Fading Light

by Nick Cook

  ‘Jake, this is getting way too much,’ Chloe said through her gritted avatar teeth.

  ‘Just hang in there – it will get easier.’

  I took a sharp breath as a ripple of pain passed through me and then, just as before, the tension disappeared completely. Now multiple light-lines replaced the single tether that threaded back to Alderney.

  Chloe groaned, her simulated body slowing as lightning rippled the clouds above us.

  ‘Just push on through the pain,’ I said.

  ‘Like breaking the sound barrier, hey?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘I know I can. I know I can,’ Chloe whispered, each word dripping with effort as we drifted even further out and the island became a blob in the distance.

  We must have travelled another half a mile when Chloe screamed as her single tether splintered and broke apart in strands. Released like a balloon, she streaked ahead of me and up into the mountains of rolling clouds.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I called out, before remembering she was really still sitting right next to me in the tower.

  ‘That hurt like hell, but…’ She laughed as she started to carve up the sky like an aerobatic pilot out on a joyride. ‘This more than makes up for it.’ With a whoop, she pulled out of a dive towards the sea and then headed straight back up, speeding past me.

  ‘Hey, wait for me.’

  ‘Come on then, slowcoach.’

  I had to accelerate hard to catch her, but at last caught up. Together, we sped through the clouds that flickered with lightning and up into the shock of a clear blue sky above the storm. In the darkness below cloud level, I’d almost forgotten that it was daytime.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I said, when I realised Chloe wasn’t slowing down.

  ‘Higher, oh so much higher…’

  I followed her speeding body until the cornflower sky dimmed to blackness. Then, one by one, stars started to appear, hanging in cobwebs in the Light Web.

  Like two rockets leaving Earth together, we hurtled out into space.

  We were so high now that the ground started to arc away until it became a globe of Earth beneath us.

  We slowed to a hovering stop above the blue-and-white-jewelled planet. But the utter beauty of our planet didn’t stop there. In the Light Web, everything around me was gift wrapped in a network of pulsing energy. I could see literally millions of fine threads of light spreading from Earth out into the depths of space.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in all my life,’ Chloe whispered.

  ‘I know, but once again I wish you could see what I can right now.’

  Sentinel’s disembodied voice filled the vacuum around us, which was, of course, only him talking to our physical bodies back in the tower. ‘Actually, Jake, you can now share exactly what you’re seeing with Chloe. I’ve finished coding a patch to map both of your cerebral cortices so I can project your sensory inputs directly into Chloe’s mind whenever you like.’

  ‘You mean I could literally see what Jake is seeing?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘Precisely, as long as you have Jake’s permission.’

  Her simulated body turned round to look at me. ‘Do you mind me having a peek into your world, Jake?’

  ‘Not at all. Go for it.’

  ‘All right, I’m overlaying Jake’s sensory input over yours now, Chloe,’ Sentinel said.

  Chloe gasped and her eyes widened as she stared around us. ‘Oh my god, this is so seriously stunning. It’s way beyond anything I could have imagined.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I replied.

  ‘Excellent, I’m so pleased that worked. But I still need to finish the calibration, so don’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Not when the view is this good,’ Chloe said.

  We hung together in space, both of us gazing down at Earth. Chloe’s avatar hand reached out for mine and I felt her real one do the same back in the tower.

  ‘Just think, everyone we know, our whole lives and experiences, is wrapped up in that little gorgeous planet beneath us,’ Chloe said.

  ‘No offence, but that’s pretty profound for you.’

  ‘Hey, I have my moments. Anyway, you can see why astronauts are transformed after experiencing this view.’

  I knew all about this from reading the accounts of the Apollo missions to the moon. ‘Yes, it’s called the overview effect.’

  Chloe’s avatar smiled and she slowly turned round. In silence, we watched as the glowing sphere of our moon began to peek over the arc of Earth, seeing shimmering energy tethers linking the moon to our planet.

  I grinned. ‘It’s as if Earth has the moon on a lead.’

