1.4 (6 page)

?Who the hex is Molly Grabowitz?

/Oh, boy. Look her up. I gotta go./

/Catch you there./
I said.

/Most def. Later./

I smiled.

The Link might be a repository of the world’s knowledge, accessible by anyone with the right credit rating, but it’s also a place where all the world’s crazy people meet up and trade conspiracy theories.

For some reason Perry seems to find the crazy things the crazy people leave on the Link, and feels it’s his duty to direct me towards them.

So he’s had me checking out cats the size of horses which even a rudimentary grasp of the principles of photo manipulation should have told him was faked.

I searched for the name he’d given me on Linkepedia and found that Ms Grabowitz was an actress in some new Link Opera.

Probably had a new role coming up and the ghost thing Perry seemed so interested in was just some promotional viral to get the world talking about her.

I didn’t even bother to follow Perry’s link to the photos.

File:
224/09/12fin
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Live\Peter_Vincent\Personal

This is hard, this next entry.

I’m trying to get everything in the right order, to make sure that the thing I’m committing to permanent memory is indeed the event that occurred and not some altered, corrupted version of the truth.

This next bit, though,
has
been altered, and I’m not just talking about the way the diary crashes at a crucial part of the proceedings.

There are things missing, I feel it intuitively, but I have no way of filling in the gaps, of physically remembering the event so that I can reconstruct it from memory.

That’s the thing about the Link, you see, the thing that we never thought about or acknowledged, or even suspected: We have stopped remembering things. We trust the Link to remember them for us.

The problem is we shouldn’t have trusted the Link to remember things the way they happened. Details can be changed, and memories edited.

History itself can be rewritten. You only need to change a word here, an event there. Even things like emphasis and importance can be up- or down-graded to make history say what they want it to say. To make it read how they want it to read.

My memories are no different. I remember things because I put them on the Link. That’s what we all do.

But I can no longer be sure that what’s stored there is the truth.

File:
113/44/00fgj/Continued
Source:
LinkData\LinkDiary\Peter_Vincent\Personal

At the doors of the Science Council my father gave me a tired-looking smile, told me to find a seat in the chamber, and disappeared into the crowd milling around the foyer. I stood there for a few seconds feeling abandoned, then shrugged myself out of it.

I made my way down a couple of white corridors and then through an arch that led into the Council’s main chamber.

My father once told me that the chamber was modelled after a natural cave formation that had been discovered somewhere in South America. Now, walking into it I was struck by the weirdness of its design. It had a ceiling that stretched high over the heads of the assembled people, with sculpted stalactites dangling down. Some of the ‘stalactites’ were two metres long, and made of some material that made them look as if they were natural formations, made over many thousands of years.

Except for the fact that they were hanging from the ceiling of a room in a modern building.

Still, it sort of took your breath away just being in the room and I realised that – as a percentage – very few people got the opportunity to see it for themselves.

I looked around for Perry, but couldn’t see him, so I flashed him an enquiry and he replied with an image of the inside of the chamber, then an image of his seat number: Row F, Seat 23.

I made my way towards him.

Seating was in tiered concentric semicircles, facing a central hub, and I found Perry easily.

‘Looking sharp,’ Perry greeted.

I nodded at his suit, a dark-plum-coloured Nehru affair with a cravat that changed colour every twenty-or-soseconds. It might have been a suit I’d seen him wear a couple of times before, but the chromatic cravat was something new and, I had to admit, a pretty neat touch.

‘Not looking so bad yourself,’ I told him, taking the seat next to him. ‘What have I missed?’

Perry rolled his eyes.

‘A talk on the place of science in our brave new world, complete with a holographic presentation that was inferior to the ones we were doing for show-and-tell to the class in pre-prep.’ Perry faked a yawn. ‘Look, we’re nearly sixteen years old, have we really got nothing better to be doing of an evening?’

‘Are we not our fathers’ sons?’ I replied, then added: ‘They didn’t have the holographic giraffe again, did they?’

‘And the duck-billed platypus,’ Perry said scornfully. ‘But they’d re-skinned them both in company colours, with a logo and everything.’

‘Making nature better, one animal at a time,’ I said. ‘I’m
so-o-o
sad I missed that.’

‘I just bet you are,’ Perry replied. ‘Told your father about the course change yet?’

‘Of course,’ I said, waited a couple of beats and finished it with: ‘Not.’

Perry’s cravat switched from orange to grey.

‘Leave it long enough and you’ll have graduated by the time he finds out,’ he smirked.

‘That’s kind of what I’m hoping,’ I said.

Perry suddenly looked around in a decidedly shifty way, and lowered his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. ‘So what’s this I’ve been hearing about you and a mystery girlfriend?’

I swallowed and it must have been loud enough for Perry to hear.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, in my best version of a ‘deny everything’ voice.

Perry just grinned.

‘You can’t hide your filthy little secrets from me,’ he said. ‘There were confirmed reports, from many sources, of a secret tryst between my main man Peter and an as-yet unidentified female. I just want to hear your side of it so I can keep spreading the rumours.’

I shook my head. My cheeks felt hot. I’d kind of thought that lunch with Alpha wouldn’t have been important enough for anyone to even notice, let alone remark upon.

‘Nothing to tell,’ I muttered. ‘I did buy a girl a fruit soy, but the last time I checked that wasn’t really an important occurrence.’

Perry tutted.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘OK,’ Perry said. ‘Since when is fraternising with girls anything other than an important occurrence?’

‘Well . . .’

‘The answer, my friend, is:
never
.’ Perry raised his eyes to the ceiling, then back down.

‘It was a soy.’ I said feebly. ‘Sometimes a soy is just a soy.’

