The Future We Left Behind (17 page)

I guess you only really start to
see
something – really, truly see it – when it is in jeopardy. I suddenly realised that it all could just end in an instant. That the world we were passing through could suddenly become another one, just because of a signal transmitted from the depths of space, and everything we knew, everything we were, could just
change
.

Whether it would be a better world was irrelevant, really.

It wouldn’t be
ours
.

And Alpha and I wouldn’t be
us
.

Not really.

Not any more.

After the upgrade, Kyle Straker’s parents were no longer his parents. They might have looked the same, but they weren’t. They had become something else. Something more like us, like Alpha and me, creatures that could network through fleshy wires in our hands, and that could communicate without speaking.

To Kyle they were monsters.

Just like we would be monsters to people who missed the next upgrade.

Do you know something?

I realised then that I actually liked being me.

I liked being the way that I am.

I wanted to hang on to me.

And if that meant going up against alien programmers, or worse, my father, then so be it.

I would do everything in my power to remain me, and to keep Alpha Alpha.

We reached our stop and left the slider.

File:
113/50/05/wtf/Continued

Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

I had to log Alpha in as a guest so we could get through the security fence. She held on to my hand as the fence performed its checks, a few nervous seconds passed, and then we were through.

‘Nice,’ Alpha said, staring up the path at the house. ‘So this is where you live, huh, Peter?’

I felt a jolt of guilty embarrassment, thinking about what she had said earlier about the crystal neighbourhoods being slums in all but name.

‘You’re not going to get all Kyle Straker on me and stop calling, are you?’ I joked.

‘There’s a reference you wouldn’t have known to make last week,’ Alpha said, rolling her eyes. ‘You’ve got to admit that hanging around with me is nothing if not educational.’

I gave her a smile, but then purpose filtered back in, and humour suddenly felt out of place so we consulted the GPS.

We made our way in silence to the precise spot indicated on the map and stood on the lawn, pretty much in the centre of the front expanse, looking at the ground and trying to figure out how the hex to get under it.

The garden was calm and tranquil and there was a hazy quality to the light that made the place seem unreal and unfamiliar.

I’ve heard about archaeologists finding the past in the ground, digging up remnants of that which went before, but I don’t think I have ever stopped to think just what that meant. That societies have always built upon the past, new societies on top of older societies; that layers of history stretch down into the very earth itself, sleeping, awaiting discovery.

I really didn’t think that digging was going to be our way in, though. My memory had been altered so that it looked like it took place in this garden, when it had actually taken place
beneath it, and I doubted that we got down there through spadework.

But get down there we did. Somehow.

Alpha stood there, looking baffled. ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.

‘There must be an entrance somewhere.’

‘But why?’ Alpha said, frustrated. ‘Why would there be?’

And that was a good question. A really good question. Why the hex would there be an entrance to an underground world in the garden of our house? It was stupid. Just plain stupid. Like something out of a Last Quest scenario, but not the kind of thing that happened in real life.

Unless …

Oh, no.

Unless …

I shook my head and realised what I fool I had been.

The answer was right in front of me, and had been all along. ‘What if my father’s research into the Straker Tapes didn’t end with that committee?’ I said. ‘What if he’s known about the silos all along, and it’s why we live here? He might be the world’s greatest critic of your beliefs in public, but in
private he’s looking like a devoted believer. Except with him it’s not even belief. It’s not faith. It’s certainty. He was on that committee and he found out the truth. He even built us a house slap bang over the evidence. Alpha, my father
knows
that the Straker Tapes are true. That was the real finding of the committee. It’s true. It’s all true.’

My voice had been steadily rising in volume, until I was almost shouting by the end of it.

Alpha looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘But why?’ she asked me. ‘Why would he pretend like that? Why would he hide the only real evidence of what Strakerites have been saying for centuries? Why, Peter?’

‘Because he’s up to something,’ I answered.

I broke off, feeling sick to my stomach.

