The Future We Left Behind (2 page)

‘Well,’ he said, finally, ‘I guess the last line of defence is that it
is
an extra class …’

‘Oh Perry,’ I said. ‘My wonderful, water-brained friend. That’s not going to make him feel any better about it, is it? Not only am I taking a soft subject, but I’m also wasting the time I
could
be using for extra science studies to do it.’

Perry grinned again. Wider, if that was possible.

‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘You’re doomed.’

‘I know.’ I matched his grin. ‘Fun, isn’t it?’

Perry slapped me on the shoulder way too hard.

In truth it had been his enthusiasm for Professor King’s classes that made me want to sign up in the first place.

Perry Knight is one of those people who rarely displays any kind of emotion, managing to keep cool at all times. And he has a terribly serious face that makes him look like he’s picking up constant bad news from the Link.

Hearing him enthusing about the books that Professor King was getting him to read — and watching his face light up with sheer excitement when telling me about it — well, it made me want to see what in the world it was that had got him so animated.

Plus — and I know my dad wouldn’t like this, but it’s true — I’m getting a bit sick of science textbooks.

Actually:

In fact:

Can’t be too careful.

The student lounge was usually a buzzing mass of students, but today Perry and I had the place to ourselves. It was supposed to be a free period, but the college had suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, raised the learning quota a couple of days ago and the empty room was evidence that everyone else was playing catch-up; desperately trying to earn more edu-credits before the big Student Audit next week.

Perry and I were already
way
above its threshold.

That’s why we could afford to be sitting around while everyone else panicked.

I’m not as crazy bright as Perry, but I reckon I’m not far off. We breezed through pre-prep, prep and then school together, and ended up at the same college in New Cambridge because it was the best. And so were we.

It might sound like bragging, but it’s true.

When you’re the son of someone like David Vincent, it’s the very least that’s expected of you.

Of course, Perry’s father works for my father, so we’ve been friends since we were old enough to, like,
have
friends.
We’re as close as brothers would have been in the old days, before the population explosion led to the One Child Limit on family sizes.

We are both supposed to follow in our fathers’ footsteps and end up in the very same labs where they work.

Supposed to.

If we don’t let Professor King’s Literature class knock us from the path our fathers have so carefully built for us.

1
.
Gulliver’s Travels

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2
.
Romeo and Juliet

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3
.
Wordsworth: Selected Poetry

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4
.
Great Expectations

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5
.
Ronnie Barker: Collected Works

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6
.
Heart of Darkness

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7
.
The Maltese Falcon

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8
.
Midnight’s Children

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9
.
Flanimals

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10
.
Sense and Sensibility

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11
.
Beowulf

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12
.
Human.4

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I almost told my father last night.

I mean: if he had come home I would have. Probably.

But he pushed me a message saying he was stuck at the lab, and it didn’t feel right talking about it over the Link, so another day passed by without me mentioning it.

I ended up spending most of the evening reading an actual book on my LinkPad. The process of reading a book takes a while to get used to. It’s so slow and laborious. But once you get into it, once you forget the way you’re reading and concentrate on
what
you’re reading, it becomes a really unique experience. You have to work to draw meaning from
it rather than having a meaning given to you, which is the only way we receive information these days.

It doesn’t tell you how to think.

The book is called
Gulliver’s Travels
and it’s about this sailor who keeps ending up in weird situations in even weirder countries. It’s pretty funny, but in a way that makes you wonder about life and stuff, and it got me thinking about how we put our trust in people who probably don’t actually deserve it.

The weird thing is, it kept me off the GameServers for the whole evening.

I realised that I would
like
to discuss it in class: so many things in it kept popping back into my mind.

My father would hate it. ‘Waste of time and energy’ he’d call it.

And this morning he was just too busy to be interrupted. He’s always thinking and theorising, and he often forgets that a son needs a little … I don’t know … 
parenting
, I guess. It might be nice to be asked how things are going at college, or in my life, but my father never thinks these things are worth talking about. He lives in his own head, and his body is just a
machine that his brain uses to get from place to place.

He has a lab in the house, in case of domestic eureka moments. Not that I have ever been allowed to see it: I am so irrelevant to him that he’s never even let me. And I’m so scared of his disapproval that I’ve never dared look inside when he’s not here. How sad is that?

He expects me to be just like him, too, but I’m not. Not really. I don’t like to think all of the time. Sometimes I actively
avoid
thinking: logging myself on to one of the many GameServers and losing myself in a Digital Environment.

The world seems
too full
sometimes, with so much information that it gets hard to see past it all. You can get lost in data and newsfeeds and SocNetworking and forget that there’s a real world out there, buried beneath all that information.

That’s why the book surprised me.

It was talking about an ancient world, but it actually made me think about this one: about the silly things we do as a kind of reflex action, without giving them a second thought.

