1.4 (12 page)

. . .
to what?

That was the question, wasn’t it?

The young man in the photos counting down on his fingers – was one of the 0.4? The 1.0? The 1.4.7?

I felt a cold trickle down the length of my spine.

Counting down on his fingers.

Was he counting down to another upgrade?
I thought, suddenly.
Does everything change tomorrow?

I stared at the wall, looking for something that would disprove the wild, insane, horrible theory.

But nothing there helped.

I lay down on my bed, with dark thoughts flowing through my head. Outside my window I could hear the muted buzz of artificial bees.

What can I do?
I asked myself.
What can any of us do?

There was, of course, no answer.

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I dreamed that I was standing in the street outside New Lincoln Heights, staring up at the crystal spires.

Except they weren’t quite the spires I’d been looking at earlier.

The alien language from the Straker Tapes was writhing and curling like smoke across the crystal walls, and there was a high-pitched squeal – like the screams of a million people

– tearing through the air.

Over the towers hovered dull grey clouds, and there was no sun in the sky. Everything around me looked like it had been leeched of colour, pallid shadows of their former selves.

The only thing unaffected by the fade-out was that horrible language that was spreading outwards from the towers, moving throughout the sky, until it infected the clouds with its alien message.

The clouds grew heavy with code, bloated and stretched, and then they let go and the code rained down on the world below.

My heart was pounding in my chest like it was trying to break free of its bone cage.

I wanted to turn away, run as far from there as was possible, but I could not move, I could only stand and watch as the wet code from the clouds splashed around me, and everything it touched became tainted by it.

I watched as a group of people fled towards me, their eyes wide in terror. The rain enveloped them and then they were being swallowed up by the hooks and eyes of that terrible code. It seemed to dance across their flesh before sinking into their bodies.

Suddenly the fear in their faces was gone, replaced by a uniform blank look. They stopped moving and stood upright, their eyes blinking in unison, and behind them the crystal towers blurred – like a graphical glitch – and then they were different: twin concrete towers, rounded at the top.

‘You must not look at goblin men,’ a voice behind me said, and I recognised it as Alpha’s. I turned in relief and gratitude, only to see the man who’d shouted at me when I was walking back home: the goblin man himself. ‘Their fruits have roots deep underground,’ he said, eyes wide and hair tousled, ‘where you will find a worm is eating its own tail. A place where all things begin and end. Alpha. And Omega. She’ll follow you into fire, but why would you lead her there?’

‘Who are you?’ I asked, but my voice sounded like a child’s.

The man ignored me as if he hadn’t even heard.

‘She wants to find her father,’ he said, ‘but the key is with your mother. To find him, find her. Follow the breadcrumbs. They will lead you here.’ He pointed to the concrete towers.

I turned to look at the towers and when I turned back the man was gone.

There was a sound like thunder in the sky.

I turned my face up to the heavens and the clouds were gone. The alien code was gone.

And that was when I saw. That was when I saw THEM.

There were things up there, on the other side of the sky, pushed up against it and making the sky itself stretch under their pressure. It was as if the sky above me was little more than a skin, and the things were pressing against it from outside our atmosphere, making it bulge inwards.

I can’t say what the creatures looked like because I only saw unrelated details. There were flexing coils that could have been ropes or tentacles or tubules, enormous and terrible. There were the gelatinous lumps and knotted bumps that pulsed against the sky, making it shake. Then there were the horrible patches of sky that seemed to be concealing squirming masses of things that I could have thought were maggots writhing in dead flesh if it wasn’t for their colossal, impossible scale.

As I watched, a tear appeared in the curdled sky, and a mass of vast, grey, wet tubing lolled obscenely from the wound in our atmosphere.

The sky is falling,
I thought as I woke up
. The sky is falling and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

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I awoke feeling tired and drained and on the very brink of panic. The terrible imagery of the dream was still clinging to my mind like cobwebs.

It was far and away the weirdest dream I’ve ever had. It took me minutes to shake free of it, but eventually it lessened its grip on me, and I was able to push it to the back of my mind and concentrate on the things that needed to be done.

I chose ‘simple but sophisticated’ as my wardrobe theme for the day, shut down the data wall and went out to face the world.

My father was in the dining room, reading data from a LinkPad. He didn’t so much as acknowledge my presence so I left him to his work, fixed myself some breakfast, bolted it down and made to leave the room.

‘Are you going out, Peter?’ my father asked, without looking up from his Pad.

I froze, my hand on the door stud.

‘I-I . . .’ I started to say.

‘It’s all right, Peter,’ he said. ‘I know what you are up to. And I know that you are only playing your part in the drama of life. The question you should be asking yourself is,
who’s writing the script?

‘What are we talking about here?’ I asked. ‘Is this about the college course?’

Still my father studied the screen of his Pad.

‘English literature,’ he said, and made it sound like a pair of dirty words. ‘That’s about the least of it, right, Peter?’

‘If you say so,’ I said.

‘I certainly do say so.’ There was steel in his voice, but still he didn’t look up.

‘I was going to tell you,’ I said, pathetically.

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ My father responded. ‘Today is going to be . . . very interesting indeed. Run around, play detective, find out the truth for yourself.’

He broke off and finally looked up from his screen. ‘See if it makes any difference at all.’ And he grinned.

‘I left something for you on the table by the front door,’ he said. ‘A present for you and Alpha.’