I couldn’t say what had just occurred to me.

I just couldn’t.

Alpha, however, could. ‘And your mother?’ she asked.

I had tears in my eyes. ‘And my mother,’ I whispered. ‘She didn’t leave us. He did something. He took her away from me.’

‘And my father?’ Alpha said weakly.

I nodded.

‘It’s all connected,’ I said. ‘Everything. And my father … he must be behind it all.’

It was a startling and terrible thought, one that reached into the very heart of who I was, or who I
thought
I was.

I’m not naïve.

At least not much.

But I genuinely thought that my father was a decent man. Driven in his work, maybe; surly and often indifferent to me, of course; cruel and dismissive to people who didn’t share his opinions, always; but I never suspected him of being utterly dishonest.

Now I was certain of it.

Weird how your life changes, isn’t it?

Well I had to do something, and standing in the garden was getting us nowhere, so I reckoned that there had to be a clue in the house, somewhere.

A secret door in his lab – and maybe that was why he’d never let me in there – or a hatch in the floor?

I was about to tell Alpha about my father’s lab-at-home when she let out a sudden shriek and started flapping at her neck with panicked hands.

‘Something just bit me,’ she said indignantly. ‘Right on the hexing neck.’

I hurried over to her and she stopped flapping, so I looked at where her fingers were now busy rubbing at a red patch on her skin.

‘Let me look,’ I said, and she moved her fingers aside, drawing back her hair so I could see clearly.

An angry red bump stood up from the surface of her skin, with a red pinprick at its summit. I thought that the red spot looked like a drop of her blood.

‘That’s weird.’ I said. ‘Maybe it is a bite. Or a sting.’

I put my finger on to the bump and it felt hot and inflamed. Alpha grunted in discomfort and I was just about to say sorry when I felt a sudden, sharp pain on the back of my hand.

I looked at it and for a second I thought that someone was playing a practical joke. There was an artificial bee sitting there, in the spot where I’d just felt pain: four centimetres long and glinting in the light of the sun.

It was just so strange. I mean the bees, they don’t interact with humans at all. They’re programmed not to.
They’re programmed to stay away from us.

This one didn’t seem to know that.

In fact, it had just stung me.

I tried to shake it off, but it was clinging on tight, so I had to swat it free with the other hand.

‘Are you all right?’ Alpha asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I just got stung. By a bee.’

‘A bee?’ Alpha said.

‘A bee,’ I repeated. ‘One of my father’s robot bees just stung me on the hand.’

Alpha looked at my hand, and at the twin of the bump she had on her neck, and her brow creased up.

‘It must be the same one that stung me. It has to be a malfunction, or something.’

‘Artificial bees don’t have stings,’ I said. ‘Why would they? They don’t need defence mechanisms, they’re made of metal.’

‘Well, this one did. Weird.’

‘Weird indeed, I mean I have never heard of someone being stung by a bee before, and here we are, two in a minute …’

I broke off. Alpha was looking around and seemed a little freaked out.

‘What?’

‘Ssshhhhh,’ she said, waving me quiet with her hand. ‘Listen.’

I shut up and did as she instructed.

The garden was still and quiet, interrupted only by the buzz of bees.

The buzz of bees.

Not the quiet, languid hum of bees as they went from flower to flower, spreading pollen and ensuring the plants’ reproduction though fertilisation; but rather a loud, disquieting buzz that sounded … 
angry
.

Enraged.

‘I don’t like this,’ Alpha said, and her voice was scared. ‘Not one bit.’

‘Me neither. Let’s get inside. Quickly,’ I said, gesturing at the house.

My hand froze in mid-air.

Off to our right, the air was suddenly becoming obscured by a dark, hazy disturbance. It took a second or two to make
sense, but when it did I felt my growing disquiet graduating into full-fledged terror.

A huge cloud of bees was rising slowly from the bushes and flowers; a dense swarm that had to be made up of literally thousands of the artificial insects.

