leave me alone.’ She moved her hand to shut the door. ‘And it’s Mrs.,’ she added as her voice started to crack.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, not sure if I was apologising for the intrusion, her grief, or for addressing her incorrectly. ‘I don’t want to interrupt, but we really need to talk to you. It’s about Tom.’

The very mention of his name caused her face to soften. It was only a little, just a loosening of her tightened jaw muscles, but enough to give me a tiny bit of hope.

‘Thomas …?’ she said, only turning it into a question on the last syllable.

‘Thomas. Yes.’ I figured it might be a good idea to adopt her use of the longer form of the man’s name. ‘I need you to help me … 
us
.’

I gestured at Alpha and she gave a tiny nod, solemn and earnest.

‘It’s my father,’ Alpha said. ‘He used to work with Thomas. Now he’s missing. Vanished. No one has seen him.’

‘Oh,’ Mrs. Greatorex looked confused, but her hand fell to her side and no longer looked ready to slam the door in our faces. ‘Your father …?’

‘His name is Iain, Iain Del Rey.’

‘Iain?’ The woman’s face looked puzzled. ‘Iain was the name of Mr. Peterson’s son.’

I looked at Alpha, primarily to pull a face that meant I thought the woman was losing it, but Alpha frowned at me.

‘That’s right,’ Alpha said warmly. ‘Iain was four years old when he developed leukaemia, and Mr. Peterson made Mr. Peebles to get him to laugh.’

The woman nodded, and I saw a miraculous thing. Her mouth finally untwisted and became a smile. Not much of a smile, but a smile nonetheless.

She looked at Alpha with something like admiration.

‘Please,’ Mrs. Greatorex said. ‘Won’t you come inside?’

We followed her and she led us through a huge minimalist
hall lined with marble tiles. There were five doors along the hall, and she took us into the closest room. It was a lounge featuring the same lack of decor, with no seating: just four silver vents of differing sizes on the floor.

Mrs. Greatorex gestured to the larger of the vents, while she went towards a smaller one, then sat down. She hung in mid-air as if there was a chair underneath her.

The seats were an act of faith, too.

I had to lower myself down and hope that there was something there to catch me, half-expecting to hit the floor with a thump.

But, just as I reached the point-of-no-return and would have found it hard to stop myself, I felt my body come into contact with something … 
soft
.

It was so weird.

I realised that there had to be some sort of controlled blast of air coming up through the vent, forming a kind of cushion of pressure that was strong enough to support my weight, and focused enough so that it fit to the contours of my body perfectly.

It was, I was surprised to discover, incredibly comfortable.

And slightly warm.

Alpha said: ‘Wow.’

I nodded in agreement.

Mrs. Greatorex waved a hand in the air. ‘Thomas designed the seating, because it tied in with the invisible way that makes the
auto da fé
work,’ she said. ‘He did so love to link things together, develop themes … He never stopped, you see. Even when they took it all away from him …’

‘Who took what?’ Alpha asked. ‘I mean, we don’t know anything about Thomas, we just found a photograph of him in my father’s study …’

Mrs. Greatorex frowned.

‘My husband is … 
was
 … a remarkable man,’ she said. ‘Truly remarkable. He had a great mind, an uncommon, brilliant mind. He was able to turn himself to any problem and see through the most complex sets of data to find the simple answer that everyone else missed.

‘He saw patterns that no one else could. He would look at pages and pages of statistics and numbers and suddenly he would see order. Even when they took away his lab and his livelihood he carried on, trying to find answers to
questions that no one else had thought to ask.’

Mrs. Greatorex shook her head, slowly and sadly. ‘He became obsessed with the Link. Not with using it, but with how it worked. He had noticed some glitches in the system and he wanted to work out how to stop them happening. That was him, really. He identified a problem and then he
had
to work out a solution.

‘He ran a whole series of experiments, and then set out to find some kind of pattern; something that tied all the glitches together.

‘The problem is that our minds seek out patterns. I think that Thomas became so desperate to find
something
, he started to imagine that even chaos made sense.

‘He started acting strangely. He became secretive and distant. I just thought he was wrapped up in his work, but it was something else …

‘Towards the end he got very scared. He was sure that something was happening, something that he was powerless to stop. He wouldn’t talk about it … he couldn’t … but it was eating him up inside. You could see it on his face. He had always been so happy and full of life, but the worry was
draining the joy and life from him, and I hardly recognised him at all.’

I felt Alpha’s hand squeezing my arm. Hard. I looked over but she wasn’t looking at me, she was staring at Mrs. Greatorex with unblinking attention and I realised that she probably wasn’t even aware that she had hold of me.

‘Then it got really bad,’ Mrs. Greatorex continued. ‘He started to look at me … with
suspicion
. He said that I was ‘one of them’, that they were everywhere, that there were ‘a million eyes’ watching him all the time.

‘Fear and anxiety overtook his mind, and the whole world became one of surveillance and conspiracy.’

She broke off and I could see how much it had hurt when her husband’s suspicions turned to her, implicating her in his elaborate fantasy. But what if it hadn’t been a fantasy?