Then he looked back at his screen.

It was hard to know whether he was finished or not, but the seconds passed slowly and he didn’t say anything else so I let myself out.

On the table by the door was the ‘present’: a small anthracite-black case with a gold hinge. I tried to open it but my hands were shaking, and to be honest I just wanted to get away from there, so I put it in my pocket and walked out.

Did my father know everything?

I felt sick and my stomach was knotted into leaden coils. Had he been reading my LinkDiary? Even though it was encrypted?

It was the only explanation I could find for the things he seemed to know.

The thought that he had broken into my LinkDiary made me angry, but also something else.

Confused
If he did know everything, if he knew what I was doing and where I was going, then why hadn’t he told me off, grounded me, or tried to stop me?

I’d lived in such a state of anxiety about him finding out that I had enrolled on the English literature course, and he had hardly given it a moment’s thought.

He
definitely
knew about Alpha, though – which should have sent him into an incandescent rage.

But he had been calm;
resigned
almost.

Or worse, he hadn’t cared.

That worried me more than anything else: his complete indifference.

LINKPEOPLE

An Interview with David Vincent

Q.
So, you are perhaps one of the best-known scientists in the world. Certainly the most high profile. How does that feel?

A.
Feel? Great, I suppose. It’s odd, because history is littered with far greater scientists than me, but I’m who people immediately think of when asked to name one. And it’s flattering, but humbling too. And in all likelihood utterly undeserved.

Q.
The man who saved the world from the bee crisis? Undeserving?

A.
Well, that’s what I mean, really. The bee crisis was a high-profile thing, and everyone was aware of it, so it was inevitable that it would be seen as a defining moment for me, but it was nowhere near as important as figuring out gravity, or DNA, or the laws of thermodynamics. I guess what I did was just a bit flashier.

Q.
It was certainly that. (Laughs.) Anyway, you are a – how shall I put this – an outspoken opponent of Strakerite doctrine, and especially its place within our schools. What are the problems that you see in Upgradist thinking?

A.
Ah, straight in with a big one.

Well, the problems are simple. You see, Strakerism is built upon an unprovable premise: that we owe our minds, our ideas, even our physical characteristics, to alien creatures; programmers from outer space; gods in all but name.

But it’s nothing more than superstition. And superstition is the enemy of scientific progress, of reason. Science is based on the provable, the measurable and the repeatable. Superstition, on the other hand, requires no tests, no measurements, no proof: just faith.

It is a viewpoint that explains human existence by using a lie. A primitive, childish lie. Humanity got to be the way it is through many millions of years of the greatest scientific project this planet has ever seen: evolution.

To deny the truth of evolution by natural selection is to deny the very truth of ourselves, and that is incredibly dangerous.

Q.
Right, evolution. Strakerites suggest that it’s a theory that stops covering humankind hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that filament networking, the Link and other such things seemed to occur very recently and cannot be explained by evolution. How do you reply to these suggestions?

A.
How does anyone reply to statements that are so wrong? The Strakerites have built themselves a ‘case’ on the flimsiest foundations, always demanding that we show them where ‘x’ came from, or when ‘y’ arrived as a human characteristic, without stopping to think that the alternative they suggest is, frankly, absurd. We have evidence of evolution. We have evidence that the human animal has, for millions of years, adapted to challenges that were flung its way by this planet of ours, and every time our genes have risen to the challenge.

Where, I ask them, is the evidence for these so-called alien programmers? I mean, a single, tiny shred of evidence would do for starters, wouldn’t it? The problem is that incredible claims require incredible evidence, and without that evidence the Strakerite house of cards just falls down.

Why do we, as a race, constantly seek ridiculous answers to simple questions? Why would we rather believe in people from the sky? In gods and ghosts and monsters?

It makes me sad that we have come so far, that we understand so much, but would still rather put our faith in alien programmers than believe the evidence we see around us every day. Strakerites have a habit of ignoring that evidence. And that is why their doctrine CANNOT be taught in schools.

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Alpha was waiting for me at what I was starting to think of as our spot.

I mean how crazy is that? We’d met there once and I was already attaching sentiment to the place.

Anyway, she looked desperately glad to see me and we had an awkward sort of hug; and then I told her about my father and handed her the black case.

She frowned at it.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘Beats me.’

She thumbed the case open and we both stared at what was inside.

Four, small glass discs laid out on a dark cloth.

Alpha looked puzzled. ‘What on earth are they?’ she asked.

I’d seen something like them before in a science lesson. We’d been talking about medical advances, and how we no longer needed some of the things that had been important to people in the past.

The lecturer had handed around a set of small glass discs and asked everyone what they thought they were.

No one had known.

Inside the box my father had given me were two pairs of those same glass discs.

‘People used to put these on their eyes,’ I told her. ‘They were used to correct defects in vision, before we learned that our filaments were perfectly capable of adjusting our vision. They were called
contact lenses
.’

A memory surfaced, and I replayed the odd moment in the car when my father looked over at me and his eyes had changed from blue to brown.

Here was the explanation.

He’d been wearing contact lenses.

Just like these.

Alpha looked at me in confusion. ‘What an odd gift,’ she said. ‘My vision is perfect. Yours?’

‘As good as it’s ever needed to be,’ I said. ‘They must be fashion accessories. He’s started wearing them, to change the colour of his eyes, but I wonder why he gave them to
us
.’