  ‘It’s not the only one – look there.’ Chloe pointed behind me.

  I floated around to gaze directly at the sun blazing in the distance, yet it didn’t hurt my eyes. A highway of light-lines connected the sun to Earth, with finer ones heading off into the depths of space, no doubt to the other planets in our solar system and maybe even to distant stars.

  ‘Looks as if our world is connected to the whole galaxy in one massive pool of interconnected energy fields,’ I said.

  Chloe’s eyes glistened. ‘All one. All connected. Everyone should get to experience this at least once in their lives. Maybe if they did, it would help to stop wars.’

  I’d never heard Chloe talk like this. Perhaps I was getting to see a deeper side of her, or this experience might have been changing her, just as it was me at this moment.

  ‘OK, I’ve almost finished,’ Sentinel said. ‘But first, I want to show you what I can do with the full power of the quantum computer at my disposal.’

  The globe beneath us erupted with billions of points of white light.

  ‘Wow, what are those?’ I asked.

  ‘The positions of almost every human on the planet, at the point we lost the internet connection to the island twelve hours ago.’

  ‘Holy crap,’ Chloe said. ‘I knew DT3 could do this in theory, but seeing it is something else.’

  ‘You said almost everyone,’ I said. ‘Why are some people missing from the sim?’

  ‘There’s no data for anyone who isn’t carrying a mobile phone, or is out of the range of a camera.’

  ‘Oh, I understand. Anyway, this is still damned impressive.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Sentinel replied with more than a bit of pride in his voice.

  It reminded me that he wasn’t the AI equivalent of Spock, not by any measure. It was something maybe both Chloe and I needed to remember sometimes.

  Beneath us, a huge swirl of cloud was centred over London. Countless white lights – individual people markers – shone all over the city. I knew London had a population of at least nine million. To think that they, and the rest of the planet, could be tracked in real-time by Sentinel was an absolutely mind-blowing thought.

  ‘But how are we meant to find Gemma down there among all these people?’ Chloe asked.

  ‘That’s where my ability to tap into your remote-viewing skill comes in – when I combine it with Ember’s sim data,’ Sentinel said. ‘And now I’ve finished calibrating, we can begin the final stage. But I must warn you that it will be slightly uncomfortable at first, until I fine-tune my neural filters.’

  ‘Great, here we go with the pain again,’ Chloe said.

  A high-level humming, beginning at the edge of my consciousness, started to fill my mind. ‘That’s not too bad.’

  ‘That’s just the neural synchronisation sequence I’m afraid. Brace yourself,’ Sentinel replied.

  A banshee-like wall of noise flooded my brain, overwhelming my thoughts with a tsunami of sounds that seemed to drown me.

  I gasped. ‘This is too much, Sentinel, stop!’

  Chloe’s avatar grasped her head. ‘I think I’m going to throw up.’

  ‘Just a bit longer and it will ease off,’ Sentinel replied.

  A sound like a million rock concerts thundered in my mind. ‘What…is…that…noise?’ I said through a clenched jaw.

  �
��With your Awoken ability, you are tuning into the unfiltered thoughts of the entire planet, which is why it’s so overwhelming. If you can, try to pick out individual people and I will do my best to alter my filter code to adjust to this huge influx of data.’

  I clenched my fists into balls as I tried to think over the screaming mental noise. I screwed up my eyes at Earth, the heat building within my skull. The sensation grew worse when I concentrated on the cities.

  Chloe moaned and drew herself up into a ball. ‘Sen…tin…nel…’

  ‘Got it – I’m adjusting filters now…’ the AI replied.

  The storm of noise dropped to a whisper and then one voice emerged from it…

  ‘Why doesn’t anyone say thank you any more?’ a man’s voice asked.

  Before I had a chance to throw a question out to Sentinel, I heard a different voice.

  ‘That idiot jumped a red light,’ a woman said.

  Then I knew exactly what I was sensing. ‘Chloe, can you hear this? People’s thoughts?’

  ‘Holy crap, yes!’