Because the people connected to Thomas Greatorex
had
disappeared, and that had to mean something, didn’t it?

‘So you’re absolutely sure that there was no one watching him?’ I asked her.

She looked genuinely surprised by the question.

‘I don’t see how there could have been,’ she said after a
moment’s thought. ‘And a
million eyes
watching him all the time – that sounds like classic paranoia.’

Sometimes
, I thought,
a duck is a duck
.

‘Could he have meant that he was being watched
through the Link?
’ Alpha suddenly asked. ‘I mean that might seem like a million eyes, mightn’t it?’

Mrs. Greatorex’s face turned pale. Her eyes moved quickly in her sockets as she tried to see a flaw in Alpha’s reasoning.

‘Oh,’ was all she said after a few seconds.

We waited and I turned and nodded approval in Alpha’s direction.

‘It all sounded so mad,’ Mrs. Greatorex said, suddenly sounding like she was trying to convince herself rather than us. ‘That would mean …’ and she trailed off and sat there in shocked, contemplative silence.

I knew I needed to move her on fast.

‘Did you ever hear of something called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Straker Tapes?’ I asked.

‘Of course.’ The question seemed to shake Mrs. Greatorex out of her silence. ‘Thomas was a data analyst for the project. He looked at all the results of the enquiry. He wasn’t allowed
to discuss it, not even with me, but I know how betrayed he felt when that … 
that man
overrode the committee’s true findings.

‘I think that was the beginning of the end of his career. He disagreed with the official version of things and it made it very hard for him to find employment afterwards – he was the crazy one, the one who believed in the Straker Tapes …’

‘He wasn’t alone,’ Alpha said. ‘My father worked on that committee. He believed in Kyle, too.’

I felt a coldness in my spine.

‘You said “that man”.’ I said. ‘Who were you talking about?’

Mrs. Greatorex’s face showed contempt.

‘The head of the committee,’ she said, her lips pursed. ‘The chairman. He stole my husband’s life from him. He said that Tom was unstable and that his conclusions were nothing short of delusional.’

She squeezed her eyes shut and spat the next two words out with such venom that I felt ashamed and terrified.

‘David Vincent.’

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We talked for a little while after that, but Mrs. Greatorex started repeating herself. We tried pressing her for more information about our fathers, but apart from a deep-seated hatred directed towards mine, she didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, anything else of use.

I neglected to mention my relationship to the man who destroyed her husband’s career, and Alpha was sensitive enough not to bring it up.

Alpha made a few more odd references to the Straker Tapes – something cryptic about someone called Danny,
and a joke about a dog called Bambi – and then we were being shown out.

We were getting ever closer to the edge of curfew. I’ve never been out anywhere
near
curfew, and it looked possible I was going to miss it.

I told Alpha that I needed to get home, and she nodded.

‘The weird thing is, I’m terrified of missing curfew, but I have no idea what would happen if I did,’ she said.

I realised that she was right.

Even while I was sitting on a sofa made of air in Mrs. Greatorex’s place, the nagging discomfort that I would be late home was growing within me.

Now I was feeling close to panic.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘we can pick this up in the morning. Maybe a good night’s sleep will help us see some sense.’

She moved in closer to me, and her face looked pale and scared in the moonlight, but she still managed a smile.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘For what?’

‘For coming when I needed you.’

‘It’s like I told you,’ I said, ‘I like to help my friends.’

‘Yeah, well this went above and beyond the call of duty.’

‘Not at all,’ I said.

Alpha seemed about to say something, then she raised herself up on tiptoe and kissed me.

It was on the cheek, and only lasted a couple of seconds, but it was a kiss all the same.

‘We’d better get ourselves home,’ she said, and it seemed like there was regret in her voice.

I could only nod.

‘Fancy playing truant tomorrow?’ she asked, and I nodded again. I’m rarely at a loss for words, but just then I could hardly
remember
how to speak.

‘I like you Peter,’ she said as she walked away. ‘You’ve got a smart answer for everything.’

She’d already turned the corner when I realised that it was a joke.

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I arrived home with four whole minutes to spare.

My mind was a blizzard of thoughts, but none of them would settle and it all turned to slush.

I expected my father to be waiting for me, angry and accusing, and it was almost an anticlimax to discover that the house was as quiet as when I left it.

I made my way to my bedroom and sat at my desk, trying to figure out an angle to approach all of this from. Still my mind chattered away, non-stop, filling my head with near-meaningless static.

I took a calcium supplement and stared at my wall.

What did it all mean?

Did it mean anything at all?

I stood up and moved to a blank space of wall. I touched it and thought about Alpha’s missing father. That made me think of the photograph and I opened up the image file in my head, deployed my filaments, and placed it on to the wall.

It sat there in the middle of all that empty space and I looked at it for a while, before zooming in on the insignia on the lab coats in the photo and placing that on the wall too.

I studied the design.

A snake eating its own tail.

I ran a LinkSearch and came up with a lot of hits. The design was called an
ouroboros –
which was ancient Greek for ‘tail-eater’, appropriately enough – and it was supposed to symbolise the idea that existence was somehow cyclical, that it constantly renewed, or recreated, itself.