‘Matter. Of. Opinion,’ Perry retorted, making three sentences out of one. ‘Now quit dodging the question and spill the goods.’

But I really didn’t want to
spill

I wanted Perry to shut up.

He knows as well as I do that I’m not supposed to befriend girls, not yet. I am practically
forbidden
from having any female friends, let alone a
girlfriend.

Romantic love is something that is scheduled in when I hit twenty-one.

It’s standard practice that when I make that age, a list of suitable candidates will be drawn up for me, and I will have a month to decide which three are going to make it on to my shortlist.

Negotiations will begin, final criteria will be set, and a month after that I’ll be announcing my engagement.

If my father found out about me sharing a fruit soy with
a girl
, then it would be even worse than him finding out about me swapping to a ‘soft’ course like English literature.

The latter could be viewed as an error of judgement, a slip, a moment of madness.

The former would be viewed as something else entirely.

Disobedience.

I guess that was why I was so worried to hear that I was already the subject of college gossip. In a world where all information flows around The Link, nothing is private and no one can tell where it will end up.

My mother used to quote someone called Horace when she came across Linkgossip. She’d say:
a word once let out of its cage cannot be whistled back again
, and I had never really thought about what it meant.

Now I knew.

People talked and stories spread. It made me feel angry.

I was saved from these dark thoughts, however, by the bell. Or, rather, by the start of the Keynote address.

My father walked out into the speaking area and the hubbub of voices around us fell into a respectful silence. I opened my mouth, as if I was just going to tell Perry the details he wanted, then closed it and shrugged.

He rolled his eyes at me and mouthed: ‘Later.’

I turned away and watched my father getting ready to speak.

# He looked calm, relaxed even, which is something I’m not really used to seeing in him. For my father, I’m sure, anxiety is the fuel that drives him. That and anger.

As he checked his pad for the playback for his presentation I even think I saw him smile.

Suddenly the room went into darkness.

Total darkness.

There were a few whispers around us, and someone coughed.

Then my father’s voice said: ‘Imagine this. The moment before the universe sprang into being. Nothingness. Void. Blackness. Emptiness. It was a special kind of nothing that we can’t even begin to describe. Because, I’m afraid, we weren’t there. No one was.
Nothing
was.’ He paused. ‘Then: it happened.’

Suddenly a tiny dot appeared, holographically, in the middle of the darkness, and the contrast made it seem painfully bright.

‘A billionth of a second into
The Big Bang
, this tiny bubble was formed.’ My father’s face was illuminated on one side by the light. He looked a bit sinister, if I’m honest. ‘It was a fraction of the size of a single atom, yet it contained everything our universe is, everything it would become.’

The bubble started swelling outward, and coloured dots accelerated outward from within it. Red ones and yellow ones, brown ones and black.

‘Everything in the universe,’ he continued, ‘was packed into something that small: every atom in the universe, the seeds of planets and stars. Some people find that utterly amazing. Others find it terrifying. But do you know what I say to myself every time I consider the Big Bang?’

The image changed, suddenly, a view of the planet earth, seen from space, then quickly zoomed out to show our solar system; then the galaxy that we are but a tiny part of; and finally thousands of galaxies sitting in coal black space.

‘I think:
all that information
,
in something so small
; I want to make one of those.’

The image of the universe faded out and the chamber’s lights gradually came back on.

My father looked around at the faces staring at him and smiled.

‘OK, that’s just me, I guess, he said, ‘But we do have a serious problem.’

A beautiful hologram of the earth, spinning in space, appeared in front of us.

‘This world of ours is awash with information that needs both processing and storage.’

An image showing coloured lines representing that information appeared around the earth. It didn’t take long before the earth itself was obscured by all that information.

‘Our Smart Cities are built around huge computer networks that control everything from lighting to heating to the environment. Our medical computers are so sophisticated that they require vast resources just to manage the systems that keep us healthy.

‘Then there’s the Link. It is the most complex computer network ever created, managing billions of pieces of information every second; and each entry made in a LinkDiary carries not just text, but pictures, sound files and video.

‘We are reaching a point where the demand for space for our physical data is overtaking our supply. We are being saturated with data, and we are reaching the limits of its capacity.’ My father pressed a stud on his pad and a large display appeared in the air, something that looked like a read out from a heart-monitor – a line that blipped upwards and downwards from a central line, creating a jagged pattern of mountains and valleys.

‘Example,’ he said. ‘This jagged line. It’s a measurement, in real time, of this room, now. Each peak and trough is simply a graphical representation of the Link activity in this room.

‘It’s telling us that there are more than 4,000 pieces of data of a size over one terabyte being transmitted to and from this room. That’s a
whole
lot of data. And most of you aren’t even trying.

‘I’d like to suggest that we engage in a small experiment. On the count of three I want everyone in this room to open up the Link, and browse to one of your closest bookmarked channels. It doesn’t matter which one, but I want everyone to do it. OK?’

He looked around for confirmation, saw it in a few nods and some grunted words of agreement.

‘One. Two. Three.
Open Link
.’

I did as I was instructed, opening up a GameServer and navigating my way to a multiplayer fantasy game I’ve been dipping in and out of. Yeah, I know, GameServers are a waste of time and credits, but I sometimes need to escape from everything by pretending to be a hero in a virtual world. I don’t know what that says about me, and I don’t particularly care.

The response from the Link was a little sluggish – everyone else was opening up their own channel – but I still completed the action within a couple of seconds.

The ‘Welcome’ image from ‘Last Quest XXII’ greeted me with a
?resume game?
query.

My father’s voice cut in.

‘And now if everyone could leave the Link open, and bring your attention back to our graphic here . . .’

Looking back at it, I saw the jagged line was now zigging and zagging wildly, with massive peaks and lows and no visible central line.