  ‘Good, the filter is working – but keep going because I’m still tuning the system,’ Sentinel said.

  ‘Will do,’ I replied.

  The feeling that my brain was about to explode from my skull started to recede. I focused again, but this time it wasn’t just people I could hear. I found I could detect all sorts of conscious thoughts drifting up from the planet, from dogs thinking about their next meal to flocks of birds skimming through the sky, pulled by their desire to migrate across the planet, and everything in between.

  ‘This is seriously epic,’ Chloe said.

  ‘Epic is the only word for it,’ I replied.

  With a bit of experimentation, I found that I could sense people, animals, insects and plants – even microscopic plankton in the oceans – just by focusing my attention. Not all gave out conscious thought of course, but each vibrated like a song through the threads of the Light Web and away to the distant stars. Then I became aware of a deeper, slower pulse beneath all of the others.

  ‘Can you feel that other sound or vibration – whatever it is – in the background?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I can. What the hell is it?’ Chloe replied.

  ‘No idea. Sentinel, do you know?’

  ‘None, other than I can sense it through you.’

  I floated around, trying to locate the source, but as I turned away briefly from Earth, the sound got a lot quieter. Then, as the planet orbited back into view, it intensified again. An insane thought struck me.

  ‘What if that vibration is coming from Earth itself?’

  ‘You’re saying we’re hearing the song of the planet now?’

  ‘I think so… A song that all life is part of.’

  Chloe looked at me with her mouth slightly open, and then she blinked. ‘You should drop your goal of a career in science and become a poet, because you just nailed what this is.’

  I grinned. ‘I’ll have a think about it.’

  We drifted together, drinking in that stunning view and absorbing everything it meant.

  ‘Right, everything is now in place to locate Gemma,’ Sentinel said, interrupting our happy silence. ‘Concentrate on Gemma’s image in your HUD and let your subconscious do the rest.’

  ‘Got it,’ I replied as Chloe nodded.

  Without the mind-storm raging in my skull, it felt as if I were tuning into a song from a guitar with billions of strings.

  Chloe gasped. ‘I think I’ve got one – not necessarily Gemma, but another Awoken. It’s so strong, it’s off the scale. What do I do now?’

  ‘I wish I could help, but memory banks have nothing that covers this situation,’ Sentinel said.

  ‘Maybe try to chase the sensation back to its source?’ I replied.

  ‘OK, there’s only one way to know if this will work…’ Chloe accelerated away from me towards Earth, her body still traced with a blue marker in my HUD.

  I hung by myself for a moment, listening to the planet’s chatter. Part of me wanted this moment to last for ever. Beneath me, the markers of people sparkled like gems, seemingly infinite in number and spread right across the whole globe. And I knew that everything I could see – the beautiful life on Earth – would be extinguished by the Shade unless I shifted my arse.

  My attention snagged on one of brighter islands of light on the edge of North America and I felt a tug through the Light Web towards it. It couldn’t be Gemma, as we knew she was in London, but I couldn’t help but be intrigued by whoever was calling out to me. I concentrated on the vibrations, and the pulse much stronger than the rest, and I mentally locked on to it. The next moment, in a streak of blue light, I plummeted down towards a large city on the coast…

  Man, this coffee tastes good. Sean was right – this is definitely the best coffee shop in Manhattan. Shame you have to squeeze through the crowds of tourists in Times Square to get here.

  Hey, what’s that in my notebook? I must have doodled it, but I don’t recognise it at all… An island? What does that say? ‘Alderney’? What’s going on?

  I felt elated. It had worked; it had really worked. Somehow I knew this guy was called Carl and was also an Awoken. I’d briefly been in his mind and even got him to do a sketch and write the word ‘Alderney’. So we really did have a way of finding the others like us – the Summoning worked. But now the priority was to find Gemma and she was nowhere near here.

  Once again, I soared up until I was floating over the planet. I concentrated on the vast glowing knot of humanity beneath me and immediately felt two single points of energy vibrating strongly in the Light Web, not too far apart from each other.