Breakfast was spent in silence, with my father frowning at the problem consuming his attention, and I almost
interrupted his train of thought just to get him to look at me.

Or speak to me. If only to tell me off – that would have been OK.

But I ate my high calcium breakfast quietly instead.

And then I took a slider to college and tried to remember when I started keeping secrets from my father.

The problem is that the longer I leave it, the harder it gets to tell him. And he’s not easy to talk to at the best of times.

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My life is getting weird.

Like I’ve opened some strange door by signing up for an extra class, and now other things are coming out through that door.

Like Amalfi.

Amalfi Del Rey.

I guess the Amalfi thing only happened because Ms. Donlevy embarrassed me in front of the class.

In fairness she probably didn’t mean to, but when she started talking about my father in glowing, reverential tones
it made my face redden, nevertheless.

My father casts a long, long shadow, even across my science lessons.

We were discussing the development of artificial life, and Ms. Donlevy decided to illustrate the talk with an infoslice on David Vincent’s breakthrough work on the bee project.

Bee numbers had been declining for centuries, and careful study of environmental factors had at least stabilised them for fifty or so years.

But then the Black Labium mite arrived. The mite was a parasite, and it was small enough to make its home on the feeding tubes of honeybees.

Generally speaking, parasites maintain a balance with their hosts: they take a little of what they need, without putting their host in danger. This makes sense: killing a host is pretty bad business for a parasite.

Unfortunately, the black mites had crossed over from another threatened species – a butterfly, of all things – and they were ignorant of the needs of honeybees. They prevented the bees from receiving some amino acids that they needed to survive.

And the extinction of the bee as a species began in earnest.

The problem with losing the bees was that the plants they worked so hard to fertilise also came under the threat of extinction. And without plants, the human race would face a very bleak future indeed.

At the time, my father had been a researcher on an artificial life project that had already engineered an electric ant. Artificial creatures were a relatively new area of study, but there had been a few successes. What made my father’s ant different from the dozen or so other living robots was its ability to think.

And it was a triumph of miniaturisation: where some of the other creatures were unwieldy and large, my father’s electric ant was just about the same size as the real thing.

When it was forecast that honeybees would be totally extinct within ten years, my father’s team had turned their attentions to the creation of
artificial
honeybees.

I remember my father telling me that they had attempted to copy the precise structure of the creature they were trying to mimic. But it had turned out to be a dead end
because it was so hard to get the bees to fly as accurately and delicately as they needed.

So, eventually, they had ditched the natural template and went for a design that looked nothing like a bee at all. In fact it owed its form more to the common housefly, with some pouches added to its backmost pair of legs.

The infoslice that Ms. Donlevy showed even had a vid of my father addressing a symposium.

‘Programming the bees was the easy bit,’ he said from the vid. ‘Making them weatherproof was the real challenge.’

After a few prototypes had been built, the artificial bees had gone into mass production and were released into the wild with huge success. All the plants of the world had been saved, and my father was guaranteed a lifetime of wealth.

You see, the bees couldn’t reproduce – and they had a pretty limited lifespan – which meant that they were always in demand.

And always in production.

Ms. Donlevy suddenly turned to me. ‘Your father is an incredible man,’ she said, ‘and an inspiration to us all.’

I fashioned a passable smile and then looked around.
Everyone in the room, it seemed, was staring at me with smirks and sneers on their faces. And that only made my face feel hotter.

Even Perry had his eyes raised to the ceiling in mock exasperation.

Thanks Perry
, I thought,
never mind that your father helped too
.

I honestly didn’t know where to look. And, in searching for a place to rest my eyes, I saw a female face that was studying me with something different in her expression.

Warmth. Maybe compassion?

I hadn’t seen her before, but I appreciated her look and gave her an uneasy smile.

She smiled back at me and then turned her attention to Ms. Donlevy at the front of the room.

‘I can’t help thinking that it might have been better if he’d targeted the mites instead of the bees,’ the girl said pretty loudly.

Ms. Donlevy’s face did three things in quick succession: it stretched with shock, then crinkled with puzzlement, before relaxing into amusement.

‘Ah, Miss … 
Del Rey
, I believe.’ Ms. Donlevy spoke with the kind of fake brightness that was so shallow you could hear the steel reinforcements running under the surface of her words. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that point for the benefit of the rest of us?’

The girl nodded enthusiastically.

‘I was just thinking about the Law of Unintended Consequences,’ she said brightly. ‘David Vincent’s work was visionary, but he approached the problem from the point of view of an engineer. He manufactured an artificial bee that saved the world …’

‘I’m struggling to see a problem here.’ Ms. Donlevy’s voice became that little bit sharper.

‘Well, have you seen any real bees lately?’ the girl said. ‘Of course you haven’t. The fake bees were so good at their job that they muscled out the biological ones. We didn’t save them, we simply engineered their replacements.’