Rising up as if they had been hiding the whole time, waiting, and now the wait was over. The swarm looked like it had locked on to us, with the bee that had stung us both merely an advance scout for this terrible army.

We didn’t have long.

I knew how fast these things could travel. I knew that the bees were capable of vertical take-off, and that they could move three times as fast as the creature they were modelled after.

What’s the point in copying life
, my father had once said,
if you don’t take a little time to improve upon the original?

Well, were there any more tricks he’d added?

‘RUN!’ I shouted.

We broke for the house just as the swarm surged forward. Thousands of bees, armed with stings, moving as one unit.

With us as their targets.

We ran.

Ran as fast as our legs could carry us, across the lawn, with that hideous buzz driving us onwards.

Five metres from the door, the swarm caught up with us. The air grew thick and dark and sharp and impossibly noisy. Metal bodies pinged off my face as I smashed into them, and I felt stings plunging into my flesh all over my body. I squeezed my eyes into barely open slits and focused on the front door ahead of me. Ignoring the stings, the pain, the incessant buzzing, I just aimed myself at reaching the rectangle that had suddenly become the only thought in my head.

Alpha was screaming but she didn’t let it slow her down. We hit the front step at the same time and I already had my filaments ready to open the door. I don’t remember deploying them, it must have been done with pure instinct.

I grabbed hold of Alpha and literally threw us both through the door, retracting my filaments even as gravity took hold and pulled us both down.

We hit the floor of the hall hard and lay there for a few seconds, with our limbs tangled up together, and I could only
just hear the sound of the door mechanism closing over the roaring buzz of our pursuers.

My body was covered in stings that all screamed out in various shades of pain, but I managed to ignore them and even raised my head to watch as the door swung closed.

A small part of the swarm had already made it through into the house before the door finished closing. They were in the air above us, a sparse but no less deadly cloud of them, and they kind of hovered there as if they had temporarily lost sight of their targets.

The only way to get ourselves safe was simply to keep moving. I dragged myself along the floor on my knees and one hand, while the other grabbed a handful of Alpha’s clothes so I could pull her along behind me. Putting my weight on to the stings on my hand and legs just made them hurt more, but I couldn’t stop.

I didn’t head for the nearest door, the dining room, because I could see the door was closed. Instead I headed towards my room because I had, as always, left it ajar.

This is insane!
My mind kept saying.
Bees? My father’s bees? Really?

We reached my room just as the remaining bees locked on to us and started heading our way. I could hear them getting closer and I urged Alpha to hurry up. We threw ourselves forward, and made the threshold with a second or so to spare. Alpha and I bundled into the room and I kicked out to slam the door behind us. There was a resounding crash as the swarm hit the door and then Alpha and I were rolling around, brushing at our clothes, just in case we’d imported any of the swarm into my room hidden in their folds.

We lay on my bedroom floor, out of breath, adrenaline levels spiking off the scale, scared beyond our ability to speak, and for a short while the world ceased to make any sense.

My body was on fire in dozens of separate places, the most painful of which was a sting to my left eyelid that had swollen up and was rubbing against the eyeball.

I opened my eyes.

Alpha was hugging herself with arms that were trembling, and she was crying too. I crawled over to her and laid a hand upon her arm. She tensed away from my touch as if retreating from a threat.

Outside the bedroom door the swarm still buzzed, and I could hear the impacts as tiny bodies crashed into it, as if they were trying to get through to us.

Finally Alpha spoke.

‘I guess … your father … doesn’t want us to find out what he’s up to,’ she said in a voice that sounded somehow as if it had lost some of its clarity, some of its confidence.

‘It’s going to take a bit more than a few bees to stop us,’ I said, full of false bravado.

‘Do you know how many of those bees there are in the world?’ Alpha asked, still sounding defeated. ‘Billions. There are
billions
of them. And your father controls them all.’