  I locked my focus on to the first point – a ruby red colour – and sped downwards. It took me right into the middle of the eye of the storm. I snatched glimpses of London and then I was hurtling over the grey water of the Thames, under Tower Bridge and towards the first red jewel of light…

  I’m so, so cold.

  It’s all right for these commuters hurrying past me into the station. They have their cosy warm offices to go to.

  All I want is a hot kebab with chilli sauce to fill my cold, empty stomach. But there’s only one way to make that happen and that’s to sing for my supper…

  ‘Oh, Danny boy…’

  The commuters are slowing already, distracted from their phones, digging into their pockets or handbags.

  Yes – the chink of coins in my hat on the ground.

  What’s that? Something whispered in my ear!

  Keep singing, Ethan! You’ll never make enough for food this way…

  Who was whispering to me? Something about the Isle of Alderney?

  But there’s nobody there. Just my mind playing tricks, I reckon. Too little sleep, too much imagination.

  As I disconnected my consciousness from the guy, I knew I’d heard his name recently. Then it flashed into my mind – Chloe had mumbled about Ethan in her sleep. It was too much to be just a coincidence. After all, I’d dreamed of a Gemma, a fellow Awoken. But how? Were we all linked in some way? Were we all aware of each other? Was it something to do with the Light Web – since it looked as if everything was linked through some sort of energy field?

  This was something to discuss later. Right now I had bigger priorities.

  I moved towards the next jewel of light – a golden sparkling diamond. It was very close, somewhere near the Houses of Parliament. I swept towards it and realised I was heading straight for Big Ben…

  No, no, no! I’ve got to get out of here! What’s this Mathews doing? Why am I tied up and gagged? ‘Let me into your mind, Gemma, and avenge your parents,’ he says.

  No way! So Mum and Dad were murdered by those bastards called the Awoken, but I’m not going to hurt anyone. Mum wouldn’t want me to give in to hate.

  ‘If nothing else will persuade you, perhaps this will,’ says Mathews. ‘It was the Awoken who deliberately released the Zoom virus that has killed thousands around the world.’

 
; What? They killed innocent people with some sort of bio-weapon? No, Gemma. Don’t get angry. Don’t give in to him!

  But I can’t stop it. And look at him cocking his head at me, all knowingly. Who is he? He can’t really be a priest. What’s he doing here? What does he want with me?

  ‘That’s better, Gemma – embrace your anger. You can use it to fuel your power to help us stop the Awoken – before it’s too late and others are killed.’

  The room’s fading. Stay conscious, Gemma! But I can’t…

  Chapter Eight

  My consciousness snapped back into my physical body with a jarring crash. I heard excited voices around me, but the first thing I found myself focusing on was my HUD. It showed my heart rate had spiked to around one-seventy, although it was now starting to rapidly drop. Chloe, along with Sentinel, swam into focus inside Eaglehurst’s tower. Kelly was there too, with a glasses of water and hot drinks, one of which she handed to Chloe. Her face was pale as she cradled the mug as if she’d been frozen to her core.

  I tried to move but my body felt like a lead weight.

  ‘To start with, I didn’t have to reach out that far,’ Chloe was saying. ‘I actually found a young Awoken boy here on the island, although he was so freaked out by me contacting him that I didn’t catch his name. We should know who he is fairly soon, though, because I planted a suggestion in his mind for him to come here to Eaglehurst when the storm’s passed. Going by the look on his face, I think he’s scared shitless.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, hearing voices in his head, poor lad,’ Kelly said.

  I blinked as my mind started to clear. Gem sounded in trouble…

  ‘But good work, Chloe, on making contact,’ Sentinel said. ‘And if this boy turns up here, that will confirm him as an Awoken. We know now that the Summoning is working in conjunction with Ember. We have intermittent internet access again and can I email the contacts you made to offer them a full Blue Sky scholarship, so they can come to Alderney to be trained.’

  ‘The programme that you’ve been raising funds for from your stock market trading account?’ Chloe asked.